by Hannah Marae
“You know the shades aren’t listening, right?”
“Oh, right.” Zeke sat back in his seat, allowing his voice to return to a reasonable volume. “So what do you think?”
Lazarus sighed. “I think hunters are a good assumption. I just worry that her friend isn’t as innocent as she thinks. No hunter is going to take her out for scamming people with spelled cash. It’s not worth the risk.”
“Agreed.” Zeke scratched at the stubble on his chin. “But there is the fact that she’s still alive. Why would a hunter hang onto a mage?”
“Maybe she killed them.”
“Then wouldn’t she call up Eden to let her know everything was fine?” Zeke countered. “There’s something weird going on. I mean, Eden seems pretty genuine, but there could be something her friend isn’t telling her.”
“You can probably count on that.” Lazarus stood. “Finish up here. I’m going to check on Hades.”
Back at the motel, Eden let herself into the room, dropping her bag by the door.
Everything was moving so fast. This morning she had felt helpless, spinning out of control. Mab was in trouble, and though Eden knew she had to do something, the task was daunting. Impossible. But now, the pieces were fitting together. She had a direction. Two hunters had practically fallen into her lap, and, most importantly, Mab was still alive. Foolish as it felt, Eden was beginning to think there might be hope.
She went to the side table that held most of her worldly possessions: a change of clothes, toothbrush, tampons, and various sigils she’d drawn on old receipts and gum wrappers. Folding the clothes and toiletries into the bottom of her backpack, Eden carefully tucked the scrap papers into a woefully empty coin pouch. She’d have to draw some sigils on the road.
The pouch went into the bag, followed by the grimoire. Then Eden zipped the backpack and slung it over her shoulder before grabbing her purse from the floor. With one last look around the room to make sure she didn’t miss anything, Eden stepped out into the morning sun. She returned her key, then made her way down the street back to the mechanic’s garage.
Eden grabbed the duffel bag that held the rest of her life, mostly clothes and the books she couldn’t bear to leave behind. For months now, she had been on the road alone, flitting from one place to another, never stopping for longer than a day or two. These things were all she had left.
Eden returned to the diner to find the hunters. Lazarus was outside, his eyes glued to his phone. He leaned against an old truck that looked like it had rolled straight out of the eighties. Chocolate brown with cream accents, the truck appeared to be well cared for, even beneath a patina of dust and grime. A huge black dog with pointed ears sat in the bed amongst a toolbox and a heap of mismatched bags. When the dog looked her way, its eyes seemed to glint red.
“You have a dog?” Coming up beside Lazarus, Eden raised her hand so the animal could catch her scent. It took a whiff and then licked her hand, sitting down as she scratched behind its ears.
“His name is Hades,” Lazarus said without looking up from his screen.
Eden smiled. “God of the Underworld. It suits him. What is he, a German shepherd?”
“Something like that.” He turned and gave a brief smile that was interrupted when he noticed the bags hanging from her shoulders. Reaching out, Lazarus took the duffel off her arm. “These okay in the back?”
Nodding, she watched as he tucked her backpack between a waterproof duffel and the padlocked toolbox. Eden held on to her purse, with her phone and wallet tucked inside. If this went sideways, and she had to make a break for it, she’d have her spelled credit cards.
All settled, Lazarus returned to his phone, scrolling through what looked like a newsfeed. In the diner window, Eden could see Zeke hunched over his laptop, typing furiously. He was speaking into a headset worn over his jaw-length black curls, hands flying up from the keyboard to punctuate whatever he was saying. It looked like it’d be a few more minutes. At least.
Eden leaned against the truck beside Lazarus, suppressing a sigh and trying to ignore the constant pull emanating from her tattoo. At the realization that there would be no more petting, Hades whined and lay down in the bed. Eden wondered how they managed to travel with a dog, especially one so large. Maybe dogs could sniff out ghosts or something.
Honestly, Eden knew very little about hunters. Their existence had been in her periphery, but it was always in an abstract way. They were the monsters hiding under her bed, the boogeymen in the closet waiting for the perfect moment to attack.
