I was almost in position when I heard a female voice with a trace of a Southern accent. Given the steel and padding between us, it was surprisingly clear. “You’re a cooler customer than most. By now, people are usually screaming their fool heads off.”
Wasting oxygen, I thought. But, at least it seemed as though I was still in the funeral home. That could be either good or really bad news—depending on whether or not they were also a crematorium.
“You smell like a witch,” she continued. I could imagine her bent over the coffin, her ear pressed close to hear any answer I might give. Though, she could just as easily be using magic to throw her voice from somewhere far away. For all I knew, she’d gone back to sweeping the porch. “But I haven’t seen hide nor hair of a familiar. Yet you’re strong enough to steal my brother’s protection talisman.”
So that was what the snake was? That explained why it had acted the way it had in the apartment when the spiders had attacked.
“Stupid boy,” she muttered to herself. “He’s messed everything up.”
I arched my back experimentally. It would be hard to get my knees under myself, but I had to give it a try. From what I remembered from a PBS special on the subject, I had only about two hours or so of usable oxygen.
“Still, the snake charm should have easily defeated most witches,” she continued. “Unless, of course, you’re one of those unfortunate unnaturals who are fettered by that disgusting half-fairy.”
Despite myself, my breath hitched at the mention of unnatural.
“Oh?” She sounded both delighted and curious. “Perhaps we won’t have to waste your talents, after all.”
That sounded promising. Maybe I could just agree to go to the Dark Side long enough to get released from this coffin. I’d gotten my knees up as far as they could go in the cramped space.
“You know, of course, everything they told you is a lie,” she purred. “Unnatural does not necessarily equal evil.”
Coming from a woman who clearly had a skewed sense of right and wrong, this would be ironic, if I hadn’t already heard this from Jack. Still, I played along. I put a mix of skepticism and surprise into my voice. “Really?”
“Careful,” she hissed. “Don’t waste your breath. Just listen.”
I could get behind that. Speaking of, mine was ready to try a big heave-ho. I waited, not wanting to squander my one chance with bad timing. If she was going to release the casket’s seals for me, I could surprise her with a big push, maybe even knock her back a step or two.
“Good,” she said to my silence—or my plan, but she didn’t seem particularly adept at reading minds. “The other thing they lied about was that the power source treats us equally. Think about it. They’re so fond of the river metaphor, let me use it as well. Tell me, which generates more power: an inner tube floating with the current or a dam that forces water to spin its turbines?”
“B” was the obvious choice. However, there was a flaw in her analogy. While floating created no energy, it also used none.
“Have you ever noticed when they have to do something big, they start talking about actions and reactions?”
I did remember Jack worrying about “devilry” he may have unleashed after trying to pull the snake from my arm.
“It’s because they can only do so much before they have to start tapping the unnatural. The polarity shift causes a ripple.”
I’d felt that. Jack had called it a shift, I think.
“They’re so high and mighty, yet they use the same energy in the same way we do.” I could hear the hurt in her voice. It reminded me of Devon’s anger, and, if I was honest, my own.
Even though it meant using a bit of oxygen, I had to ask, “Your solution for bigotry is reanimating corpses?”
She laughed; it was a light, genuine sound. “No, that was my stupid brother’s idea. He was obsessed with breaking the fourth wall, thought it would give him unlimited power. Just got him dead, didn’t it?”
I would have agreed if I had any idea what she was talking about. My muscles were starting to cramp up, and I felt a little light-headed from claustrophobia. I was ready to break when my phone rang. Because of the odd way I was wedged, I almost couldn’t pry it from my pocket in time to pick up. As it was, I answered on the last ring. “Hello?”
“If you called to have me take out more garbage I will grow very tired of you.”
Valentine!
“A phone?” I heard my captor shriek. “No!”
Before I could begin to explain the situation to Val, I heard the hiss of the seals being broken. With all my strength, I pushed my back against the lid of the coffin. It popped upward. As soon as I could see a sliver of the outside, I tipped to the side and let gravity pull the heavy steel to the floor.
