by Jonah Hewitt
“Yes, Chamberlain, absolutely,” Nephys said simply.
The Chamberlain straightened his doublet and craned his neck as if somewhat satisfied by this answer, and said flatly, “Bueno. Good.”
Nephys stood frozen for another moment before the Chamberlain began to look impatient. “Enough! Go! Va via!”
Nephys didn’t wait to be told again.
The trip back to his tomb was a bit slower than the trip to the Halls of Death. Normally, except when shifts were changing, the streets of Limbo were utterly vacant. Even when there was a shift change, everyone queued up in neat lines, but today, everyone was wandering about the streets in a state of agitation. Children of Limbo were engaging in the unheard of practice of actually gathering together in large groups to discuss the events of the past day or just to find comfort in others’ company. Death’s little foray into the city seemed to be the only thing that could shake Limbo out of its perpetual apathy. When Nephys turned the corner he wasn’t at all surprised to find the largest crowd he had seen so far congregated outside his little tomb.
Maggie was standing in a group of about a hundred children; smoothing brows and kissing skinned knees and giving out hugs like candy. Nephys smiled and broke into a run. Maggie saw him coming and instantly lit up.
“Nep!” she shouted and tried to break free from the crowd to meet him. The whole crowd followed after her like she was a mother hen. When they met in the middle of the street, Nephys stopped a little short and looked at her awkwardly, but she just said, “Oh stop being silly!” and pulled him into a big bear hug.
When she finally let him go she looked at him and held him by his shoulders, smiling and nearly on the verge of crying.
“When I saw that little gasbag galumphing down the street I just…knew…” she swallowed hard and started to choke up and never got the rest out.
Hiero bleated out a string of flat-note obscenities and stabbed the ground mercilessly.
“What’s his problem? I mean…more than usual,” Nephys asked.
“Oh, he’s just mad I didn’t head for the Temple of Bastet the second you two left.”
“Oh…” Nephys said, clueless as to what that meant.
“So she got the note, huh?” Maggie eventually said smiling. Nephys nodded emphatically. Then he remembered something he wanted to say, “Lucy wanted me to give you a message.”
“Yes?” Maggie stared at him with the moist eyes of an expectant child. Nephys didn’t know how to start, so he just threw his arms around her and held her tight and said quietly, “I love you, Mom.”
Maggie was so stunned she didn’t return the hug for a moment, then she threw her arms around Nephys and didn’t let go for the longest time. Eventually, they parted and Nephys looked up at her.
“That’s what she wanted to say.”
“Of course,” Maggie smiled at him.
The smaller children gathered around them and jumped up and down to get Maggie’s attention. They all wanted hugs now too. Maggie pulled away from Nephys to hand out a few more hugs and to tussle a few heads of hair. It was touching. She eventually calmed enough nerves that they dispersed, satisfied, and went back to their tombs. As the last Chinese girl left only after a second hug, she looked up at Nephys to gauge his reaction.
“Now don’t get upset…I didn’t ask to be the den mother of the neighborhood. This just sort of happened.”
Nephys looked at her departing miniature entourage and shrugged, “It’s ok, I guess.”
“You guess?” she said laughing, “What? No lecture? No scolding? No treatise on afterlife metaphysics?”
“Well…not today,” he said.
She stepped back and looked at him admiringly.
“You look different.”
“Really?” Nephys asked nervously, “How?”
“Your wound, it doesn’t look nearly so deep anymore.”
Nephys blanched for a second then felt his own neck. Was it smaller? He couldn’t tell.
Maggie just smiled at him and then turned.
“C’mon, Nep,” she called over her shoulder, “Soup’s almost ready.”
Nephys thought about the bitter soup and caught up to her. She put her arm around his shoulder in a motherly way and gave him a squeeze.
Nephys was silent, but there was something gnawing at him, something he had wanted to ask Maggie since he had gotten back. “Why didn’t you tell me your daughter was next in line to be the Necromancer?” he finally ventured.
