by E. E. Holmes
The room was so absolutely pitch black that I might have gone blind. I blinked around, straining to make out a single detail of the space, but nothing would resolve in the blackness. Someone had shoved a wad of fabric into my mouth. It tasted like dust and smelled of mildew. I gagged on it and retched, but my insides were empty—there was nothing to bring up. I felt hard cold stone against my cheek. A sharp twinge of pain up my arm made me realize that my hands were tied together behind my back. I didn’t dare try to move them, for fear of bringing on another tidal wave of pain crashing down on me. After a heart-stopping moment of realization that I couldn’t feel my feet, I realized they must be tied together too.
There was a muffled groan from somewhere to my left. It sounded like a woman’s voice.
“Catriona?” I tried to say, but the gag rendered me unintelligible.
I tried to cry out for help. There was no response. I did not try again, realizing too late that my cries would be more likely to alert an attacker than a savior. I had to try to figure out where we were.
Steeling myself for more pain, I rolled myself over onto my back and then onto my side again, very nearly losing consciousness in the process. Then I stopped, gasping. It felt as though I had rolled through something sticky and wet. I could smell the tangy, musky scent of blood as my hair plastered itself to my face. That was how I discovered that the back of my head was bleeding. I could feel the dried film of it on the back of my neck and on my shoulders.
Swallowing back my desperation along with the bitter taste of bile, I began working my teeth and tongue against the gag that had been shoved into my mouth. It was slow and painful work—my jaw felt frozen and cramped from having been forced open for so long. Little by little, I felt the fabric giving way until finally, it fell to the floor.
“Catriona?” I whispered, or tried to. My mouth was so dry that no sound would come out, I swallowed a few times and tried again. “Catriona?”
A second sound, a sort of moan, came out of the darkness, but closer this time; I had rolled closer to her. Again, I fought through the waves of dizziness and pain to shift myself closer to the sound, propelling myself across the floor on nothing but whispered curses and grit, until my shoulder bumped up against another body.
“Catriona?” I whispered again.
She tried to answer me, but I could tell from the quality of the sound that she had been gagged as well. I stretched out my neck until my nose brushed against something—her chin. I lifted my face, found the gag in her mouth, and grasped onto it with my teeth, yanking it free.
Catriona wretched, sputtered, and coughed. “Bloody… bollocking… hell,” she gasped at last. “What happened? Where are we? And why does my head feel like it’s going to explode?”
“I have no idea where we are, but I think I know what happened,” I replied in a hushed voice. “We were attacked in the storage locker. I saw you on the ground out in the hallway. The pain… I can’t even…” My voice was lost, drowned in another wave of it.
“It’s not just the blow to the head,” Catriona said through gritted teeth. “We’ve been drugged.”
“Drugged?” I hissed. “How do you… wait, I think I remember something. A stinging in my neck?” The memory was murky, covered in a hazy film of agony and confusion.
“I felt it, too. Just before I went down. A syringe in my neck, definitely. Must have been etorphine, or something similar,” Catriona said.
“Why the hell do you know… actually, you know what? Forget it. I don’t want to know why you know that,” I said. Obviously, this was another one of those elements to Tracking I was better off being blissfully ignorant of.
“Do you have any idea where we are?” I asked her.
Catriona did not answer right away, but I didn’t press her; I could practically hear her wheels turning. Finally she said, “Wherever we are, it’s underground—that damp earthy smell.”
I sniffed and noticed it immediately. “So, a basement?”
“Most likely,” Catriona agreed. “Also, we’re in the city.”
“We are?” I asked. “How do you…?”
“Listen,” Catriona said. “Can’t you hear the traffic?”
Again, I fell into silence and concentrated. Sure enough, after a moment of two of hard listening, I heard the very faint sound of a horn blaring impatiently in the distance.
“Are we still in London?” I asked, frowning.
