“What?” Lexie asked, shock written all over her pale face.
“It can't be helped, sweethearts.” Grandma pursed her lips. She reached out and put a hand on each of our knees, rubbing gently with her thumbs. “If you've gotten mixed up with the Eight and they know who you are, they will hurt you and everyone you love to get what they want. You have to hide if you want to keep your family and friends safe. For what you did, you can appeal to the Pax for asylum and I'm sure they'll take you and put you in touch with their relocation experts free of charge.”
Tears welled in my eyes at the thought of never seeing my mom or dad again. What if I never got to see her again? “No.” A pitiful whine cracked my voice.
Grandma wrapped her arms around me and Lexie put her hand on my back in sympathy. If she never saw her cold, distant family again, she wouldn't miss them. But the thought of never hugging my mom again or having a pancakes-and-bacon breakfast with my parents or listening to one of my dad's Sunday morning sermons rubbed acid into the hole already forming in my heart.
“It can't be helped, duckie dear,” Grandma soothed, running her fingers through my hair. “When I'm no longer needed here, I'll join you girls in hiding. But until you can get to your new home, you'll need basic training in magics and self-defense.” She pulled away and cupped my cheek in her hand. “I'm going to go make a few preparations and phone calls and we'll meet again this afternoon for training. But until then, you girls need to stay here and do not leave. I'll bring you girls some fresh groceries tonight after we're done.”
With that, she kissed each of us on the forehead and grabbed a t-shirt from the dresser on her way out. It was only then that I noticed the big stain of coffee on her shirt. She must have been helping Claire run the shop in my absence.
Lexie and I stood there for a moment, unsure of what to do next.
“Run and hide? Never see our families again? That's our only option?” I whispered, more to myself than to Lexie. I had to repeat the words before the depth of the meanings they carried truly sank in. Anger filled me and before I could think, my hand was in motion, throwing a coat hanger across the room. The cheap, old plastic cracked against the wall and broke into pieces. “I wish I'd never seen that damn box!”
If I hadn't bought that pretty, engraved wooden box at that garage sale, none of this would be happening. I would still be living at home, savoring what time I had left with my mother. My best friend would still have a heartbeat. There wouldn't be blood on my hands. I wouldn't have to give up everything I'd worked so hard for to move to God only knew where and hide for the rest of my supposedly almost-immortal life.
My eyes went to the bracelet on my wrist, its precious stones glinting in the morning sunlight. I walked out of the bedroom and into the closet by the bathroom. Lexie's barefoot padding followed behind me. Digging through the cluttered mess, I found what I was looking for: wire cutters.
“I want this off!” I yelled at my wrist as I squeezed the handles as hard as I could. “Get it off of me!” After almost a minute of using my whole body weight as leverage, my hands gave out and the cutters clattered to the floor. I sank onto the floor and stared at them, wondering who to blame: me for not being strong enough or the cutters for not being sharp enough to remove it.
“You okay?” Lexie asked softly from where she stood a few feet away, concern furrowing her blond brows.
Defeated, I shook my head. “No, I'm not okay.”
A few hours later— I don't know when— a spoiled, vapid narcissist on TV with an unholy, Oompah-Loompah spray tan was complaining about her problems in a childish fit of obscenities and unnecessary violence. Her problems, which consisted of her hair stylist getting the exact shade of her hair dye slightly off, her personal shopper purchasing the wrong size bra to fit her brand new, beachball-sized breast implants, and that the diamonds she thought she purchased from a clearly disreputable vendor on vacation in the Caribbean turned out to be cubic zirconium.
Lexie was trying to distract me by sticking me in front of the television and stuffing me with the frozen dinners that had been in the freezer for ages. It wasn't working. All seeing these shallow, self-centered Charlie Foxtrots was doing was making me angry. They thought their problems were so serious that it warranted screaming and hair pulling.
They should try walking a mile in my shoes.
My life was going to hell in a handbasket all because I couldn't resist the urge to buy a pretty jewelry box at a garage sale for the bargain price of three dollars and fifty cents. The bracelet in that box gave me near immortality and powers that I never would have believed possible just over a week ago. But that three fifty came with a hidden price tag: now the Al Capone of the Paxian world wanted me dead so he could steal my shiny bracelet and gain the security he needed to continue operating the single largest Paxian criminal syndicate without challenge.
Because of him— Octavius, leader of the Eight— I would probably never see my family again. My mother would die without ever knowing what had happened to me. And that was a fate that I simply could not condemn her to, not if I could save her.
I stood up, determined to at least leave her a note, just as a knock sounded at the door. The key turned and my grandma stepped inside with two bulky paper bags full of food.
She saw the look on my face and gave me a stern look, “And just where do you think you're going, young lady?”
“Home. I'm going to go try to heal Mom.” I strode purposefully to the open door behind her, trying to put a steel into my voice even though I knew she wouldn't be put off by it. But I was bound and determined to see my mom and dad just one more time.
“No, you aren't.” She stood blocking the doorway.
“I have to at least let her know that I'm alive.”
She took a step forward, just inches from my face. Her chocolate brown eyes daring me to try to pass her. “You are staying right here.”
