How to Claim an Undead Soul Read online

  There was zero chance I could resist asking with that lead-in. “For everyone else?”

  “There is no one else.”

  Eyes crushed shut against reality, I pressed my face into his chest and sank into him, willing myself to believe this was real.

  I’m not dreaming, not dreaming, not dreaming. It was still so hard to be sure. Please, never wake me.

  “I’ll be off the grid for the next twenty-four hours.” He tugged on my ear with his teeth. “Call me after?”

  “Maybe.” The sting ignited a path leading straight to my core. “Maybe not.”

  “Don’t sass me, Squirt.” His smile pressed into my skin. “I’m trying to be good here.”

  I let my right arm dangle at my side, and my fingertips traced the seam of his jeans. “Define good.”

  “Good means walking away while I still can, not throwing you over my shoulder and climbing up to your bedroom. Good means knowing my limits and refusing to let a little brat like you push me past them. Good means doing my job. Not holing up with you for as many days as we can go without needing groceries.”

  “Who needs groceries?” Not I. Not him either. “That’s why takeout was invented.”

  “Please,” he groaned against my throat. “Let me do this right for once in my life.”

  “Okay.” I brought my arm up again, held him as tight as I could for as long as he let me, but his body was fighting his noble intentions. The hard length of him pressed against my soft stomach, and I eased back, more to allow him his honor than to preserve mine. “Be safe out there, Elite.” I hooked my finger through his belt loop and gave him a hard tug. “Come home in one piece or else.”

  “I always come home, if not all in one piece.” Turning his attention on Woolly, he smoothed his palm down the wooden siding beneath the glowing porch light. “Take care of our girl until I get back, okay?”

  The bulb flared in bright agreement. She was, as ever, his humble and eager servant.

  Boaz ambled over to the garage, and I forced myself to stop watching. I hated it would be a week before I saw him again. Already tonight felt spun from dreams instead of memories.

  I lingered on the porch, the churros cooling in my arms, and reconsidered my plan to share the bounty with Amelie. Following Boaz home, even if I technically beat him there, smacked of clingy girlfriend vibes, and it’s not like Amelie would want me to gush about the moves her brother put on me. Remembering the sketchbook waiting on the coffee table, I decided to share the treats with a different sort of friend. Sugar in exchange for questions about Cletus.

  I passed through the living room, scooped up the sketchbook and tucked it under my arm. Remembering the avowal, I picked that up too. I paused to rub Keet’s earholes while he hung upside down with a single wing extended. “You’re such a little weirdo.”

  He blinked one red eye at me then returned to his bat impersonation. Leaving him to practice his echo location, or whatever undead parakeets imagined while pretending to be something they were not, I exited the house through the back and entered the garden.

  Cold fingers closed over my shoulder as my toes brushed grass.

  “Hey, Cletus.” I waited for him to unclamp me, but he held tight. “What’s wrong now?”

  Maybe the wraith really was broken.

  “Let her go,” a dark voice purred from the shadows. “I won’t harm her. Promise.”

  Dread, cold and sharp, turned to icy perspiration down my spine. “Who are you?”

  Cletus, who was not the trusting sort, released me then coalesced before me, an undulating shield of malevolence.

  “Grier Woolworth.” The man savored my name the way I had that first bite of caramel-filled dough.

  “Who are you?” I demanded again over Cletus’s shoulder. “Why are you here?”

  “Call me Ambrose.” His laughter serrated my ears, two bright stars honing their edges against one another. “My reasons and my purpose are my own. I do not answer to you, little goddess, and you would be wise to remember that.”

  Cletus bumped against me, ushering me back up the steps onto the safety of the porch. His bony fingers lengthened to vicious blades he clacked together in warning, but the man kept circling, a shark scenting bloodied waters.

  For a single heartbeat, through the tatters of Cletus’s cloak, I glimpsed him.