“I’m good, but I’m not that good, pet,” Catriona said, with a touch of her usual asperity. “A city. Best I can do on that score.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Yes, and it’s arguably our most significant clue. This space is Warded,” Catriona said.
And for the first time, she sounded frightened.
“Warded?” I asked, my panic much more pronounced. “You’re sure?”
“Can’t you feel it?” Catriona whispered. “Reach out!”
Though the darkness was pressing upon me like a weight, I closed my eyes and tried to focus my energies on locating a spirit presence. My efforts were met with a silence so deafening, so complete, as to only be explained by Wards. No natural place in the world was so devoid of the whisperings of life… or rather, afterlife.
“You’re right.”
“Too right, I am.”
“What the hell does that mean? Durupinen did this? Why?” I hissed.
“Come on, love,” Catriona said, managing to drench her voice in condescension even in this state. “I know you’ve been drugged, but for God’s sake, you can’t honestly have forgotten what we’ve been closing in on.”
In my panic, I passed right over the opportunity to make a snarky remark about Catriona and her chronic need to insult me. The picture was resolving itself, growing clearer as I forced myself to focus. The daguerreotypes. Neil Caddigan.
I gasped. “Oh my God, of course! The Necromancers! It has to be!”
“I would venture to agree with you,” she said, and I could almost hear the rueful smile in her voice. “If you recall, thanks to my darling cousin, the Durupinen aren’t the only ones who know how to Ward spaces or perform Castings.”
“They found out somehow,” I said with a groan. “They found out that we discovered the daguerreotypes. They found out that we were investigating them.”
“Right in one,” Catriona agreed.
“But how?” I asked. “How did they find out?”
A man’s voice came out of the darkness, quiet and calm.
“That’s simply answered. I told them.”
Catriona and I both froze. My heart thundered in my chest, and my body was tingling all over with the overwhelming panic that I could neither fly nor fight. It was Catriona who recovered herself first.
“Who are you, then?” she demanded, with a coolness that I admired even in my terror. “Show yourself.”
A click, a pop, and the room was flooded with the wavering light of gas lamps. Involuntarily, I squeezed my eyes shut against it, dazzled after so long in utter blackness. Slowly I forced my eyelids to open a fraction of an inch, blinking away tears, until I could focus at last at the figure sitting casually in the corner.
“Hello, Jess,” said Charlie Wright.
“Charlie?” I gasped. “What… what are you doing? What the hell is going on?”
“Oh, I’m quite sure you could figure that out if you tried,” he said pleasantly, scratching at his chin, which was dark with stubble. “You’re a clever girl, aren’t you?”
I didn’t respond. I was still trying to process my shock. I stared wildly around the room. Catriona had been right; it was definitely a basement. The walls were made of roughly hewn stones. Along the top, where the walls met the low, wood-beamed ceiling, black curtains had been drawn closed over small windows at what must have been the street-level. But perhaps the most significant—and most disturbing—element of the room was the vast collection of runes scrawled all over the surfaces. There were runes carved into the beams and planks of the ceiling, d
rawn onto the stones of the walls, and painted onto the floor beneath us. In the far corner of the room, tucked into the shadows, were several large shapes draped in lengths of black fabric. A gasp from beside me made me twist around to look at Catriona, who was staring down at the floor in alarm. We were lying right in the middle of a large Summoning Circle.
Charlie allowed us to take stock of our surroundings before sighing theatrically. “Oh, come now, Jess. It was your cleverness that got you into this mess, after all. Much too clever and much too nosy. You very nearly ruined everything.”
I couldn’t think. Charlie Wright? Sweet, nerdy Charlie? The world was upside down. Nothing made sense.
“Have I shocked you? I do hope so. Honestly, there have been days recently when I have quite shocked myself. I’ve done things I scarcely thought I had in me,” he said.
