“Fuck!” Mort shouted and began scrambling out of bed. “What the hell, Pete! Do you know how much that thing cost?”
Pete stomped out of the room. It felt like a big hole had just opened up in my heart.
Mort disentangled himself from his blankets, stumbled over to the television, and unplugged it from the wall. “Well, this is just awesome. Good job, Finn. So glad you’re home. You just walk in after twenty-five years and think you know what’s best for everyone. And look how much better off we are. Father’s upset, Pete’s upset, I have a broken television, I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck—”
“That’s not my fault,” I said. “I wasn’t the one trying to buy illegal Talker artifacts.”
“I’m trying to secure the future of our business. And I wouldn’t have tried to make that deal except I just knew you’d swoop in here with your oh-so-special gift and act like you own the place! I swear, I don’t know why Father and Grandfather—”
“Seriously? Dude, I’m not trying to take over anything! I just—”
“Whatever,” Mort said, dismissing me with a wave as he crossed back to his bed. “I don’t suppose the changeling left you enough money to buy me a new TV?”
“I don’t know, but he left me this.” I flipped Mort off and followed after Pete.
Zeke stumbled out of his room in tighty-whitey briefs, baton in hand. A maze of glossy pink scars covered his pale skin where his enforcer tattoos had been removed, except for the midnight black mandala around his belly button that was his magic pee spell. He looked up and down the hall with bleary eyes. “What’s going on?” he asked, his voice thick from sleep. “I heard fighting, and your fool brother just ran by here looking like someone’d killed his dog.”
“It’s just a family dispute,” I said.
“Hnh. That explains it. Didn’t expect that boy to be runnin’ from a fight. Anything I should be concerned about here?” He glanced past me, toward Mort’s room.
“No. But there’s something you should know. The Króls attacked me tonight, at the restaurant. I guess I was wrong about my enemies not wanting to involve mundies.”
“I’m shocked,” Zeke said in a tone that held no shock whatsoever. “I called about that lead on the witchcraft supplies before hitting the rack, but it was a dead end. So if it really was the Króls who attacked you—”
“It was.”
“Then they’re damned good at hiding, or really good at hexin’ folks who blab about ’em. Maybe both.” He made a disgusted sound. “Witch clans. They should all be crushed. They don’t respect ARC laws, and they ain’t got no honor. Too bad you didn’t catch one. I guarantee I’d barely have to bleed him to make him lead us to the rest.”
Bleed one to find the others—of course! “I have an idea,” I said. “I think I know how to find them. But it’s not something I want to attempt while tired, or at night.” Or when my emotions were such a mess.
“Fine,” Zeke said and headed back into his room. “I could use more sleep anyway. See you in the morning, then, Gramaraye.”
“Wait. One more thing. Grayson is pushing for me to turn myself into the ARC. I don’t think we can count on his support any longer.”
Zeke snorted. “I never did.” He shut his door, and I stood a minute in the hallway, trying to decide what I should do next. Probably best to let Pete have some time alone before talking to him again. And I’d need rest to face whatever trials tomorrow would bring. Just thinking of bed caused exhaustion to fall gently upon me like an anvil made of ether. I wanted to lie down and sleep right there in the hall, though I didn’t look forward to the dreams I’d have.
But first things first. I tracked down Mattie and got Heather’s phone number. I called from the house phone, and after several rings someone picked up.
“Heather?” I asked.
A young man’s voice responded, “Who’s this?”
“Uh, I was calling for Heather Fl—Brown. Do I have the right number?”
“Is this Finn Gramaraye?”
“Yes.”
“Then this is a wrong number for you. You need to stay away from my mother. I don’t want her caught up in your problems, understand?”
I heard Heather’s voice in the background, “Orion, give me the phone.”
“Mother, no. You know why you can’t—”
Heather said firmly, “Give it to me.”
Orion sighed into the phone, then said, “Leave my mother alone.”
