Vampires, like powerful necromancers, didn’t always disappear when they died, and it stood to reason that their link with their zombies might last beyond death.
“Creepy,” Lloyd muttered. “Show me where to throw the salt.”
Ilsa took a step backwards towards the door. “We need to break the vampire’s connection with the vessels, right?”
“Yep.” The creaking grew louder. “Break the connection, blast him into the afterlife.”
Shuffling came from above, and the first zombie lumbered downstairs. Despite its lack of coordination, it was clearly recently dead, judging by the lack of the usual decaying smell. No wonder they’d hidden so easily.
Lloyd gripped a salt shaker in one hand, while I took aim with Isabel’s spells. The zombie’s legs collapsed as my trapping spell hit, blocking the stairs. Ilsa hissed out a warning as the dead man in the hallway abruptly rose to his feet, but Lloyd got there first. Salt flew from the shaker, and as its face dissolved, I plunged into the spirit realm and grabbed the blue thread of light controlling it. It came away in my hands so fast, the others exclaimed when the zombie rose under my own control.
“Uh. Oops. Didn’t mean to do that.” The zombie turned its half-dissolved face away, and I sensed another pulse from… under my feet. “Crap. Guys, there’s a basement—"
A trapdoor flew upwards beside the stairs and several more zombie heads popped up.
“Oh, bloody wonderful,” said Lloyd, throwing salt at the zombies pawing at the spell barrier I’d tossed at the stairs.
Ilsa had backed up to the door, a knife in her hand and an expression of concentration on her face. A line of salt surrounded her, and her vacant gaze showed me she was hunting down the vampire through the spirit realm.
Trusting Lloyd had enough salt to keep the dead away, I joined her. Grey light filtered in, showing me Ilsa floating outside her body before the undead. From this angle, they were empty spaces piloted by threads of blue light, connecting them to a single person in the spirit realm—a shadowy shape too far back to see. Clever. The vampire had left the bodies here as bait, but was hiding out of reach. I was sure the guy was dead—living vampires had a stronger presence—but maybe he was way off. Like outside the city.
Luckily, in the spirit realm, there was nothing I couldn’t reach, given the incentive.
I grabbed two of the undead by the threads of light and turned them on one another, causing them to punch and strike every other zombie that came near them. “That’ll keep them busy.” I floated onto Ilsa’s level.
Ilsa raised an eyebrow. “Wow. I didn’t know you were that proficient with undead.”
“Everyone has their talents,” I said. “Mine is creating zombie warfare.”
Ilsa’s own hands glowed with faint blue light. I had the distinct impression that she was holding herself back—I’d seen her use far more impressive magic—but with the key point underneath our feet, if any of us used too much necromancy, we might well create a disaster of our own.
I reached past the zombies, for the connecting threads, and followed them to their source, the shadowy figure beyond the lights. Now I was definitely out of my body, but without the key point, I couldn’t tell whereabouts I was. Ah, crap. I hadn’t used candles. So much for playing by the rules.
“Hey!” I yelled, in the general direction of the vampire’s shadowy presence. “Get over here and face me, you coward.”
I grabbed the nearest blue thread, yanking hard. My hands glowed blue-white, and a sudden shiver racked my spine, along with the certainty that I wasn’t alone.
I spun on the spot, expecting to see Evelyn Hemlock floating there. Instead, I saw Ilsa, her brow furrowed in confusion. “Uh, Jas, did you catch the guy?”
Nope. I’m losing my mind. I tightened my grip on the threads of light. “Yeah, but he’s out of reach. I’m going to have to go off the line.”
“I’ll back you up.”
I nodded thanks, and felt the threads of light threaten to slip away. My ghostly hands clenched tighter as the vampire grew closer. Looked like he was within the city after all. His shadowy form became larger, more present—a cut-out shadow of a man, floating in Death.
“Use your magic, Gatekeeper,” he taunted.
“Not happening,” Ilsa muttered, and spoke the banishing words instead.