Maggie shrugged. “Lifetime of secrecy, Nep. That’s the necromancer way. It’s not exactly an easy habit to break. Besides, I knew what I was asking was not exactly allowed. I thought…” she paused and looked sad, “I thought if you knew you might say no.”
Nephys nodded. That did seem reasonable, but then he had another thought.
“So…how did you know she would try to bring you back?”
Maggie stopped in her tracks, and her face got very tight. She sighed a deep sigh and then looked him directly in the eye. “Because once I almost…” she went silent and had to bite her lip before continuing, “I almost tried to bring someone back...once.”
“Really?” Nephys asked surprised, “Who?”
“Oh, it’s a long story, I’ll tell you someday.” she said it in a voice that indicated that she might never tell him.
“So…she’s ok then?” Maggie changed the subject as they started walking to the tomb again. “I mean, as well as can be expected at least…she’s safe, right?” Maggie bit her lip and looked terribly anxious. Nephys was glad he could at least ease her mind on this matter.
“Oh, yes, she’s safe.”
“Really?!” Maggie said sounding relieved. “I’m just so worried about her being all alone.”
“But she’s not alone.”
“Really?” Maggie seemed surprised. “Who’s with her then?”
“Well, Moríro for one.”
“Moríro?!” Nephys couldn’t tell if this surprised Maggie or not, but she sounded a bit worried.
“Yes, she summoned him back.”
“Really? She did that?” She sounded surprised but also a little proud. “Well, I guess that’s better than nothing,” she said at last.
“She’s also got Miles and Schuyler to watch over her,” Nephys went on.
Maggie thought for a moment. Schuyler could be a girl’s name, but she hadn’t ever heard of a girl named ‘Miles’ before, even among the most trendy parents. Maybe Miles and Schuyler were a nice, adult couple or something that had taken her under their wing, but she wasn’t certain.
“Um…isn’t ‘Schuyler’ a girl’s name?” she asked a little hopefully.
“Miles and Schuyler are both boys, teenagers actually,” Nephys replied indifferently.
“Boys?” Maggie asked a little nervously pulling her hand off of Nephys’ shoulder, “She’s with a couple of boys?”
“Well, they only look like teenagers. Actually, they’re really a couple of vampires.”
Maggie stopped dead in her tracks. Nephys walked a couple more paces before he realized Maggie wasn’t walking beside him anymore. He turned to see what was wrong and saw Maggie standing in the street with her hands in her back pockets and her nostrils flared.
“YOU LEFT MY DAUGHTER WITH A COUPLE OF TEENAGE VAMPIRES?!!”
Epilogue
Gifts
Hokharty was true to his word. Graber and he crashed Tim’s Impala into a police station the very next day. Whether they did this on purpose or because neither of them knew how to drive, it was hard to tell, but the whole drama was caught live on local TV. Hokharty and Graber made quite a show of it. Hokharty took over twenty bullets, Graber, fifty-four. Graber even took a dive and let his head get crushed under the tire of an oncoming police cruiser just to cover up the fact that the top of his head was missing. He was wearing the motorcycle helmet up until then. When it was over, the police found Tim duct-taped up in the trunk of his own car. At first, the press turned him into a hero, then, when he re
fused to do interviews, they turned him into an accomplice.
The cops grilled him about the diner, the near-miss hit and run, the kidnapped girl and the bodies missing from the Harrisburg hospital for hours, but he never cracked. Unable to charge him, they let him go. Eventually, the press concocted an elaborate theory about drug addicts stealing bodies in a black market cadaver ring gone wrong. The black market in corpses even became a campaign point in the next mayoral election.
The hospital let Tim have some time off, and Tim went home to his family in Wilkes-Barre for a while and finally apologized about burning down his brother’s ‘68 Caprice. It must have worked because his brother paid to get the Impala out of impound.
