Witch's Soul

by Emma L. Adams

  The boss turned her sternest stare onto her. “Your brother is going to have to learn to handle the responsibility himself. Jas, Ilsa, take a patrol to the spirit line.”

  “Sure thing,” I said. “Do you want the report on today’s mission when we get back?”

  “Yes,” she said. “As for the mages, don’t worry. The guild sent a team to his house to scope out the… source of the trouble.”

  “Good,” I said over my shoulder as we left the office. At Ilsa’s puzzled look, I added, “We accidentally solved a murder again.”

  “As you do,” said Ilsa. “She said take a patrol…”

  “Meaning me,” Lloyd said, where he’d been waiting outside. “I take it back, maybe I do want special powers. What am I, the third wheel?”

  “Isn’t being a necromancer special enough?” I said. “Come on, you know she only put me in charge because I’m her assistant. Whatever happened on the spirit line had nothing to do with… psychics, witchy ghosts, vampires, whatever.”

  “Did you see anything weird, except the vanishing ghost?” asked Ilsa.

  “Nope,” said Lloyd.

  “That’s what I don’t get,” I said. “Usually, there are signs if there’s someone messing around nearby in the spirit realm.”

  ‘“It was on a spirit line, right?” she asked. “Where’s the nearest key point?”

  “I’d need to look at a map,” I said. “But they move around a lot anyway.”

  “Okay. I can check while we’re there.” Ilsa took the lead as we headed back to the weapons room.

  Once we were armed and ready, we made our way downstairs. While the damage from the attack a few weeks ago had been cleared up, there were a lot more guards by the doors than there’d been before. Necromancer deaths weren’t uncommon and dealing with the dead didn’t come without significant risk, even for the experienced. But attacks on that scale were a rarity, and despite our attempts to make Mackie feel welcome at the guild, she still didn’t seem at ease enough to confide in anyone about how she’d ended up the captive of a rogue witch.

  The three of us walked Edinburgh’s cobbled street, thick dark clouds gathering over the stone buildings. December had brought no snow but a lot of freezing rain, and most of us had deliberately sped up our patrols to cover twice as much ground so we wouldn’t freeze to death. I wished the necromancer candles carried actual warmth, but if anything, they were like freezing weights in my pockets. Our coats were durable and made for movement, not keeping us warm.

  “Let’s get this done fast,” I said through chattering teeth.

  “Agreed.” Lloyd yanked his hood up. “Would you judge me if I admitted I’m wearing fluffy pyjamas under this coat?”

  “No, I wish I’d done the same.”

  “Which way is the mage’s house?” asked Ilsa.

  “Best not go back there, considering he’s probably being arrested as we speak,” I said. “The spirit line goes through this road at the far end, we can check there.”

  Ilsa nodded. “Yeah. I’ll need to actually be on the line to have a proper look around.”

  Ilsa was the Gatekeeper of Death, which meant she had the ability to project further out of her body than almost anyone at the guild. If something was up on the spirit line or in any nearby key points, she’d know pretty quickly. She was also perceptive enough she’d figured out there was something different about my magic, but even she didn’t know I was bound to a shade or that my coven had broken supernatural laws in doing so.

  Ilsa paced to the middle of the road. “Here.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” said Lloyd, huddling closer to me for warmth.

  At key points, where two spirit lines intersected, liminal spaces sometimes formed, gaps between dimensions which tended to be a little lax with the laws of reality. Humans generally had no idea they were there, even supernaturals. But nothing appeared to be here except a road riddled with pot holes and crooked houses that’d seen better days.

  Ilsa’s gaze zoned out as she tapped into the spirit realm. She hadn’t yet mastered tapping into her spirit sight while doing other tasks like Lady Montgomery did. It was kind of bolstering to know that despite her off-the-charts talent, she was still learning.

  Ilsa stepped back and shook her head. “No. I can’t see anything odd. Want to check?”

  “I believe you,” I said. “Do you want candles? I know you can leave your body without them, but you know, procedure. Plus we don’t know what’s out there.”

  “Yeah, I vote in favour of not breaking the rules,” said Lloyd.

