“You did this? You brought her back?”
“Somehow, yeah.”
“And Laurelie? Your father?”
“I … I think it’s been too long.”
Mum’s face fell. I’d been about to ask why she didn’t mention Grandad when a thought occurred to me. He hadn’t been dragged into the strid. The autopsy report claimed he’d died by the wraith’s hands, that it gave him heart failure, but the wraith had never done that before. Its methods had always been, far as we knew, drowning. It had never left a body to bury.
Marlowe extricated himself from the tangle of arms around Amelia and clasped my hands. “Thank you. I don’t know what else to say, but thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“How did you do it?”
“Grandad’s trap. It worked.”
At this, everyone stopped and stared in the direction of the shed. It was just visible over the stony knoll and through a strand of trees.
“Is it still—?” Marlowe asked.
“I’m going to check. You all can stand back.”
“I’m coming with you,” Kessian said.
“And me,” said Marlowe.
“Well, I’m not,” Amelia said, curling into Lettie’s protective arms. “I’ve seen enough of that thing to last a lifetime.”
As we set off up the knoll, Mum came with us, too. Blue light still filtered in beams through cracks in the door. I held out a hand.
“Maybe take a step back.”
Everyone did. I swung the door open and jumped back a few paces.
The wraith still stood confined, its shoulders hunched. Mum took a step closer. Marlowe said, “Well done, Tal.”
The wraith lunged. All of us staggered back at the ferocity of it. I thought for sure it would break through—light seemed a more flimsy barrier than the wooden door had been—but the sigil held fast, and the wraith let out a keening wail of fury and pain as its shadows singed every time it slammed its shoulder against its cage.
“The question is, what do we do with it?” Mum asked.
Kessian and I exchanged a look.
“The answer to that’s complicated,” I said. “It’s trapped, but the sigil won’t last indefinitely. Continuously replenishing the tithes is just asking for a fatal mistake. But we don’t know how to banish it permanently. Honestly, I don’t think it can be except by cleansing the strid. Which, in practical terms, means finding whoever murdered Grandad and lured all those people to their deaths in the first place, and either bringing him to justice or getting him to undo it all.”
“And do you have any more information on who did it?” Marlowe asked. “Warwick?”
The wraith continued its assault on its prison with renewed vigor.
“Not yet.” Watching the wraith, I couldn’t quite let go of that connection between the strange shape of its antlers and the identical statue in Warwick’s house. It played over in my mind again and again. How could he have created such an exact replica without having studied the wraith, and when could he have? It only appeared to take someone, and far as I knew, Warwick had never been present during an assault.
Unless … Unless the relic wasn’t mimicking the wraith, but the other way around.
I recalled the details of that statue. The hollow tines, the holes placed at intervals along two of them, two central holes fusing into one.
The strange flutelike instrument that had been played on the banks of the strid had that exact shape.
“What if he has the murder weapon in his house, right under our noses?” I asked aloud.
