The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding (The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding #1)(18)

Prosper, the letter began. With a jolt that zipped straight from my heart to my brain, I recognized my dad’s handwriting. The neat, usually uniform letters were messy, as if he’d written this quickly.

I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but your grandmother refuses to see reason. Your mother and I have taken precautions to ensure that you or Prue, whoever it might be, will be safely out of her reach. Please be good for your uncle Barnabas, and listen to what he tells you. As hard as it will be to believe, it’s all the truth. He will do everything in his power to see that you get the help you need. Until then, it’s too dangerous for us to come to you, or for you to come to us. Do not call us. Do not e-mail. Do not tell anyone your name. Be patient. Be brave.



And then he’d signed it…with his business signature. Not a Love, Dad. It could be that he wanted to prove, in case I had doubts, that it was really him. I traced my finger over the loops of Percy Redding and wondered why it felt like my heart was pumping ice.

“Why…why did he send a letter?” I asked. “Why didn’t he tell me any of this in person, or call, or e-mail?”

“Because of your grandmother,” Uncle Barnabas said. “Because he knew that your grandmother was now watching the lot of you, and had men assigned to monitor your e-mails and phones. I don’t have either, for my own safety and now yours. This was the only way.”

All of that, unfortunately, sounded plausible. When you had more money than Bill Gates and plenty of time on your hands, you could achieve a whole new level of meddling. My grandmother had bypassed evil and gone straight for supervillain.

Nell had begun pacing but stopped suddenly, cutting off whatever I was about to say next. “Can you just skip all this babying and get to the part where you tell him he has an ancient demon trapped inside him?”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, like the way you’re a witch? Come on. Be real.”

But even as the words left my mouth, I remembered how hard those invisible fists had shoved and punched at me. And when a faint crackle of light seemed to travel over Nell’s skin and hair, her eyes turning to slits, I sat as far back into the couch as I could.

She was a witch.

Oh, crap.

“Prosperity—”

“Call me Prosper,” I begged. “Please.”

“All right, Prosper it is.” My uncle cleared his throat explosively. “What I’m about to tell you may be shocking, too fantastical to be believed, but you have to hear me out.”

Listening. I could do that. The curtains fluttered around us as a breeze moved in, carrying with it a scattering of bloodred leaves. I smelled the faint cinnamon again, the smoky scent of autumn, and forced myself not to think of anything or anyone I’d left behind in Redhood.

“Your—our family, I mean,” Barnabas said, glancing at the family tree. “We’ve had dealings with a devil.”

Yeah, and what else was new? “I know,” I said, holding up my bandaged arm. “Her name is Catherine Westbrook-Redding.”

But this time, Uncle Barnabas didn’t laugh. “I wish I were joking, but believe this if nothing else—the Redding family’s fortunes in America were no accident. All of this wealth and power and influence came to us because Honor Redding made a contract with a demon—a fiend, as they’re really called—in 1693.”

“Oooookay,” I said, suddenly thinking of the gallery of stalker photos and articles on the attic’s wall. The engravings. “A fiend.”

“This kind of fiend is known as a malefactor. They draw up contracts with humans to give them whatever their heart desires. In exchange, upon their death, the malefactor will come to claim their soul.” Uncle Barnabas paused, but I wasn’t sure if he was trying to be dramatic, or just making sure my brain had time to catch up. I could barely hear him over the thump, thump, thump of my heart. The scratching of the racks of drying herbs against the wall. “Honor Redding leveraged the souls of his family and every settler in Redhood for a guarantee that the Reddings’ fortunes would not fail.”

Now that it was autumn, I knew to expect night to sweep in earlier, coating the room. In the silence that followed, it seemed to arrive all at once. With the dark wood all around us, the cramped nooks and crannies, it started to feel less like an attic and more like a coffin. And we were just waiting for someone to close the lid over us.

Nell snapped her fingers, and the three lamps in the room turned on. It startled me out of my thoughts. I blinked.

“Like I said, it’s a bit of a shock, but…” Uncle Barnabas’s gaze flickered between his bony hands and my face. “Do you need something for your nerves? Tea? I have a little brandy—”

“I’m twelve,” I reminded him.

“Right, well…right…”

Nell began to roll up the family tree. I watched the names of my family disappear branch by branch, until, finally, my name slipped by with the rest of them.

“It’s true,” she said. “It sounds absurd because it is absurd. I don’t think anyone ever gave you the full story. Like the Bellegraves. They sound familiar?”

Uncle Barnabas’s lips went white as he pressed them together. “Ah. The Bellegraves.”

“I do know about them,” I said. “We had a unit on Redhood’s history last year. They were the big family that followed the Reddings from England and settled Redhood with them back in 1687.”