  His skin was as pale as the first full moon in winter, his hair a ravaging flame around his head. His lips were so blue they were almost violet, his eyes full of shadows so deep no light had hope of penetrating them. Mist swirled around his ankles, black tendrils that resembled a wraith’s tattered cloak. Having that emptiness gaze back with calm detachment turned my knees to water.

  He looked more like the stories I’d heard of ethereal fae princes, as sharp as razors and as lovely as death, than anything born of this world. He twitched his berry lips, and my heart gave a painful lurch.

  Behind me, Woolly rang her doorbell in panicked bursts. I glanced over my shoulder as she waved her door back and forth in a hurrying gesture. Gathering my courage around me, I turned from Ambrose and ran. I didn’t stop until the wards snapped into place on my heels.

  Hands shaking, I dialed Boaz and got dumped straight to voicemail. I queued up Linus next. No answer. Amelie left me hanging too. I jogged up the stairs and peered out my bedroom window. Ambrose stood on the lawn, his hands shoved into his pockets, head thrown back to see me better, the Romeo to my Juliet. He was electric in the night, alive in the way dreams are before you wake.

  And he was wearing a French blue dress shirt.

  Nine

  Today the nightmare wasn’t a problem. I never fell asleep. I kept seeing Ambrose when I closed my eyes.

  Smoothing my thumb over my phone’s screen, I scrolled through its list of unanswered texts. Amelie had finally replied. Turned out, she had been taking an exam with her phone muted. She hadn’t seen my message until after she left campus. Now that the immediate danger had passed, I wasn’t in a rush to call her over knowing she would have to cross the yard—and Ambrose—to reach me. Boaz was within his twenty-four-hour incommunicado period, so no help there. And Linus...

  Right now, I wasn’t sure what to make of the shirt or the resemblance.

  “Of all the gardens in all of the backyards in all of Savannah…” Ambrose walked into mine.

  Woolly sighed her agreement through the floor registers.

  First the ghosts and now an otherworldly trespasser. What the heck was going on in this town?

  Slumped at my desk, I gave up on catching shut-eye and hauled out my grimoire. The modified pen Linus adapted for me tipped heavy in my hand, but I refined the foundation wards for Woolly, line by line, over and over, until my vision doubled.

  Dusk took an eternity to arrive, but I was dressed and ready to confront Linus in record time.

  After gathering the grimoire, the sketchbook, and the avowal, I made a beeline for the carriage house. The front door stood ajar, as usual, and delicious smells snaked out to tempt me across the threshold. Funny, I had never considered bacon as sinister before now. But I had also never seen a man so calm about his head being on fire while dressed in a shirt belonging to Linus either.

  I padded inside, leaving damp-grass footprints, and searched for hints Ambrose had been here.

  “I made pancakes to apologize for the bagels.” Linus glanced over his shoulder and indicated I should sit. “We need to get started on the foundation before it’s too hardened to accept sigils.”

  “I came by last night.” I sank into my usual seat. “You weren’t home.”

  “I had an errand to run, as I told you in my text.” His movements lost their fluidity, a hitch in his otherwise calm façade, and the pancake he’d been flipping broke over the edge of the pan. “You didn’t reply, so I assumed it was nothing pressing.”

  “Sorry to leave you on read.” I picked at my fingernails, still unsure how to play this. I had never been on this side of the interrogation table before. “I got di
stracted by homework and forgot what I wanted in the first place.”

  A motion rolled through his shoulders that might have been a shrug or a flip of the spatula.

  “I brought you a present.” It came out too loud, too bright. “Two, actually.” I placed the avowal on the table, but it was the sketchbook I held out to him. “Does this look familiar?”

  “I haven’t seen that in years.” He killed the burner, set the pan aside, and carried a plate stacked high with pancakes to me. There he traded them for the sketchbook. Despite the heat from the stove, his fingers were frigid where they brushed my hand. “Where did you find it?”

  “In the garage.” I jogged my leg under the table. “I didn’t look inside.”

  The rubber band was so brittle it snapped in two when he removed it. “How did you know it was mine?”

  There was nothing for it but to be honest. “Boaz recognized it.”