“You’re… you’re a Necromancer?” I asked, though the answer to the question was obvious in the twist of his smiling lips. “But how did you… I don’t…”
“It all seems terribly unlikely, doesn’t it?” Charlie said, nodding his head sympathetically. “I never believed in spirits, you know. Well, honestly, I’m hardly the type. Spent my life studying science and math, deeply rooted in the firm basis of facts. Facts were safe. Facts were reliable. I had no need and no use for the supernatural in my life. It did not fit. Until about five years ago, when my parents were killed.”
He was speaking in a bright, friendly voice, the very same tone I’d always heard from him, except that now, in juxtaposition with the circumstances, it set my teeth on edge and raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Alarm bells were going off inside me, clanging in discordant panic. This young man, despite every appearance of friendliness, was maybe the most dangerous individual I’d ever seen.
“Can you possibly understand what an event like that does to you?” Charlie asked. He looked from Catriona to me, waiting expectantly for an answer, like a teacher tossing out review questions. When we didn’t oblige, he went on, “Oh, come now, Jess, you ought to. After all, you’ve lost nearly everyone dear to you, haven’t you? Pity, that. The difference, of course, was that the answers to all your deepest questions came knocking on your door. You didn’t need to wonder what happened when someone dies. It was all explained to you, and you held the key to understanding it all, while the rest of us are left to wallow in our helplessness and our grief.”
“I had been left with nothing. Every constant in my life stripped away, like that.” He snapped his fingers. The sound echoed sharply around the room. “No answers to my questions. No explanations to ease my anguish. I’d spent my life solving problems and seeking logical explanations, and here I was, confronted with the first question to which I could not find an answer. I must admit it nearly broke me. Nearly. But then, I found Neil Caddigan.”
I swallowed back the revulsion that name always brought flooding to the surface. “What do you mean, you found him? How?”
“Well, I suppose it was he who found me. I’m not one to believe in things like fate, but then… I was never one to believe in any of the things to which I now dedicate my life’s work. I was already enrolled in one of Neil’s seminars at City College of London when the accident happened. When I returned to classes he pulled me aside. He talked to me, asked me if I was all right. When it became clear that I was not all right, he asked me to lunch with him. ‘I think I have some information that might help you,’ he told me.”
Anger boiled under my skin. Of course, Neil would never miss a chance to poison a mind, to recruit to his legion of followers. He had made a victim of Charlie as surely as he had made a victim of Lucida. Like any decent cult leader, sniffing out the vulnerable, pouncing on them in their moment of need, and offering to save them—a destructor in savior’s clothing. However, as Charlie the victim had beaten, drugged, and kidnapped me, my sympathy for him was severely limited at that moment.
“In the corner booth of a nearly deserted pub, he told me about the Necromancers and the world they inhabited. ‘With your extraordinary intelligence and your drive, you could be a valuable asset to our mission,’ he told me. ‘With your help, we could at last unlock the mystery, to take control of the forces that determine who lives and who dies. What mightn’t you do to bring your family back, if that power was within your reach?’ I did not believe him at first, of course. The fantastical does not so easily sink into a mind armored in the logical. I extricated myself as politely as I could from that luncheon and the next day, withdrew from the seminar. The man was insane, I told myself, and I would have nothing else to do with him. Oh, how naïve I was.”
Charlie laughed amusedly, as though he were simply reminiscing over a childhood anecdote. Beside me Catriona shifted uncomfortably. Her expression was warier than ever—clearly she thought, as I did, that Charlie was quite unhinged.
“Neil knew exactly what he was doing. He had planted the seeds; then, all he had to do was sit back and wait for them to take root. And take root they did. I lay awake, night after night, turning his words over and over again in my brain. What if—just what if what he said was the truth? What might I discover if I joined him? What if my loss—my pain—could be erased?”
“A fair question,” Catriona said, interrupting for the first time. I thought I could hear the fear in her voice, well concealed beneath the contempt. “And one you ought to have seen through, if you’re as clever as you seem to think you are. Neil Caddigan’s ranks were swollen with those foolishly seeking a power to which they had no right.”
