The question, so earnest and direct, caught her off guard.
“Yes, Mally,” said Anaïs, using a finger to hold her place in the book while she stood up to stretch. “What do we plan to do?”
“Well,” Mallory began, feigning confidence, “as I said last night, there are numerous methods available to us. We shall begin with the simplest and work our way into the more complex spell work.”
“What is the simplest method?” asked Armand.
Mallory searched the depths of her imagination. “That is… to be determined,” she finally concluded. “I would like a chanceto walk the grounds and… perhaps communicate with the spirits firsthand, before I decide on the best course of action.”
“Yes. I’ll gladly accompany you—”
“No! No, thank you. I need space. To think. And to talk with them. The ghosts, that is. To… sense. Things.”
“Sense things?” asked Armand.
“Spirity things.”
Anaïs smirked. “My sister is a genuine authority on the subject of spirity things.” She winked at Armand. “You are in good hands with the Fontaine sisters.”
Armand nodded slowly, and only the smallest pinch in his brow suggested he was a bit skeptical.
Mallory peered around the terrace. “It’s a shame you don’t have any land here that has been dedicated to the Seven. Hallowed spaces tend to be best for conducting séances and exorcisms.”
“Like a chapel?” asked Armand.
“Precisely. A chapel or an altar or—”
“We have a chapel.”
She froze, her mouth open with an unfinished thought. She’d never heard of a chapel on the Saphir estate.
“My aunt had it built and consecrated by an acolyte of Freydon,” he added, “perhaps thirty years ago.”
“Of course she did. We will certainly make good use of that information.”
“Fantastic,” said Armand, beaming at having been useful. “Then I shall leave it in your capable hands.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“You should tell him that we can’t do anything until the Mourning Moon,” Anaïs said, who had read through six novels in as many days—each one involving a combination of pirates, rogues, and nobility, and sometimes all three in one. “Or better yet, the winter solstice. You could buy us months without him being any the wiser.”
“It might come to that,” Mallory said, fingers skimming along the tops of the book spines on an upper shelf in the library.
“What are you looking for, anyway?”
“I’m not sure. A manual on how to exorcise spirits for the magically uninitiated?”
“If he had that book in his possession, one would think he’d have already tried it.”
“I don’t need a book on how to exorcise spirits,” said Mallory. “I need something that makes us appear… knowledgeable. That suggests we are trying.”
The frustrating thing was that Mallory and Anaïswereknowledgeable. Magic or no magic, they were still their mother’s daughters, and had grown up surrounded by charms, potions, and spell books. As a child, Mallory had loved the lyrical quality of the spells written out in various grimoires. She had been especially fascinated by those in the old language, the way the unfamiliar syllables danced on her tongue. She’d memorized so many of them in her youth. A talent that was utterly useless to her now.
She wondered what their mother would have done, if hired by Lord Saphir. Which spell would she have used? There must have been some ritual to lure, to bind, to banish… but Mallory certainly didn’t know what it was.
At least the situation didn’t seem as dire as Armand had first made it out to be. She’d barely seen evidence of the ghosts that haunted the mansion since that first night at dinner. A maudlin piano tune played in the middle of the night. Footsteps on the stairs. Whistling down the corridors. The painted eyes of gloomy portraits watching as she moved through the halls. Rooms that never warmed, despite roaring fires in the hearths. Candle flames that were snuffed out with no hint of a breeze. Pages mysteriously turned when she left her sketchbook sitting out… though that could have been Triphine, who was still holed up in the bedroom and liked to look at the pictures.
It seemed to be a fairly mild haunting, but given what Mallory knew of Le Bleu, she wondered if maybe he was biding his time. Waiting for something…