Lazarus and Zeke didn’t strike her as particularly monstrous, but Eden knew it was better to play it safe. Like her new companions, she had several protective wards inked into her skin. Each mark could be ignited with just a touch of power. She also kept a few tricks tucked into her purse: a water-soluble sleep sigil and another that blinded the eyes. Eden was confident she could incapacitate the hunters long enough to take their truck and make a getaway if she had to. If there was one thing she was good at, it was disappearing.
At Lazarus’s heavy sigh, Eden looked over. He held his phone out in front of him, the screen now black with the accusatory low-battery symbol flashing in his face. Before he could slip it into the pocket of his jeans, she held out her hand.
“May I?”
With a wary look, the hunter passed her his phone. He kept his eyes on her as she reached into her bag and produced a tube of pink lipstick.
“I’ll clean it up, promise,” Eden told him with a grin that he failed to return. Inwardly shrugging, she quickly drew out an energizing sigil on the back of the phone. Then she took the phone in both hands and closed her eyes. Within herself, she found the well.
Plucking a strand of power, she sent it into the sigil, which gave a brief glow. The device buzzed in her hands, the start-up screen flaring to life. Eden grinned triumphantly, then dug in her bag for a disinfectant wipe, quickly clearing all traces of lipstick from Lazarus’s phone.
“There you go,” she said as she passed it over.
He turned it over in his hands, nodding his appreciation. “I’ve never seen that trick.”
“It’s just a modified energizing sigil,” Eden told him. She grabbed his arm and turned it over, pointing to the small symbol tattooed on his inner forearm. “See, not much different from this one.”
He withdrew his arm, quickly shoving his hands in his pockets. “Can it be used with a channeling coin?”
“Sure, but only use it on phones and things like that. Don’t use it for your car.” She grimaced. “Learned that one the hard way.” Not one of her best moments by a long shot. In a fit of desperation over a dead car battery, Eden had attempted the sigil. It worked, technically, but the draw on her power was too high. She’d woken up, hours later, on the side of the road.
“Noted.” He nodded. “It seems you’ve got a few tricks up your sleeve, mage.”
She flashed him a grin. “Sure do, hunter.”
“Let’s get this show on the road!” A cheerful voice cut in. They both looked up as Zeke came strolling out of the diner with a messenger bag, the headset still perched over his ears.
Eden was struck by how different the Morgans were. They shared the same dark hair and eyes—brooding and intense in Lazarus while boyish in Zeke—but the similarities ended there. Zeke was shorter than his cousin and lighter in build, bouncing around with abundant energy. In contrast, Lazarus seemed to lurk in a calculated fashion, moving like a predator on the hunt. He was the one she’d have to keep an eye on.
“Forgetting something?” Lazarus asked, pointing to his head.
Zeke felt for the headset and chuckled. He removed it and stuffed it into the bag, which he set in the truck’s bed with a heavy thunk. “Everyone ready?”
They piled into the truck, Lazarus climbing behind the wheel. Zeke hopped in ahead of Eden, sliding into the middle seat to wedge himself beside his cousin. She suspected he did it to keep her from feeling cornered, a gesture that she appreciated. In ret
urn, she scooted close to the window to offer him a bit more legroom.
Eden looked around. The interior was old but well-kept with little modification. On the dashboard sat several old paperbacks with yellowed pages. Eden craned her neck to peer at the spines, picking out a few American classics by Steinbeck and Twain.
The truck roared to life, then pulled out of the lot and onto the road heading out of Nowhere. As they passed the garage, Eden looked out the window. “What do you think they’ll do with my car?”
“I’ll fix it when we get back,” Lazarus replied.
Eden shot him a look, but he didn’t elaborate. It was a nice offer, but she fully expected her car to end up impounded or sitting in a junkyard somewhere. There was no way it would still be here when she came back. If she came back.
A few minutes later, the truck rolled past the same welcome sign Eden walked by on her way into town. It was strange to be going back the way she came, like all the ground she had covered in the last year suddenly meant nothing. At least this time she knew where she was going.
