She was exhausted. She was falling to pieces. Her guardians were dead, dead and gone, and so was Augustine, and …
And Mrs. Cunningham had not crossed the circle, had she?
“Leave,” she mumbled, thickly. She needed space. She needed air. “You must leave. I do not want to see you.” She struggled to remember. She had knelt there, and Mrs. Cunningham had come to the very edge of the circle. She had reached out a hand, and Jane had taken it, but had her hand crossed the boundary?
“Sit down, darling,” Mrs. Cunningham crooned.
Her hand had not crossed the boundary. Jane was sure of it; she had been the one to reach out. Mrs. Cunningham had not crossed the circle.
Orren had not crossed the circle.
Whatever Augustine had been, then, he was not the same as the Cunninghams.
She tore at her hair, falling back one step, another. Her head pounded.
“You’re overwhelmed. You’re seeing things. We will send for the doctor.”
“No!” Thoughts of these creatures wearing Dr. Nizamiev’s face drove her to her feet. She threw her aching, wrung-out body toward the hall.
They followed behind her, hunting dogs that had scented prey.
She broke into a run, through the bisected foyer and up the stairs, staggering into the banisters and hauling herself up, step after step. “Cease your childish flight, Jane!” Mrs. Cunningham called from behind her, voice echoing in the vaulted space. “It does not become a young lady! It does not become a new wife!”
“You are not her!” Jane cried, crashing onto the second-floor landing. “You may have died as her, but you are not her now. Something has happened to you!”
“The girl’s gone mad,” Mr. Cunningham said. “I will send for Dr. Nizamiev.”
“And how do you know her?” Jane hissed, then tore herself away. She could not get drawn into this. She had to get to a safe place. But where was safe? She could not afford to build a circle so high as to obliterate the sound of their voices.
She climbed to the third floor. They followed, but they did not run. They proceeded, arm in arm, as if out for a stroll by the river. They fell away below her, but Jane’s flight bought her only a few minutes, a brief reprieve.
She had to find a way to banish them.
Whatever these starving creatures were, however the spirits of the dead had been twisted, they came from what had been done to Elodie. Hadn’t they? Everything began with Elodie; the ritual had been worked with Elodie’s flesh. Jane needed to find her, to demand answers, demand solutions. But Jane had not seen Elodie in days. Since the blankness had replaced Elodie in her hallucination, there had been no trace of the fair-haired, red-eyed ghost in any window. Why?
Was it connected? It had to be.
Jane ran for the third-floor bedroom, slowing only to turn the gaslights up to full brightness. She had found Elodie’s journal here, the only trace of her left in the whole house. If Jane was to find Elodie anywhere beyond the crypt, it would be here.
But the rooms were empty, and Jane could not bring herself to look at the windows, too afraid of seeing something other than fields and farms beyond. Even with every light turned up to full brightness, there were only walls and ceilings and floors, ghost-empty furniture with no trace of character, of inhabitance. Jane found herself standing in what had been the bedroom, staring at a tarnished, floor-length mirror, helpless, wishing Elodie would appear.
“Elodie,” she said, addressing her own reflection. “Elodie, come!”
Her own eyes stared back.
Of course; Elodie had never come when called, appearing only when Elodie herself willed it. Where did she go, when she was not there? Jane tried to sort through her harried thoughts, organize them into sets and work through each with logical precision.
First: Elodie had died, and from her body Augustine had worked a spell that pulled the ghosts of the dead back into the world of the living.
Second: Magicians changed the workings of their bodies. Things grew out of place. Natural occurrences were not merely natural in the hands of a magician.
Third: When Jane had seen Elodie’s life, she saw a hole where Elodie should have been. But when Jane had seen Elodie’s death, Elodie had been present, and since her death she had appeared to Jane, out of place, out of time.
From these points, she could construct a chain that linked Elodie’s presence directly to magic, and from there, a solution: Magic should be able to call her back, and Jane could work magic.
There was no way to make chalk and salt stick to the slick surface of the mirror, so Jane pulled out her hairpin and began to scratch at the glass. The metal squealed, loud enough that her ears hurt. She was careful to make it as perfect a circle as she could manage, holding the radius steady by way of a strip torn from her dress and the straining of her thumb upon the mirror.