by Lyn Benedict
“Yeah?” Sylvie said. “So why isn’t there a word for a good necromancer? Everything else has a good versus bad. White witch. Mambo. Shaman.”
“Because we don’t need the ego stroke. Deal with death enough, and you’d be surprised how little you care for human approval. I think you’d understand that. Besides, good, bad, benign, malign—it’s all about who’s making the judgment.”
“Bullshit,” Sylvie said. “Enslaving the dead’s a magnitude worse than a witch’s glamour.”
“Even if the witch spells someone to fall in love? Erases their self-will? It’s not just the stuff of novels, Shadows. Witches talk a good game, but they use the same magic we do. And let me tell you. Witches do far more damage than your average necromancer. Yeah, we can turn a man into a zombie, keep him as a servant until he falls to pieces, but it’s really not all that useful. They take effort to create, they’re hard to control—too stupid to really get complex ideas across—and they can’t communicate even if they aren’t dumb as a sack of bricks. Brain death really means something, y’know.
“And in the time that a necromancer does that? Your average witch will have sold, traded, or dealt out enough spells to destroy a dozen men. Witches like their comforts. Or has your friend Cassavetes never used magic to get her point across?”
Sylvie shrugged, wanting to deny it, but she couldn’t. Val was, or had been—before her powers got nuked—all about the little irritants. Sylvie had seen her whisper a confusion spell through the phone when an unlucky solicitor had dialed her one time too many. Val had said the spell was temporary.
Wales said, “I knew a priest once who made awesome zombies. Mixed in a witch’s poppet spell, broke out his own teeth, and bound them into the zombies’ skulls. It was like he had an entire group of servants who responded to his every whim.”
“So, what, that makes it worth the effort?” Sylvie said. “That how you made your new deal with Marco? Tied a bit of yourself into him?”
Wales shuddered. “No. A thousand nos. The priest I mentioned? That witch spell was based on the law of similarity. Like to like. It let him control ’em with minimal effort. Problem was he drew that similarity so tight it went both ways. He started to rot.”
“Gross,” Sylvie said.
“At least he only injured himself,” Wales said. “Your average witch could do that to any man on the street.”
“Careful,” Sylvie said. “You make your point sharp enough, you’ll end up impaled on it.”
When he paused, she said, “I already distrust magic-users. You really want me to have another reason to tar you all with the same brush? Keep comparing yourself to the Maudits and bad cess witches. Give me a reason to go after—”
Sylvie stopped midthreat, shaking it off. Wales wasn’t a witch, but he just might be as clever as Val at getting his own way. Locked in their argument over semantics, they’d headed absently back toward her truck.
She had other ideas.
“The ghost girl,” she said.
“Jennifer,” he said.
She waved off the name. She knew it, but who the girl had been was currently less important than what she was now. “Can you get her to track the other women?”
Wales opened his mouth, caught her expression, and sighed. “Yeah. Probably. If she’s not too afraid.”
“So. Do it.”
Wales scrubbed at his face, at his wayward hair, and said, “Yeah, okay. It’s just weird.”
“You were talking to her before,” Sylvie pointed out.
“In the place she died. That’s like . . . going to interview someone at their home. This is like cuffing them and bringing them down to the station. She’s going to be unhappy.”
Sylvie said, “Talk, talk, talk. Not getting it done.” Briskness was best, the only antidote to Wales’s dwelling on a fear that wasn’t his.
He sank down to a spider-legged crouch; his shadow drew away from him, spraddled long and dark over the grasses and waters. He scraped charcoal from his boot tread, piled the chunky ash and soot into Marco’s turned-up palm, folded himself over the Hand, whispering, his breath stirring the dust and ash. “Marco, bring her here.”
A spur of glacial cold racked Sylvie’s bones for a millisecond, then passed through her, leaving her with a taste of danger in her mouth and a rocketing heart. Wales shrugged uncomfortably. “Marco doesn’t care for you overmuch,” he said.
“He’s not the only one,” Sylvie said. “Just keep him under control.”
The brush of cold came back; this time she sidestepped the majority of it. She was a quick learner if nothing else.
“Is she here?”
Wales ignored her, head cocked slightly, gaze turned inward, lips moving in soundless speech, coaxing, commanding. He shivered, either for being bracketed between ghosts or for fighting off Jennifer Costas’s fear.
“Wales,” Sylvie said. “Her pain. Not yours. Her fear. Not ours.”
Wales nodded, head up, gaze following something invisible to Sylvie. If she squinted hard, concentrated, she thought she saw a shimmer walking ahead of him, something like a blur of smudgy heat. Jennifer Costas.
A coolness in the air—the lurking Marco—got her moving also, thinking wryly that this was the single most gruesome game of hot’n’cold she had ever played, directed by ghosts in the search for bespelled women.
* * *
WITH THE GHOSTS GUIDING THEM, THEY CAREFULLY MOVED OFF THE track into the pure wilderness. Sylvie tried to pick her way over the grassiest ridges, tried to stay out of the water. At least she didn’t have to worry about animal life—the ghosts were better than hounds at flushing game. Everything fled before them. Anhingas rose up on dark wings, clacking beaks. Snakes oiled through the grass, left dark wakes on the water like miniature sea serpents.
Only the mosquitoes stayed persistent. She slapped another one from her cheek, drawn there by the bloody symbols Wales had put on her skin. She lifted her shoulder, rubbed at the stickiest spot, and left smears on her clothes.