I blinked. “Look, I—”
“Hi, Finn,” Heather said. “I figured you’d call to check on me, and you don’t need to worry. I’m fine. But … I think it’s best if we don’t see each other for a while.”
“What? Why?” I said. “If it’s because of the attack—”
“No, it has nothing to do with that. I just—I need to figure some stuff out. Good-bye, Finn. And thank you for still caring.”
“Wait, I—”
Click and dial tone.
I stared at the receiver for a minute, then hung up. Between Pete, Dawn, Mort, and Heather, it felt like half the world hated me or wanted nothing to do with me just then. I shuffled back to my father’s room to sleep on the love seat, feeling very alone in a house full of people.
17
Peek-a-Boo
DAY 2
I woke early with a kink in my neck from sleeping on Mother’s reading sofa and snuck from the room without waking Father. 6:30 A.M. again. Damn it. I never used to be a morning person. The rules for changelings really should include one against messing with the host’s body clock.
I changed into a somewhat snug Thundarr the Barbarian T-shirt from my dresser, and went out to Pete’s cottage. I knocked on the door and heard the squeak of Pete getting off his bed, but he didn’t answer.
“Pete. Come on, bro. I’m sorry. I know I’ve lost your trust, and I feel like the biggest jerk in the world. But I swear I’ll do whatever it takes to make this up to you. Just give me the chance to start.”
Still no response. I wished time would speed up so I could get to the point where Pete didn’t hate me anymore.
“Petey, I’m begging here. I know you’re mad, and I don’t blame you. So hit me, or yell at me or something. But talk to me. Let me explain. We’ve already lost twenty-five years, I don’t want to lose any more time.”
I heard the floorboards creak, the sound approaching the door. But then silence again.
Damn it. This really sucked. I waited long enough to be sure he wouldn’t change his mind, then marched back inside. I’d taken it for granted that Pete would always bring the happiness and smiles no matter how crappy my own day was, or his. To know I’d helped to make him so unhappy made me feel like I’d just beat a unicorn to death with a Care Bear in front of a small child.
I would make this up to him.
I gathered some equipment from the necrotorium and then met Zeke in my bedroom.
“So what’s the plan?” Zeke asked, leaning against the door with his arms crossed. He still looked tired, but not ready to collapse at least.
I pulled the throw rug aside, revealing dark floorboards. “The plan, Sam I Am, is to find the clan if we can.”
I proceeded to set up the Kin Finder 2000. At least, that’s what I called Father’s invention. About the size of a microwave, it looked like half clockwork slot machine, half distillery, and half something that would pop out of Inspector Gadget’s hat. Yes, that’s one too many halves, but the Kin Finder 2000 looked like it had one too many halves. Still, it worked, and that’s all that mattered. In fact, despite Grandfather’s disapproval of Mother marrying a thaumaturge, Father’s inventions had helped give our family an advantage over some of the other necrotoriums who had larger families, or more money.
I turned the machine to align it to true north according to the compass on its top, then extended the mechanical arm with its thin tube and ring at the end. I slid a topless pen into the ring, and set the end of the tube into the pen. Finally, I set a piece of paper on the f
loor beneath it all. Zeke eyed the whole thing askance, and stroked his mustache as I worked.
“What’s this mess gonna do?” he finally asked.
“This is going to tell us the locations of Felicity’s blood kin.”
Zeke blew his mustache out, causing the ends to flap. “I already told ya, fool, the ARC couldn’t find any Króls near here, and they have the best location spells around.”
“Yes, but this thing doesn’t use a location spell. It works on the spirit plane, using spiritual harmonics to— Never mind. It will work, don’t worry. Assuming, that is, this still holds enough of her resonance to do the job.” I held up the lock of Felicity’s hair from Sammy’s voodoo doll, which had thankfully still been in her bedroom vent where Sammy used to stash her cigarettes and other contraband.
I pulled a different braid of hair out of a wooden box. The control braid. I placed a strand of hair from it into the pot at the device’s heart, poured in a bit of the water, and lit the candle underneath. Then we waited.