I did the same, our voices joining in chorus. The vampire struggled but couldn’t fight the call of Death, and he disappeared in a scream of light.
The blueness dissipated, and I rotated on my heel, looking around for my body. Instead, I found Ilsa. “Jas, relax. Just focus and you’ll go back. Spirit lines are anchors—you won’t go floating off into space from here.”
I’d long suspected Ilsa knew some tricks for navigating the spirit realm without candles, so her advice came as no surprise.
“Thanks.” I closed my eyes, concentrating hard. A moment later, I was back in my body, with Lloyd shaking my shoulder.
“Oi. I killed the zombies. Don’t die.”
“We banished the vampire.” I nodded to Ilsa. “He was already dead. I guess one of these bodies was his.” That, or his body was lying in a gutter elsewhere.
“Glad to hear it.” Lloyd backed out onto the doorstep. “Want to destroy this lot?”
“Only when we find out who they are,” I said. “That’s a lot of recent dead.” Their half-dissolved zombie forms concealed how they’d died, but I was positive the guy we’d first found in the hall had had no visible injuries whatsoever.
I walked into the hall, kicking a zombie off the corpse that we’d first found here. Something told me that he was the vampire I’d just banished. While the shadow had hardly resembled the man, necromancers possessed a sixth sense that let us see the essence of a person. “I think I know how he died,” I said. “He went too far away from his body and the connection broke.”
Ilsa frowned. “Are you sure?”
I shook my head. “Nope. But he was miles away. I know vampires can travel further than normal people, but his body was on top of the key point when it switched off.”
Ilsa’s eyes rounded. “Oh. You think… I guess if there was a big enough surge of magic on the key point, it might have broken the connection…”
“Or his death turned off the key point?” I suggested. “I don’t know. It’s all guesswork.”
Had some invisible force had yanked him out of his body and switched off the spirit line at the same moment? Nothing else in the house registered with my spirit sight, and yet…
“Who knows,” said Ilsa. “If it’s any consolation, a key point can’t permanently be switched off. The spirit realm has healed from worse.”
“You talk like it’s alive,” Lloyd said. “Tell me it isn’t. This is wacky enough as it is.”
“It’s not living, but there’s a balance between the realms that has to be maintained,” said Ilsa. “The mortal realm, the spirit realm, and the faerie realm. If something goes wrong in one of those realms, it affects the others. The key points are part of that.”
“We can at least figure out who he is,” I said, reaching for the vampire’s body. I pulled him upright, grimacing when his cold, dead hands brushed against mine. Though there wasn’t a spark of life inside him, we’d still need to destroy the body to prevent him from rising again, as per the rulebook. He wore a simple jacket and jeans, not a necromancer’s coat or anything else to indicate his identity. I dug in his pockets but didn’t find a wallet or ID. Nothing, except a piece of screwed up paper, torn across the bottom. It contained only a handful of words. “The Society of Ley Hunters.”
“What does it say?” asked Lloyd.
“The Society of Ley Hunters,” I said. “That rings a bell.”
“Not to me,” said Ilsa. “Ley as in Ley Line?”
“Probably.” But I knew that name…
“People who hunt Ley Lines?” Lloyd said sceptically. “Uh, isn’t there only one of them, and most people can’t sense it anyway?”
“Th
ere is,” Ilsa said. “It’s on the other side of the city, but… what’s that, a flyer?”
“Looks more like an invitation.” I read the words again, as though to parse out a double meaning. “An event… an exclusive event, by the looks of things.”
“And these were the other invitees?” Ilsa poked an undead with her foot. “Hmm. Maybe. Not sure if they were supernaturals or humans, though.”
“Search their pockets,” I said. “Watch they don’t rise again.”
“They won’t with the key point switched off,” Ilsa commented, digging into another dead man’s jacket pocket. “Same invite. He got invited to a secret meeting, and the prize was to end up being ripped from his body?”
“That’s just creepy,” said Lloyd.
If we were doing things by the book, we’d search until we found someone who carried ID, take it back to the guild, and they’d use their channels to hunt down the person in the real world. Usually when we found an undead in the more well-known parts of town, someone eventually figured out who that person had been. But not always.
