“Okay,” I tried to say, only it came out as a cough.
“You can do it,” Ian whispered into my ear.
“What’s the third thing?” I asked.
Ian’s prolonged silence was unnerving enough to tempt me to open my eyes, but I stayed still.
Against my closed eyelids, the sun seemed to shift. My head spun, and I reached out for the bookcase next to me, but all I touched was Ian’s arm. Solid, warm, and disturbingly alive, which was impossible. I tried to pull my hand back, but Ian covered it with his own and held it there.
“Listen to me, Griffin,” he said. “Winning over the Guild is easy. St. Hilaire is a joke. Nobody buys the whole spiritualist thing anymore. This town is hemorrhaging money. They need a sure thing. Marketing. Tourism. Blah, blah, blah. That is one of the reasons they’re busting their asses to try to reach me. They think I’m their ace in the hole; that they can market me as their poster boy. Ghosts exist and all that crap. Just think of the Times Square billboard they could buy with my picture plastered all over it to advertise their freaking fundraiser. Get your shit together and give them an angle they haven’t seen before, and they will eat you up.”
With his last word, Ian pushed me backward into the bed. I opened my eyes. “What if I can’t?” It wasn’t as if I could go into Eaton Hall and ask a Guild member to inject me full of chemicals.
Ian leaned over and slapped me lightly on the face, leaving his hand there a beat too long. “Wrong question.” He turned and reached for my backpack, and I froze when he pulled out my grandmother’s notebook.
“Hey,” I called out. “What’s the right question?”
Ian tossed the book onto the bed. “They don’t know what you have. Stop overthinking everything. Go in there and do what you do. Let them worry about picking up the pieces.”
I glanced at the book. Maybe.
“So what…?” I started to ask Ian again what the right question was, but the room was empty.
I stood, staring at the book for an absurdly long time. Once again, I’d let Ian screw with my head. I shrugged back into my coat. Then I closed the window against a suddenly sleet-filled rain, sat down, opened the book, and began to read.
* * *
The letter that arrived the next morning was just as I expected: cream envelope, tangerine sealing wax, brown calligraphy. “The presence of your company is requested…”
It must have come in the middle of the night, because my father left it on the dining room table under a note that read, “Not all who wander are lost.” I didn’t know why my dad would think of me as wandering. And I didn’t know if he’d written the note before or after he’d seen the invitation from the Guild. He’d never been a huge Guild supporter, but he’d always wanted me to do what made me happy.
I put the summons in my bag, flat for safekeeping. I owed Dec a call; usually, I answered on the first ring. Ian’s accusation had hit close to the mark.
While I knew Dec would agree our friendship was supposed to go beyond scorecards, and checks and balances, that didn’t change the fact that Dec wasn’t going to be thrilled about my Guild invite. It was safe to say Dec hated them. Would he hate me too once I joined?
I had to hope that Dec would come to terms with it eventually. Maybe he wouldn’t love the idea, but he could learn to tolerate it. That was the best I could really hope for.
My phone rang again and this time I picked up.
“Are you okay?” Dec asked.
Something in my veins quieted at hearing his voice. “I’m good,” I said, trying to choose my words carefully. “Sorry about not calling you back last night. I was reading and fell asleep. I was about to, actually. Call you.”
The lies sat uneasily on my tongue. They tasted like my father’s health shakes—bitter and green.
Dec was silent for a long time. The tension that hung between us was new and toxic, a quickly growing vine that would choke out all other living things.
“So this morning,” I began. Tell him. I thought the words, mouthed them, Ian Mackenzie showed up and told me how to win over the Guild and then I got my letter. In my head, Dec exploded in anger.
No words would be able to deflate Dec’s reaction. So instead, I finished with, “Sorry. Wasn’t trying to blow you off.”
Dec ignored my apology and said, “Something is happening with Tristan. Something bad.”
I exhaled, my breath jagged. For Dec to sound so upset about Tristan, sad not angry, things must really be dire. “Do you want me to come over?”
Dec went silent on the line. We were both instantly aware of the oddity of the question. I’ll be right there. That was what I would normally say if I hadn’t been there already. Somewhere in the question existed the option for me to do nothing. That option had never existed before, and now it was too late to take that option off the table.
“He’s remembering a lot more,” Dec said, ignoring the question. “But he’s less. Like fading. Physically. He says he’s disappearing.”
I fumbled with a pen on the table, flipping it over and over and over. From what I’d read about curses, I knew this might be a possibility. And I knew that the only chance he had of actually resting was to finish the Prelude. I was afraid to think about what the alternative might be. That was often how these things worked.
My hand tightened in a nervous twitch. I put the pen down. Whatever was happening to Tristan wasn’t a problem I’d be able to make go away. Its existence would be one more log on the fire of Dec’s anger. And that was before Dec knew about the Guild summons. Or about Ian.
“Never mind,” Dec said. His voice sounded weary, all the fight gone out of him.
“Sorry,” I said again. And I was. For everything I was saying, and more, for everything I wasn’t. “Actually there are a couple of things I need to talk to you about,” I spit out before I could stop myself.
Dec made a “huh” sound into the phone, and my jaw clenched. For someone who didn’t believe in keeping secrets, I was suddenly overflowing with them.
I glanced outside the window to see rain still pouring down. “I could come over now,” I offered. “If you want me to.”
Dec sighed. “I don’t know. I mean, I guess you could. But I promised Laura I’d help her drag some stuff down from the attic and sort through it before school starts, and we’re running out of time. I don’t think Tristan is going to fade away today, anyhow. I mean, maybe soon, but not today.”
It was such an obvious lie that I stared at the phone long after Dec had hung up.
I’d gotten what I’d been wanting for years: a request from the Guild. Now I needed to respond. My heart wasn’t in it, though; it felt empty and wrong, beating out of rhythm.