Spirit Ascendancy Read Online Free Page A

valuable historical documents!” Lyle said, vanishing and appearing offensively close to Finn.
    Finn caught my eye and very nearly smiled. “Mate, I hate to break it to you, but this is just a stack of rubbishy old magazines. You’d be better off binning them.”
    Lyle was practically apoplectic with rage. “Binning them? Don’t you see?  Everyone else will have binned them, but I kept them! I preserved them for posterity! I don’t think you understand the importance of this collection. It is, I am quite sure, the most complete collection of important royal memorabilia in all of the city and, quite conceivably, the world. It’s worth a fortune!”
    “Lyle, we need to um… stay here for a little while,” I said.
    Lyle stared at me. “What do you mean, stay here?”
    “I mean we are in some trouble, and we need a place to lay low in the city while we figure out what to do next. And seeing as no one is living here at the moment…”
    Lyle drew himself up, clearly affronted. “Oh, and I suppose because I’m not technically alive, that means this isn’t my flat anymore?” He put the word ‘alive’ in quotation marks, as though it were a mythical state of being instead of a medical fact.
    I snorted, “Well, actually, that’s pretty much exactly what it means.”
    Finn made a tiny sound that could have been anything, but I took to be a tiny snicker.
    “Well, I don’t care a fig for your problems. The contents of this flat are mine, and I’m not leaving them, especially with people who have no idea of their true worth,” Lyle said.
    “Look, we don’t want to throw your things away,” I said, lying through my teeth. “But maybe we could just… just move them to a more convenient area so we could, y’know, walk? Or sit on the furniture?” I gestured toward the nearby sofa, stacked four feet high with boxes of newspapers.
    “No, no, no!” Lyle shrieked hysterically, and his energy seemed to billow out from him, raising the hair on my arms like an electric current. “You can’t move these things! You can’t do that! I have a system, an organizational system. If you disturb the system, things won’t be catalogued properly, and the whole integrity of the collection could be compromised!”
    We all carefully avoided looking at each other. It couldn’t have been more obvious that the whole contents of the apartment were worth more as kindling for a good-sized bonfire than as any sort of legitimate collection, but there was no chance of convincing Lyle of that. There was still a lot I needed to learn about dealing with spirits, but one thing I had managed to learn at Fairhaven before torching the place to the ground was that a spirit was pretty set in its ways, much more deeply than a living person. A living person was always changing, growing, aging, adjusting to the world around them, but a ghost was a different story. It was a lot more difficult to coax any kind of change out of a ghost. Siobhán explained that that was why so many spirits were known for repetitive behaviors: walking the same hallway, looking out the same window, wailing at the same time of night, and so forth. And the longer a soul was in that state, the less mutable they became. There would be no convincing Lyle to move or get rid of his “collection,” but there was also no way we could hide out in an apartment that was basically a royally-themed death trap. So that meant…
    “You’re gonna have to expel him,” I muttered out of the corner of my mouth to Finn.
    He nodded grimly, as though he’d heard the entire argument I’d just considered in my head and arrived at the same unassailable conclusion. He waited until Lyle was chastising Hannah for replacing Her Majesty’s bobble-head at the wrong angle, and muttered back, “If I do that, I can only keep him out temporarily. Do you know how to put up the wards to keep him out for good?”
    “Well, I’ve never actually done it, but I’ve got the Book of Téigh Anonn, so