“This one has an ID card,” said Lloyd, dropping a zombie’s limp hand. “But no photo ID.”
“This is just weird,” I said. “Were they specifically told not to bring any identification to this top-secret meeting?”
“Because they were going to be used as sacrifices and the person running the show didn’t want anyone to be identified?” suggested Lloyd.
Ilsa stiffened at the word sacrifice, and I gave him a look.
He bowed his head and went back to searching the pockets of the dead. “This one has a business card,” he said. “Except—it’s the same. Ley Hunters.”
“That’s not a business card,” said Ilsa. “It doesn’t have contact details on it.”
“Or anything else,” Lloyd added. “Just the name.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Humans looking for the Ley Line? I’ve seen the name before.” There was such a thing as a coincidence, but the Ley Line was the largest spirit line, and as I’d found out recently from Ilsa herself, the boundary between this realm and Faerie. Humans couldn’t cross that way unless accompanied by one of the Sidhe, and it was a one-way street even then. Necromancers didn’t contact the spirit realm on the Ley Line if they could help it. It was too volatile. So the mere presence of the word cemented my certainty that this foul play went beyond a few undead.
“You’ve heard the name before?” asked Ilsa. “When?”
I hesitated, then figured it couldn’t hurt to ask. “There was this shop in the witch district of south Birmingham… it looked like it was under construction or abandoned, though. But it had the same name.”
“Really?” she asked. “When was this?”
“Uh. I went back to visit a few weeks ago… I have family there.” Even now, the geas my family had put on me was in full effect. I couldn’t tell anyone about the Hemlocks’ forest, which existed outside of space-time and could jump to Edinburgh from England in a heartbeat. “Anyway, I ran into the shop when I got lost in witch district. But it was empty, as I said. Probably means nothing.”
“Considering all these people died, it’s worth mentioning to the boss,” said Ilsa. “A death—several deaths—at a key point, when it seems to be switching on and off randomly… it’s a bad sign.”
“You’re telling me,” said Lloyd. “I don’t think I want to know why humans would be stupid enough to go hunting for Ley Lines. What would happen if they found one?”
“There’s only one,” said Ilsa. “And nothing. They’ve been walking on top of the Ley Line for their whole lives without knowing. The Line only opened in the invasion, and I don’t think they want a repeat performance.”
Damn. It was the Ley Line that had brought the Sidhe into this realm, twenty-two years ago.
“I can tell the boss, but there’s nothing I can do about it,” I said. “Like I said… the place was abandoned.”
And the only way to get home was to do something I’d been dreading for weeks—talk to my fellow Hemlock witches again.
4
“So, Jas,” said Lady Montgomery. “Am I correct in hearing that you’ve encountered this ‘Ley Hunters’ group before?”
“Nope,” I said. “I just saw the name. Might belong to anyone. Do you think it’s weird that all we found in the house were undead? I mean, it’s pretty obvious someone used necromancy there, aside from the vampire. But they left no props behind.”
“If they were foolhardy enough to use magic on the spirit line at a surge, they might not have needed to,” she said.
“Surge?” I echoed.
“The amount of magic in a spirit line is never constant,” she said. “It ebbs and flows. Sometimes you can use necromancy on a spirit line and have no more effect than using it anywhere else. Other times, you might cause a dozen spirits to come back from the veil. It’s entirely random, and very dangerous.”
“So, the vampire decided to hop over the veil without a candle and got ripped out of his body?” I suggested. “And… the others did the same? I’m sure they must have been human.”
“It seems so,” said Lady Montgomery. “But don’t forget: most humans have the potential to use magic. It’s not all related to ancestry, however much the mages would like to have you believe that. Not all magic users come from magical families. If the vampire lured those humans to the key point during a surge, even non-supernaturals might have been caught in the spell.”
I doubted it. A surge that powerful, Lloyd and I would have felt when we’d been at the old mage’s house exorcising his spirit. Rather, the opposite of a surge had happened, and the key point’s power had all but disappeared. But if even the boss didn’t know what was going on, I was lost.
