by Debra Dunbar
“You’d be surprised. Steak one day, on the streets the next. Could be he makes enough money to use the laundromat and dress in decent clothes, but not enough to afford rent.”
I’d been very close to that just a month ago. This could have been me with my nice clothes living on the streets.
No, it wouldn’t have been. I had that checking account. I had a wealthy family who would welcome me back home with open arms, or wire me thousands of dollars in the blink of an eye. And even if I refused their help, I had a car to live in. I had a vampire boyfriend who would have pitched the mother of all fits and hauled me off to his house in Federal Hill, fed me Italian food, and tucked me into bed before going off to wherever it was he sheltered during daylight.
“Head on back home, Ainsworth,” Tremelay commented. “We’ll take it from here. Nothing for you to concern yourself about on this one.”
I watched as they loaded the body into the van to take to the morgue. No. Probably no need for me to worry at all. Just one more death in a city where death seemed to be a brutal reality of daily life.
Chapter 2
It was a busy day at Holy Grounds for a Tuesday. I assumed a lot of people were getting in extra caffeine, trying to cram as much work as possible into the two days before the Thanksgiving holiday, because I was pouring double and triple shots left and right. We were all cheerful—even those of us who would be coming in early Friday after gorging ourselves on turkey the day before.
I was one of those people. It was going to be a scramble driving down to my parents’ house Wednesday night, eating and spending time with family Thursday and driving back late to make sure I got in for my early shift. It sucked being the low person on the seniority totem pole, but I was grateful for the extra hours. From what Sean had said, other employees tended to want time off during the holiday season, so I’d have the opportunity to make a whole lot of extra money if I was willing to be flexible about my schedule and work the occasional double shift.
I didn’t mind as long as I could hop down to Middleburg for Christmas Day, and as long as I could squeeze in a Wednesday night here and there for my game with Zac and the others. Thankfully there didn’t seem to be much LARPing or reenactment activities over the holidays and my presence wouldn’t truly be required until early January when I was expected to make a royal appearance at some Twelfth Night celebration.
“What are you doing tonight?” Brandi interrupted my thoughts with the question and a cup that had chai latte with soy and one-shot written on it.
“Date night. Dario and I are going out for dinner.” That was the plan anyway.
“Incurable Optimism is playing down at The Ottobar tonight. Anna, Grace and I are going. You guys should join us.”
I hesitated because outside of introducing Dario to my family, to Janice that one time, and to Raven, I hadn’t included him in any of my other activities. Of course, a lot of those activities took place during the day when he was unavailable, but there was no excuse for why I hadn’t included him in evening reenactment events, or role playing games, or when I went out with the girls. It seems when Dario and I were together, we were together alone.
Why was that?
We’d only been romantically involved for a short time, and he was so busy with the Balaj that I wanted some one-on-one the few times we managed to get together. Yes, that was it. It wasn’t that by including him in activities with my other, human, friends, I’d somehow be making this thing we had together real—making him my official boyfriend. Introducing him to my friends would be like changing my status on Facebook from “single” to “in a relationship”. It would be a public proclamation that we were a couple. And for some reason I balked at that.
Frothing the soy milk, I made a decision. “Sounds good. What time are you all going to be there? We’ve got dinner reservations at nine, but we can show up afterward.”
Brandi grinned. “The band doesn’t start until ten. I’m psyched you’re coming. We’ve all been dying to meet your boyfriend.”
Boyfriend. I gulped and finished the drink, calling it out as I put it on the pickup counter and grabbed the cup for the next order.
Yes, I guess Dario was my boyfriend, although we’d never really sat down and discussed the details of our relationship. We’d communicated that exclusivity was a requirement for both of us. We both clearly had an emotional attachment to each other. We had mind-blowing sex every chance we got. That seemed to check off all the boxes of what would make Dario a boyfriend. But him being a vampire, and now the Master of the Baltimore Balaj, made me hesitate to use that label.
My boyfriend is a vampire. It sounded like an absolutely delightful campy horror-comedy, but in real life I didn’t see a happily ever after to this relationship, no matter how emotionally invested I was in it. Could I go on like this forever, giving up the traditional marriage and kids I’d always assumed were somewhere in my distant future? And more importantly, would the pair of us be able to hold off on the blood thing that would end with me an addicted blood slave?
I never thought there was much appeal in having some dude bite me and drink my blood, but each time I had sex with Dario, it grew more difficult to resist—especially since I’d actually been bitten against my will twice by that asshole Master from the Philadelphia Balaj and knew firsthand how it felt.
You’d think having someone blood rape me twice would totally turn me off the idea. Yes, I still had nightmares about it. And the worst part of those nightmares was, along with the fear and helplessness, the anger and hatred, I’d still be turned on, my body rebelling against my mind because of that stupid narcotic in vampire venom. Just thinking about it made everything south of my waistband come alive—which pissed me off to no end.
And sicko that I was, I wanted Dario to erase all that. I wanted to associate the feeling of having a vampire feed from me with him, not that asshole in my nightmares. But I was pretty sure if we went down that path, it wouldn’t be a one-time occurrence, and I didn’t want to end up a blood slave to a vampire, no matter how much I cared about him.
