“There’s always a catch,” Lowe murmured.

“Indeed. And this one was eight years,” Dr. Bacall said. “Eight extra years of life, then they’d die. That was the curse. What could I do? Watch them die in front of me? Lose my unborn daughter? I was out of my mind with grief—over their betrayal, over the loss of my innocence and trust in the two people I cared most about in the world.”

Bacall shook his head, remembering, then sighed deeply and continued.

“The witch pulled them both back from death’s grip and saved Hadley in the process. I was elated for a time. It wasn’t until much later that I learned the true nature of that magic and what had gone wrong. Because the spell, you see, was intended to make the recipient deathless.”

“Deathless?”

“Indestructible. For eight years, anyway. And I saw it with my own eyes. Death wouldn’t touch Noel. He would not bleed out from a stabbing, nor die from a bullet. Disease and poison had no effect. I pushed him off a cliff in 1901. He fell several hundred feet, brushed himself off, and walked away.”

Dear God.

“Terribly inconvenient for me, as the more I learned about the length of their affair, and how much my wife still cared for him, I was rather sorry I saved him. The only thing I wanted in those ensuing years was to bury the bastard—and it was the one thing I couldn’t do.”

“And your wife had this same advantage? This deathlessness?”

“No.” The blind man felt around the table for his tea and took a sip. “My wife seemed perfectly normal. Human. And Hadley was born healthy. Nothing was amiss. I began to hope perhaps she got lucky, and that since Noel got the curse’s blessing, he’d also be the one to pay its price after eight years—that Vera would live a normal life.”

The old man shook his head and continued.

“But eight years is a long time when you’re young. And spell or no spell, Vera just would not give Noel up. She insisted she loved us both equally, but would leave both Hadley and me if I forced her to end the affair. I couldn’t risk that. If she wouldn’t leave him, I figured I’d just take him off the playing field. So, two years into the curse, I began searching for a way to kill a man who can’t die.”

“The amulet,” Lowe whispered.

Bacall nodded. “If it were assembled, I could call up a door and Noel would be claimed. Maybe it would be enough to pay the ferryman, so to speak. Or, if nothing else, Vera might borrow Noel’s extra years once he was out of the picture.”

“So you searched for the amulet and found the crossbars, but you couldn’t find the base.”

“Exactly. I sent them home, hoping to keep them hidden from Vera. But she was smart. And she couldn’t bear to lose Noel, which is why she hid the crossbars when she realized what I was planning on using them to do. She couldn’t let me kill him.”

Lowe remembered Vera’s words during the channeling, warning Hadley to keep the amulet out of both men’s hands. “But after she hid the crossbars, the earthquake hit.”

“Exactly eight years to the day that the witch had cast the curse on them,” Bacall said. “I arrived home from England an hour before the earthquake struck.” Unseeing eyes blinked away tears. He shook his head and composed himself. “As you can see, this house survived both the quake and the Great Fire. But Vera was not so lucky.”

He leaned toward Lowe, as if he could see him. “You see, the spell was meant for one person—not two. And because it was cast on both Vera and Noel at the same time, the magic split. My partner got the advantageous part of the spell—the immunity from death. And my wife’s soul was dragged into the underworld, harvested by dark reapers.”

Hadley’s Mori.

“And as if that weren’t enough,” Bacall continued, “not only did these reapers take my wife’s life, they somehow got passed along to my daughter. I suppose it’s because Vera was pregnant with Hadley when the original spell was cast, because after my wife died, the spirits started appearing to my daughter.”

Christ. Mummy’s curse, he’d told Hadley all these years.

Anger tinted Bacall’s voice. “You can’t fathom how shocked I was to see them again after they’d taken Vera’s life. I thought they’d come to take Hadley, too. But no. They were just attached to her, appearing for short times, then disappearing. It was as if she was being haunted by ghosts—ghosts that never seemed to scare her, even when she was a child.”

“Did she see her mother taken by them?”

“No, and I never told her. You can’t imagine how terrifying it was to watch them following my daughter around like hellhounds. They are a plague. Nasty, evil creatures. They’d taken my wife, and for eight years after Vera’s death, I was terrified they’d take Hadley, too. I prepared for the worst, waiting for them to turn on her.”

“But they didn’t,” Lowe said quietly.

Bacall shook his head. “They seem to be merely bound to her without purpose. I’ve come to believe they are still hanging around because of Noel. He tricked death. That spell should’ve taken his life, too—not just Vera’s. But as long as he’s alive, Hadley bears the burden of the specters.”

They may not want Hadley’s life, but they were still hungry to reap souls. Lowe nearly said this out loud, but caught himself. In Dr. Bacall’s mind, Lowe barely knew Hadley at all. And if the man got an inkling of what Lowe had been doing to his daughter? Well, he damn sure could take away the dangling check, couldn’t he?