  Ilsa nodded. “It’ll be easier with two of us.”

  “Oh.” It wasn’t as though I hadn’t seen this coming. I couldn’t avoid going deep into the spirit realm forever, especially as it was a major part of my job. “Sure.”

  I set up the candles in a circle of twelve on the cracked tarmac, my hands shaking a little.

  “It’s okay.” Ilsa crouched down behind me. “There aren’t any liminal spaces here. It’s totally clear.”

  Oh. She thinks I’m traumatised by the battle. Well, I kind of was, but even she didn’t know that I’d been trapped in a summoning circle with Evelyn Hemlock and left to die. I’d had to use necromancy on my own body to escape, and that was before Evelyn had taken control and nearly killed my friends.

  Relax, Jas. Evelyn Hemlock was locked away. She couldn’t take control of me from her prison, even if I left my body wide open to possession.

  “Yeah,” I said, straightening upright. “I can just have a look around from here. It’s fine.”

  In a single blink, the grey fog of the spirit realm rose to surround me. The moment the shift happened was swift and easy, because technically, my spirit existed in this realm all the time, visible only to other necromancers. I raised ghostly hands in front of my face, part of me expecting to see two pairs of hands as I had before.

  I shook my head fiercely to dispel the thought and searched for Ilsa instead. She wasn’t hard to find, her spirit blazing brighter than mine and outlined in shimmering blue light. Below our feet was a faint grey line. The spirit line. It extended as far as the eye could see in each direction. I’d never seen anyone actually travel on the lines before, but it was possible for higher necromancers to learn how to do it. But if you went too far, you risked leaving your body behind for good.

  Ilsa floated forwards a few steps, apparently unconcerned about the risk. “Hmm. No signs here. The nearest key point is there.” She pointed up ahead to our north.

  “How in the world can you tell?”

  “Reach out,” she said. “It’s like… a vibration along the line. When it gets intense, that’s a key point.”

  By ‘reach out’, she didn’t mean in a physical sense. I’d used my spirit senses to track down Lloyd when he’d been captured, so I knew what she meant, but it still took several moments before I managed to ‘feel’ outwards from where I was standing. It was easy to extend my consciousness towards Ilsa and Lloyd because they were close by and I knew how to recognise them, but not something that wasn’t human.

  Maybe locking Evelyn up had made me into a normal necromancer, after all.

  Dammit. I can do this.

  I searched for Ilsa’s presence again, shining in the middle of the line. She had some serious necromantic strength, enough to make the spirit line itself hum with magic. I extended my consciousness outwards from her presence, and moved north, towards—ah, now I felt it. The line vibrated with power, and the echo of Evelyn’s magic hummed so suddenly, I broke the connection and slipped off the line.

  “You okay?” Ilsa looked down at me where I’d sprawled in the air. If you fell over in the spirit realm, you either floated on the spot or just kept falling until you landed back in your body.

  “Yep. Nobody saw that.”

  She smiled, and then a jolt along the line snapped my attention back to the key point. The faint hum of magic faded in and out—and disappeared. Then the trembling stopped, and I blinked awake in my
body in confusion. The candle lights had gone out.

  Ilsa’s bewildered eyes met mine. “I think someone just switched off the key point.”

  3

  Ilsa and I stared at one another for a moment. “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “I can’t think what else might have caused the line to turn off,” she answered. “Let me look…” She paused, her gaze going out of focus. “Nope. Nothing. It’s gone.”

  I switched on my spirit sight to check, but nothing remained but the thin line under our feet. It was as though the pulsing point of energy to our north had disappeared altogether.

  I’d witnessed more than a few flare-ups on a spirit line, where a key point would suddenly get a power boost. Usually it meant some intelligent person had decided to summon a poltergeist or raised a horde of zombies. I’d never seen a key point switch off before. Hadn’t thought it was possible. Though it was clear that the necromancers’ rulebook wasn’t nearly as transparent as it seemed, and there were certain things kept to the higher levels only. Like the existence of vampires and shades, for instance.