I heard a shriek, but I had no idea if I managed to knock down my captor or not. The sudden influx of air to my lungs and light to my eyes completely disoriented me. My arms and legs shivered with exertion.
Tinny and distant, Valentine’s voice from the iPhone speaker asked, “What’s going on?”
“It’s okay,” I panted. “I’m okay.”
“Not for long,” the necromancer’s sister snarled.
This time, I moved fast. I didn’t know if you could actually dodge magic, but I was sure as hell going to try. As blind and clumsy as I was, the best I could do was bail out. I tumbled onto the floor, arms and legs thrashing. My graceless exit from the coffin sent a number of other display models rolling. One of the carts must have hit a wall of urns, sending ceramic explosively crashing to the floor.
Despite the chaos, I didn’t manage to do much to stop the necromancer’s sister. When I finally blinked the tears from my eyes, I discovered her standing over me. Her face was flushed red with anger, and her long hair was disheveled. She muttered in Latin and her hands massaged the air as if kneading invisible bread.
I had a feeling I was about to get a serious magical smackdown.
Closing my eyes, I cringed, waiting for the inevitable. “Ah, fuck all,” I muttered.
A clap of thunder forced my eyes open. A burst of light blasted the necromancer’s sister off her feet. She was thrown backward, and tumbled up and over a mortuary table. I heard a crash as she knocked into a medical cart. Steel instruments rained down on top of her.
When she didn’t get up right away, I struggled to my feet. I glanced around to see who it was who had come to my rescue.
There was no one.
Picking my way around the broken shards of urns and tipped coffins, I found the necromancer’s sister pinioned to the floor by surgical instruments. Scalpels and scissors had landed precisely along the edges of her sweater and jeans. A roll of medical tape unraveled over her mouth.
She glared angrily at me and struggled against the makeshift bonds.
“Weird,” I said. Glancing over my shoulder, I still expected some accomplished wizard to step out of the shadows to take credit for this.
Another blast of wind, icy this time, came from the stairway. I pivoted, ready for some new danger. The shadow on the wall showed batlike wings that, before my eyes, folded into the figure of a man. Valentine glanced carefully around the room, his cell phone still close to his ear.
“Oh my God, thank you,” I said, leaping over the detritus to envelop him in a big hug. “I thought I was dead.”
His arms went around me slowly, as though surprised by my gratitude. “You’re thanking me for arriving too late?”
I pulled my head from his chest to frown up at him. “No, for the rescue, the big magic bang—that was you, right?”
“I believe that was you,” he said dryly.
“Me? But all I did was—”
Curse.
Just like when I “stole” the necromancer’s snake protector. If this was how my power manifested, I was going to seriously have to watch my mouth from now on.
There was a commotion upstairs. I could hear pounding and voices shouting, “This is the police! Open up!”
Valentine gave me one of his self-satisfied grins. “Ah, I see the cavalry has arrived.”
Of course, Jones got all weird and confrontational when he saw Valentine, which meant Valentine got that smug expression on his face that I was beginning to interpret as “I could eat you all in a single bite.”
“The important thing,” I said in my loudest voice to get Jones’s attention, “is that we have the necromancer’s sister.”
“Brooklyn? What? Where?” Jones’s eyes frantically searched the room.
Jones knew her name?
I was about to comment on that, when Valentine pointed down to the floor. Jones followed his gesture, and his eyes went wide with—sympathy? Concern? Whatever it was, he quickly schooled his expression to coolly inspect the still intensely pissed off and struggling woman pinned to the floor. He knelt down and examined the various instruments holding her in place. “Spontaneous improbability magic?” He shot a surprised look at Valentine. “I didn’t think that was your species’ specialty.”
“It’s not,” Valentine said, with a proud glance in my direction. “It’s hers.”
“You?” Jones sounded incredulous as he gave me a measured inspection. “You did this?”