  Absorbed by the slow turn of pages, he didn’t speak for a long time. “Did he tell you why he took it?”

  I toyed with my fork, unable to eat no matter how tempting the food smelled. “Yes.”

  “Here it is.” He paused on a page crinkled more than the rest. “Would you like to see?”

  The silverware clanked on the plate when my sweaty fingers slipped. “Sure.”

  Taking care not to damage the fragile onion-skin paper, he turned the sketchbook around then watched for my reaction.

  The drawing was of me, true enough, but that girl had yet to be broken. There were fractures, tiny ones, so small you had to squint to see them. She missed the idea of her mother, but she was loved. She had a family, a home, friends, a life. Try as I might, I could not see myself in her. I could not remember ever being this open, like my heart was a book with hope for the future written on its pages.

  The graphite portrait showed me kneeling in front of my open window, almost prayerful, with my arms stacked on the windowsill. I rested my chin on the bend of my arm and stared across the yard, right at the artist. Or so I would have thought if Boaz hadn’t told me the story of yanking Linus from the tree that straddled the property line. Linus, despite the angle, hadn’t been the recipient of my wistful sighs or my star-crossed gaze. As usual, it all came down to Boaz. I had been daydreaming in the direction of the Pritchard house, and Linus had immortalized that pitiful ache that entered my eyes whenever I saw him.

  “You could have drawn that from the ground,” I murmured. “Why did you climb that tree?”

  “I hoped you wouldn’t notice me,” he admitted. “The upper limbs concealed the limb where I sat.”

  I could almost tell from the angle he was higher than I’d first thought. “How did Boaz find you?”

  “Bad luck.” He grimaced at the memory. “He had a slingshot and a handful of berries. He was going to test his aim and see how many he could shoot through your window.”

  “That sounds like him.” And he had conveniently edited out that part.

  “The rest of the story you know.” He left no room for doubt that Boaz had told me how it ended.

  Linus’s candor was why I returned the favor. “I met Ambrose last night.”

  A brief flicker of—surprise?—played across his features before he sank into the chair across from me. “Where?”

  Not who? Or how? But where?

  All the niggling doubts skipping through my head all day broke into a sprint.

  “He was in the garden. I bumped into him when I went to drop off the sketchbook with you.”

  “Did he…?” Black threads spooled through his irises. “What did he say to you?”

  I cradled the grimoire to my chest, its warm leather a comfort. “My reasons and my purpose are my own. I do not answer to you, little goddess,” I repeated, “and you would be wise to remember that.”

  “That’s all?” His pupils expanded into gaping voids. “Did you get a good look at him?”

  “Yes.” I forced myself to hold his fathomless gaze. “He resembled you—” in a funhouse mirror kind of way, “—and he was wearing one of your shirts.” As a matter of fact, the style and cut matched the one he wore, if not the color. He probably ordered them in triplicate from his tailor. “Who is he? What is he?”

  “Let me handle Ambrose.” Ice glazed his words until a warm breath would shatter them into a million pieces. Not since that night in the Lyceum, when the Grande Dame named him my tutor, had I heard this imperious tone from him. “He’s a dangerous man. Avoid him at all costs.”

  The warning startled a laugh out of me. “Hard to do when he’s trespassing on my property.”

  “You don’t have to trust me,” he said, each crisp word making his teeth clack, “but trust me to take care of this.”

  As much as I wanted to show a little faith after all he had done for me, he had dodged too many of my questions for me to let the matter drop, and I was fresh out of blind faith. I had two eyes and—despite what Boaz thought—they were both cranked wide open. No one got a free pass from me these days. I had written too many in the past, and look where it landed me.

  Unwilling to give him my word, I let my silence speak for itself.

  “I must secure this.” He stood abruptly, sketchbook forgotten, and collected the avowal. “Then we’ll get started.” On his return from the office, he brought two boxes overflowing with supplies with him. “Are you ready?” The stiffness in his limbs echoed in his speech. “Or would you rather postpone?”

  Shoving back from the table, I got to my feet. “There’s no time like the present.”