Charlie’s face hardened for a moment, then broke into a smile again. “Spoken like a true Durupinen, so confident in her own destiny, so sure she has the unalienable right to play God with the rest of us. I will not entertain your smugness. It is as Neil said. You are too weak, too limited, too afraid to use your power to its potential. And if you cannot wield it mightily, you do not deserve it.”
“Our gift is not a weapon,” I said, finding my voice for the first time. Perhaps it was hearing the echoes of Neil Caddigan in his words, but I felt an angry flame spark in my chest. “And the fact that you speak about it like it is one only proves you understand it no better than Neil did.”
Charlie laughed. It wasn’t his typical chuckle. There was a wild, unhinged quality to it, as though he were laughing to keep something darker and more dangerous at bay. Catriona heard it, too; I felt her stiffen slightly beside me.
“I will not waste your time or mine trying to convince you. Did Neil Caddigan manipulate me? Perhaps. But only to my benefit. Once his ideas took hold of me, I could not shake them. Two weeks later, I was back in his office, ready to assist him and the Necromancers in any way I could. I was determined to prove myself, to show them that I could be a valuable asset to them. It was perhaps the most exciting, most pivotal moment in the history of the Necromancers. They were poised, Neil told me, on the brink of a great coup that would bring the Gateways within their power at last. But before I could be fully inducted into the Brotherhood, all hell broke loose. And by ‘all hell,’ of course, I am referring to the Prophecy.”
I recoiled as Charlie turned his gaze on me, a gaze that was full of undisguised loathing. “Just as I was poised to find the answers I needed, you and your sister tore our Brotherhood apart. Neil was dead, the upper ranks were captured or decimated. We were in shambles. The few who avoided capture went to ground, afraid to face a reckoning for their failure, and the rest of us were left to pick up the pieces of all that you destroyed.”
“You can blame Hannah and me all you want,” I said, “but the days of blaming ourselves are long gone. It was Neil’s decisions—not ours—that led to your destruction.”
“It does not matter, now,” Charlie said with a wave of his hand. “Let the past molder where it lay. The damage you have done will be repaired.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, my voice hoarse and dry.
He leaned forward conspiratorially. “We are rising, Jessica Ballard. We are rising again, and this time ther
e will be no limit to the scope of our powers.”
Catriona snorted. “You have risen before. And here you are, wallowing in the ashes of your failure yet again. A Brotherhood that cannot learn from its mistakes cannot succeed. You will be relegated to the gutters of the spirit world where you belong, make no mistake.”
“Ah, but it is you who do not learn from your mistakes. You have underestimated the Necromancers time and again. Your arrogance will be your undoing, in the end. And the end approaches.”
“You sound confident in that. Why should this time be any different? Why should this rising not end in a crashing fall, like all the others? Impress me,” Catriona said.
Charlie leaned forward and whispered. “We have allies, now. Allies you have lost through your neglect and your arrogance and your ingratitude.”
Catriona’s voice shook. “What do you mean? What allies?”
“Soon your defenses shall be ours. And so shall your gifts,” Charlie hissed.
“Our gifts?” I repeated, numb with fear.
Charlie did not answer. Instead, he stood up, careful to crouch slightly to avoid the nearest beam. He crossed the room to the corner where the fabric-draped shapes stood like a mockery of ghosts. He bent down, grasped one of them and, with a grunt, lifted it and carried it to the center of the room. He set it down carefully and then drew back the fabric with a flourish.
Beneath it was a lacquered wooden box, utterly unremarkable-looking.
“Ah, yes, the dreaded wooden box,” Catriona said with a sardonic smirk. “Truly, I quiver with fright. Surely we cannot survive the wrath of the box.”
I, however, did not scoff. I was too busy focusing my still blurry vision on several details of the box that stirred my memory. A metal circle on the front. A second, larger box that protruded from the first. A small metal plaque on the side. I struggled to tease the details out of the hazy fog of the drugs that still hung like a pall over my senses, dulling everything, making me feel like I was moving in slow motion.