I shrugged. “I guess.”
Jones gestured to an officer with his chin. The officer must have known what Jones wanted because he came over and began unsticking the necromancer’s sister, while holding up some kind of talisman that he pulled out of his cop utility belt.
Standing up, Jones pulled me to the side. “Tell me what happened.”
Valentine shadowed us as Jones led us to a mostly undamaged section of the basement, next to the crematorium furnaces. I was horrified to discover they’d been turned on.
“Start at the beginning,” Jones prompted. “What brought you here?”
I explained how I’d gotten lost and everything up to the final “fuck all,” as it were. He listened intently, looking progressively more irritable. Valentine, meanwhile, couldn’t keep the smile off his face.
“You’re sure that’s all you did?” he asked. “No accidental gesture? No…Latin?”
“Unless cringing counts as a gesture, yes, I’m sure.”
Jones looked at Valentine and shook his head. “Well, we can clean up here. Why don’t you take some time off?”
I wasn’t sure that was a good idea. “Do you know her?” I asked Jones, gesturing with my chin in the direction of where they were still dealing with the necromancer’s sister. “Only I noticed you called her Brooklyn.”
“Oh, I did?”
That was the most unconvincing lie I had ever heard in my life. Jones couldn’t even keep his eyes from sliding away from mine.
“Yeah, you did.”
He shrugged. He even managed to refocus on my face. In the outer circle of his green irises I saw a faint glow when he spoke. “It’s a small town. A very small town when you’re magical.”
Valentine sneezed. “Ugh,” he said, waving his hands in front of his nose dramatically. “Your blarney stinks of overripe pineapples. Turn it off.”
So Jones was trying to use his magical powers on me just now? What was he trying to convince me of, exactly, I wondered?
Jones ignored Valentine. He kept his eyes locked on mine. “You’ve had quite a scare, Alex. You should go home and rest.”
I blinked. In my inner ear, I heard a soft strain of music so beautiful that my heart ached. Suddenly, I felt exhausted. The rush of excitement drained completely, leaving me feeling limp. All I wanted to do was go home and curl up under the covers.
Valentine’s voice sounded harsh in comparison, though I was grateful for the support of his arm around my elbow. “We get the hint, fairy princeling. We’re going.”
Valentine steered me toward the stairs slowly, as my legs seemed sort of sluggish and there was a lot of broken pottery to step around. At the foot of the stairs, I caught a whiff of cool, fresh air. The strange cobwebs in my brain cleared.
I hadn’t even realized how heavily I’d been clinging to Valentine, until I stood upright. “Hey,” I said, suddenly really angry to have been overcome by Jones’s magic.
Valentine squeezed my arm slightly—a warning.
Jones looked up with a dark expression in his eye. He started toward us. I remembered that he told me he had to keep in close proximity for his glamour to work. I swallowed what I wanted to ask, and tried to sound casual when I asked instead, “Hey, uh, what about the body from my morgue, the guy we’ve been calling the necromancer?” Whose name you have probably always known, I added silently, before continuing, “Where’s he? Or his body?”
Jones stopped, clearly relieved I didn’t call him out. “Oh. Well, obviously, we’ll see if his sister is feeling talkative,” Jones said. He waited a moment, as if waiting to see if I would say anything else. When I didn’t, he turned away from us and headed over to where Stone seemed to be putting charmed cuffs on the woman in question.
“Try not to kill the prisoner this time,” I joked.
Jones shot me a look that made it clear he did not find my humor to his liking.
I stood for a moment trying to decide what had just transpired here, and what it all meant. My head was too foggy to make much sense of anything at the moment, however. Maybe it was a good idea to go home for a little while. I headed up the stairs. Valentine trailed behind me.
“I do believe the fairy princeling is jealous,” Valentine said once we were out of the mortuary’s back door. I noticed that the wood had been staved in by something very, very strong.
“Jealous? Of what?” I leaned against Valentine’s arm. My head was beginning to pound from the extended period without fresh air.
