Lord Jack was a hazard to my emotional well-being. Because I could easily let my guard down around him.
He made me vulnerable.
I firmly pushed both thoughts away.
“A scar or rip in the fabric of reality implies a sense of a boundary,” Tennyson noted.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “The idea that if you stepped through the rip, it would deposit you elsewhere. Given that Jack is the only one who can see the scar and the black slime, it would not be outrageous to posit that the scar is a gash between our world and the shadow world. The black slimy sludge could just be part of the membrane between the worlds. Though I can’t think that I’ve ever read a description of anything like this.”
“Exactly,” Tennyson said. “We’ve spent some time digging into the D’Angelo archives, but we haven’t found anything yet. Granted, there is a lot to look through.”
Knowing that the family carried an awful curse, our D’Angelo ancestors had begun keeping meticulous records starting in the early 1600s. The records contained journals, letters, observations, first-hand accounts of visions and so on. The original documents were all in a vault underneath our palazzo here in Florence, but fortunately we had digitized everything about a decade ago, allowing the archive to be accessed remotely.
Unfortunately, the entire archive was only scanned images of the original documents. No text recognition, which meant that it wasn’t searchable.
We wanted to transcribe everything, but as the contents were mostly in archaic, handwritten Italian, it wasn’t a process that could be automated in any way. The entire collection—thousands upon thousands of pages—had to be manually read and keyed in. Nonna had spent years slowly transcribing some of the archive, but she had stopped when the work strained her eyesight. Since then, I had been trying to organize things in my spare time, but it was low on my priority list.
“We should keep searching the archives,” I said. “Of course, there’s no saying this black Chucky-slime has any relation to the D’Angelos.”
“Chucky-slime?” Tennyson’s eyebrows disappeared into his hairline.
I shrugged. If the label fit . . .
Jack took it in stride. “Precisely. The Chucky-slime could simply be a by-product of the barrier between worlds and only tangentially attached to the D’Angelos. Case in point, my brief sweep of the apartment showed that the scar didn’t follow us here.”
“Do you think it’s tied to you?”
“It’s hard to say with any certainty.”
Tennyson sat back, lacing fingers behind his head. “Iwashaving a vision when the scar . . . ruptured.”
I let that sink in, pondering options. “So the scar could be tied to whatever energy you guys tap into when you use your GUTs?”
GUTs stood for Grossly Unusual Talents . . . it was what you ended up with when you allowed seven-year-old triplet boys to name their paranormal abilities.
“Hard to know without testing it.” Tennyson let out a long breath. “And I can’t say I’m eager to put Jack in harm’s way again.”
Mmmm. Not all of us were that squeamish . . .
“Aren’t we making a huge assumption here?” I asked. “What if the scar and this black sludge are innocuous?”
Jack huffed. “Unlikely. The slime tried to pull me heaven knows where. And the scar feels . . . different from the rest of reality. Denser. More present. My ghost instincts tell me to beware of it. I value my existence, such as it is.”
A pause.
“You have ghost instincts?” I had to ask it.
“Of course. I can sense things. The world I inhabit isn’t entirely devoid of stimuli.”
A longer pause while I processed that. I had about a thousand follow-up questions.
“So when you say stimuli, what precisely—”
“No, Chiara. Just no.” Tennyson leaned toward me. “We’re not going down that rabbit hole right now. Table it for later.”
“But—”
“No.”
