“Call.” It was Tamara, hanging over the edge of the hayloft. Call could see Jasper behind her. “Your dad is a wanted criminal. He doesn’t have ‘personal stuff.’ ”
“She’s right,” Aaron said, sounding sorry. “Anything could be relevant.”
“Fine.” Call wished he’d been cleverer, wished he’d guessed his father’s hiding spot instead of Aaron, wished he didn’t have to share these letters with the others. “But I’m reading them. Not anyone else.”
He kept the letters jammed under his arm as he climbed back up the ladder, Aaron on his heels. Jasper had figured out how the hurricane lamps worked, and the hayloft was full of light. Call sat down on one of the beds, and the rest of them clambered onto the other one.
It was weird, seeing Master Joseph’s handwriting like this. It was spiky and thin and he signed every letter with his full name, complete with middle initial. There were nearly a dozen of them, dated over the last three months. And they were full of disturbing lines.
There’s a way we can both have what we want.
You want your son brought back from the dead and we want Constantine Madden.
You don’t understand the full power of the Alkahest.
We never saw eye to eye before, Alastair, but now you’ve lost so much. Imagine if Sarah could be returned to you. Imagine if everything you lost could be returned to you.
Steal the Alkahest, bring it to us, and all of your suffering will be over.
None of it made any sense. Alastair had been going to use the Alkahest to kill him, hadn’t he? He’d wanted to destroy the Enemy of Death.
Call remembered the astonishment on his father’s face as he’d struck the wall, remembered the feeling of overwhelming fury. What if he’d been wrong about Alastair? What if Alastair hadn’t been lying when he said he wasn’t going to kill Call?
But if Alastair wanted to get rid of him and get the soul of his real son back, that was just as bad. Maybe he didn’t want to kill Call outright, but sticking his soul back in Constantine Madden seemed a lot like dying.
“What?” Tamara was leaning so far off the bed that she was nearly falling. “Call, what does it say?”
“Nothing,” Call said grimly, folding up the most incriminating note and sticking it in his pocket. “It’s a bunch of tips on how to grow begonias.”
“Liar,” said Jasper succinctly, snatching one of the letters off the bed. He started to read out loud, eyes growing wider. “Wait, these are … these are really, really, really not about begonias!”
It was horrible. Tamara and Aaron clearly hadn’t believed him, but the look of betrayal on both their faces was almost as awful as Jasper’s smug gloating. Worse, they read everything. Line after bizarre line — though to Call’s relief, nothing in the letters referred directly to the fact that he possessed the soul of Constantine Madden. Who knew what they would have thought if they’d gotten ahold of the letter in his pocket?
“So, he really has the Alkahest and he’s going to give it to the Enemy?” Jasper looked frightened. “I thought you said he’d been wrongfully accused.”
“Look at this one,” said Tamara. “Alastair must have agreed, because Master Joseph is writing about how he’ll contact him and how they’ll meet. It’s supposed to take place two days from now.”
“We need to go back to the Magisterium,” said Aaron. “We have to tell someone. Call, I believed you about your dad, but maybe you were wrong.”
“We can’t risk the Alkahest falling into the hands of the Enemy,” said Tamara. “It means Aaron could be killed. You see that, right, Call?”