A straitjacket.
There was something quietly, calmly sinister in the congruence. I just stared for a moment, and the bottom fell out of my stomach as I finally realized, for the first, awful time, what my instinct had been screaming at me: I was in danger. That my rescuer, teacher, my guardian meant to do me harm.
Tears blurred my vision as I asked him, in a very quiet, very confused voice, “Why?”
Justin remained calm. “You don’t have the knowledge you need to understand, boy. Not yet. But you will in time.”
“Y-you can’t do this,” I whispered. “N-not you. You saved me. You saved us.”
“And I still am,” Justin said. “Sit down next to Elaine, Harry.”
From the couch, Elaine said in a quiet, dreamy monotone, “Sit down next to me, Harry.”
I stared at her in shock and took a step back. “Elaine . . .”
Justin threw kinetomancy at me when I looked away.
Some instinct warned me in the last fraction of a second, but instead of trying to block the strike, I moved with it, toward the front picture window, weaving my own spell as I went. Instead of interposing my shield, I spread it wide in front of me like a sail, catching the force of Justin’s blast and harnessing it.
Me, my shield, Justin’s energy, and that picture window exploded onto the front lawn. I remembered the enormous sound of the shattering glass and wood, and the hot sting of a dozen tiny cuts from bits of flying glass and wood. I remember being furious and terrified.
I went through the open space where the window had been, fell onto the lawn, took it in a roll, and came up sprinting.
“Boy!” Justin said, projecting his voice loudly. I looked over my shoulder at him as I ran. His eyes were more coldly furious than I had ever seen them. “You are here with me—with Elaine. Or you are nowhere. If you don’t come back right now, you are dead to me.”
I lopped the last two words off the sentence to get his real meaning and poured on more speed. If I stayed, he meant to render me helpless, and from that beginning there could be no good endings. If I went back angry, I could fight him, but I couldn’t win—not against the man who taught me everything I knew. I couldn’t call the cops and tell them Justin was a mad wizard—they’d write me off as a nutcase or prankster without thinking twice. It wasn’t like I could run to Oz and ask a more powerful wizard for help.
He’d never told me about the White Council or the rest of the supernatural world. Abusers like to isolate their victims. People who feel that they are completely alone tend not to fight back.
“Boy!” Justin’s voice roared, now openly filled with rage. “Boy!”
He didn’t need to say anything more. That rage said it all. The man who had given me a home was going to kill me.
It hurt so much, I wondered if he already had.
I put my head down and ran faster, my tears making the world a blur, with only one thought burning in my head:
This wasn’t over. I knew that Justin could find me, no matter where I ran, no matter how well I hid. I hadn’t escaped that straitjacket. I had only delayed it for a little while.
I didn’t have any choice.
I had to fight back.
“What happened next?” asked a fascinated voice.
I shook my head and snapped out of the reverie, looking up to the sunlit sky outside my grave. Winter’s hold was definitely weakening. The sky was grey clouds interspersed with streaks of summer blue sky. There was a lot of water dripping down the edges of my grave, though the snow at the bottom was still holding its chill.
The Leanansidhe sat at the edge of my grave, her bare, dirty feet swinging back and forth. Her bright red hair had been bound back in a long tail, and she was dressed in the shreds of five or six different outfits. Her head was wrapped in a scarf that had been knitted from yarn duplicating various colors of dirty snow, and the tattered ends of it hung down on either side of her head. It gave her a sort of lunatic-coquette charm, especially considering the flecks of what looked like dried blood on the pale skin of her face. She looked as happy as a kid on Christmas morning.
I just stared up for a moment and then shook my head faintly. “You saw that? What I was thinking?”
“I see you,” she said, as though that explained it. “Not what you were thinking. What you were remembering.”
“Interesting,” I said. It made a certain amount of sense that Lea could discern the spirit world better than I could. She was a creature who was at least partly native to the Nevernever. I probably looked like some kind of pale, white, ghostly version of myself to her, while the memories that were my substance played across the surface.
I thought about the wraiths and lemurs that Sir Stuart had put down on my first night as a ghost, and how they had seemed to bleed images as they faded away.
“Yes,” she said, her tone pleased. “Precisely like that. My, but the Colonial Knight put on a display for you.”
“You knew Sir Stuart?”
“I have seen him in battle on several occasions,” Lea said, her eyes somewhat dreamy. “He is a worthy gentleman, in his fashion. Quite dangerous.”
“Not more dangerous than the Corpsetaker,” I said. “She destroyed him.”
Lea thrust out her lower lip and her brow furrowed in annoyance. “Did she? What a contemptible waste of a perfectly doughty spirit.” She rolled her eyes. “At least, my godchild, you have discerned your foe’s identity—and that of her pet.”
I shivered. “Her and Evil Bob.”
She waved a hand. “Evil is mainly an aesthetic choice. Only the spirit’s power is significant, for your purposes.”
“Not true,” I said mildly. “Though I know you don’t agree.”
Her expression was pensive for a moment before she said, “You have your mother’s Sight, you know.”
“Not her eyes?”
“I’ve always thought you favored Malcolm.” The serious expression vanished and she kicked her feet again. “So, young shade. What happened next?”
“You know. You were there.”
“How do the mortals say it?” she murmured. “I missed that episode.”
I coughed out a surprised little laugh.
She looked faintly miffed. “I do not know what happened between the time you left Justin and the time you came to me.”
“I see.” I grinned at her. “Do you think I just give away stories for free? To one of the Sidhe?”
She tilted back her head and laughed, and her eyes twinkled. Like, literally, with little flashes of light. “You have learned much. I began to despair of it, but it seems you may have acquired wisdom enough, and in time.”
“In time to be dead,” I said. “But, yeah. I’ve worked out by now that the Sidhe don’t give anything away. Or take anything for free. And after however long, I realized why that might be: because you can’t.”
“Indeed,” she said, beaming at me. “There must be balance, sweet godchild. Always balance. Never take a thing without giving such a thing in return; never give a favor without collecting one in kind. All of reality depends on balance.”
I squinted at her. “That’s why you gave Bianca Amoracchius years ago. So that you could accept that knife from her. The one Mab took from you.”
She leaned toward me, her eyes all but glowing with intensity and her teeth showing in a sudden, carnivorous smile. “Indeed. And such a treacherous gift it was, child. Oh, but if that deceitful creature had survived you, such a vengeance I would have wreaked that the world would have spoken of it in whispers for a thousand years.”
I squinted at her. “But . . . I killed Bianca before you could balance the scales.”
“Indeed, simple boy. Why else, think you, that I gifted you with the most potent powers of faerie to protect you and your companions when we battled Bianca’s ultimate progenitors?”