Champagne, Misfits, and Other Shady Magic

by Meghan Ciana Doidge

  It might have been an ungainly title, but thankfully it wasn’t a sore subject between us. I was, however, terribly glad that he had proposed and that I had accepted — eventually — before any question could have formed in my mind as to whether Warner was interested in me. That he was in love with me, and me alone. And that he wasn’t with me, or in my bed, out of any sense of duty.

  “I believe I’ve inadvertently tied myself to the grid,” I said with a sigh.

  He chuckled. “Of course you have.”

  “Hey!” I reached down and retrieved my bra and T-shirt from the pile of clothing at our feet. “Maybe it happened to all the witches. Maybe I’m not the only one with itchy feet.”

  “Itchy feet?”

  “Yep. You’d better get dressed, sentinel. I’m fairly certain I need to go for a walk.”

  He tugged on his leather pants without protest, and I took a moment to slowly steal a full-body caress — from his shoulder to his groin — before he got them done up. A girl could only stand so close to such majesty without touching for so long.

  He grinned at me.

  “I’d like to spend some time fortifying your weapon,” I said, changing the subject. “Before you head out to help Haoxin.”

  “I assume you mean my knife. Since you just had a handful of my other so-called weapon, and it is thus well fortified.”

  I laughed. Apparently, my dragon was feeling playful again. A warmth spread through my chest at the thought that just by being with each other, we could affect our moods so positively. Maybe that was part of being in love.

  Still grinning, he slipped the aforementioned blade into its built-in sheath while I attempted to find a clean pair of jeans. The itchy feet were intensifying, and I was becoming antsy about where the feeling might be leading me.

  3

  Slipping out of the shadows of the concrete stairs that led to both of our apartments, Kandy joined Warner and me as we hit the sidewalk on West Fourth Avenue. Though it was just after 3:00 a.m., I’d texted, expecting her to be sleeping. But if she had been in bed, she dressed a lot quicker than I did. Her attention was currently riveted to her phone. Texting. Again.

  She was also wearing the purple dinosaur backpack cinched tightly over both shoulders.

  Warner eyed the bag. “Interesting fashion statement, wolf.”

  Kandy lifted her lip in a snarl but didn’t otherwise rise to the bait.

  Compelled by the magic that was now heating the undersides of my feet — even through my shoes — I jogged across the empty but well-lit street, darted south along Vine Street, then turned left on West Fifth Avenue. Warner and Kandy followed at my heels without question.

  Just a block to either side of West Fourth, the shopping district gave way to walk-up apartment buildings, converted triplexes, and the occasional stand-alone Craftsman. The narrow lots were teeming with rhododendrons, cherry trees, and laurel hedges. Both sides of the street were lined with vehicles of all shapes and sizes, mostly permit parking only.

  “Jade,” Kandy said, clicking the remote locks on a hulking SUV I was about to pass on my left. The headlights flashed, momentarily destroying my night vision.

  “It might not work like that,” I said over my shoulder, continuing to jog. “My feet might need to be in contact with the ground.”

  Ignoring me, Kandy climbed into the SUV while Warner stayed at my shoulder. We could jog two abreast without issue. Dark homes blurred past us as we silently and swiftly crossed Yew Street, continuing east. Then the hulking SUV roared up beside us, Kandy at the wheel.

  The werewolf matched our pace, hissing through the open passenger window. “Mountain View Cemetery, you twit.”

  “What?”

  “Itchy feet is just a weird side effect. Only affecting you, as far as we’ve figured. Pearl says the map is lit up at the cemetery.”

  “Lovely,” I grumbled, darting between parked cars and hopping into the SUV before Kandy had pulled to a stop. “I love weird side effects and unknown magic lighting up cemeteries with equal fervor.”

  Warner climbed into the back, stretching across the seats and closing his eyes.

  Kandy glanced over her shoulder at him, then picked up speed along the dark, narrow street. “Nice to have you back, dragon.”

  Warner responded with a grunt. “Wolf.”

  Kandy grinned at me toothily. “Wore him out, did you?”

