“Admiring Queen Bathsheba’s beauty, I see.” Asmodeus smiled, his freckled cheeks flushing. A servant rushed forward and pulled out a chair for him. “How could you not?” Sitting, he thrust out a hand toward the nearby seats. “Please. Sit.”
Thomas took his seat, partially distracted by the shifting symbols on the tablecloth. Oswald folded his hands behind his head, leaning back. From the way he seemed to make himself at home, Thomas almost had the feeling that he would cross his ankles on the table.
“You wish to return home to Boston,” sad Asmodeus. “My scrying stone told me.”
Thomas nodded. “Very impressive. And you have a lot of… grand things in here.”
He beamed. “I was at the top of my scrying class in Sortellian College.”
Thomas cleared his throat. “I’m afraid there’s been a change of plans.” He pulled off his silver watch, dropping it onto the table with a clank. “What sort of plague-healing spell can I get for this silver?”
CHAPTER NINE
Jack
Jack unlocked the door to his apartment in Salem, eyeing the sofa with longing. It had been his retreat from Boston. Now, it would be his new home.
He liked his hometown, and the spacious, wooden-floored apartment would be perfect for a respite. He needed some time to restore himself after the Tatter forces had driven him out of Maremount.
He pulled off his gray peacoat, hanging it on a wooden rack. If he could ever bring Fiona in for a visit, she’d be impressed by the skylights that bathed the room in ivory morning light. At night, they could lie on the floor and look at the starry sky with hot cups of tea, wrapped in a downy blanket.
He ran his fingers through his dark hair and set his keys down on the countertop. What is she doing now, anyway? Her whole school had burned down. Scrying had shown him that she was in a mansion somewhere with her peasant friend, but he couldn’t tell where it was. Papillon, his moth familiar, was looking into it.
He walked over to a window overlooking the old burying ground and rested his hand on the rough granite wall. Of course, what really made the apartment perfect was that it came with enough reminders of death to keep him on task. The memento mori were his sword of Damocles, preventing him from becoming bloated with luxury. If something rendered him incapable of completing his Great Work, death was inevitable—for him, Fiona, and everyone else.
He caught a brief glimpse of his own reflection in the windowpane. This building had once been the old Salem jail, and his apartment overlooked a crooked-stoned cemetery. The graves jutted out of the ground at odd angles like hags’ teeth.
He could even see the spot where, during the witch trials, Sheriff Corwin had slowly pressed Giles Corey to death under the weight of stones. It had taken several crisp September days to finish the task, just as the leaves were starting to turn orange. The old man’s eyes had bulged, and his tongue had lolled out of his mouth. The sheriff had poked it back in with his cane.
Giles had been a stubborn old bastard. If he’d falsely confessed to witchcraft, it would have been over a lot quicker. It wasn’t a great loss to the world, anyway. The man had beaten one of his servants to death and condemned his own wife as a witch.
Jack turned back to his living room. Apart from the lone granite wall, a remnant of the old jail, each wall was covered from ceiling to floor with oak bookshelves. There were old grimoires, poetry books, a first edition of Paradise Lost, and his guilty pleasure—Gothic romances. And of course, now he had the most important book of all: the Voynich manuscript. It would be the key to completing his work. For all his time torturing people in Maremount, they had been able to tell him remarkably little about the Relic of Genesis. He knew only that the Purgators had possessed the relic at one point, as had the philosophers of Maremount. But after the creation of the magical realm, the Throcknells had sent the relic back to where it came from. Wherever that was.
That was where the Voynich manuscript came in. It would tell him of the relic’s history.
He glided over to the bar, nestled between bookshelves, and pulled out a wineglass, still thinking of Giles Corey’s bulging eyes. It was odd that he remembered his early days so well. He couldn’t remember a thing about the 1950s, but he’d probably spent most of it around here, skulking around cemeteries with a martini. He walked over to his dusky green sofa and threw himself down, leaning back into the cushions to stretch his muscles.