I ended up working until three, overlapping a bit with Chalese to help Sean restock the syrups and pastry case, then with a promise to see Brandi and the girls later, I headed home, bundled Fulk into my car, and drove to my appointment with a necromancer.
Chapter 3
Russell stared at the crystal ball in front of him, then at the dog, then back at the crystal ball. His coffee table was littered with divination items—Ouija board, Tarot cards, the ball, two empty cups with tea leaves wet and slimy in the bottom, a pile of small bones.
The bones kinda weirded me out, but then just about everything to do with necromancy kinda weirded me out.
“He’s a dog,” Russell pronounced. It hadn’t been the first time he’d made that statement.
“Yes, I know he’s a dog, but Raven was in there. This dog rose from the dead at the animal shelter. He made her signature checkmark on the cement floor. I looked into his eyes, and I swear I saw Raven.”
The necromancer gave me one of those looks, like the kind you give toddlers on the edge of an exhaustion meltdown. “I’m so sorry, Aria. He’s a dog. There’s no spirit possessing him. At the moment, anyway.”
I seized on that last sentence. “But maybe there was? Maybe she’s in one of the figurines, the lelek raktarban? Or floating around the house?”
“I’m sure if she was in one of the lelek raktarban or in your house, she would have made herself known to you by now.”
I knew he was right, but I also knew that for a moment there at the animal shelter, I’d been positive that Raven was communicating with me through this dog. The fact that I’d sensed no sign of her since then didn’t negate that fact. She’d been there, I was sure of it. And I held on to the faint hope that she might still be somewhere nearby, waiting for the right moment to return to communicate with me again.
Was I wrong to hold on to hope like this? Should I be praying instead that she had found peace in the af
terlife? I needed to let go. I really needed to let go. But that moment in the animal shelter had given me questions, and I needed to answer those questions before I could even think about letting go.
Russell sighed once more and scooped the bones into his hand, tossing them on the table as he’d done twice previously. “Let me see if I can divine her spirit’s whereabouts.”
He stared at the bones intently. Squinting. Leaning closer until his nose practically brushed the surface of the coffee table. “Her spirit is not on this plane of existence.”
My heart sank. Was she in purgatory? Hell? In Balsur’s clutches?
“But…” Russell hesitated.
“But?” I held my breath. Watching Balsur crush Raven’s fox figurine in his demonic hands, hearing her screams as he’d forcibly ripped her spirit from the lelek raktarban had devastated me. It had devastated her lover, Reynard, who’d been ready to throw me under the bus and make a deal with the demon to bring her back to the land of the living. She’d given her life for me twice, erasing the demon mark and saving my soul. And now it was my turn to help her.
Fulk hadn’t shown any signs of Raven’s presence since the animal shelter. I’d been so positive, but had I imagined it? Was it all in my mind? Was it grief that filled my mind with memories of Raven’s screams, with dreams of her terrified eyes, full of agony and desperation as she reached out toward me from a lake of fire?
“But… It’s like when you jam a foot in a doorway.” Russell rubbed his nose and frowned at the bones. “There’s an opening. There’s something that’s not letting the veil shut all the way.”
My heart skipped a beat at the thought. “Veil in general? As in it didn’t close completely after the Halloween window? Or as in Raven’s got one foot still in the land of the living?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
I hoped it wasn’t the first, because then the nasty creatures that inhabited the underworld might be able to squeeze through. During the three days surrounding Halloween, the veil between the worlds thinned, and under certain circumstances, the demons and other unsavory beings could communicate, or even sometimes cross. But I wasn’t sure the second of my scenarios was much better. From what I’d read, a spirit that didn’t fully cross over risked being torn apart until nothing remained.
“This isn’t completely unusual, Aria,” he added with a sympathetic smile. “Yes, the veil is thin around Halloween, and it is easier for spirits to cross over, but a skilled medium knows how to find the tiny gaps in the veil and use their talent to communicate through those gaps.”
I stared at the bones, realizing what I knew about magic involving the dead wasn’t much. As a Templar, I knew how to put restless souls at ease, and about the various types of ghouls and undead that we might need to fight and battle. What I didn’t know was more than the vague and somewhat contradictory Christian dogma about what happens to a soul after death.
Maybe that’s where I needed to start in order to figure out if Raven was okay in her afterlife, or if she needed my help.
“When you communicate with spirits on the other side of the veil, do you temporarily bring them through? What’s on the other side and what’s it like? Is there a way to tell if a spirit is in heaven, or hell, or purgatory?”
Russell sat back. “The veil shrouds many places, and each spirit’s afterlife is individual. Some rest in slumber until the call of end-times. Others exist in a calm peace, other spirits appear to be distressed. None of them has ever communicated specifically what their afterlife is in concrete terms. Necromancers and others talented in spirit work only get emotions and abstract expressions of what the spirit experiences. And no, we cannot fully bring a spirit across, at least not without a difficult ritual and either an incredibly powerful necromancer or the combined efforts of a group. Even then, it would be a temporary ritual. We channel the dead. We communicate with them. I can raise the dead for a limited time with only an echo of their former spirit, but that’s the extent of my abilities.”