“Of you,” Valentine said. “Of your magic and your friends.”
“You are pretty cool,” I said with a fond smile.
“As are you.”
Valentine had a phenomenal sense of direction and knew exactly how to get to Robert’s place. Turns out, I hadn’t been terribly far from home. We walked the distance easily, though I was exhausted by the time we got back. The shock from the whole experience caught up with me in a rush.
I must have looked as droopy as I felt because, once inside, Val insisted that I shower while he cooked some late lunch. He promised not to burn the place down this time.
The hot water was heavenly on my bruised back and neck. I knew I should probably use cold to decrease the swelling, but I wanted the luxury of the heat. Scrubbing everywhere, I tried to remove any trace of the horror of the experience from my body and my mind. My skin was rubbed raw, but my hands still shook.
Nearly incinerated inside a coffin. Gah.
The reflection in the steamy mirror looked like a scared little girl with blue bruises on both sides of her neck. The impression of the zombie’s fingers was distinct. The burn on my cheek from the spent casing seemed like decoration in comparison.
I wrapped myself in my terry cloth robe and padded out to find the dining room decked out with Robert’s best linen and candles. “Oh” was all I could say, as Valentine pulled the chair out for me.
Valentine had also raided the china cabinet for Robert’s grandmother’s Wedgewood. He saw my expression and halted my reprimand with a raised hand and an innocent shrug. “I can’t resist pretty things.”
I had to admit that in the candlelight the setting was gorgeous. It wasn’t like he’d allow any of it to break; Valentine did always take good care of the things he coveted. The thought made me ask, “How did you know to come? When I first tried to call I couldn’t get a signal.”
The soup that he poured into my bowl smelled of beets and beef. Borscht?
“You have my number in more ways than one.”
I remembered that Jack could call Sarah Jane with his mind. “So it’s telepathy?”
He shrugged, and sat himself down. “I call it instinct.”
The soup was good. I had several sips before I asked, “Where were you headed? Did I take you away from something important?”<
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In the dim light Valentine’s eyes glittered darkly. “Nothing is more important than you.”
If that were true, he would never have left this morning. I didn’t want to push things, so I let him have his secrets. I groped for a safer subject and found work. “Why do you think Jones used his glamour on me?”
Valentine shrugged. “The fairy wanted us out of the way.”
“You don’t think it was something more sinister? You don’t think it was weird that he knew my attacker by name?”
He picked up the fancy bowl with his hands and took a big gulp of it. I smiled. It was so like him to be strangely uncouth while surrounded by expensive things. When he set it down, he said, “Stranger to me was his desire to cover it up. This is a small town. Moreover, as a princeling it would not be unusual for him to know all the magical in his region regardless of their—shall we say, orientation.”
“I don’t think he tells a lot of people that he’s a half-fairy prince.” I pushed the soup around in the bowl, thinking.
“How can they fail to notice?”
“Not everyone has dragon senses,” I reminded him. “One thing I did notice, though, is that Jones doesn’t seem to be a very good cop.”
Valentine snorted. “Now, that surprises me. Fairy love honor and justice, or at least pretending at it.”
“Jones is definitely heavy on the pretending, then.” I scowled.
“No,” Valentine said, picking up the bowl to slurp up the contents again. “You misunderstand. When a fairy pretends, it is a thing of beauty to behold. I would say he gives it his whole heart, but fairy have none. Which is why they fake everything with a passion.”
“I don’t really understand,” I admitted. “All I know is that Jones is the worst cop I’ve ever seen and the rest of his team is no better or too busy squabbling with each other to notice that nothing’s getting done. As far as I can tell, I’m the only one trying to crack either case.”
“Either? You have two?”
I ticked them off on my fingers. “The missing necromancer/grave robber. The cow mutilations.” Then, I shook my head in frustration, and added another finger. “Maybe three; it depends on if the sister is working with her brother or against him.”
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