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A ghost who has my name. How was that at all possible? Who was this unexpected ghost?
Mercury began undertaking the strategy one set of shelves at a time. He tried to somehow take in every book within visual range. Nothing moved. The Reluctant Recluse, assuming he could even manage to move a book, wouldn’t be able to move it very much; it would be difficult to spot.
The Invisible Rain peeked his head back inside once more.
“This would be much faster if the Violet Giant were in here as well,” Mercury said to him. “You haven’t seen him nearby, have you?”
The Invisible Rain shook his head.
A curtain in the room tugged, pointing back in the direction Mercury had been searching.
“Did I miss it?” he asked.
The curtain tugged again.
Mercury stepped back to the previous set of shelves, eyeing them. “Is it this one?”
The curtain tugged again, this time directly up and down.
“I will take that as a yes.” He faced it directly.
But everything was quite still. Nothing moved. There was no sound. No shifting of books or curtains or furniture.
“I wish I could see and hear you both,” Mercury said. “And not merely because it would make this easier.”
The light in the room changed in the next instant. It flickered in an amber glow that Mercury knew all too well. The Forever Flame.
“Have you come to lob more threats?” Mercury drawled. “They’ve grown a bit tedious.” He kept an eye on the shelves, though he tried not to be terribly obvious.
“Tedious?” The Forever Flame sneered. “I have been feared for centuries. I have followers who do my bidding, because generations of their families have done so. You cannot sever that. And you cannot fight it.”
“And yet I don’t look worried, do I?”
The Forever Flame eyed him, the tiniest, fleeting hint of uncertainty in his expression. “Your attachments are too emotional. It makes them very easy to locate. How easily I could sever more of them.”
“Sever?” Mercury slowly turned and faced him defiantly. “I know precisely what it is that you do, which makes it far more likely that I’ll discover how to undo it.”
The Forever Flame laughed, and the sound landed like cold shards of glass. Mercury didn’t doubt the ghost truly was dangerous and vengeful, but Mercury had learned to survive. And he wasn’t easily quelled.
“It can’t be undone,” the Forever Flame said. “What I do outlasts human lives. It is a fate those ghosts cannot possibly escape.”
“But you’ve come to Aventine Manor. Here, unbreakable things are broken all the time.” He took a single step closer to the Forever Flame. “And you’re facing me, who has spent my entire life doing the impossible.”
“You think you have the power to repair what countless people before you have failed to heal?”
“If I can’t heal it, then I will simply break it more. I will break you.”
In the echo of that declaration, two indistinct silhouettes formed in the room, barely discernible but also unmistakable. One, a little taller than Mercury. The other, the size of a five-year-old little boy.
The Forever Flame noticed as well. He stared, confused and wide-eyed. And whispered to himself, “Impossible.”
Hope like Mercury hadn’t felt in a very long time surged through him.
As the silhouettes began to fade, the taller of the two pointed at a book. Mercury reached over and snatched it. Then he rushed out the door. It pulled against his hand, an indication that the room was likely moving again.
The corridor twisted under his feet as he rushed away. The path in front of him distorted as the house creaked around him. He held fast to the book, unsure why he’d been directed to grab it, unsure what it contained, but exhilarated just the same. The Forever Flame’s unbreakable powers had, for the flicker of a moment, shown cracks.
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