In the night, Moríro snuck into the morgue and made sure that the disposal instructions for Hokharty’s corpse specified cremation. He said it was important not to leave necromancers any back doors. He came back from the morgue though with the battered corpse of Graber in the pick-up and that kept the cadaver black market stories alive for a while longer. First, he made Lucy use her powers to banish Graber’s spirit back to Limbo, which was quite a bit tougher if you weren’t the one who summoned him in the first place, and then secondly, he made her re-summon Graber back again into the same body. This seemed horribly redundant to Lucy, but again, Moríro said he didn’t want to leave Amanda any back doors either. She was still around after all, somewhere. Lucy objected to all of this, but Moríro insisted Graber was only following orders and that he was a good man to have around. At least the walking slab of meat kept out of the way.
Lucy spent the next few weeks practically locked up in Rivenden. She was still technically missing, and Moríro preferred to keep it that way. There were very few people, dead or living, around the old manor at night and no one around during the day. Rivenden was more of a clubhouse for vampires than a home. The vampires all had something better to do it seemed then hang around with a thirteen year old, even Miles and Schuyler. They had all moved on and forgotten her and left the old manor to her and the previous Necromancer and the walking corpse, Graber.
It was horribly dull and lonely. The plumbing wasn’t exactly modern and the pantry was usually empty. What did vampires need toilets or food for anyway? She had to beg Moríro for a change of clothes. He came back with a thrift store sack dress with gigantic paisleys in green, mustard and white. It looked like it was cut from a sofa from forty years ago. Still, it was better than the princess kitty pajamas. Moríro went out for food only when necessary. All other errands were secret, something to do with dead things almost certainly, although Lucy never knew exactly what. Other than that she hung around the nearly ruined manor and the overgrown gardens by herself. Mostly she passed the time by sitting near her mother’s grave.
Eventually, when Moríro thought it safe to return to Ephrata, they took the old pick-up truck back home. At first it was great to sleep in her own bed and wear her own clothes, but home soon turned into a kind of prison as well. Moríro never let her go farther than the stone lantern. He only knew how to cook dishes from the old country and even then, all his recipes were from three centuries ago. Lucy never imagined there were so many ways to prepare tripe.
Other than that, there were lessons, though Moríro didn’t teach so much as glare over her shoulder while she read. Death seemed to suit Moríro, he no longer had to eat or sleep, and he acted like no one else had those failings either. In between the rare times when Lucy convinced him she needed to sleep or eat, she studied, and not fun books, but thick, thorny tomes from Grandma Holveda’s collection. Each one was full of horrible things about death and the undead, most of which Lucy couldn’t even hope to understand. So Moríro decided she needed a remedial education. He drilled her endlessly on declensions in Latin. If she did poorly, she did them all again. If she did well, he moved her on to tougher declensions in Greek.
In between remonstrations on her form or enunciation, Moríro insisted on strict formal protocols. He kept calling her “Necromancer” or some other high-sounding nonsense like “Mistress” as if she were the one in charge, and he was just her humble tutor. No matter how hard she tried though, it was nearly impossible to pull rank on the slippery Spaniard and get him to let up for even a minute, let alone allow her to order in pizza. He had this way of twisting an argument around until disagreeing with him sounded like denying the existence of the sun while you were staring at it. He always said he would agree to do anything she commanded, but of course, for every choice she laid out, he had ten logical objections to her intended course of action. Each objection sounded frustratingly obvious, commonsense and rational once she had heard it. And of course they all made her original idea sound as sane as taking a bath with a toaster in the middle of an open field during a thunderstorm while holding a lightning rod by comparison. Though there were many times she was so angry with him she wanted to scream, “Why, yes! I do want to take a bath with a toaster in the middle of an open field during a thunderstorm while holding a lightning rod! Thank you very much!” she never did.
The only peace Lucy ever got was when Moríro was out on one of his “errands” which usually kept him out ‘til just before dawn. The dead weren’t exactly morning and sunshine people after all. Graber stuck to lurking around in the woods, so when Moríro was gone, she had the house to herself. When, early on the evening of August twenty-ninth, Moríro left to go tend to some unknown, important affair, she was certain that the schoolmaster’s absence was to be the only present she was going to get on this, her fourteenth birthday (she was certain Moríro had forgotten of course, or worse, never cared to begin with), but she was wrong.