The water finally boiled. I placed my hand on the small crystal ball at the back of the machine and concentrated, reached out as if to summon the spirit of the person who owned the piece of hair in the pot. The crystal vibrated. I could feel the resonance of the other spirit, like the faintest scent on a breeze, or music so low you could only sense it as a vibration at the edge of hearing. The steam rose from the pot into a copper tube and passed through an arcane series of transformations within the machine, causing gears and wheels to turn, producing an escalating series of pings and clangs and sproings. As the noises neared their crescendo, Zeke leaned forward and watched the device, obviously forgetting his job to appear stoically disinterested.
“Now watch as the spirit world talks to us,” I said theatrically.
The arm lowered. It drew a single line out from the center of the page. It rose back up.
Zeke continued to watch for a minute as the machine quieted then finally stopped altogether. He frowned. “That’s it? It drew a line!”
“A perfect line.”
“A perfectly useless line, fool!”
I smiled. “It’s a line that tells us the exact direction and distance to the nearest living relative of the deceased. The sister of the woman whose hair this is happens to be agoraphobic and hasn’t left her little cottage since she was a girl, so we always know where she is. And now,” I said, lifting up Felicity’s lock of hair, “I will do the same thing for Felicity’s relatives, and by using this first line as a point of reference, we’ll be able to tell exactly which way and how far the other line points to.”
“Oh.” Zeke leaned back against the door. “I thought it was going to write out an address or something useful like that.”
“We’re dealing with spiritual energy, not an actual spirit,” I said as I rinsed out the pot and put it back with all of Felicity’s hair in it. “It’s not like we’re calling the ghost of an AT&T operator for information. It’s more like the way a compass uses magnetism.”
The water boiled again. I took a deep breath and reached out for Felicity’s spirit. Nothing.
She’d been warded against Talking. But damn it, I wasn’t trying to Talk to her. I just needed to pick up her resonance. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and placed my free hand on the floor. I spread out my fingers, and let myself sink deep into that place where the rest of the world falls away and there is just my spirit, and the magic, where I could sometimes hear echoes left in the material world like grooves in a record of clichés. You get the idea.
My hand went numb on the floorboards as though plunged in icy water. I felt Felicity then, a faint suggestion of her that brought an image of her face to my mind, and a hint of something else to my heart. Pain. Betrayal. Sadness.
The machine made its noises. I shuddered, and jerked my hand from the floor. I opened my eyes and looked down at my fingers, half expecting to see them blue, dead, but they looked normal.
The arm of the machine lowered and drew a second line, perpendicular to the first.
“So that’s it?” Zeke asked. “Ya know where they are?”
I picked up the paper, and set it next to the Thomas Guide, a book of maps divided into confusing grids. “Almost,” I said. This was the part where Pete normally helped. He had an uncanny ability to just glance at the two lines and point right to the correct spot in the book. I had to do it the hard way. I used a ruler, started with the line between our house and Miss Shenestiky, figured out the difference in the line length and how much that meant I had to take away from the other line, and, uh—
Shazbat. Indiana Jones I was not. I’d totally be the guy digging in the wrong place for the ark.
Zeke nodded at the paper. “Maybe I should hand that info over to the enforcers,” he said.
Crap. Then I’d have to explain that the KF2K only worked with someone who was dead, which would lead to the question of how I knew Felicity was dead, and that was a question I didn’t want an enforcer asking me just yet.
“Look, the enforcers already think I tried leading them on a wild goose chase with the Króls. If this information is wrong for some reason, or the Króls get wind that the enforcers are coming and clear out, it’s only going to waste everyone’s time and probably get me hauled in early. I’d rather check this out ourselves first, see if it’s correct.”
Zeke pulled on his mustache a second and looked between me and the KF2K, then shrugged. “Fine. Just means we get to question the Króls my way, without all the stupid new rules. I doubt that machine really works anyway.”
