“I’ve seen all of it.”
“And they’ll hurt me too?”
“No. It doesn’t work like that.”
Vernon is distracted by something at Blake’s feet, and Blake looks down and sees the vine has wrapped itself around his right ankle.
“Then what the fuck are you doing here?” Vernon asks.
“I wanted to give you a choice.”
“’Cause if I’d hurt you, then that thing—that thing will drink your blood and come after me…”
“Yes.”
When Blake looks up again, Vernon is holding the revolver’s handle out to him, and it takes a few seconds of stunned silence for him to realize the man is actually offering him his weapon.
Is he offering Blake the opportunity to kill him? Or is he trying to give him a chance to end his own life before a million winged terrors come for him?
Maybe both. But these questions lodge in his throat when he hears the sound he’s been dreading for over an hour now. Here on the bayou, dappled now with the gray light of early dawn, it would be far too easy to pretend it was just the whine of an approaching outboard motor, but Blake knows that isn’t true.
He turns to the walls of glass in time to see the great clouds swooping low over the tree line across the bayou. Two matching columns of dark, tumbling flecks barreling straight for the house. One instant they’re vivid against the gray sky; then they’re camouflaged by the backdrop of the surrounding foliage, even as their whine gets louder.
He can hear Vernon backing away, can hear the man’s shuffling, panicked footsteps squeaking against the floorboards.
“I said no,” Blake whispers.
He presses his hands to the glass. The clouds cross the water’s edge yards away, filling the gaps in between his fingers.
“I said no and you took my blood anyway!” he growls. Who is he praying to? He’s not sure. God? Virginie Lacroix? Vernon Fuller?
The whine is deafening now, as loud as it was in the moments before Caitlin was rocketed across the second-floor hallway of Spring House.
“I said no!” Blake screams.
A tremendous force slams into the wall of sliding doors, shattering them in a single eruption powerful enough to send Blake skittering backward. But the hand he held against the glass when it was still intact is still out before him, bloodied, but still rigid and defiant, like a child’s attempt to stop an ocean wave. Blake forces his eyes open against the onslaught and sees the clouds have stopped their relentless assault. A thin finger of them reaches almost to the center of his palm, but nothing pricks the skin there, nothing touches his skin at all, and behind this buzzing tendril the clouds are branching off in different directions, a great swirl that extends from the lawn outside through the wall of shattered glass and into the living room.
Is it possible? Has he really staved them off with a single cry and an outstretched palm? Could Caitlin have done the same?
The cloud before him assumes a fibrous shape that is gaining human proportions. The noise they make is steadier and even-toned. Behind him, Vernon Fuller emits desperate panting that sounds almost sexual, if not for the terror pulsing through each one. And a few feet in front of Blake, a face appears out of the insect swarm in impressionistic brushstrokes.
Does the spirit driving these tiny creatures feel compelled to present some random face Blake will find knowable? Or is this monster about to reveal its true identity?
He has never seen a painting or a photograph of Virginie Lacroix. But it doesn’t matter, because the face swirling before him now is not hers. The high-domed forehead, the deeply recessed brow, the lips so fat they appear to be peeling free of his face—they are familiar features he’s stared up at in the foyer of Spring House since he was a small boy. Blake finds himself staring not at the visage of a murdered slave, but at the face of Spring House’s owner.
“Felix…,” Blake whispers.
“Blake Henderson.”
33
The spirit’s voice is so loud it rattles Blake’s teeth and every other hard surface in the wrecked living room.
“Who are you?” Blake cries.
“My visage is not intended to deceive.”
“You’re really Felix Delachaise. You’re his—you’re his ghost?”
“I am what remains of him when he is called back to this plane again and again by the will of another.”
The whine of each insect forms a lone note in a monstrous symphony that rattles Blake’s bones. It feels as if he and Vernon are literally swimming in the spirit’s every word.
“Who brought you back? Caitlin?”
“You and Caitlin Chaisson are the tools, nothing more.”
“The tools for what?”
“My freedom. My existence consists of teasing glimpses of a realm of limitless possibility before I am returned again and again to the soil of this earthly plane, the soil beneath Spring House. There I am forced to endure the racket of human passion and rage. Ever since the death of my body, I have poked and prodded at your meager existences from my prison of spirit and blossoms, desperate for a way to unburden myself of my sins, so that I may move on. Know this. It is not the living who are haunted by the dead—it is the dead who are haunted by the living.”
“I don’t understand. The will of another… whose will? Who keeps bringing you back?”
“Life, human life, is nothing but resistance to the infinite. All cells, all spirits, are without shelter, are without home, until they find a single will around which they may gather and take form. And as long as that will endures, there is life, even if it doesn’t wear a costume of flesh and bone. And so, as long as Virginie Lacroix’s will to walk this earth as a free woman endures, I am tasked with her resurrection. I am doomed to live as the slave to my slave.”
“All life?” Blake cries. “You’re saying anyone can be brought back if they didn’t want to die?”
“Those with magic in their hands do not die as easily as others might.”
Blake feels again the soft bed that was waiting for him at the bottom of the pit when he jumped into it to cut a segment of the vines free. A new growth, a new life, swelling up from the earth itself in response to the terrible events all around Spring House.
“We’re the tools you’re using to bring her back?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Betrayal is my sin. I used Virginie Lacroix’s powers for gain and refused to keep my promises to her in exchange. Her revenge caused my death and took prisoner of my spirit. But I was given new direction and new power by the blood of Caitlin Chaisson and the betrayal that ran through it. Her rage. This is the justice of the earth.”
“Rage? That’s the essence of life itself? Only rage?”
“All life? Perhaps not. Perhaps only the life I am able to create while trapped in this prison. The life I am able to create for Virginie.”
“But you stopped,” Blake says. “You just stopped. Why haven’t you taken me?”
The spirit doesn’t answer. The low whine from the surrounding insects could be their usual song or Felix’s frustrated growl; there’s no telling which.
“Where’s Caitlin?”
“What remains of Caitlin has gathered up the lives she needs to aid me in the resurrection. She has returned to Spring House to play her role.”
“And now it’s my turn to play mine? Is that it? You’ve come for me and then I’ll… what?”