I met her gaze. “How can you do this to her? To your own daughter?”
“Do you think I like to see my baby girl wasting away?” Her previously quiet voice rose in angry volume. She slammed the door shut behind her with her foot, blocking my escape. “Her body cannot handle the stress of your disappearance and the stress of that godsdamned cancer eating it away.”
“So let me try to save her!”
Her flushed face was nearly vibrating in rage. “If you go back there, he will find her. He will find her and torture her in ways that a person as wholly innocent as Winnifred Flynn should never even know exist and all because you couldn't make the hard choice and exposed her to him!”
A tense, deadened silence filled the room as we stood there frozen. Images of what Octavius had done to poor Selena flashed through my mind— flayed alive and left to dangle on a hook. I had no doubts that twisted monster would gleefully do the same thing to my mother, who balked at the cheesy Kool-Aid blood on our favorite crime drama.
I stepped back, submitting.
“You are not a child anymore, Constance. Quit acting like one.” She turned around and gestured for us to follow her. “Now let's go. We've got to get you girls whipped into shape.”
3
Grandma stopped at the door and turned around. She fished two glass vials filled with a clear, red liquid that looked like pomegranate juice out of her jacket and handed one to me and one to Lexie. “Before I forget, both of you drink this. It's a basic, VAT three glamour that should distort your appearances enough to keep humans from recognizing you for twelve hours. I'd have made a stronger batch, but I didn't have the right ingredients handy. This should be enough for today, though.”
“Vat what?” I asked.
“The VAT scale is a way of measuring the strength of a glamour in its three categories: visual, auditory, and tactile. Each one is rated on a scale of one to three. One is the weakest, only potent enough to fool a human; two is moderately strong, enough to fool most Paxians; and three is the strongest, capable of fooling just about everyone. This is V one, A one, T one,
so it's relatively weak and any Paxian will be able to see you as you truly are, but it should suffice for today.”
I paused and stared warily at the contents of the vial.
Lexie downed hers like a shot. She instantly made an exaggerated sour face, but still looked exactly the same. “Thank God you didn't make a stronger batch. That was like sucking on a lemon soaked in old port-o-potty juice.”
Grandma knowingly chuckled and shrugged.
She noticed me staring at Lexie and explained, “You're no longer a human, so the effects of a wimpy spell like this won't work on you. Lexie and I will still see you as you are, as well, but any human passing you on the street will see you as a woman of their own imaginings. I didn't have the time to scrounge up ingredients for anything too strong, but we'll be making a pit stop on our way out, so tomorrow's will be much better.”
I looked back down at the little vial and dreaded ingesting its contents now that I knew it was going to be awful.
“Drink up,” Grandma insisted.
Lexie started to chant, “Chug, chug, chug!”
Uncorking it with my thumb, I knocked it back before I had the chance to think about it. The worst possible taste exploded in my mouth— like that awful taste when you drink orange juice right after brushing your teeth mixed with vinegar and sour milk. My stomach instantly rebelled at what I'd put in it and I had to fight my gag reflex to keep it down. What the hell was in that revolting concoction?
When I could open my eyes, I saw that Grandma was holding two bananas in front of our faces. Where was she pulling these things from? Her jacket wasn't that big! “Nothing works better at clearing that repugnant taste from your palate than a banana.”
Taking her at her word, I snatched it from her hands and took greedy mouthfuls— anything to get that flavor from hell out of my mouth. Miraculously, it worked and that banana was the most sublime thing I'd ever tasted.
Lexie held up her hand. “No, thanks.” She still wore a pinched expression on her face, but refused the aid of the banana.
With a mouth still full of banana— I almost didn't want to swallow it for fear that that taste would come back— I raised my eyebrow in question.
“The thought of any food right now makes me sick.”
I took Lexie's banana from Grandma and held it directly in front of her face. “Eat it,” I encouraged. “It works like a charm.”
Still, she shook her head.
“Suit yourself,” I intoned teasingly and passed it back to Grandma who was looking at Lexie with a strange expression.
Before I could ask why she was looking at her like that, she opened the front door. “It's time to go, ladies. Grab your coats. We've got a lot of work to do and not enough time to do it in.” She stopped me at the doorway and asked Lexie, “Would you go down to the car, dear? I've got to speak with Constance.”
Lexie nodded and went downstairs to wait in the parking lot.
“How is Lexie doing?” Grandma asked. The question was innocent enough, but I sensed there was a more serious reason that she was inquiring.
I met her gaze. “Why do you ask?”
“You raised her as a zombie, but there are different grades of zombies. She appears to be very high quality.” She spoke carefully, choosing her words.
“I sense a 'but' coming.” Anxiety made my skin crawl at the way she let her sentence dangle.
Grandma took a breath to say something, then after a moment, huffed it back out again. She chewed on her lip before asking, “Have you noticed any… changes in her since you raised her?”
Now she was just being weird. Asking such an obvious question, surely there had to be another meaning that I was missing. “For starters, she doesn't have a heartbeat.”
Grandma rolled her eyes at my attempt at sarcasm. “I mean just since she was raised. Have you noticed anything about her body or her mind that has changed? Has her skin changed color? Is she bloated? Has her decision making gotten slower?”
