Free Spirit Ascendancy by E. E. Holmes Page A

Finn, who pasted on the most empathetic expression I’d ever witnessed on his features. Annabelle clutched the afghan more tightly around her body, but nodded.
    “You’ll have to go back out the way you came,” she mumbled. “They put another casting on the door. They could only leave it in pairs, and they had to say some kind of incantation before they crossed the threshold.”
    “That’s fine,” Finn said. He walked over to the bed and, respectfully keeping his eyes averted from her, scooped Annabelle up in his arms as though she weighed nothing at all.
    We followed as he slid easily through the window and ascended the fire escape, all without jostling Annabelle in the slightest. She clung to him, eyes clamped tightly shut, and I wondered if she was afraid of heights, or just still too traumatized to take in her surroundings. I heard him tell her to duck her head, and they disappeared smoothly into the flat above us.
    Savvy was the last through Lyle’s window, sliding it shut behind her, snapping the lock into place, and yanking the curtain closed for good measure.
    “I don’t think anyone was watching us,” she announced, waiting by the window, twitching the curtain aside just enough to continue peering into the alleyway.
    “Keep watch while we get her settled,” Finn said. “I’ll do a sweep.”
    Savvy nodded and turned back to her vigil, eyes darting here and there.
    “What’s going on?” Milo asked, materializing beside Hannah. “What are you… hot damn, what happened to
her
?” He was staring in unflattering horror at Annabelle.
    “This is Annabelle,” I said. “The Necromancers had her trapped downstairs in her flat.”
    “She looks wrecked! How long has she been down there?”
    Annabelle gave no indication that she had even heard him, which, I realized, was entirely possible; she was sensitive to spirits, but whether she could actually see and hear them the way that we could, I had no idea.
    “Annabelle? How long were you down there?”
    I couldn’t tell if she’d heard me either. She was staring blankly ahead; her teeth were chattering violently and there was something wrong with her eyes—her pupils were so widely dilated that her irises had been swallowed up by the wells of black.
    “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Hannah, can you help me?”
    Twenty minutes later, Annabelle sat curled on Lyle’s orange plaid sofa, a blanket around her feet and trembling hands gripped tightly around a steaming mug of tea. I had managed to scrub most of the runes from her skin in a hot bath, and Hannah had found her a clean pair of cotton pajamas from the bags of clothes Savvy had purchased at a nearby charity shop. The hot water seemed to have steamed away her confusion and even some of the weakness. Though I’d nearly carried her into the tub, she had climbed out on her own, and needed only minor help getting changed, her fingers still shaking too badly to fasten the buttons on her own. She started answering questions more readily, and when we’d brought her back out into the sitting room, she’d nodded in acknowledgment of Milo’s pronouncement that she was looking better; it seemed that, while she could not actually see him, she could sense, and in some cases hear, his contributions to the conversation. He certainly elicited the first hint of a smile from her by insisting that her hair was “runway chic” even right out of the shower.
    Through all of the clean-up process, Annabelle made no sound, save for one or two repressed sobs; I hadn’t pushed her, asking not a question as we cleaned her up. But now, as she sipped slowly on the tea, I eased into the interrogation. I was all for letting her recover, but there were some questions that needed to be answered right away, for all of our sakes.
    “Annabelle, how did you wind up in that state? Can you remember? I hate to make you talk about it, but we need to know,” I said, offering her a plate of scones.
    She made to