The Necromancer's Knives

by Jen Kirchner

  There was still the matter of possible widespread doom brought on by the Seer’s Curse. Just by looking for this stupid key, we could be making things even worse than they are now. Then again, I highly doubted the key even existed. The chances were great that he wouldn’t find anything and we could drop this stupid key business once and for all.

  “Kari, are you there?”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond.

  As it turned out, I didn’t have to, because Mikelis took three large steps across the room and took the phone from my hand.

  “Luucas,” his voice rumbled, “you need to drop this stupid key business. It’s gotten you into enough trouble. Go back to your jail cell and keep your idiotic thoughts to yourself so Marcus can get you out of this.”

  Before I could say more, Mikelis slammed the phone back into its cradle, disconnecting the call. His eyes glittered down at me and searched my face. They lingered on my mouth for a brief moment, making my chest feel hot, before returning to my eyes.

  “Well.” I folded my arms across my chest and stared up at him. “I guess that’s that.”

  He nodded and started for the door. “Yep. I’ll go get the car. We’ll grab coffee on the way.”

  “On the way to what?”

  “Ruairí O’Bryne’s voodoo bunker.” He said it like duh! “Meet me out back in thirty minutes. I’ll get rid of Intelligence.”

  He shut the door before I could say another word.

  Thirty minutes later, I was still debating whether to meet Mikelis. I knew where he was—he’d allowed his undead signal to appear on Death Radar. He wasn’t far, just through the woods behind my house. However, had he stopped to ask my opinion before declaring our next move, I would have said that I had a lot of feelings about returning to the voodoo bunker, and none of them were positive.

  I was worried about my mom’s well-being. By acting upon the information she’d given Luucas, we’d likely make her condition worse. There was even the possibility of it killing her. And Marcus said something about widespread doom.

  I was worried that by leaving the house I’d be exposed, and Immortal Intelligence would either kill me or kidnap me.

  I was worried about Rambo, and I didn’t like that we were searching for a key instead of my knife. I didn’t like that Mikelis had made the decision for me and tried dictating what I was going to do.

  And the cherry on top of this crap sundae was that I was scared to return to the voodoo bunker.

  I had no interest in reliving what I’d done. I thought about it enough during the day, and before I fell asleep, and in the middle of the night when I woke up because I’d dreamt about it…

  Another twenty minutes later, Mikelis was still waiting for me, and I was hungry. I still couldn’t decide where I stood on the impending doom issue, but I knew that it was time for Mikelis and I to have a conversation and resolve whatever had happened between us. Preferably while I was chowing down on a cheeseburger.

  I changed my clothes, packed up a large leather tote, slid on my bracelet with the telepath spell—I hadn’t given up hope that I’d catch my dad—and followed Mikelis’s signal to where his old silver Camry idled on the side of the road.

  I slid into the passenger seat, shut the door, and dropped my bag on the floor between my feet. A thin cloud of black necromancer smoke squeezed through the zipper.

  Oof!

  “Sorry, Stubby.” I reached into the bag and shifted the flashlight off of the tightly bound roll of socks, scarves, and one ugly pair of panties covered in scantily clad glow-in-the-dark witches with the words trick or treat all over it.

  Without so much as a greeting or acknowledgement, Mikelis pulled the car away from the curb and took off. The only thing I said to him for the next twenty-five minutes was “sixteen ounce shot in the dark with cream and one sugar and a Thai chicken wrap.”

  And then we were off to Listowel, Ontario. We pulled onto I-490 heading west and merged into light traffic. Mikelis wore sunglasses to protect his eyes from the oncoming headlights, but I noticed him glancing at me periodically, as if gauging the temperature between us. He kept shifting in his seat.

  His hands continually repositioned on the wheel. They went from eleven o’clock and in his lap, to ten and two, and then nine and coffee. Then back to ten and two. Gripping hard, like he was playing chicken with an oncoming freight train.