“So how accurate is your Mab compass?” Zeke asked. He was fiddling with the radio, trying to find a station that didn’t consist of static.
Eden thought about it. “We’ve never used it before. It’s supposed to get stronger the closer we are.”
“How can you tell?” He looked up from the radio dials and pointed. “Can you open the glove box?”
Opening the compartment, Eden saw a first aid kit, a phone charger, and a few dingy flip phones alongside several CD cases with missing labels.
“Just pick one,” Zeke told her, so she took the case on top and passed it over.
“It’s kind of hard to explain,” Eden went on. “There’s a pull, but not a physical one, just a gut feeling telling me to go east.”
“So we’re chasing after a gut feeling?” Lazarus muttered. He looked at home inside the truck, leaning back against the bench seat with one hand draped across the wheel. She got the feeling he spent a lot of time here.
“A magical gut feeling,” Eden quickly corrected.
“Uh-huh.”
Beside her, Zeke freed the CD from its case, revealing a blank disk with a track list written in sharpie. He popped it into the truck’s after-market player, a device whose installation Eden assumed Lazarus had nothing to do with. A few moments later, an old punk rock song flared from the speakers, and Zeke sat back happily.
“I can’t tell how far Mab is. Not yet.” Eden spoke over the music.
Giving his cousin a sharp look, Lazarus turned down the volume. “Look, I don’t mind carting you around to look for your friend, but I’m not going to stop doing the job. If I come across a haunt, I’m taking care of it.”
Eden furrowed her brows. “You do remember the part about it being urgent, right?”
He spared her a glance, and if he noticed her irritation, he failed to acknowledge it. “You don’t even know where she is or what happened to her. We’re playing a game of ‘hot or cold,’ and east is the only thing we have to go on. If I see a job, I’m taking care of it.”
“It’s a hunter thing,” Zeke piped in apologetically.
Eden scowled out the window, gritting her teeth around a protest. She tried to understand Lazarus’s position. He wasn’t a hunter for the hell of it; no one was a hunter for the hell of it. According to Mab, they all had reasons for getting into the business, most of them brooding and bleak. Maybe Lazarus had a personal vendetta against ghosts.
Either way, Eden didn’t see many options. The way she saw it, her path was forked. She could ride along with the Morgans, or she could strike out on her own. Lazarus was right. Eden had no idea what waited for her on the other side.
As she watched the desert glide by outside the window, Eden looked ahead at the horizon. If she had to go it alone, then so be it, but for now, the Morgans were her best bet.
A few hours after hitting the road, Lazarus pulled into a roadside gas station to fuel up. So far, the trip was pleasant enough. Zeke’s whiny music filled the cab, and for once, Lazarus was grateful. Instead of arguing, the mage spent the drive staring sullenly out the window with her arms crossed. She might have sent him a few irritated glances, but that was nothing Lazarus couldn’t handle.
It wasn’t that he meant to bait her; he considered it a fair warning. Ignoring a haunt meant hoping another hunter would come along and take care of a job that Lazarus could do himself inside an afternoon. Not only was it stupidly inefficient, but people could get hurt. He didn’t expect a mage to understand that.
She seemed all right, but Lazarus still kept an eye on her, not an easy task while watching the road. Call him paranoid, but mages were too close to the things he hunted, barely treading the line between man and monster. They held a power that far exceeded anything else in the natural world. He’d never pursued one personally. His mom had some stories, most notably that of a blood mage who had taken complete control of a C-list celebrity.
Sigil mages were usually pretty safe. Many worked closely with hunters, providing written sigils and imbued weapons. The worst of them were usually just grifters, not practitioners of dark magic. But Lazarus couldn’t help imagining her turning on them, igniting some sort of sinister sigil, overpowering them with magic. He mentally willed Zeke to stay on guard, but his cousin just slouched in his seat playing air guitar.
Pulling to the pump, Lazarus filled the tank while Zeke and the mage climbed out and disappeared into the store. While he waited, Laz pet Hades, who sat placidly as always, in the truck’s bed.