“No, none of the above. Why are you asking?”
Again, she looked like she was struggling for words, beating around an explosive bush. Her unwillingness to say whatever was troubling her was making me even more nervous. Had I inadvertently done something to hurt Lexie?
“Just spit it out already,” I hissed, trying not to yell so Lexie wouldn't hear me in the parking lot downstairs.
She sighed and ran a hand over her hair. “No matter how beautiful a zombie is on the outside, they're all still dead.”
“Clearly.”
“Which means they decay just like every other corpse, walking and talking or not.”
I almost couldn't wrap my brain all the way around what she was saying. The second it seeped all the way in, air left my lungs in a whoosh. It felt like she'd knocked the wind out of me.
“You mean she's going to—” I couldn't even come up with the words to describe what was going through my mind.
With a grave look on her face, she replied honestly, “She might.”
That thought slammed me in the chest like a ton of bricks. Not only was I losing my family, but my best friend may also rot to death before her own eyes because I wasn't strong enough to let her go. The image of those piteous, decaying creatures that restrained me at Octavius' flashed through my mind. The innumerable statues of rotting bodies peppered the insides of my eyelids like so many sick stars. Lexie was too gentle of a person to face such a gruesome fate.
“Is there any way that we can save her?”
“Before you go expecting the worst, I do have a theory.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “Based on what I see in you two, I think you may not have just brought her back, but it looks like you may have made her your familiar, as well.”
My expression must have been clueless, so she explained, “A familiar is an animal magically bound for life to a mage. The mage can command the animal, sensing and acting through it. The animal protects the mage and can survive on their energy in times of need. I believe that's what you've done to Lexie.”
“But she isn't an animal.”
Grandma nodded. “No, she isn't. But I'm assuming that she was dead when you bound her, since it is impossible for any mage to bind an animal as high-energy as a living human being. However, I did read a story once where a necromancer did bind a freshly dead human as a zombie familiar.”
“Who? Can I talk to him?”
“The case that I read about was of a man known as the 'Dominum Mortis', Titus, a man long since relieved of his head.”
“You say that like it's a good thing,” I stated. It was hard for me to see how my only potential resource for help understanding my necromancy being dead was a good thing.
She nodded her head, her eyes emphasizing her point. “He was so powerful that he had his own armies of the dead, raised from the battlefields of the Punic Wars. From what I read, his entire household was run by zombie slaves, he maintained a harem of zombie women, and that he selected the finest warrior in the Roman army and slew him for the sole purpose of making him his familiar bodyguard.”
“Oh. I get what you mean now.” Even if it meant never fully mastering my necromancy, I was glad he was dead.
“It was rumored that personally, he was a monstrously cruel man. Even the Circle was wary of reprimanding him for the utter magnitude of his power and his vicious sadism. Titus was also the father of Octavius.”
Well that explained a lot.
She continued, “My point is that all we have to go on is ancient records. There hasn't been a necromancer strong enough to raise such lifelike zombies in more than two thousand years, let alone bind one as a familiar.”
“So what makes you think she is?”
Grandma lifted her hand to her lips. “To start with, you're sleeping more than normal and eating like a goat, which in all fairness could be attributed to stress and exhaustion. However, I think that your body is doing this to try to support Lexie's. As a zombie, she cannot sleep or eat. And as a human, her body naturally requires a
much larger amount of magical energy to stay alive than a simple dog or cat. Since she can't get the energy she needs from eating food, or resting in a sleep state, she has to derive all of it from you through your familiar bond.”
“So you think I'm keeping her alive?”
Grandma nodded and shrugged. “Depends on how you define, 'alive', but yes. A zombie requires a large amount of energy being fed into them regularly to prevent them from rotting. Normally, a necromancer would 'charge' them with magic to keep them going, but you have no training yet, so I don't think you know how to. If you can't intentionally give her the magic she needs and you two had no bond for her to take it from you unconsciously, then she would have begun to decay by now.”
“So what does all of this mean?”
“That you two are tied together forever as mage and familiar. You should be able to sense through each other and feel what the other is feeling. You may or may not be able to command her like you would be able to if she was an animal. A zombie can be quite powerful, depending on the necromancer that raised it. If your necromancy is truly as… potent as I suspect, then she could be exceptionally strong and fast. And since familiars are bound for the duration of the mage's lifespan, she will not be able to die until you do, though as a zombie, her wounds will not heal without your input, either.”
It took me a second to rifle through the dusty, cluttered attic that had been my mind lately. All of this was starting to feel like such an overload of information being crammed into my brain. The only word I managed to pull out was, “Oh.” Kind of pathetic, but I had bigger things to worry about right now than semantics.
Grandma put her hand on my arm. “Don't worry, duckie dear. Everything will be okay, I promise.”
I appreciated the reassurance, but I was having a hard time believing in that.
She ushered me down the stairs. Lexie was worrying on her lip by a gray, rented Jeep in the parking lot. She glanced up at me, but quickly diverted her gaze and went around to climb in on the other side of the car.
Duo (Stone Mage Saga Book 2) Page 3