  “Please tell me if you decide to wander off the line,” Lloyd said. “Don’t forget it’s me who’ll take the heat if one of you dies. Been there, done that.”

  Ilsa shot me a curious look. I felt bad for constantly dodging her questions, but the geas my coven had put on me prevented me from letting slip even the most minor piece of information about the Hemlocks, including the time I’d nearly died from being poisoned a few weeks ago. I was a terrible liar, and I wouldn’t have minded telling Ilsa about my family, since she kept her own set of secrets. But while Ilsa wasn’t breaking the law by being Gatekeeper, being bound to another spirit was another thing entirely.

  “I think the same thing might have happened to the poltergeist,” I said, changing the subject. “The ghost vanished. So did the candles’ light, as though all the spiritual energy got turned off.”

  “That’s definitely not normal,” said Ilsa. “Not here, certainly. This isn’t a major spirit line, but I can’t tell if it affected the whole line or just this part.”

  Ah, crap. Knock-on effects were generally a given, and if you summoned a zombie on a spirit line, it was likely to cause several others to rise as well. By that logic, another necromancer must be responsible. Maybe there’d been a zombie attack elsewhere on the line and the banishing had gone too far.

  But it’d have to be a powerful necromancer… and not a guild one.

  “Did you see if any patrols went that way?” asked Ilsa, pointing north where the key point had been.

  “Two will have been there earlier.” I was the one in charge of the rota, but I’d more or less left it the same for weeks now. “We can check back with the guild. Or maybe just look ourselves.”

  “Why am I not surprised,” said Lloyd, scooping up candles and handing them to me. “You know the key point might be in the middle of someone’s house, right?”

  “Yes.” I took the candles and slipped them into my pockets. “We’ll get to that part later. I’m pretty sure I’d want to know if someone had switched off a key point in the middle of my house, besides.”

  “How did I guess you’d say that?” said Lloyd, with an eye-roll.

  I took the lead, though I didn’t have much more of a clue about the way than Ilsa did. I might know the patrol routes by heart, but I’d mostly avoided the areas of the city where the mages hung out. As for Ilsa, she’d lived with humans for most of the time she’d been in Edinburgh as far as I knew, since she and her brother had only discovered their necromantic talents in adulthood.

  “How can you even see the spirit lines?” asked Lloyd, when we paused at a side street to get our bearings. “For that matter, why do they even exist?”

  “They’re like… paths,” said Ilsa. “Places where the boundaries between the worlds are thin. We don’t notice it as necromancers because we can see the spirit realm everywhere, but the spirit lines divide this realm from the afterlife. If things go really wrong on a spirit line, ghosts become visible to everyone, even humans.”

  “Lovely,” I said. “I guess that’s in one of the advanced training books?”

  “Yep.” Ilsa’s curiosity knew no bounds, and it wasn’t surprising that she’d read her way through half the archives by now. She’d also sought out a bunch of books on vampires I wanted to get my hands on, as unlikely as it was that I’d find anything useful about shades in there.

  We turned the side street into an unfamiliar neighbourhood—a human one, judging by the iron wards on all the doors and the sprinkling of salt on doorsteps to deter the wandering dead. Standard precautions. As we walked, the houses grew sparser, and some were fenced off and under repair. In places like this, you could imagine tourists exploring the underground catacombs as they did before the dead had risen for real and the places where ghosts lurked turned into death traps. A sign in one of the windows said, “Zombies can suck my cock.”

  “Nice decor,” I commented.

  Lloyd snorted. “I could tell some stories that would give the most badass mercenary nightmares.”

  Mercenary district. That explained it. Mercs lived anywhere rent was cheap, since people desperate enough to hunt monsters for cash couldn’t afford to be picky. But almost all mercs were humans. Supernaturals generally had more sense than to poke the dead, the guild being the obvious exception.

  A small twig-like humanoid figure danced onto the road, light sparking between its palms. “Fire imp.” Ilsa dug a hand in her pocket.

  “Un-glamoured,” I added. Ilsa had the Sight, being related to a faerie family, but the rest of us were oblivious to any faeries unless they chose to reveal themselves.

