Lesley and Humphrey had hustled to the front row, where they’d scooped up the seats to the right of the aisle and, from the look of their campsite, didn’t intend to release them for the duration of the Con. Floraidh and Dormal, weighed down with supplies for their booth, were working their way through a swelling crowd of avid ghost fans who’d only now begun to seat themselves. Most still stood in groups of anywhere from two to fifteen among the double rows of chairs set up in the east half of the red-carpeted room. They kept looking eagerly toward a temporary platform, on which the organizers had placed a podium with a microphone wired to two large black speakers that sat at the front corners of the stage. A pair of long, narrow tables set with pitchers of water and glasses, and slightly nicer chairs than the ones reserved for the audience, flanked the podium.
You reached the entire setup via a set of rickety stairs that made me hope all the speakers had sworn off donuts the month before. If the n thy made it safely to their seats, they might be impressed by the roughly plastered wall, which soared to a peak behind them. It had been painted with a massive representation of the Hoppringhill’s coat of arms, five scallops on a crossed scarlet ribbon.
A minute later Floraidh and Dormal popped out of the crowd onto the west side of the great room. This held a variety of booths, some built to resemble lemonade stands, some looking like mazes with their multiple lattice walls folding in odd directions. This portion of the room could be shut off by an electronically controlled curtain that moved up and down like a shade. At the moment only a couple of feet of it peeked out of its tubular metal ceiling-mounted casing.
The Scidairans found their booth right away. The haunted-house facade, complete with a ghostly figure staring out the tower window, was kinda hard to miss. A young woman dressed in white sat on the “front porch” behind a long wooden table. Dormal started unpacking while Floraidh chatted with the woman, who had to be a coven member. Even from across the room she scented other to me. But without my Sensitivity I think I’d still have guessed bad guy the second I laid eyes on her. She had Floraidh’s steam-cleaned demeanor, her bouncy blond hair and rosy cheeks making her seem like the kind of girl who’d organize a food drive for the homeless. Until you spent some time on those snapping brown eyes that left her lips and teeth to smile without them. Plus, she let them linger on people a beat too long. Like a python who’s sizing up her next meal. Floraidh said something to her and she bared those teeth again. Was it me, or did they seem a little sharper than your normal burger grinders?
“I wonder what they are talking about,” said Vayl.
“Too bad we couldn’t put a bug on them. I wonder if they really would’ve found it.”
Vayl’s shrug was less, I don’t know, than, Hey, you’re the one who consulted the Wiccan.
I opened the program as Floraidh and Dormal turned back toward us. While Vayl kept an eye on them I began to read. A couple of paragraphs later I said, “These Connies function like vampires.”
“Excuse me—Connies?”
“Yeah, you know, people who spaz out over theme conventions? Like that dude over there who’s dressed as Hamlet’s father?”
“Ah, I see. Go on.”
“They’ve got a whole night full of goodies planned. Panel discussions here in the great room. Smaller talks by different experts in the kitchen, dining room, library, and billiard room, not to mention several of the bigger bedrooms. GhostWalks every fifteen minutes starting right outside the front door. Those you have to pay extra for.”
“How long do the opening ceremonies take?” Vayl asked.
“Half an hour. It looks like the lights are going out at the end, so be ready for that,” I said. “They’ve hired a couple of the best Raisers in the biz, according to the program. Gerard Plontan and Francine Werry. Have you heard of them?”
Vayl shook his head. “Should we assume they know what they are doing?”
“Well, they’re here. That’s p sherat robably significant. This says they’re going to try to summon the castle ghosts for the crowd.” I held the booklet up for him to see. “They actually have a warning in here for people to keep their hands off the phantoms.”
We looked at each other and together chimed, “Liability.”
Vayl added, “Surely everyone here understands how angry a shade would become if he were to be touched by the warmth of humanity. The reminder would throw him right back into the Thin.”
“It seems weird to me that a place like that should exist,” I said.
“Why?”
I shrugged. “I just wouldn’t think either side would tolerate such chaos.”
Vayl shook his head. “You must always factor in freedom of choice, my pretera.”
I thought of the deaths I’d witnessed since my Sensitivity kicked in. The multifaceted souls that had split apart like shards from a perfect stone, each of them taking off in a new direction.
“I’m trying to imagine why any bit of a soul would want to linger in a place as brutal as the Thin,” I said.
“Come now,” Vayl scoffed.
“No, really, I don’t get it.”
He leaned in, took a deep breath with his eyes closed, as if the smell of my shampoo made his digits tingle. “Life is sweet. Even when all you can hope for is to catch the scent of a human heart filling its body with vigor.”
“Is that—”
“No. You know you mean infinitely more to me than that. Now, what else is in the program?”
I flipped through the pages. “Well, according to the program, the castle has at least seven ghosts ranging from a warrior who died at Culloden, to a young groom who was kicked in the head by a horse, to a nineteenth-century owner who either fell, jumped, or was pushed from an upper-story window, leaving his wife free to marry the guy she’d been boffing on the side. But in case you start feeling too bad for him, she died six months later and is rumored to haunt the bedroom where the cheating took place.” I looked up at Vayl. “She did it right under his nose?”
“He must have been stupid and blind.”
The lights dimmed, like in a theater setting, to let the crowd know the show was about to begin. People took their seats, led by the convention’s star speakers. They crested the scary steps without incident (though the middle one creaked alarmingly beneath one guy who probably hadn’t seen his toes since 1975).
Floraidh and Dormal found a spot left of the aisle, about halfway back. We worked our way toward them as Cole’s voice rang on the party line. “No, really, it was nothing. I’m just good at finding things, that’s all. When my mom misplaces her purse she still calls me.”
Trickle of appreciative feminine laughter as he went on. “Hey, I see Lucille and Jeremy. Should we sit with them?”
“Are you okay?” I asked, then immediately wished I hadn’t. My backbone was going to buckle if I couldn’t learn to deal with Vayl in pain.
“The ghost has retreated. Something put it off the moment I moved into the aisle. Perhaps Francine and Gerard have convinced it to behave once more.”
“How about you, Cole?” I asked, mainly to cover up the massive relief I felt at Vayl’s news.
“I’ve lost Iona,” Cole said.
“Find her quick,” I told him. “We don’t want anybody snakebit.” And if you catch her trying to control this reptile, so much the better. This mission sucks and I wanna go home.
Staying off the floor whenever possible, I stepped from row to row, approaching the stage at a diagonal. Francine hadn’t seen the snake, which held its place closest to her. It hesitated, as if undecided what to do next. But when forty of its fellows joined it, I realized what was happening.