Page 23

Mercury could hear footsteps in the corridor behind him. None of his ghosts would make that noise moving through the house, so it had to have been one of the people who had taken up unwanted residence at Aventine Manor. The only ghosts with him at the moment weren’t able to act as another line of protection for him. He would be wise to slip out of reach until he could make his way to one of the hidden passages.

He pulled open the door to what he expected to be a small sitting area. But instead, it deposited him outside. He didn’t feel disappointed by the unexpected location. Quite the opposite, in fact. Being outside, he could orient himself. The inside of the house moved, but everything else remained the same. In fact, looking at it from the outside, one would have no idea that anything odd was happening within its walls.

Mercury slipped quickly away from the house and wove through the garden. If he could get to the other side of one of the walls surrounding the garden and sit there, then he wouldn’t be visible from the windows of the house. He could have a moment to breathe, to think through what came next, and to see if he could discover what it was that the Reluctant Recluse wanted him to find in the book he’d gone to such pains to make sure Mercury found.

He hunched down behind the wall, out of sight. Unseen. And for the moment, safe. But he didn’t immediately open the book. He leaned his head against the wall, rested the book in his lap, and simply breathed.

“I saw you both,” he said quietly. “I know I did. For just a moment, and not clearly, but you were there. The power that the Forever Flame used to hide you . . . cracked. I don’t know why. I don’t know how. But that means it’s possible. I know that now. And he knows that now.”

Mercury couldn’t hear anything. But for some reason, he felt certain they too were relieved and hopeful.

“We’re going to fix this. We’re going to break his hold. We’re going to heal what’s wrong with this place.”

He looked down at the book in his lap. He’d rushed from the library so quickly he hadn’t even bothered to check what the book was.

Mercury read the title out loud. “The Rending Rock.”

His heart hiccupped inside with an almost painful anticipation. The legendary rock tied to the folklore of Aventine.

The book was not a thick one, but it was decidedly too long to quickly read while he was sitting there. Though there was every chance the Reluctant Recluse had simply seen the title and thought it would be helpful, Mercury suspected the ghost knew what was in it.

He flipped one page at a time. “Give me some kind of sign when I’ve hit the page you want me to look at.”

Not more than a half-dozen pages in, the corner of the page flapped around seemingly on its own. Mercury dropped his eyes to the text and began to read.

The legends surrounding the Rending Rock have faded out of general knowledge. And therefore, it is not surprising that the details of it have been lost to time, as well. But for many years, it was spoken of in whispers and furtive glances in the area surrounding Hrendan Cnoll.

The Scholar had said that was the ancient name of Palantine Knoll, the village nearest Aventine Manor.

It was remembered that this was the place where, for the very first time, one ghostly attachment was traded for another. It was generally referenced with fondness or celebration. Only some were aware that this severing of attachments caused a rift, rending the very rock on which the trade occurred. But by the time this recounting was collected, there was but one person remaining who told a different story from the rest.

Mercury adjusted his position, bracing himself for yet another version of the history he had unknowingly stumbled into when he’d purchased Aventine.

Two families lived in the area, at war with each other. One lived beyond a thick grove of thorn trees. The other marked their land with hurdle fences made of twigs.

And in this place of broken things, that war came to a head. On the Rending Rock, the first severed ghost was not traded.

He was stolen.

Stolen.

Mercury had to read that word twice again for it to settle with any certainty on his mind. The first ghost trade was not a trade at all. The ghost was stolen. Taken. As impossible as a first trade would have seemed, stealing a ghost remained impossible. Of course, that was how he had described what happened to Baby Blue before he understood what had actually happened.

Had this stolen ghost been the same: the attachment was hidden rather than taken? Could the Forever Flame have been involved that long ago? No one was quite certain how long ghosts existed, not even the ghosts themselves. It was possible he’d been around that long, wreaking havoc from the beginning.

No, that couldn’t be right. If one ghost had simply disappeared, it wouldn’t have mistakenly been described as traded.

Mercury returned his eyes to the text, hungrily reading the secrets kept there.

The Place of Rending, it is believed, has held together the chaos that would otherwise have descended upon the world by enforcing rules on ghost trades. Not since that first one could a ghost be stolen. Not since that first one could an attachment be taken from someone who could not or did not agree to it. One ghost was always swapped for one ghost. No person was ever left with fewer than they began with. A careful dance, balancing what was broken, with a fragile plaster holding it together. But near this Place of Rending, that plaster wears thin. It breaks and shatters what comes in its path, searching for what can fix it at last.

At some point, the price will come due, and that long-ago act of thievery will either be put right, or the chaos it unleashed will break everything in its path.

The Place of Rending needed the crime committed centuries earlier to be made right. How was Mercury supposed to do that? He didn’t know who that ghost was. The person they were stolen from would be long dead by now. The theft had occurred at a time before standardized family names, so identifying who those long-ago people might have been was nearly impossible. The thorn-tree-grove-dwelling family might now be known by the surname Bush or Thorne or Grover. The family surrounded by barriers and hurdles might be known as Barr or Herd or Huddleston. Their names might have changed so drastically there was no guessing what they were now.

Mercury hadn’t the first idea how that long-ago thief had managed to steal a ghost. It wasn’t something even possible now. According to this record, the Place of Rending made certain of that. It held chaos at bay by preventing that from happening again.

And he was charged with fixing it.