  Finally, he cleared his throat. His right hand left the wheel and stretched across the front seat. He took my fingertips in his hand, lightly, as if he was afraid I’d bite.

  I wasn’t going to bite, but I wasn’t going to roll over and accept his bad attitude, either.

  I jerked my hand out of his and jammed an angry finger at his face. “You fight dirty,” I snapped.

  He winced. “I know, I—”

  “What you did was hurtful, uncalled for, and completely unfair. And then you accused me of being ashamed of you. Seriously, who does that?”

  “Just let me—”

  “You didn’t listen to a word I said. The renewed contract with Cody Springer wasn’t my fault. I was given legal limitations that I couldn’t override. You jumped to conclusions and then wrongfully accused me of looking down on you and prioritizing Cody, which you know I would never do. If I have to be honest here, and I really do, I’d say you weren’t even jumping to conclusions. You were just being mean on purpose.”

  “I know. I shouldn’t have said—”

  “And,” I continued, still jamming a finger at his face, “what is the deal with you deciding we’re going to the voodoo bunker without even a discussion? If we”—I waggled my finger back and forth between us—“are going to be together, then we are a team. A unit. Tight. Distinct individuals, but together. We discuss and we decide together. You don’t get to decide for me. That’s the only way this relationship is going to work.”

  At last, Mikelis was quiet. His lips were pursed, and one eye twitched. He was finally waiting for me to continue.

  But I was done.

  “Well?” I demanded. “Do you have anything to say?”

  “Yes, but you keep yelling at me.”

  “It’s not my fault that you require a good yelling.”

  “That’s true, I do.” He reached over and took my hand. “And I’m sorry. I knew I was in the wrong almost as soon as I left your house.”

  “‘Almost’? How soon after?”

  “Right after I drove over your roses with my car.”

  Stubby snorted.

  “I’m sorry. Really.” His hand squeezed mine. “From now on, I’ll try to be a team player. You know I’m not great at it.”

  I opened my mouth to interject, but he brought my hand to his mouth and kissed the back of my fingers, putting a pause on whatever I was about to say.

  “I know it’s no excuse,” he continued, “but I’ve been alone for so long. And no one questions me for fear that I’ll blow up half the city. I’ll try to do better. I’m sorry.”

  “Apology accepted.”

  I looked out at at the dark highway in front of us. The moon was rising in the night sky, and dark silhouettes of tall balsam firs loomed overhead on both sides. We’d been on the road for a while, and it was going to be at least another hour before we arrived in Listowel.

  “I’m not sure I understand why you were suddenly so interested in looking for this key,” I said. “You know how the Seer’s Curse works, Mikelis. Her visions may no longer be accurate.”

  “You’re right, but Isadora has a long history of saving the Immortal State in times of crisis. She’s always had a way of dropping clues that protect a lot of people. Sure, it can be cryptic, but when she talks, people listen.”

  He was quiet for a long time. He glanced at me and he shifted in his seat.

  “I’ve never told you why I’m here,” he said.

  “I called you when I found Cody in my bushes. That’s why you’re here.”

  His laugh was short and quiet and felt uncomfortable. “I mean why I’m here on
this continent.”

  “You moved here because of Luucas.”

  I knew the story; it was legendary among Immortals. After Ruairí O’Bryne killed Mikelis’s parents, Luucas and Mikelis chased Ruairí and his followers all over Eurasia, avenging Mikelis’s family. After two hundred years of hunting, they’d failed to capture Ruairí, and Luucas felt he could put his talents to better use as a conservator. Mikelis came with him.

  “Not exactly,” he said. “When Luucas was made immortal, he didn’t know what he was. He met me almost a century later and gave me the Change, and we still weren’t entirely sure what we were, just that we could cast magic a lot better and more powerfully than humans.