  “I wish it was just me,” I murmured.

  “Oh? Something up in guardian land?”

  “You know I’m not interested enough to ask questions.”

  Kandy snorted doubtfully.

  “Oh, and they dropped the charges … or maybe voted in my favor. Anyway, the guardians exonerated me of Shailaja’s beheading. Though you know it was the magic absorption that really pissed off Pulou. Plus Haoxin wants a T-shirt. Something about espresso.”

  “What?” Kandy cried, turning right onto Arbutus, then speeding through the blocks up to Broadway far too quickly. “A T-shirt?” Then she grinned at me happily, in a way that had nothing to do with the guardian of North America’s demand and everything to do with me being free and clear. According to the guardians, at least.

  “Yeah,” I said softly. “I’m pretty pleased about not being locked away in that magic-dampening cube room again.”

  Warner grumbled from the back seat as Kandy ignored the red light and veered left onto Broadway. “That was never going to happen, dowser.”

  My itchy feet seriously disagreed with Kandy’s choice of route. “Wouldn’t Sixteenth Avenue be better?”

  Kandy snarled pissily, executing a sharp U-turn in the middle of the four-lane street. My forehead glanced against the side window, but my feet were pleased when we turned back onto Arbutus, heading south again.

  “So far, this grid thing is utterly delightful,” I said.

  “It always is with you, Jade,” Kandy snarked. Then she tilted her head thoughtfully as she murmured, “Something with espresso …”

  Warner chuckled to himself in the back seat.

  I grinned, gazing out the window at the mixture of apartment buildings, businesses, and restaurants that populated this revitalized section of Kitsilano. Being compelled to speed off in the deep dark of the early morning to investigate unknown magic with my BFF and my fiance at my side?

  Well, it didn’t get any better than that, did it?

  Though I did miss Kett.

  A zombie was blocking the almost-hidden side entrance to Mountain View Cemetery. No gate between it and me. Just a short set of concrete stairs and a path that cut through the unruly cedar hedges. Directly across from dozens of residential homes in the middle of the Riley Park neighborhood, about a fifteen-minute drive south of Kitsilano.

  The memory of Hudson, the only other zombie I’d ever come face-to-face with — and the heartbreaking results of that confrontation — rushed back on me like a wave. Momentarily disconcerted, I paused to contemplate the rotting corpse, uncertain as to whether or not I should stab it in the head. It was wearing the remnants of a dark suit, a tie still tight at its neck, though the collar of its shirt had rotted away. I could see its teeth where its cheeks should have been, and it appeared to have lost its nose somewhere. Perhaps while crawling from the grave?

  If you had asked me a moment earlier, I would have guessed that a grave-risen zombie would stink. But this one didn’t.

  Mountain View Cemetery occupied a huge amount of property west of Fraser Street and north of West Forty-First Avenue — two exceedingly busy streets, even at this early hour. Stretching easily ten city blocks north to south and four residential blocks east to west, the vast graveyard was surrounded by tightly packed homes on all sides.

  Homes currently filled with slumbering, vulnerable people.

  The zombie’s jaw hinged open, and the taste of toasted-marshmallow magic rolled across my tongue. Then the voice of a sullen junior necromancer emanated from that rotting maw.

  “I’ve got it under control, Jade.”

&
nbsp; Mory.

  Morana Novak, to be specific. Pain in my ass, to be explicit.

  I saw the junior necromancer every Friday at the bakery during a scheduled meeting with Gran, who was mentoring Mory in some fashion. At a casual glance, that mentoring appeared to be more about knitting than magic. But I fed Mory as many cupcakes as she would tolerate, occasionally adding the antique coins I’d collected from Warner to the necklace she always wore — after carrying them in my own pocket for a while to imbue them with my magic.

  “Well,” I said casually, “since I’m talking to a corpse, that appears to be in some doubt.”

  The zombie huffed indignantly, lurched into motion, and began to shamble deeper into the graveyard.

  “That’s all creepy as hell,” Kandy muttered to my right.