“Yeah? How’s Plan B coming, then?” I tried again to measure out the location on the maps. “Figured out where Magus Verona is yet?”
“As a matter of fact, yeah. She’s beneath something called the EMP.”
“Isn’t that, like, a nuclear weapon of some kind?”
“No. It’s a museum over in Seattle. And you can bet they’ve put enough security on it to kill a dozen wizards. Like I said, only a crazy fool’d try getting at Verona.”
“So you’re saying you can beat a whole clan of witches but not a security system?”
“I’m sayin’ I know how to deal with witches. But who knows what kinda security they got on that crypt? And the ARC might forgive us roughing up a couple illegal witches, but breaking into an ARC Sanctum, that’s another matter.”
I sighed and gave up trying to figure out the maps. “Well, hopefully we won’t need to be crazy fools, then. But if we did, it might not hurt to know exactly how crazy we’re talking about.”
“Fine. I’ll make some more calls. It’s your phone bill.”
I picked up the maps, and led the way out into the hall. “And I’ll see if someone can help me with these.”
Mattie stepped out of Mort’s room and closed his door. She wore footsie pajamas that made her look like a giant yellow mouse and had a box of Band-Aids in one hand. “Would you believe Petey bit my dad?” she asked as she walked toward Zeke and me.
“What?” I said. “Why?”
“I guess he was like, I want to know if I’m really a waerwolf or not. Chomp!”
I laughed, but Zeke crossed his arms. “What if the fool had been a waer and infected his brother?”
“That’s what Dad asked him, I guess. And Uncle Pete said then Dad could drink the potions too.”
A smile crept across Zeke’s rugged face like waves eroding a sandcastle. “Okay. I could almost like that kid.”
Mattie pointed at the Thomas Guide. “What’s that?”
“Directions, of a sort,” I said. “I need to figure them out, though.”
“Oh, the Kin Finder? That’s easy. You should try calculus homework if you want hard.” She took the guide, and the Kin Finder lines, and flipped through the book. “This is so old school. We so need to figure out how to hook a GPS up to the KF or— Got it.” She held out the Thomas Guide and pointed to the map. “There’s your spot.”
I looked from the map to Zeke. “What say we go visit a family of ven
geful witches in lovely downtown Kingston?”
18
Blasphemous Rumors
I drove across the Hood Canal Bridge, following Zeke’s directions to Kingston. Zeke shifted again in the passenger seat, and looked decidedly uncomfortable. He was back in his Magi Vice outfit and looked nearly as white as his jacket.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I hate bridges,” he said.
I chose not to ask why, since I felt certain the answer had something to do with me being a fool. I turned on the radio and listened to how music had changed in the past twenty-five years. The first band sounded like a Pixies knockoff, the next two had touches of Grandmaster Flash and New Order. A couple of catchy tunes, though there seemed to be more noise and less melody than I was used to. I might have turned it off, except it obviously annoyed Zeke. I turned it up. He lasted until we passed through the picture-perfect town of Port Gamble, when the singer started scream-whining over a dying drum machine. It was a bit Sigue Sigue Sputnik meets a bandsaw. I imagined it looked impressive on stage though, with Mechagodzilla stomping on robot cats and all. Zeke punched the radio off, his glower daring me to challenge his decision. I shrugged.
Zeke checked the contents of his pockets for the hundredth time. “When we get there, you do what I say. I’ve dealt with witches before. They may not have the raw power of wizards, but they can be twice as dangerous.”
“What’s your plan?”
“If we can, we’ll sneak in and find their sanctum before confronting them. A witch is far less dangerous if we can cut off access to their talismans and foci.”
“And if we can’t?”
“Then stay behind me and be ready for a nasty fight.”
“Right.” I sighed. It would have been nice to have Pete with us again for extra muscle, though I felt equally glad he hadn’t come. The last thing I wanted was to endanger him again.
Finn Fancy Necromancy Page 20