One of the thaumaturges energizing the stone circle around us stood, rubbing at his lower back, and stepped close to Verona. “The circle is ready, Magus,” he whispered. “Did your daughter make it through the breach?”
“Your daughter?” I said, glancing down at the breach. “Your daughter Traveled into the Other Realm during the fighting?”
Without looking at me, Verona said, “Beatrice sent her spirit into the breach, into the body of a Fey who also wanted peace. The bond between our spirits allowed me to tap into the raw magical energy of the Other Realm through her, to draw enough energy to seal this breach. But the act … my spell caused Bea to overload with magic. Her Fey body—the energy—her death wiped out an entire Demesne. Thousands of Fey, and my daughter, died in an instant. And … I knew it would happen.”
That was the secret weapon everyone had tried to get from Verona. But the weapon hadn’t been a weapon at all. It had been her daughter.
“Oh, man. I … I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” she said softly.
Was this why the Legion—or Arcanites—really wanted me back in the Other Realm? To use me as a bomb? No, that didn’t feel right. For one, why then hadn’t they blown me up the first time I was there? For another, there was nobody living who had the kind of connection to me that Verona and her daughter had shared.
“Why tell me your secrets now?” I asked. “Aren’t you worried I will tell someone else?”
Verona took a deep breath and exhaled sharply, her gaze sharpening again as she peered at me. “No. Even if you did, I suspect my secret is no longer secret anyway. And the Fey have certainly devised protections against such an … attack again. But more importantly, I think the world needs young men like you fighting to keep it sane, if not entirely safe.”
“I thought you didn’t want to get involved?”
“I don’t. I’m not. Your grandfather, he thought he’d discovered the key to absolute victory, absolute power. Perhaps total arcana dominance would be worse for everyone in the long run than conflict and a new truce, a new balance. Perhaps not. Either way, I have not alone given you the means to destroy worlds, my boy, or even the sole means to see your grandfather’s plans succeed or fail. I have only given you a piece of knowledge. What you do with it is up to you.”
“It is time to go,” Anubis said.
“Wait!” I said to him. “I still don’t have the answers I need.” I turned to Verona. “Please, there’s got to be something more you can tell me, something you know? Felicity, our au pair. Was she part of this group, this plot? Is that why she testified against me? Is that why she was killed?”
“It’s possible, but I don’t know for certain. I’m sorry. I met her only the one time, a sweet girl.”
Anubis grabbed my wrist. “It is clear she does not have any further answers for you. The time has come to leave.”
“No!” I pulled against the Anubis’ grip, but couldn’t break free. “Please—Magus Verona, Felicity’s clan said she had a lover. Do you know who that was?”
Verona cleared her throat. “That is a delicate matter.”
“She’s dead,” I said. “And the answer could prevent more deaths.”
“We are going,” Anubis said. We lifted from the ground, and the moonlit battlefield began to fly away from us.
“Your grandfather was her lover,” Verona shouted, her voice growing faint. “But after his death, I heard rumors of anoth—”
Darkness. Silence.
And then the blackness lifted as though someone slowly turned up the lights in a dark room. We were back in the Inner Sanctum, floating above my body at the feet of Verona’s preserved body. The crystal ball rose and fell gently on my stomach, and Mort still held his hands on my forehead and sternum.
“And now,” Anubis said. “Your payment.”
“Wait,” I said. “I didn’t get the information I needed. I may still need to Talk to other spirits.”
“You brought back knowledge from the other side, and the balance must be maintained. It is not part of our bargain that I wait for you to understand the knowledge you have received. And I never said I would take your Talker skill. You have a gift far greater than that.”
I didn’t like his wicked grin, or the gloating tone of his voice. “What gift?”
A memory rose up, enveloped me: my kiss with Dawn on the ferry.
“Love,” Anubis said.
I could see the memory drifting away from me, drawn into the Anubis as a stream of multicolored smoke, and it melted from my mind like cotton candy in the mouth. Another memory rose, of Dawn and me picking strawberries together, and then that too was gone. The memories started to appear and be drawn away in an ever-quickening stream. I tried to grasp them, to hold on to them, even as I forgot what I tried to hold on to. Soon I struggled against the loss purely out of instinct. But it was like trying to hold on to water.
“Stop!” I shouted, but the Anubis ignored me. “Stop! Please!”
I tried to return to my body, like I had when escaping from the Other Realm, but the Anubis held on to me. This was my worst nightmare, to have my memories not just pawed through by the Fey, but actually taken, consumed, lost, along with the person they made of me.
In desperation, I sought out the crystal on my stomach, and turned my focus to it.
Come on. Flicker, damn it!
There. A flickering.
Mort gave a startled glance around the room, then took a deep breath, and closed his eyes.
In much the same way that summoning my own spirit had torn it free of my body, the surge of energy from Mort jammed my spirit and body back together with all the gentleness of a Terminator crushing a human skull.
I sucked in breath and shouted, “Stop!”
I sat up sharply, which had the unfortunate result of dropping the crystal ball onto my crotch. My shout turned into a groan of pain.