  Coming from a werewolf who could transform into a seven-foot-tall, three-inch-clawed monster, that was saying something. But I didn’t disagree.

  Warner appeared to be trying to choke back laughter that would normally be completely inappropriate. Except he was laughing at me rather than the zombie situation.

  “Maybe you want to take another nap, sentinel,” I said pertly.

  He stifled the smile, nodding seriously. “I’ll check the outer perimeter. To ascertain that the apocalypse isn’t upon us. Despite your necromancer’s insistence to the contrary.”

  I shot him a look for the sarcasm and the ‘your necromancer’ comment. “You do that.”

  He nodded curtly, dour faced now, then jogged off silently down the street. Almost instantly, he disappeared within the deep shadows next to the six-foot-tall cedar hedge that defined the edge of the property. Once there — and out of retaliation range — he started chuckling again.

  I shook my head. “It’s a complicated relationship, all right?”

  “With the dragon?” Kandy asked, frowning.

  I sighed. “No. The necromancer.”

  The green-haired werewolf snorted. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  Glancing around for other walking dead, I entered the graveyard — completely begrudgingly. Mory shouldn’t have been playing with corpses, even beyond the fact that it was seriously creepy. Because middle of the night or not, we were surrounded by family homes.

  The zombie had shambled off toward the eastern side of the cemetery. Not that I needed to follow it closely. The taste of Mory’s necromancy and the individual tenor of the magic embedded in her necklace intensified in that direction.

  The fact that I had originally crafted Mory’s necklace as a way to bar the ghost of her brother, Rusty, from draining his sister of her life essence was where the ‘complicated’ part of our interactions began.

  Or actually, no.

  The wedge that would always be stuck firmly between us went further back than that, by about three months. Three long, annoyingly eye-opening months, during which I had figured out — far too slowly and exceedingly late — that my foster sister, Sienna, and Mory’s brother had teamed up to murder werewolves and drain them of their magic. They had used the trinkets I’d made as some sort of conduit.

  Hudson had been one of those werewolves. And someone who I’d thought I might be able to truly care about.

  Sienna had ultimately screwed over her partner in crime, sacrificing Rusty to fuel a blood-magic spell with the intent of foiling the investigation into the murders. Utilizing Rusty’s latent necromancy powers, she had also raised Hudson as a zombie, nearly killing Kett in the process. Because magic had a twisted sense of humor, and apparently zombies trumped vampires.

  Rusty’s ghost had returned — or perhaps it had never left this plane of existence — in order to exact revenge. He’d tried to use Mory to get to Sienna. Nearly killing his own sister in the process.

  And as if all that wasn’t messy or guilt-riddled enough, Sienna had then kidnapped Mory, holding her for three months and siphoning off enough of her necromancy magic to raise three demons in London.

  No matter that Sienna had died for her crimes. No matter that Rusty had been complicit, or that Mory ultimately came through it all — I still harbored the idea that the original kidnapping had been aimed at me. Even in retreat, and despite how Sienna had ultimately used Mory, my sister had wanted to prove that I couldn’t protect anyone. Or at least not everyone. That I was never going to be quite strong enough. That I was always going to have to choose when it came down to it. Vanquish a demon but lose Mory … rescue Mory but almost lose Kett … and so forth.

  Kandy, Drake, Kett, and I had saved Mory from being sacrificed that evening in London. But I couldn’t give her back her brother, or the three months my sister had stolen from her. And that wasn’t even getting into what she must have seen and experienced as she was dragged through Sienna’s ongoing murder spree across Europe.

  So yeah, I still wore the guilt. And feeding Mory while I continually fortified her necklace were the only things that eased it. The necromancer was a symbol of the hole in my heart. Damage that could only be shored up, never fully mended.

  Something grabbed my ankle. I went down, managing to fling my arms out to break my fall but ending up with my forehead barely an inch from slamming into a gravestone. Teeth scored my leg, trying to gnaw through my last pair of clean jeans.

  Served me right for wallowing in the past instead of focusing on the present.