  Neither of us had eaten, but I wasn’t hungry, and he never seemed to be either.

  Since his arms were full, I held the door for him, and we trekked over to Woolly together. The old house rustled her curtains in question, and I raised an arm in answer. All was well. No signs of the berry-mouthed Ambrose.

  About the time I realized I had been staring a hole through the back of Linus’s head, he caught my eye, his expression wary, like he didn’t trust my acquiescence. The flat press of his mouth reminded me of the flaps on an envelope as he sealed them closed on the topic still itching my lips with questions.

  Without resorting to a letter opener, I wasn’t sure how to get him talking again.

  “How does this work?” I stuck my nose in the topmost box, expecting to find silvery chisels or hammers. But the contents all sloshed and glistened in the moonlight. Jars upon jars filled with Maud’s signature ink waited for us to crack their wax seals. “The old wards were etched into the foundation. Is that what we’re doing?” I found a pen and three brushes of varying sizes loose in the bottom. “I’m not sure how steady my hand will be.”

  “This etching is done with a sigil, not by hand,” he explained, not buying my act for a minute. “All you have to do is paint on your design, let it dry, and then I’ll walk you through the rest. That’s where things get interesting.”

  Things had already gotten plenty interesting, if you asked me. “Are you going to help?”

  “No.” He located a sketch pad and pencil in the second box. “This way the wards will be answerable only to you.”

  “I like the sound of that.”

  A hint of smile threatened to peek through. “I thought you might.”

  A dip in temperature announced Cletus’s arrival, and it got me thinking. “Last night—”

  Linus was already shaking his head. “I told you I’ll handle Ambrose.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from telling him what I thought about that.

  “No, it’s not that.” I sat and crossed my legs. “Boaz and I were walking after dinner. We passed the Cora Ann, and Cletus started acting peculiar. He kept pointing toward the second deck.”

  “I see.” He settled on the grass near my elbow. “Was that the extent of it?”

  “He didn’t seem to want to leave the boat, but it was late, and we wanted to get home.”

  Linus rubbed his jaw. “He wasn’t aggressive or agitated?”

  “No.” I smoothed ou
t my design in front of me. “He was protective of me, but he didn’t harm or threaten me. He didn’t bother Boaz either.”

  I shook the small vial of ink Linus selected for me, broke its seal, then breathed in the familiar tang of Maud’s unique blend. There was no mistaking a necromancer’s signature once you learned its scent. Inks were as individual as the necromancers who mixed them.

  “I’m glad to hear it.” He tapped his pencil against the pad in his lap. “Cletus has been with me for a long time. I trust him as far as you can trust a wraith.”

  “I thought you said they weren’t autonomous.” I kept working, kept moving, not giving the words any particular weight. I think that offhandedness was the only reason he answered.

  “You can teach a wraith a series of commands, and the creatures abide by them as law. You can give them short-term goals, such as protect Grier. Or long-term goals such as do no harm unto others.” He scrunched up his face. “They operate within those parameters, even if you’re not actively controlling them. Or they should. Accidents do happen, but usually weak summoners are to blame, not the wraiths themselves.”

  This was different than what he’d told me the last time we’d spoken about wraiths. Then I had imagined Cletus parked in the living room at the carriage house, staring off into space, waiting for his master’s command. But Linus was admitting he had given Cletus blanket instructions to protect me as he saw fit.

  While he lectured me on wraith theory, relaxing into the safer topic, I worked on laying down my design in neat rows. I had a cramp in my hand when I finished the space within easy reach, but I was pleased with the work I had done. Flexing my hand to ease the pangs, I leaned back so Linus could get a better look.

  “You must have worked all day to finish this.” His gaze cut to me, a question in his darkening eyes. “I only recognize every fourth sigil or so from your initial design.”

  Ambrose had robbed me of sleep, but I kept that to myself. I seemed to be bottling up more and more lately. Woolly would not be pleased about that. She would demand I uncork as soon as possible. That meant reaching out to one of my three lifelines.