“Nice one,” Mort said.
“Shut it, Mort.” I eased the crystal ball away from the epicenter of the nauseating crotch quake.
“Why’d you shout ‘stop’?” Mort asked.
I frowned. “I—I don’t remember.”
“Well, maybe you got a concussion there, dick for brains,” Mort said.
“Hilarious. You’re a regular Andrew Dice Clay,” I said.
Mort helped me off the desk. “I sure hope you got the answers you wanted after all this,” he said.
“Not exactly.” I looked back at Verona sitting there, her face frozen in a sad and distant gaze. “She did tell me some important things, but I need to figure out what they mean.” I slapped Mort’s back. “By the way, thanks for keeping me alive, bro.”
He shrugged. “Mattie would’ve been upset if you died.”
“Uh-huh. Well, thanks anyway.” Hopefully, this would be the start of rebuilding our friendship, and not just one more thing Mort held over me. Especially since I was about to repay his help. “We have one last bit of business.”
I pulled a small gnome statue out of my satchel and placed it on the floor. A few seconds later, it tipped over to reveal a hole beneath it, and Priapus climbed out. He adjusted his blue hat as he looked around the room and grinned.
“As agreed,” I said. “Passage past all the security.”
“Pleasure doing business,” Priapus said and whistled down into the hole. “Shop’s open, boys!”
“Come on,” I said to Mort. “Let’s help Zeke and get the heck out of here, if we can.”
We rushed back out the way we came, past the other bodies and up the stairs to the science fiction museum. I glanced behind me as we sprinted up the stairs, unable to shake the feeling that I had forgotten something—like I’d left something important behind.
26
Don’t You Forget About Me
Zeke sat in the center of the space before the captain’s chair, a befuddled look on his face as if he’d fallen on his butt and didn’t know what this gravity thing was all about. A circle of bodies—creatures from a dozen movi
es, and an equal number of men in security uniforms—surrounded him. A couple of the wardens moaned but didn’t move.
“Give me a hand,” I said to Mort as I hooked my arm under Zeke’s armpit and lifted. Mort grabbed the other arm, and we hefted Zeke to his feet.
Zeke’s head swiveled toward me, his eyes glazed. He opened his mouth as if to say something and drooled on his shoulder.
“Yeah, good to see you too.” I leaned him against Mort for a second and grabbed up his bag, almost falling over at the unexpected weight of it.
“Let’s get out of here before enforcers show up,” I said, slinging Zeke’s bag on one shoulder, and Zeke’s arm across the other.
* * *
We made it out the side door and to our car without incident and caught the 10:50 P.M. ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge Island. Mort and I both tried calling Sammy, but our phones were still dead. Mort tried charging his with a cord from the car lighter, but it had no effect. Hopefully Sammy and Vee were home safe and all was well.
I left Zeke and Mort in the car and walked up to the top deck of the ferry alone, drawn by some desire. I watched Seattle receding from us as misty sea wind and the smell of the ferry’s exhaust washed over me. The skyscrapers and Space Needle shone like Christmas against the night sky, their light reflected in the water along with the silver glimmer of the moon, and the neon colored streaks from the signs for Ivar’s and Red Robin and the other waterfront restaurants. The wind made me shiver but also made me feel very awake, my mind sharp.
A young man and woman sat out of the wind in the nearby covered area, cuddling and looking up at the moon. I felt a pang of loneliness, of loss for something I’d never really had. Maybe someday that would be me. Maybe me and Heather, if I could figure out what was up with her, why she thought we couldn’t see each other.
But first I needed to get myself free of the mess left by Grandfather. I turned over everything I’d learned, working the clues like a Rubik’s cube, trying to find the pattern, the answer.
Grandfather had been Felicity’s lover. He’d not just supported the decision to bring her over from Austria, he probably suggested it in the first place. And he must have done so for a reason other than sex, given the difficulty and expense to bring her over. Maybe he’d even become her lover just to get what he wanted from her, although I found that hard to believe—and worse to imagine.
The Króls said Felicity had special skill with plants. And she’d taken care of our garden, presumably in honor of Mother, but maybe that too was part of Grandfather’s plan. Could the secret power Grandfather discovered be some kind of potion? I’d have to go through the garden with Heather and see if the plants there gave us any clues. And if Felicity was a member of this Arcanite extremist group, it would explain why she would testify against me, and why they might have killed her to keep their secrets.
But that still left me with the question of why they were so determined to frame me at all.
I’d thought it was to keep me from Talking to Verona, but nothing she’d said seemed so devastating a secret it was worth all the effort and cost that the Legion—the Arcanites—had spent on me. Even if their plan was to send spirits into the Other Realm to nuke the Fey as Verona had done, surely the Fey were prepared to stop such an act now. And Verona seemed to imply the Arcanites had some other plan already in place with or without her secret weapon.
Gods, I wished I could just Talk to Grandfather. But even if I really had felt his spirit watching over me in the Other Realm and not just imagined it, he’d been warded by someone outside our family and was beyond my ability to Talk to at will.
Okay. Enough thinking on what I couldn’t do.