  “Eventually, we met other immortals who told us there was some kind of organized nation that could help us. But Luucas was tired of the chase; he said it felt like we were getting nowhere. We were put in touch with a local conservator, and they gave us money for a trip to Milan, where the Immortal Council was based at the time. The Immortal State took us in. On the day we arrived, they gave us dormitory-style boarding, and we were able to start school that same week.”

  “That’s pretty fast.”

  “Yeah. After the Council heard about all that we had been through with hunting Ruairí and his cronies, we were both pitched the conservator program.”

  My eyebrows shot up. I didn’t know that. “Luucas wanted to become a conservator, but you didn’t.”

  He nodded. “I think Luucas found a good use for the skills we’d developed over the years, and he felt encouraged that there was a good life for people like us who had become immortal through less-than-ideal circumstances. But the basic education course lasted two and a half years, and I thought Ruairí would escape. I felt like we had been close so many times, and if we just kept going…”

  Mikelis’s voice drifted off, apparently thinking about what might have been. Then he shrugged it off. “Two days after we arrived in Milan, we talked about what we wanted to do next, and we wanted different things. The discussion was quick, and it was an amicable split. We’d been told about a new continent and how the Immortal settlements there would need conservators. But I’d heard rumors of Ruairí being seen in China, and I was going to leave at the end of the week.”

  Stark headlights from oncoming cars flashed over his features. Strong, square jaw. Thoughtful blue eyes that squinted behind sunglasses in the wash of bright light.

  “But you’re here,” I said. “You didn’t go.”

  “Right. After Luucas and I talked, I headed to the dormitory to pack and leave.” He waved his hand in the air as if brushing away the comment.

  He started again. “I’m a necromancer, and you know I’m paranoid, so I’m always aware of when another immortal is near. This was the one time in my life that I was distracted. I was thinking about Luucas, and wondering if splitting up was the right thing for me.” He smiled. “Despite what the movies tell you, being an army of one isn’t an advantage. And, you know, by that point, Luucas was like a brother to me. I loved his grouchy ass. So, I was deep in thought when I came around a corner and literally bumped into another immortal. It looked like she’d been waiting for me.”

  Wait a minute.

  “She?” I repeated. I had a feeling I knew exactly what had happened. I narrowed my eyes at him. “Are you kidding me?”

  He nodded. “I knew who she was as soon as I’d knocked her down: Isadora Rendon, the world’s oldest Seer. She didn’t even introduce herself or say hello. She just launched into how Luucas was going to the New World and how amazing it was going to be. She said a person who didn’t move there was going to miss out on the chance of a lifetime.” He shook his head at the memory. “The way she looked at me when she said that… I’ll never forget it. Her eyes were so intense.”

  This happened two hundred years ago, and he described it like it had happened yesterday. Why in the world would Mom go out of her way to do that? Why had I never heard this story before?

  “Anyway,” he said, “I never got a word in edgewise. As soon as she said all that, she said good night and ran off.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “That’s it? That’s all it took to get you to abandon your quest and move here?”

  Mikelis gave me a sideways glance. “Kari, when the world’s oldest Seer tells you to find the treasure waiting for you at the end of the rainbow, you don’t ask questions. You just go.”

  That sounded crazy. The entire story was crazy. What was my mother thinking? What was Mikelis thinking?

  “Did you ever figure out what was waiting for you here?”

  He glanced over the rim of his sunglasses and our eyes met.

  “I’m pretty sure I’m looking at it.”

  The weight of his words hung between us. My heart was so full, I was afraid to say anything and spoil the moment.

  Smoke wafted from my bag.

  I liked the first half of the story where you were blowing people up, but then you added some kissy stuff. I’ll give it a C+.

  I kicked my purse.

  Ow!

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  As we stood before the laundromat, a thousand emotions came rushing back at me and swirled in the pit of my stomach.

  The door had received a shiny new deadbolt since I’d been here last, along with yellow police tape bearing a repeated warning: “CRIME SCENE: DO NOT CROSS.”

