The hooks of a summoning dug deep into my essence, pulling me down. Had I a form, I would have made a face. I was weak. It had been around three months since London was ravished by a horde of spirits led by Nouda the Great. To my dismay, I almost missed the cheerful enmity that Faquarl and I had shared. My essence was mostly healed, and I was almost looking forward to taking my mind off things.
You see, in the Other Place, we don't do anything. We just are. And that leaves an awful lot of time for helpless, hopeless brooding. It wasn't as if I was sad. Not at all as if I liked Nathaniel. It was simply that the London incident had reminded me uncannily of Ptolemy. In my relative solitude, I had had far too much time to reflect on that. Both times, some poor human had risked body and soul to join me in the Other Place. Both times, that person or someone close to them had died in battle shortly afterwards, releasing me beforehand. The similarities... endless.
I uneasily left my thoughts behind and returned to resisting the present summons. Who would it be this time? Someone different. As far away from London as possible, I hoped. But as the relentless tug of the summoning formed a familiar pattern, I began to have doubts.
I gazed at my surroundings as they trickled into focus. The style was resoundingly familiar, but I couldn't quite place it. And my master? I hardly dared look. But when I gathered my courage and looked, the worst fears that had begun to take shaky form at the back of my vast mind (no, literally, vast. Try me sometime.) were confirmed. It was her.
Kitty Jones.
She sat in the circle, looking tired after the strain of the summons. She looked much fitter than I had ever hoped to see her after her trip to the Other Place. Next to her was a boy roughly her age, with dry, flaky skin. I restrained myself from commenting, sensing that a rude personal statement would not go down well.
"Bartimaeus."
I raised Ptolemy's arched eyebrow. "Yeah. Who did you expect, the tooth fairy? You summoned me." I threw in this little bit of cheek to show her that I was still me. I hadn't changed. She turned to the boy next to her with a face like thunder.
"Why?" It seemed to be a rhetorical question; in any case, the boy did not answer it. I took another look at him and involuntarily did a large and horribly obvious double-take.
There, battered, bruised, scarred and barely recognizable, stood Nathaniel.
"It's rude to stare."
His voice was the same as always, flippant and boyishly accusing. I reached up an olive-skinned hand to push my mouth closed. "You're looking a bit worse for wear, Natty-boy!" I spoke coolly in an attempt to regain my lost composure. A shadow of a smile touched his face.
"You don't look so great yourself, Bart. Kitty – let him go. He's seen enough to stop him getting his essence in a twist."
"But – but -" I had so many questions, but Kitty's eyes were closed and with each whispered syllable, the weight of words binding me in the pentacle fell away. As the dark room spun and dissolved around me, I knew that the story of Bartimaeus and Nathaniel, such as it had become, was well and truly over.
Deep in the farthest misty reaches of the Other Place, a torn, twisted, hurt spirit cradles in its ethereal, smoky hands everything it has left of its once-great identity; a ghostly, roughly created illusion plays over and over of the one thought that keeps its wounded essence in the pull of time – revenge.
And Bartimaeus will be the first to go.