She sat on the porch holding herself and watched the twilight fade into blue-blackness over her mom’s overgrown garden. The flowers were choked with weeds and half the perennials had died. The monkshood had nearly covered the stone lantern. When the last fireflies stopped appearing she was about to stand up and go inside, when a car came struggling up the drive. It wasn’t Moríro’s pick-up. At first she tensed and looked towards the stone lantern, but as the car came closer, she could tell that underneath the freshly applied grey bondo and duct-taped vinyl top was a cream colored, seventies-era sedan with red, white and blue pin-striping.
She stood up and pulled her hair behind her ears. The car stopped and a lanky guy with scraggly hair dressed in scrubs stepped out of driver’s side.
“Dude, this place is harder to find than I remembered.”
“Tim?” she said, surprised at the unexpected elation in her own voice.
From the passenger side stepped a tall figure with shoulder-length, windblown hair with a metallic-silver blazer over his shirtless chest and iridescent black pants. Lucy blinked. She thought she must be seeing things, but his perfectly toned pecs seemed to sparkle.
“I told you you didn’t know where you were going.” Sky took a crystal clear lollipop with silver sprinkles out of his jacket pocket and flipped it into the air before catching it artfully between his teeth.
“Well we could have started sooner if you had been willing to ride in the trunk.”
“I told you, I am never getting in that trunk again,” Sky said indignantly, “Besides, you haven’t even fixed the latch.”
“I fixed the latch!”
“Bailing wire is not a fix.”
As Sky and Tim continued to bicker, a short, stocky teenage boy with acne scars and short, spiky ginger hair got out of the back.
“Oy! Can’t anyone help me with this?”
“That greasy stuff? In this blazer? Not a chance,” Sky said dismissively.
“Here. I got it.” Tim reached into the back and pulled out a couple of large greasy pizza boxes and handed them to Miles and then he pulled out a large tub of ice cream.
“Bloody ‘Master of Rivenden’ my foot, why do I always get stuck in the back?”
“Because you don’t need the legroom, you sawed-off runt, and Tim doesn’t want you to shed on the front seat.” Sky shot back.
The three walked up
the drive before stopping awkwardly in front of Lucy who was staring at them in wonder. They all stared at each other for a moment before Tim broke the tension.
“I hope you like pepperoni,” Tim said at last.
“What are you guys doing here?” Lucy asked, not daring to hope.
“Well…” Tim said nervously, “We just thought, y’know…since it was your birthday and all.”
Lucy looked at them for moment and said, “You knew it was my birthday?”
“Well, Moríro…sorta mentioned it,” Tim said hesitantly.
“He did?” Lucy said amazed.
“Tim’s being modest,” Sky gave Tim a friendly punch on the arm and twirled his lollipop, “Truth is, Tim’s been pestering Moríro about it for weeks now and the old corpse finally relented.”
“You have?” Lucy said to Tim, amazed.
Tim shrugged, a little embarrassed, “I meant to get cake, but the bakeries were all closed by the time I got off work.”
Lucy stared at them, smiling stupidly. She thought about how different things were a few months ago. She had never dreamed that she would be so happy to see these three screw-ups as she did now or how much this little gesture could mean to her.
“So, can we come in?” Sky finally said expectantly, “I hate to be a stickler, but it’s sort of a requirement for our kind.”
Lucy could only nod “yes” repeatedly; she was too emotional to talk. As Sky and Tim went first through the door and found their way into the kitchen, Lucy could hear them arguing.
“So who picked anchovies for the second pizza anyway?”
“When you pay, you get to decide.”
“Why should I pay for stuff I can’t eat?! Nobody ever thinks of the undead at parties. Why can’t a vampire get a decent snack anymore?”
“That was a one-time deal, Sky! I thought we agreed never to talk about that ever again!”
“I wasn’t talking about you, scrapple-boy!”
“Shut up, Sky!”
As the arguing faded into the house, Lucy had to stifle a laugh.
Miles leaned in and whispered close to her ear.