I thought back to séances I’d attended, to readings where mages skilled in spirit work communicated with the dead to divine the future. “So when you communicate with those who have died, it’s like a telephone call reaching through the veil?” I asked.
Russell collected the bones on the table, moving them to the side. “It’s something like that, but a portion of the spirit being does reach through to inhabit the medium or communicate through our tools. But it’s temporary. We may be able to sense and utilize the small gaps in the veil, but we cannot hold a spirit across two worlds for long.”
I frowned in thought. “Can a spirit find the gaps and temporarily send part of itself across without the help of a medium?”
I was pretty sure there had been no medium at the animal shelter calling Raven’s spirit across the veil to communicate through Fulk, so either she’d done it on her own, or at the time she’d still been on this side of the veil.
“Normally I would believe that an earthbound spirit temporarily possessed the dog, as it would take an incredibly powerful being to communicate through the veil unassisted, but you said you were sure it was Raven, and my divination says she is no longer in this world…”
“Maybe she was on this side of the veil at that time,” I guessed.
Russell scrunched up his face. “It’s possible. But if she’d been determined enough to communicate with you that she possessed a dog, then I can’t believe she would willingly cross. And from what you’ve told me about this Balsur demon, I’m sure he would have flung her spirit across the veil.”
I agreed. In fact, my greatest fear was that Balsur had cast her down to hell to torment personally. Seeing her for that brief moment in Fulk, watching her make the raven mark on the floor, had given me hope that she’d escaped the demon’s clutches, but still I had to know.
“Raven was a skilled mage,” I told Russell. “She knew her stuff when it came to Goetic demons. She’d have more knowledge than most people since her expertise lay in bringing demons across the veil. Completely. If any mage would have known the gaps and how to use them, it would have been her.”
I wasn’t nearly that skilled. Yes, I’d been involved in some mid-level rituals during my short time in Haul-Du, and I’d led a few where I’d brought across a low-level Goetic demon—including the time I mistakenly got Balsur instead. Yes, I understood demons as a Templar, knowing how to send them back across the veil. But I didn’t fully understand the veil itself, or everything that lay on the other side.
“If she was able to find the gaps and powerful enough to cross, then she may well have been able to communicate with you briefly through the dog,” Russell said. “Besides the small gaps that mages skilled in spirit work use, there are larger, more temporary openings. At the point of death, when the deceased’s spirit crosses the veil, there is a brief doorway. A spirit with considerable power and skill can take advantage of that, cross the veil and take the body in that twilight moment, possessing it.”
I stared at Russell, open-mouthed. Was he saying a powerful being could come back from the dead? Take over a deceased person’s body? How long would that continue, especially if the body itself were badly damaged or failing?
“You mean a spirit could permanently possess the body of a person or animal who had just died?” I looked at my dog, suddenly wondering who the heck was in there if the original dog spirit had crossed over and Raven had only been able to be in the body temporarily.
“Oh no. At least, not without an incredibly complicated ritual and a powerful mage. What you’re talking about is basically a resurrection with a soul-swap. There are so many variables involved that the risk of failure is high. If everything isn’t just so, if the mage hasn’t sufficient power to complete the ritual, then all sorts of disasters could occur.”
“Such as…”
Russell shrugged, as if we were talking about the chances of rain tomorrow. “The wrong spirit could come through and take the body. The desired spirit could fai
l to cross completely and the body would end up a zombie. The original spirit could snap back as a resurrection. Both spirits could end up possessing the body. Lots of things.”
“What happens if two spirits possess the same body?” I looked down at Fulk once more.
“In that case the spirit crossing the veil is pulled back along with the desired one, and two spirits inhabit the same body.” Russell shook his head. “The two will always battle for control. Either the stronger spirit will prevail, or both will go mad. Unless a necromancer is able to force one of them out of the body and across the veil, that is.”
“But a necromancer wasn’t involved with what happened at the animal shelter,” I told him. “Or a medium, or any sort of mage. Just me, and I wasn’t doing anything magical at the time.”
Russell smiled sympathetically. “Then I would guess that Raven’s spirit was able to temporarily communicate through a gap in the veil. That action blocked the animal’s spirit from crossing, and when she left, the dog’s spirit returned to the body.”
I scratched Fulk behind the ears. “But according to the people at the shelter, he’s not the same. They told me he’d been used as an attack dog, used in dog fights. He was aggressive, unpredictable, violent. They were putting him down because he was a danger to whoever would adopt him.”
They’d tried repeatedly to dissuade me from rescuing the dog. And the Fulk I’d brought home was nothing like the aggressive monster they’d described. He was happy and slobbery and goofy. I thought he’d probably protect me if needed, but he might be just as likely to run away or lick my attacker to death.
“Our personalities are not only formed by our spirits, Aria,” Russell said. “Yes, a spirit will carry the memories of its former body and life, but returning to the body after it has died…well, the longer the body is dead, the longer the spirit is separated from it, the more they both change. Joining them back together doesn’t always result in the same personality as the person—or dog—was before.”