The Necromancer's Knives

by Jen Kirchner

  My knives tell me that I got very lucky when I tripped and fell on top of that necromancer power a few months ago. If I take any more magic powers for myself, they’ll overwrite the abilities that I have now. Ever since, I’ve been extra cautious about making sure that doesn’t happen. Even though my magic is largely impractical and only a novelty, I love it. If I became the other kind of necromancer—the destroyer—I wouldn’t know what to do. I would no longer be me.

  I waved my hand at the notebook. “We may not have to comb through my notebook after all. Stubby knows the power I should use.”

  Luucas’s gaze flickered from the ebony blade in my hand, to me, then back to Stubby. “Advice from sacrificial knives? Sounds like a terrible idea.”

  Sacrificial knives live to instruct and protect our necromancers. It’s the sole reason we exist! I’m a wise sage who should be listened to, especially when it comes to choosing tonight’s TV show.

  I smiled. “Stubby would know about the powers in this book better than anyone.”

  Exactly.

  I reinforced my grip on the knife, and a foreign image flashed in my mind, courtesy of Stubby: I was looking at one of the white walls of my lab—the one just next to the table I was sitting at, in fact. A series of crude black hashes and dots wrote themselves into existence as if by an unseen hand. Each group of markings represented a number. The whole thing represented coordinates to the location of a magic power.

  “Is that a blood power?” I asked.

  Yes.

  “And that will protect me against magic?”

  Luucas reached over and pressed two fingers to the back of my hand so he could hear the answer.

  It will protect against all magic.

  “All magic?” Luucas looked skeptical. “What about Mikelis? Can it defend against Mikelis’s spells?”

  Even Mikelis’s spells.

  There had to be a catch. There usually was with Stubby. Although, the last time I went with one of Stubby’s spell ideas, it wasn’t so bad. I needed to get through a door, and Stubby told me how to take the door off. It worked a little too well, flying off its hinges, sailing overhead and behind me and into a couple of parked cars which it completely destroyed.

  I got through the door, though.

  As if Stubby were reading my mind, the knife prodded me.

  Out of all the protection powers we found together, this is the best one.

  That careful wording made me realize why Stubby was being so gentle. I’d used Stubby to research about half of the magic powers in that notebook. The knife I’d destroyed, Mouth, had been used for the other half. It made sense that Stubby had memorized all of the powers we’d researched together.

  Luucas pulled his hand away. “Okay, let’s see Stubby’s protection idea. We’ll test to see if I can get through it with third-channel magic. You’ll need to cast it in less than sixty seconds.”

  “That’s impossible! I’m not pulling these powers out of the fourth channel, Luucas. I’m pulling them directly from the plane of the dead. It takes two minutes just to connect down there.”

  “Sixty seconds, and don’t think I’m not being generous. Some fights are over in sixty seconds.” He smiled, but it didn’t feel humorous. “Get moving. There will be a test later.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Can’t you make it go faster?” Luucas asked.

  I’d been at it for nearly an hour. Our coffees were long gone, and Luucas was simultaneously working his way through my ꜱʏᴍʙᴏʟꜱ notebook and my supply of sugar-free lollipops.

  I shot him an irritated glare. “No. If you can’t tell by now, it goes at its own pace.”

  Hanging in the air before me was the same set of hashes and dots that Stubby had shown me: coordinates to the magic power that was the cornerstone of my new protection spell.

  My spells take extra long to cast because I don’t have powers stored in the fourth channel like my dad and Mikelis do. I have to create a spell formula from scratch and attach it to a magic power that exists on the plane of the dead—otherwise known as The Floor. After I’ve connected to a power, I have to program a spell to make the power do what I want.

  To say it’s slow is an understatement.

  The series of crude marks hung for a few more seconds, as if waiting for me to make final changes.

  I had none, so I dropped my hands.

  The marks blurred, looking almost as if they were being spun on a dial, as they made their connection to the matching location on The Floor.

  I glanced over to where I’d set Stubby on the table. I hadn’t needed to hold the knife for a while; I’d memorized everything by now.

  A minute later, a loud clang rang out, signifying that my coordinates had been accepted and I was now connected to the protection power that Stubby had suggested. The marks changed and formed long, black tangles that intertwined into a convoluted mess. This mess was the magic power’s unique identifier, like a person’s magical fingerprint. I was sure there was a pattern in the tangles—some kind of simple alphabet that I could use to skip the coordinates—but it was too complicated for me to decipher. Until I could figure it out, I had to stick with coordinates.

  Necromancy was the oldest form of magic, and it predated language, so we cast our spells with hand gestures. We look like the conductors of invisible orchestras.

  I beckoned the black spell string with two fingers. A thin, translucent film appeared, as if prying itself up from behind the physical plane, revealing itself as the supernatural parchment that the power’s elaborate mark was written upon. The supernatural film split into three layers. The front layer with the power’s mark on it floated toward me. A blank layer hovered in the middle. The back layer held my magical fingerprint.