  “They’re attention seekers,” she said, grasping a handful of iron filings. “Little bastards.”

  Ilsa threw the iron in the little faerie’s general direction, and it danced gleefully away, giving us the finger.

  Lloyd scowled. “Lovely neighbourhood. Are you sure we want to be here?”

  “We’re almost at the key point.” Ilsa pointed ahead to a house set slightly apart from its neighbours. Despite the iron bars on its gate, it looked abandoned. The roof was half caved in, and the front door lay wide open.

  “That’s the key point,” muttered Ilsa. “But it’s still faint.”

  I tapped into the spirit realm to have a look around and saw nothing but fog. I tentatively pushed my consciousness towards the house, sensing for anyone living. A flicker of blue light stirred, and my heart sank.

  The spirit realm didn’t lie. Someone was in there. A vampire.

  Keir?

  No. Not Keir. The shadow was too faint. Like the dead. My throat went dry.

  “I think there’s a vampire in there,” I whispered to Ilsa. “They can control any number of undead from a distance, and considering it’s on a key point…”

  “It might be a trap.” She nodded, her hand dropping to her pocket. “Are you two ready?”

  “Yes,” I said, with a glance at Lloyd. “You don’t have to—”

  “I’m coming,” he said. “Go in there with you or wait out here with the fire-slinging faerie? My money’s on you two.”

  “I’m flattered,” I said. “Stay close to me.”

  After the battle, I couldn’t help feeling like I’d been at least partially responsible for his being taken captive and nearly killed. But Lloyd was a stubborn arse as well as being my best friend, and I wouldn’t leave him behind if he didn’t want me to.

  Ilsa pushed the house’s door open and walked ahead into the hall. A faint blue glow enfolded her, making her look taller, more intimidating. Lloyd and I walked close behind, leaving the door open.

  A body lay sprawled on the floor of the hallway. Dead, from the awkward sprawl of his limbs and the utter silence in the spirit realm. I checked for the traces of a necromancer or vampire, and found none.

  “Uh,” said Lloyd. “Does that say, ‘blood sacrifice’ to you?”

  “No,” I said. “There’s
no blood, for a start.”

  Or chalk symbols or creepy glyphs. But a shiver traced down my spine as I looked down at the man’s body. The problem with dealing with the dead on a daily basis was that it was too easy to remember that death wasn’t the end, far from it, and a corpse might hide a trap.

  “Weird.” Ilsa crouched beside the dead man, carefully moving him into a sitting position. “Not that I’m a medical expert, but I can’t tell how he died at all. Can either of you?”

  “Fell downstairs?” Lloyd suggested, indicating the dusty, bare wooden steps a few feet away.

  I shook my head. “You can’t get upstairs. The roof’s caved in.”

  “Didn’t you sense a vampire?” Lloyd asked.

  “I thought I did,” I said. “Maybe this dude got drained. It explains why there’s no visible injuries.”

  Ilsa nodded slowly, rising to her feet. “Nothing in the spirit realm as far as I can see.”

  I turned on my spirit sight again. A person didn’t just drop dead on top of a key point. Not without prompting.

  Wait. Shouldn’t the key point be pulsing with life? Or death? It seemed entirely too quiet. I turned to Ilsa. “The whole key point is still off, isn’t it?”

  She gave a tight nod. “Yes. I think the person who did it is still here.”

  I switched on my spirit sight, and outside the hall, blue lights flickered on and off, too faint to be ghosts.

  “Undead,” I warned. “I think.”

  “Gotta be zombies,” said Lloyd, frowning. “Where the bloody hell are they, then?” The half-open door to a sitting room on the right revealed nothing, and my spirit sight was too fogged from the spirit line’s proximity to pinpoint the flickering lights.

  “What did you say vampires looked like, shadows?” asked Ilsa, turning on the spot with her head tilted slightly upwards.

  “Ah, crap.” I tilted my head upwards and sensed an unmistakable flicker of blue light. “They must be hiding under the caved-in roof. And—I think the vampire controlling them is already dead.”