Gillian scrambled into the back seat beside Sally. She’d always thought that Sally was the sister with power, but perhaps she’d been wrong. It appeared Gillian had skills she hadn’t imagined, and being here had woken what was inside of her. Everything that had been done could not be undone, but what was to come was unknown. Fate could make the best of you or you could make the best of fate, that was what Jet always said. “We’ll find Kylie,” Gillian told her sister.
“We will,” Sally said, her voice shaky.
* * *
The sisters held hands as the van headed toward the Three Hedges Inn. It was a ramshackle place thought to be charming by Londoners who came for the weekend to look for antiques or hike in the forest where masses of wildflowers could be seen each spring. There were tales of how forbidding these woods once were, there had been robbers and horse thieves and men who thought of murder as sport, but people tended to laugh at such stories now, even the ones about women who were drowned and burned and who had cursed those who had done them wrong. All the same, it was a tradition for hikers to take a black stone and leave a white one in its place, to appease any magical forces, just in case danger still existed, perhaps in the form of a root one might trip over, or a child separated from a class on a school trip, or a woman stung by a bee.
The road was a bumpy, single lane that was dark and overgrown, but by the light of the fat pink moon, they soon saw the inn before them, a squat whitewashed building with a thatched roof. There was a pub and a function room where the town council had monthly meetings and wedding and engagement parties were held. The inn itself had six rooms to let, and three of those were said to be haunted and weren’t usually rented out. Tonight, however, they would be, for Americans would likely not notice the tapping in the walls or the chill in the corners of the rooms. Visitors from the States tended to keep their headphones on and ignore what was going on around them, and frankly they made the best guests as French and German tourists were inclined to complain about the shabbiness of the decor. Furniture was frayed and rugs were threadbare, but wasn’t that all part of the lure of the place? Sally and Gillian and Franny were given the haunted rooms. They happened to be the biggest and most well furnished, even if most people refused to stay the night.
“If you see any figures, throw salt in their direction,” said Jesse Wilkie, the manager of the pub who had taken a break from her duties as a waitress in order to help them with their luggage. She was in her mid-twenties and the youngest of the staff, except for a boy called George who came to help on weekends, putting out the trash and carrying in the boxes of groceries. “If the salt doesn’t work, then say Begone three times. My granny told me so when I was a girl. That should do the trick.”
Franny rolled her eyes. The advice was total nonsense, although it might work if a bat managed to get inside, after you threw a blanket over it, pulled on a pair of leather gloves, and brought it out to the garden.
“Do you have ghosts out in the fens?” Gillian wanted to know.
“Oh, we have them everywhere,” Jesse said cheerfully. “My granny said there was once a lady she knew in town who had relations with one. Or maybe she just said that so no one would ask who the father of her child was.”
“I’m happy to take one of the haunted rooms,” Vincent said. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“We’re fine,” Franny told Jesse. “Don’t worry about us.”
Vincent wished he did believe. He’d waited for William to return to him in some form for weeks after his death. He had avoided sleep. Come back to me, he’d whispered. Love of my life. Love eternal. One night, he’d heard a scratching and had run outside, only to find that the vines had twisted around the window ledge. Vincent had collapsed in the sandy earth, exhausted, remembering what their aunt Isabelle had told them, what comes back from the dead comes back as dark and unnatural if forced to return, brought back by necromancy and spells. All the same, Vincent was made to use magic and when he’d arrived in Paris to stay at Agnes’s, he’d brought along a pure white candle to William’s grave when he went to the cemetery at night. He would light it and wait till it burned down to a pool of wax, the dog Dodger at his side. And still, the night remained empty and dark. He could not call up the dead; he didn’t even think it was possible.