Page 80 of When the Sky Breaks

Ansel was on his feet in an instant, as he’d only been feigning sleep anyways, with Neal and I close behind him. A quick glance around the cabin and Ansel homed in on the source of the shaking and gurgling—the insufferable art dealer. Black ectoplasm leaked from his mouth, his nose, his ears. The crate beside him shook violently.

“Yes!” Ansel crowed. “Cursed object. No bloody portals. No bloody politics. Easy.”

Neal and I just stared at him, unmoving, as the train erupted into further chaos. Neal sighed and muttered something about “not reading the room.”

“Come on now,” Ansel encouraged, climbing over our bags and slipping into the aisle. “Sorcha, lass. Bit of help.”

“With what?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“Cursed objects usually have etchings, usually in languages I can’t read,” Ansel said, pulling me down the aisle behind him.

“And?” I pressed as we stopped at the art dealer’s seat. Ansel was already prying open the rattling crate with a shoehorn he seemed to have apparated from thin air.

“Don’t touch it,” Ansel said, tossing the crate’s lid aside and turning to the limp body of the antique merchant. “Just tell me what it says. And we’ll be right as rain.”

I shot Neal a panicked look over the seats, but he only shrugged in response.

“Now’s when he decides to stop being overprotective?” I muttered.

“Hurry now,” Ansel said, wiping black slime from the man’s face and sniffing it. “Ghost possession.”

“What?” a nearby passenger shrieked.

“Easy fix,” Ansel said casually, waving the woman off.

I turned my attention to the urn. It was a dark red clay, roughly the size and shape of a pumpkin, etched along the lid and glazed with a chipped black paint. The language was unfamiliar, some kind of old Cyrillic, but I got the essence easily enough—an epitaph, a warning.

“I think this is someone’s ashes,” I said, standing up and stepping back into the aisle. “It’s an epitaph. Some kind of curse? Something about wanting to stay buried?”

“Like I said,” Ansel muttered, digging through the art dealer’s coat pockets, “easy fix.”

He produced a flask, then doused the still-rattling urn in its contents.

“What the hell are you doing?” I hissed.

“Classic ghost possession,” Ansel repeated. “Destroy the cursed object. Free the victim.”

“So why are you pouring liquor on it?” I asked, taking another step back.

Ansel didn’t reply, just struck a match, lit the entire crate on fire, and tossed it out the window. The moment the match struck the whole train car went silent, and a collective sigh of relief rippled through the space as the art dealer choked awake, jerking into consciousness. Ansel didn’t offer a single sentence of comfort, simply clapped the man roughly on the shoulder and said, “Avoid back-alley deals for a while, would you?”

And then a single, high-pitched, irate voice cut through the night air. It was the chaperone from earlier.

“I’m calling for the conductor!” she screamed.

Thirty-Four

Neal

Istood beside the train tracks, eleven miles south of Fredericksburg, regretting every single life decision that had gotten me to this point. It was still raining and oddly cold for the time of year. I shrugged off my coat and slipped it around Sorcha’s shoulders. She hadn’t stopped glaring at Ansel since the old woman had started screaming, called for the conductor, and gotten us all kicked off the train for unseemly conduct.

“What do we do now?” Sorcha asked, voice living up to every ounce of venom in her expression.

“We find a ride into town,” Ansel said, “and we find a place to sleep for the night. Once we’re in Fredericksburg and it’s morning we’ll work on next steps.”

“And how do we find this ride into town?” Sorcha pressed. “It’s three in the morning.”

“We head to that road,” Ansel said, pointing vaguely west, “and we start walking.”