  I glanced back to see that a second zombie had crawled through the dark night between the tightly spaced headstones. It was crawling because apparently — reduced to bones and hanging bits of leathery skin — it had left its bottom half behind somewhere.

  “Jesus Christ …” I muttered.

  Kandy started chortling. “All right there, dowser?”

  I glared at her, snapping a kick with my free leg to the zombie’s head that easily decapitated it. Its white skull spun off into the night.

  Kandy lost it. She was full-on laughing, with her hands on her knees and everything.

  I scrambled to my feet, brushing off my jeans as best I could. The toasted-marshmallow magic animating the corpse intensified. Then the zombie skeleton started crawling away, patting the ground frantically as if it were looking for a lost contact lens. Except, of course, it was looking for its head.

  “Jesus freaking Christ,” I muttered. “Now I’m going to have to find a freaking severed skull.”

  Kandy gave up the pretense of standing, falling to the ground and gasping for air between guffaws.

  I shook my head at the werewolf, attempting and mostly failing to maintain a stern, adult demeanor myself. I was in charge. Well, technically, Kandy was in charge. But I couldn’t let Mory walk all over me. No matter how much fun it would have been to kick the heads off more corpses, it was just wrong.

  Scanning the graveyard for more grabby zombies and one decapitated head, I slowly moved toward the epicenter of Mory’s necromancy. The legless corpse slithered ahead out of my sight, suddenly and disconcertingly mobile.

  Even in the filtered moonlight, the landscape of the cemetery was exceedingly inconsistent. Large, low buildings occupied an eastern section of the property near Fraser Street. Rows upon rows of eclectic headstones, including some sporadic statuary, were interspersed with wide sections of flush-mounted grave markers. Many huge trees were planted throughout — cherry, maple, and various cedars, some trimmed, some not.

  I rounded a massive chestnut tree, spotting the petite necromancer perched on top of a light-gray gravestone, which appeared to be backed by a three-foot-tall white concrete statue depicting a woman holding an urn. Mory was wearing a deep-red poncho and — as near as I could determine in the low light — had dyed her hair since I’d seen her the previous afternoon, in shades of blue ranging from aquamarine to navy. She was also knitting.

  The zombie that had greeted us at the gate appeared to be crawling its way back into the grave underneath her dangling feet. The second corpse was crawling toward a disturbed grave three headstones away. Its decapitated head was tucked underneath its arm.

  Well, t
hat was one blessing.

  I paused, trying and failing to gather together words for the lecture that the situation obviously called for. Normally, I didn’t have to work at being pissy when opportunity knocked. But as with all my earlier soul-searching, the dynamic with Mory always felt … strained.

  The necromancer looked up, tucking a lock of hair that had fallen across her dark-brown eyes behind her ear. She leveled a scowl my way, even as her hands steadily and efficiently churned through stitches on what appeared to be a knitted tube. A sock, probably. Her colorless magic — at least to my eyes — was coiled tightly around her, concentrated in her hands and at the center of her forehead. The last time I’d seen her casting full force had been in Tofino. She had tried and failed to kill Sienna with what felt like a death curse. The power she now appeared to be wielding effortlessly was much, much stronger.

  But that was the way with magic. It grew with age. And with use.

  “See? Taken care of,” Mory said snottily.

  I bit back a retort about raising the corpses in the first place.

  Kandy, who had apparently gotten the chuckles out of her system, appeared silently at my side. Thankfully, she had no apparent compunction when it came to chastising Mory. “Unacceptable, fledgling. Not only did you get us all out of bed, but that was probably someone’s uncle! And … well, I couldn’t really tell with the second one.”

  Mory jutted her chin out. “It wasn’t intentional.”

  “How many more are running around?” Kandy asked.

  “None.”

  Kandy looked pointedly at a grave with a flush-mounted dark-gray headstone just a few feet away. The sod and dirt to one side of it had been churned up.

  Mory grimaced.

  Kandy then jabbed a finger toward a fourth grave, this one topped with a concrete cross. Again, it appeared as though a corpse had crawled up from underneath it.