“I guess,” I said to her. “Maybe they were dormant necromancers or people with distant ancestry.” I was an eighth necromancer, technically. My great-grandfather had been one, according to Lady Harper, and the slightest hint of the spirit sight could be harnessed and used to teach magic, the same way the tiniest proficiency for magical remedies could develop into skill at witchcraft. Lady Montgomery had put me through a few basic tests to make sure I developed the ability to see ghosts, then put me into novice training. Very luckily, I’d been good enough to scrape by until I was fully qualified.
“And do you have plans this weekend?” she enquired.
I stared for a moment. Lady Montgomery did not, as a rule, ask questions about my personal life. “Uh, volunteering in the archives, if there isn’t anyone else on duty?”
I’d been sneakily reading every book the guild had on vampires, shades, and dark magic… which wasn’t many, because the good ones were in the boss’s office where nobody could access them. Her on-point spirit sight would catch me in an instant if I sneaked into her office without permission, and besides, it wasn’t worth it. The Hemlocks had used magic that nobody had on record at all, and unless they chose to volunteer the information, I’d remain in the dark.
Lady Montgomery gave me a sweeping look. “Jas, don’t mistake this for permission to shirk your duties, but I’ve hardly seen you leave the guild’s premises except on missions for weeks.”
My mouth hung open for a moment before I closed it. “I’ve been, uh, short on cash.” Not really a lie. I’d spent most of my savings at the witch market to build my own stock of spell ingredients. Just because I kept my use of Evelyn’s magic to a minimum didn’t mean I’d given up using witchcraft altogether.
“Do you have hobbies?” she asked.
“I… took drawing lessons.” Okay, the last class I’d taken was two years ago. The guild’s unpredictable shift schedule made it impossible to regularly keep up with any kind of hobby, so I’d switched to spending my evenings marathoning zombie movies with Lloyd. Besides, Lady Montgomery could hardly talk. She lived and breathed her job. If she was concerned that I had no social life, ice-skating ghosts would come to bear me into hell at any moment.
“And when was the last time you saw yo
ur family? You said they live in England?”
“Er, adoptive family. But yes, they do. I guess I haven’t seen them for a while.” Mostly because I hadn’t exactly told everyone I planned to run away to Scotland seven years ago.
“No,” she said. “We do allow family visits at the weekend, you know, and I believe this Ley Hunter shop you saw might be important in getting to the bottom of this case.”
Of course. The guild’s shift rota covered seven days a week so I never got a full weekend off, and she wouldn’t let me go on a weekend away during our busiest season if it didn’t have a purpose. Not that she knew about the forest, which would at least be easier than an overnight coach trip. There was just the slight issue that I was not on speaking terms with the owners of said forest, and I wouldn’t put it past Cordelia Hemlock to use it as an excuse to force me to resume my position as coven heir. On the other hand, I couldn’t avoid my coven forever, and I had a few questions I wanted to ask Isabel about my witch training. If I swallowed my pride and faced the Hemlocks. Who knew, they might even apologise this time. Okay, let’s face it, that was probably less likely than Lady Montgomery giving me a free holiday. But I could dream.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll get the bus tomorrow morning. I’ll let you know if I find anything out.”
“Do that, Jas. You’re dismissed.”
I left her office, closing the door behind me.
“Verdict?” asked Lloyd.
I pulled a face. “I’m being forcibly sent on a holiday.”
“What?” He looked at me like I’d announced I planned to relocate to the North Pole. “Where on holiday?”
“To the Hemlocks’ forest, for a start. Then all the way over the Midlands until I find out if this ‘Ley Hunters’ society is an actual thing.”
“You saw a sign in a window and she’s giving you a free holiday for it?” he said incredulously. “Okay, I know what to do next time.”
“It’s not free unless I go into the forest,” I pointed out. “Also, I don’t have anywhere to stay overnight, so it’ll be a quick day trip. That’s all.”
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