  I gestured again, pulling the blank middle layer forward. I call this the “exception panel.” This is the fun part of spell building where I give the spell some parameters: height, depth, duration, intensity, or any other variation in how the spell will work. The basic function would always be what the power dictated, though. In this case, it would protect me from magical attacks in some capacity, but since we hadn’t tested it and my notes were old and vague, I wasn’t entirely sure what it would do beyond absorbing some spells. But it had to have limits. All magic has limits and loopholes, and I’m not sorry about that. My abilities excel in the loopholes.

  “What’s this?”

  I glanced over at Luucas. He’d flipped a page, and two hot pink glow-in-the-dark bandages had slid out from between the pages. What he couldn’t see was that there were black spell strings swirling around each of them.

  I felt every muscle in my body tense up. Flustered, I snatched the bandages off of the table and stuffed them into my front pocket. “Just a spell that I was tinkering with.” Or rather, one of the spells that Brad and I had been tinkering with about three months ago. But he didn’t need to know that. “It’s nothing. A failed spell.”

  “Your notes call it the Midas Touch spell, but there’s not a lot of detail here. Does it really turn stuff to gold?”

  “No,” I said. “It animates objects. I cast it on one of my chairs and it went berserk, chasing us around the room.”

  “That sounds funny.”

  It was even funnier when it mistook Brad for a girl-chair.

  Which is why we abandoned that spell and went with something else.

  “You put it on a bandage?”

  “It’s faster than trying to build a spell from scratch each time.”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I cringed at my mistake.

  “So, you could put the protection spell on a bandage, like those.” He didn’t look up from my ꜱʏᴍʙᴏʟꜱ notebook, but he pointed in the general direction of my pocket, where I’d hidden the bandages.

  True. Although, a protection spell might need a different applicator. I might need to build different defenses and parameters into the spell for different situations. Hmm…

  “You’ll need a
bout fifty bandages to start,” he added.

  I decided to make one or two. Later. What Luucas didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

  “I was thinking,” Luucas said, “maybe while we’re here, you could also make some spells for the first channel.”

  I stiffened, inwardly cursing myself. I should have seen that coming. The bandages seemed to mock me from my pocket. Stubby must have noticed my reaction, because the knife cackled.

  “I don’t know, Luucas.” I turned back to my unfinished spell and began gesturing at it, putting the correct parameters into the exception panel. “I don’t want to make violent spells.”

  “A lot of their spells were destroyed by Ruairí O’Bryne. They’ve only got one offensive spell left. Do you know how many first-channel conservators I have? The Council is going to vote on whether they should be pulled from duty because they’re struggling to do their jobs.”

  Of course I knew that. Brad’s a first-channeler, and he’d nagged me about it constantly. Before we’d gone on tour, we agreed that it was too dangerous for him to be related to me and not have any protection spells, even though there was no danger at the time. Better to be safe than sorry. So, I put a new offensive spell into the first channel, and we didn’t tell anyone.

  Yes, the spell could be used for violence, but since it’s just a super-secret emergency spell, he’s probably never going to use it. Ever. And that makes it okay.

  Probably.

  Luucas went on, oblivious to my reaction. “I even know how we could put new spells into the first channel and distribute them without anyone connecting them to Eliana Rendon.”

  My head snapped in his direction. I felt my face get hot… and then flush six different shades of red. “What?”

  Stubby snickered.

  Luucas looked up from the notebook. His eyes narrowed. “Obviously, we need to make sure no one can connect new spells to Eliana Rendon.” He shook his head. “Every developed country on Earth already wants to get their hands on you and turn you into a weapon. If they found out you can also add spells to channels and permanently alter or neutralize existing ones, the effort to find you would be a hundred times more intense than it is now.”

  The words left my mouth before I could stop them. “Who would use me as a weapon?”

  I’d spent three months hoping my family would make this all go away. I’d forced the idea as far from my mind as I could and buried myself in the band’s comeback tour. I really didn’t want him to answer my question.

  His upper lip curled. “Everyone. Why do you think the Immortal Council wants to find you so badly? That stunt you pulled three months ago with the global magic killer proved that you could eliminate our entire population with a wave of your hand. People are terrified, Kari.”

  “I would never!”

  “I know you wouldn’t, but no one else does. You’re unknown. As much as I hate Immortal Intelligence, they’d be doing a bad job if they weren’t trying to find you, just to make sure you don’t end up in the hands of a government who has a grudge against us.”

  I had no idea what to say. I didn’t know what to do. This was bigger than me and had spiraled so far out of my control that I wasn’t sure how to fix it.

  “The first channel needs some offensive spells.” Luucas tapped the ꜱʏᴍʙᴏʟꜱ notebook again, drawing the conversation back. For now.

  I frowned. “I already made the first channel an offensive spell right before I went on tour. The Sneeze spell.”

  “The Sneeze spell sucks,” Luucas said. “Everyone hates it.”

  I clenched my hands into fists. We’d had this argument before I’d left on tour.

  “That spell does everything you asked for,” I said. “It stops an assailant and restrains them. Mostly.”

  If you call being thrown forward repeatedly while sneezing a restraint.

  “Yeah,” Luucas said, “but it has diminishing returns. If you cast it on someone four times, they become immune.”

  “Because I built that into the spell. If it was allowed to run long enough, people would get a weird plague that would eventually kill them.”