  A piece of paper was taped high in the center, bearing the Immortal State Conservators’ official seal and bolded text proclaiming prosecution to all trespassers. I recognized the barely legible signature at the bottom since it matched the quick scribble on Luucas’s monthly rent checks.

  A blue access spell encircled the laundromat, leaking through the brick walls that separated the narrow space from the stores on either side and slithering across the facade.

  I took a step back to get a better look at the spell. Inside the exception panel, I saw Marcus’s magical fingerprint and a unique symbol that read clearly to me as a key. I cast a wary look at the Realtor’s SOLD sign in the window.

  “Do you know who bought this building?” I asked.

  “No.” I almost missed his quiet murmur. “Some pompous asshole who wants to cash in on the legacy of a serial killer.”

  I glanced around the darkened street, marveling at the new businesses that had sprung up almost overnight in the sleepy town of Listowel.

  The last I’d heard, the Council still hadn’t cleared this town as an official settlement, but it was approved for tourism. Temporary residence was allowed as long as it was related to the historic voodoo bunker.

  Luucas said he hadn’t yet figured out how to handle conservator coverage. Businesses were set up, stocked, and ready to open, yet most of the shop signs declared “Coming Soon!” We’d passed one on the way here that displayed shrunken heads, faceless cloth dolls filled with bright pins, and Ruairí O’Bryne bobbleheads. Across the street was a tea and coffee shop featuring themes that spanned the entire gamut of voodoo, not bothering to differentiate between sincere religious practices and the abomination practiced by Ruairí O’Bryne’s cult.

  Two blocks away, a brand new motel was nearing completion. From the size of it, the owner planned on a lot of business.

  I turned around to face the laundromat again. Whoever had bought this building over the voodoo bunker had dollar signs in their eyes, too. To get into the bunker, you had to go through the laundromat. Ticket sales would make someone a fortune. Whoever bought it must have had to outbid a small army, including half of the members of the Immortal Council.

  And, as Mikelis said, they were also probably a total ass.

  Mikelis produced a silver key from his pocket. Luucas had scrawled laundromat on a sticker attached to the keyring. We’d found it in Luucas’s desk.

  Mikelis slid the key into the new deadbolt. The unique glyph flashed inside the access spell, and the spell temporarily clicked off.

  We stepped inside and let the door fall shut behind us. Mikelis locked the door and the ac
cess spell clicked back on. The room was as cold as the street, and was musty from disuse, but I could still detect the faint scent of fabric softener. The only light came from the dingy, yellowed street lamps reflecting off of dull appliances.

  Mikelis made a full turn to inspect the room. I felt his mood darken. “So, this is it. This is where Ruairí lived.”

  “Sort of. It’s below.”

  I paused and studied him for a second. I couldn’t imagine how this must have felt for him, to stand inside the home of the person who murdered his family and changed his life—forever. I hadn’t been here in three months, and it still felt surreal.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter now. We’re here.”

  You two are killing me! Take me out of this bag. I want to see!

  I removed Stubby from my bag and shook off the towels, socks, and underwear.

  You’re right. Kind of a letdown.

  I grabbed the heavy-duty flashlight from my bag and switched it on. I kept the light trained on the dull floor, although its concentrated beam still made Mikelis’s sensitive immortal eyes squint from discomfort. I walked to the back of the room, passed through the swinging rubber doors, and stopped, unable to look at anything other than the open trap door in the center of the floor.

  I shined the flashlight into the maw-like hole, illuminating the steep concrete stairs and green door at the bottom. An obvious trail was worn through the dust and dirt on the stairs, probably from Luucas going up and down them so many times.

  Getting weirder.

  Mikelis went to the edge of the trap door and looked down. No uncertainty in his gaze. His expression was all business. His eyes were hard and his jaw was set. Arms loose at his sides. Hands ready. Bulletproof Mikelis.

  I followed him down the stairs. The door was unlocked and cracked open. The scratches around the lock suggested that Luucas had used the same indelicate touch he had with my lab door.