“What do you think?” Lazarus asked as he scratched the dog behind his pointed black ears. “Can we trust her?” Hades stared at him, red eyes giving nothing away. Sighing, Lazarus patted him. “How about you keep me posted?”
When he finished, Lazarus walked across the empty lot to the store. He passed through the doors into a wash of fluorescent lights and bright colors, spotting Zeke and the mage combing through an extensive collection of candy bars. With a couple of cans of some putrid-looking energy drink tucked under his arm, Zeke snagged a handful of chocolate bars off the shelf. Behind him, the mage carried a bottle of Coke and a box of cheap donuts. She nodded enthusiastically at Zeke’s choice.
“Perfect,” Lazarus muttered to himself as he walked away. “There’s two of them.”
He strode to the spinning rack of sunglasses that sat beside the window. After grabbing a few at random, Lazarus joined Zeke and the mage at the checkout.
Back in the truck, Lazarus removed the tags and then passed the sunglasses to the mage. “Do you know what to do with these?”
“Of course,” she said brightly, “but I’ll need my kit unless you want another lipstick sigil. Don’t leave without me, huh?” She hopped back out of the truck and climbed into the bed, dodging the excited dog whose tail wagged a mile a minute.
“Told you she’d be useful,” Zeke said, his mouth full of potato chips.
Lazarus frowned, watching the mage in the rearview mirror. “I told you that.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound right.” Zeke shrugged, wiping crumbs off his stubbly chin.
Once she was back in the truck, Lazarus got them on the road. The mage pulled her brown hair into a tail before propping a heart-shaped coin purse on the dash. She withdrew a small engraving tool and carefully etched a tiny sigil onto both lenses of the sunglasses in her hand. Then she placed a finger on each sigil. Lazarus saw the glasses flashing a bright purple out of the corner of his eye before fading back to normal.
“You use a sight sigil to see spirits, right?” the mage asked. “The sunglasses are a great idea, but it’d work just as well if you let me paint it on your eyelids.”
Zeke shuddered, knocking Lazarus on the shoulder. “No offense, but I don’t want anything near my eyelids.”
“The glasses are handy for trapping the spirit, anyway,” Lazarus told her. “Can’t do that with your eyes.”
“True,” she admitted, already working on another set. �
��Just try not to let them get scratched up. Marking the sigil will break the magic.”
Taking a freshly imbued pair of glasses, Zeke traced a finger on the glowing lenses and whistled. “These would’ve cost us a fortune, you know.”
Lazarus nodded. “Thank you,” he said, hoping he sounded genuine. Even with Ignatius’s deals, imbued glasses cost a pretty penny. So did just about everything mage-spelled. It was one of the prices one paid to become a hunter, why so many of them lived out of their cars and scrambled to keep day jobs.
“It’s the least I can do, right?” the mage said. “And it keeps me busy. Just let me know if there’s anything else you need.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
A few hours later, they pulled into a rest stop. Turning down the radio, Lazarus took out his phone. Zeke and the mage left the truck to stretch their legs, stopping to pet Hades and give him some water before searching for a restroom in the store. Lazarus dialed Ignatius’s number, stepping out of the truck and walking a few yards into the desert.
“Hey, Laz.” Ignatius’s gravelly voice came through the speaker. “I was just gonna call you.”
“What’s going on?” Lazarus asked, though he had a feeling he already knew. There weren’t many things that’d make Ignatius pick up a phone.
“You still in California? I’ve got a job for you.”
Looking back to where his companions stood talking, Lazarus bit his inner cheek. He knew this would happen. It was a good thing he’d already warned the mage. “Just about to hit Arizona. What’ve you got?”
“Probable spirit walking a church. Graveyard out back, you know the drill. Should be quick and easy.”
“Where?”
“Lonesome End.”
Scoffing, Lazarus turned to face the desert. With his free hand, he swept back his hair. “That a town or a band?”
“You’re funny,” Ignatius retorted. “Are you in or what?”