Verona said that Grayson and I were key somehow to the new power Grandfather sought. Could that be it? It still made sense that this was all about my Talker gift somehow, since I couldn’t think of anything else particularly special about me. Well, I could get all the way through Dragon’s Lair on a single quarter, and I could rock the Star Blazers theme song on the recorder, but somehow I didn’t think those were the types of gifts that a group bent on world domination would prize. And Grayson was a Talker as well. But I couldn’t see how having me exiled helped them if they needed my gift somehow. And I couldn’t see how my Talker gift tied in with plants or alchemy as any kind of ultimate weapon.
And … if Grayson was fine and active in the world, that either meant they didn’t need him exiled like me—or that he was part of the Legion of Arcanites. Everything began to make sense. Grayson was Grandfather’s student. And Verona started to say something about Felicity, maybe that she’d taken another lover? Grayson was a definite possibility. I could see how the Króls might consider him part of my family, or at least our household.
Well, I now had a better idea of why I was framed, and who likely did it, though I still didn’t understand what exactly they needed me in exile for, or exactly how Grayson got past the house wards to possess Father, assuming Grayson was the culprit. He certainly wasn’t in the house that night.
I’d talk it all through with everyone back at the house. Maybe they’d see something I missed. But either way, I’d contact Grayson and set up a meeting somewhere safe. If he wasn’t part of the Legion, maybe he could help us find out who was, especially now that I had a better idea of what to look for. And if he was part of the Legion, well, Zeke could help me set a trap.
The deck rumbled beneath my feet as the ferry slowed, signaling its approach to the Bainbridge ferry dock.
* * *
Mort parked in the lot of the hardware store and we took the back way to the house just in case anyone waited for us. Zeke was still pretty out of it, but at least he was able to walk after his two-hour nap so that Mort and I didn’t have to carry him. I told him everything I’d learned from Katherine Verona, and my own theories. He grunted occasionally but didn’t offer any additional thoughts or theories. I hoped he’d have more to offer when he recovered.
I sent Mort ahead to check the house for enforcers. My watch said it was a quarter after midnight. Technically, my three days were up. Would the enforcers wait until morning to grab me, give me one final night? I wasn’t sure what eight hours might win me that three days had not, but there had to be something I could do, something I could use from all I’d learned to help prove my innocence, or gain more time from the ARC.
Actually, once they figured out who broke into the EMP, they would be hunting us in earnest, regardless of the three-day deadline. So either way, Zeke and I needed to find someplace new to hide awhile until we cleared our names.
I had an idea about that.
Mort came running back. “Finn, something’s wrong! And I don’t think it’s enforcers.”
“Help Zeke!” I burst into an all-out run, leaving Zeke to follow in a zombielike lurch with Mort’s help. I skirted past the tangled garden, which seemed to writhe in the moonlight, and through the open back door. I noticed that the frame was splintered. But the buzz of the wards still washed over me as I crossed the threshold. How was that possible, unless someone let the enemy through the wards?
“Hello?” I shouted, checking each of the rooms as I passed. I reached the entry hall. Father sat on the stairs, his head in his hands, shaking back and forth.
“Father? What’s wrong?”
Father looked up at me, but his eyes seemed fixed on some distant point behind me. “Interesting fact,” he said, and then his mouth snapped shut as if trying to bite a fly as it buzzed past his teeth.
Goose bumps sprang up along my arms as pieces started falling into place.
“Finn!” a woman’s voice called from above. “Upstairs!”
I hesitated, looking from Father to the top of the stairs. Mort and Zeke limped up the hall, panting.
“Finn?” the woman called again. “Hurry.”
Crap. “Mort, keep an eye on Father.” I ran up the stairs.
Pete lay on the floor. He looked as though he’d gotten into a fight with Freddy Kruger and an angry bear. His
body was covered in groups of ragged slashes and bite marks, some small, some large. His pajamas and bandages were little more than shredded scraps pasted to him with blood. The entire hallway was covered in blood, the walls dented and slashed, the pictures fallen and trampled, and chunks of brown and gray fur lay scattered about. And someone I didn’t recognize, a beautiful black woman with a lavender afro, sat with Pete’s head in her lap, making soothing sounds. An empty potion bottle lay on the floor beside her. A healer?
“Is he—” The words choked in my throat. Pressure built in my chest and behind my eyes, demanding release. I made my way past the blood and broken glass to stand next to Pete, beside the healer. Would she call in the enforcers?
“He’s going to live, I think,” she said. “They didn’t cover this in First Aid training. I don’t really understand what happened.”
Breath burst out of me in a mixed sob and sigh.
“Thank you. You’re not a healer, then? How did you know my name?”
“What?” the woman said. “What the hell do you mean, how did I know your name?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, raising my hands. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I’ve been away for a while, so if you’re a friend of the family’s or something—”
“Friend of the family’s?” the woman said, and her eyes brimmed with tears. “Oh man. I don’t know what the hell is going on here, Finn, but you’d better get your shit together and fast or you’re going to wish you could forget me.”
Finn Fancy Necromancy Page 30