  “It doesn’t even affect immortals,” he argued.

  “Because immortals don’t breathe,” I said. “And you’re all welcome. That spell does everything you asked for, and no one gets hurt.”

  “It’s dumb.” Luucas tapped his index finger on the bottom half of a page. “How about this one? Your notes say it’s some kind of explosion.”

  I knew what he was talking about, and the answer was a definite no. “Fire hurts people.”

  “Fire makes a statement.”

  “Fire is dangerous, and secondhand smoke is hazardous to your health.”

  Stubby asked how long this was going to take.

  Luucas continued talking while I ignored him and finished the protection spell. He was still suggesting first-channel spells.

  “Okay,” I said, cutting Luucas off mid-sentence. “I’ve got the protection spell memorized. I think we’re done here.”

  He looked up. He blinked at the enormous, hovering spell string. “Put it on yourself.”

  Whatever. As long as we were no longer talking about first-channel spells, I didn’t care. I grabbed Stubby and pricked my index finger.

  Yesssssss!

  A bead of blood appeared on the tip of my finger. I reached over and swiped my blood into the spell. A loud clang rang out, and the layers snapped back together. The supernatural panel shimmered as it receded into the background, its edges becoming invisible. The spell string disappeared from its place in the middle of the room, and a much smaller version now swirled around me.

  Luucas stood up and went to the back of the room. He faced me. “Now attack me.”

  I frowned. “No.”

  “You’re not like Diaco and Mikelis, but you’ve got some weird abilities that you can use to defend yourself.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry.”

  Luucas’s lips moved, ever so slightly, like an amateur ventriloquist. I didn’t hear the command word that kicked off his spell, but I definitely saw the red-orange spell string that started to form in the air over his left shoulder.

  Out of habit, I reached out and ripped his half-formed spell out of the air. The dead spell string, now black, slapped against the wall.

  “I can do that all day,” I said, feeling rather smug. “No need to practice fighting. Anything you throw at me, I can stop—peacefully.”

  His eyes narrowed into thin slits. Then he charged.

  Chapter Six

  I peeled out of the room and through the boundary of my protective posts. All of my necromancer senses clicked on. I became acutely aware of several things: the spells around my house, a hive of dead wasps next door, and two hundred and eighty pounds of Luucas Mikkelson tearing after me. Immortals’ bodies are dense, so a typical human can outrun a typical immortal.

  I’m typical. Luucas isn’t.

  Luucas had spent over a century as the Principal Conservator of the largest Immortal territory in the world. He had pushed his physical and mental limits every day. I’d spent the last three months on a tour bus, eating my feelings.

  I made it upstairs to the family room and darted around the sectional sofa. Luucas was right behind me. My breath was ragged, and my lungs felt like they were going to explode. I wouldn’t make it to the car before he caught me.

  Luucas reached the top of the stairs. He showed no signs of physical exertion.

  “Are you kidding me right now?” he demanded.

  “Kidding you?” I panted. “You’re chasing me!”

  “Fight back, Kari.”

  “You can’t make me.”

  Luucas charged around the sofa. I circled around it, keeping as much sofa and coffee table between us as possible. Without warning, he changed direction and circled the other way. I tried to change course and slammed my knee into the sofa. The half-second pause was all Luucas needed to get closer. He lunged for me.

  Without thinking, I p
ointed at the floor with my free hand and quickly drew a large circle right in Luucas’s trajectory. The supernatural plane peeled itself up from the floor in a jagged circle. As soon as he stepped into it, I flipped my wrist. The supernatural plane flipped over. Luucas staggered, lost his balance, and crashed to the floor, temporarily disappearing behind the sectional.

  He was back on his feet in a split second.

  Hmm. I’ll rate that a 4.7 out of 10.

  I’d almost forgotten about the knife in my hand. I had no idea if Stubby was rating my response or Luucas’s face-plant. Knowing Stubby, it was probably both.

  “Knock it off!” I yelled at Luucas.

  “No!”

  The patio doors jiggled behind me and I heard a key sliding into the lock. I glanced over my shoulder as the doors opened. Sunlight poured into the room, along with an overpowering wave of humidity and Mikelis Priedis, necromancer extraordinaire and terror of kitchens everywhere.

  Mikelis is immortal, but he doesn’t always show up on Death Radar because he has badass skills that I’ll never have. He wasn’t plugged into my access spell, either, but minor magical inconveniences had never stopped him before.

  He looked delicious in a pair of faded old jeans and a gray short-sleeved T-shirt. He was shorter than Luucas but more muscular. Dark hair. Strong jaw. A faded and torn Yankees cap was pulled so low over his face that it touched the top of his dark sunglasses, hiding his eyes.

  Mikelis and I had started a romantic relationship just before I’d gone on tour. Thanks to the radio silence, we hadn’t talked in over two months. Things between us had been really good when I’d left, but I had no idea where we stood now.

  You have some drool on the corner of your mouth.

  I swiped at my lips with the back of my hand. I checked my hand. I was drool-free.

  Jerk.

  The corner of Mikelis’s mouth perked up in a smile. “What’s going on?”