Something powerful is drawing Ward back to Devil's Island. Something he thought he had forgotten. He must evade vicious lighthouse keeper George Jaggles in order to rescue it, but Jaggles will soon be the least of his worries. Because an assassin is...
All that long summer Joe's fel had stalked about in the background of Nick's dreams, her eyes afire with otherworldy light, and all the stories he had ever heard about familiars – that they belonged to sorcerers, that they were harbingers of death – had returned to him. He began to observe the fel more closely. He fancied she watched him too, though he only ever caught her out of the corner of his eye.
Sometimes there is a confluence of small events, each innocuous when taken alone, but terrible in their cumulative effect. Even Janice would not have wished the outcome: she had only wanted to plant a wedge between the two boys, of whom she was intensely jealous, for she had no such friendship of her own. In later years Nick would look back at it and wonder at the perfect storm it had been. It was as if it was pre-ordained.
Nick had arrived home one day to discover Joe in his room. Worse, he was holding the dice in his hand. Joe stuttered some explanation involving Kefira, which only made Nick more suspicious. The fel was nowhere in sight. Nick remained silent, watching his red-faced friend run out of words.
There had been a time when Nick wouldn't have been angry – when he would have taken Joe's explanation without question. But that time was gone.
"Get out," Nick said.
But Joe didn't leave. "What are they?" he said.
"Dice."
"Where'd you get them? Was it the Vault?"
Nick nodded. What did it matter if Joe knew this? He had already told Joe about the Vault months ago. Who was Joe to interrogate him about the dice anyway? It was he who had done wrong. He should have been begging Nick's forgiveness, not interrogating him.
Nick across the room at his friend and felt a revulsion for him. His stupid, bland, innocent face. Joe had never been in danger in his life. He had not had to watch his own parents die. And it occurred to him that Joe had come here to steal the dice. It was as clear as day.
Now, incredibly, Joe was offering to take them to his mere.
"No!" Nick said, surprising himself at the ferocity in his own voice.
Joe's eyes widened. "Okay," he said. "Sorry." And without another word he'd thrown the dice on the bed and left the room, casting a troubled glance back at his friend from the doorway.
Nick had closed and locked the door. Then he got the pouch out from the desk drawer and put the dice in it and hid it in the hole in the mattress where he kept the revolver Randall had given him. Janice's story rang in his ears. Joe's fel had been spying on his parents. And now Joe was spying on him.
Perhaps it was the closeness of the dice that night as he slept, but his dreams were more vivid than ever. He found himself on the scaffold at the Derricks, a rope around his neck. From the seats Joe watched blandly on, Kefira at his side, the dice resting in his open hand. The trapdoor fell open and the rope snapped taut, and he felt himself falling through the dice, down through the sign of the Bear, into a darkness where lay some ultimate, fateful meaning. And somewhere behind a curtain of darkness burned a terrible fire.
He woke knowing exactly what to do.
He reached into the hole in his mattress, his fingers running over the leather pouch and the cold weight of the barking iron, until they found the chain of the locket that was the double of the one the Brothers had taken from him. He pulled it out and put it over his head.
The house was empty. Joe and his sisters were at school, and Anna was at the Courts. Nick went to the kitchen and poured some milk into a saucer. Then he removed the pill from the locket, broke it in half over the milk, and stirred in the fine powder that fell from it. He carefully washed the spoon. Then he laid the saucer by the back door and sat down nearby to watch.
Presently Kefira appeared. With a mewl of delight she smelled the milk.
She was dead before she got halfway through it.
He was not a cruel boy. He didn't enjoy killing the fel. And he felt none of the relief he had expected once she was dead. He just felt empty.
That afternoon, at the height of Joe's fury and grief, it was Janice who stumbled upon the truth. "Nick was the only one here," she had said over her Brother's wails.
Her furious mere had sent her to her room and told her to mind her own business. But Joe had heard. He cast a burning, bleary-eyed look at Nick, then raced out of the room with the dead fel in his arms.
Nick was left alone in the room with Anna. She watched him silently for a while, her face inscrutable. He looked back at her until she looked away.
Nick often wondered if Joe had told her about the dice. The old Joe wouldn't have: the unspoken axiom of their boyhood had been that you never told secrets to adults, ever. It was the highest order of treason. But still, Nick wondered. If Anna suspected him of killing Kefira she would not have voiced it, for she frowned upon unsubstantiated allegations – indeed, she had spent her career fighting them. So he never learned what she knew. In any case, that night he left her house forever.
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