“Don’t suppose she has a time frame,” Sylvie said. The sun was high and hot, would stay that way for hours yet. Didn’t mean she wanted to spend the entire day in the swamp.
“Look on the bright side,” Wales said. “At least we’re off the radar for Odalys and her crew.”
“Small comfort,” Sylvie said. “Very small.”
Wales grinned, surrounded by ghosts and utterly at ease. Necromancers were just plain different from regular people.
“You just want to shoot something,” he said.
“It is cathartic,” she agreed.
She slipped off the next hummock, splashed down into dark water to her calf. Shaking water out of her shoes, she thought, Yeah, shooting things was better than this.
Between one breath and the next, her irritation fled. Her spine tightened up; her skin went clammy. She wanted to blame Marco for it, a ghostly bump and run, but Wales had gone just as rigid.
She drew her gun, the rasp of it leaving the holster loud in the sudden silence. Wales, beside her, was whispering into the wind, or Marco’s ear, or Jennifer’s, seeking reassurance or explanation.
The question—Is something there?—hovered on her lips, unasked. The answer was evident. The thick heat of the day had gone unwholesome, unhealthy. Sylvie licked her lips and tasted something in the air, something foul and earthy like a poorly skinned hide left out to cure.
Her palm sweated on her gun; she changed hands and wiped the other against her jeans.
Wales said, “We’re close.”
“You think?”
He shot her a pissy look, which she gave back in spades, and he shrugged a single shoulder in reluctant agreement. “To our left. Magic. A lot of it.”
“Necromancy?”
“Not exactly,” Wales said. His face creased in concentration; his eyes closed as if he could get the feel of the area better with one sense cut off. Sylvie, thinking of dead cops and bespelled women, preferred to keep her eyes open, watchful. “It’s
not not-necromancy either. I don’t . . . I don’t like it. Marco doesn’t like it. And Jennifer—she’s so scared. I’m letting her go now.”
Jennifer wasn’t the only one scared; Wales’s voice wavered. He tucked his hands into his pockets, tangling Marco’s dead fingers in his own.
Sylvie felt the trembling echo of his fear in her own bones, transmitted like a virus. This, this was why she preferred to work alone. It was hard enough to face the Magicus Mundi on her own; she didn’t need someone to infect her with their fears.
“We could go back,” he said.
“Or hey, we could do the job I brought you here for? Investigate?”
“We don’t even know what we’re walking into,” he said. “I like caution. Caution is good.”
“Caution had me calling the cops last night,” she said. “Caution killed Jennifer Costas and three policemen. Injured a friend of mine. This job doesn’t reward caution.”
She took a steady breath, refusing to choke under the weight of whatever saturated the air. She had resisted aversion charms made by one of the best witches in the state; she could withstand this growing miasma of fear and wrongness. She let her breath out, pushed Wales’s fear out of her bones, and took the first step toward trouble.
The next one was easier.
Wales followed on the fourth step, so tense that she felt his presence like a live wire, something to be wary of, something that could lash out, unexpectedly, in any direction.
“Are we getting closer?”
When he didn’t answer, she glanced over her shoulder, irritated that she had to do so—the ground before them was growing marshy again, treacherous.
He nodded stiffly. “Straight on.”
Straight on, like there was even a path. Sylvie soldiered onward, stepped into a deceptive puddle, and found herself suddenly knee deep, a plume of mud swirling through the previously still water.
Wales said, his voice tight and small, “Marco says we’re close.”
“Well, if Marco says so.” She shifted her grip on her gun. Didn’t know if she would need it. So far, the day was quiet. Creepy and fraught with magical tension, but quiet. But then, that was how it had been yesterday, and Lio had been mauled.
Her skin goose-bumped. She didn’t know if she should use the gun, even if attacked. Odds were, any attackers would be the shape-changed women, not the wildlife that fled their path.
But she knew herself and knew that she would shoot in a heartbeat. If necessary. She hoped it wouldn’t be.
Water slipped into her jeans, nearly blood temperature, and wicked upward, filling her senses with swamp. A vibration in the water ahead sent ripples stroking slowly back her direction.
Sylvie squinted against sun gleaming off the water. There was something up ahead, a paler patch in the water, the sway of something that wasn’t reed. “Wales,” she breathed, and picked up her pace, still scanning the area but moving off to investigate that pallid gleam. Sand maybe?
Given that Wales looked as happy to be in the water as a house cat, she doubted it was anything so natural.
Sylvie hastened the last ten feet, her pulse echoing in her ears, her breath in her chest, and splashed forward. She stilled, staring down at the choppy water, trying to see. She could reach through the water, touch . . . but even the kaleidoscope image she could piece together looked distressingly like flesh. If she reached, would she end with cold flesh in her hands?
Or worse, if this was one of the women, would touching her break the spell in the wrong way? Create another burst of lethal flame, boiling her and Wales alive?
Wales said, “Sylvie?”
“I found . . . something,” Sylvie said.
“So did I,” Wales said. He waded a gentle circle around her and the lagoon. His mouth drew tight. “You said there were five women?”
“Were five. Now four.”
“Five,” he said.
“What?”
“I count five. A pentagram. Jennifer’s been replaced.”
Sylvie waded over to him, following his path, dismay overriding the cold dread in her bones. She studied each face, blurred by water, trying to pick out which one was new.
Six women and only two names known. One of them elicited from the woman’s ghost. Her city had enough problems without women being dragged into the ’Glades and turned into mannequins.
The bodies swayed gently in place, as if tethered. Despite Wales’s assurance that they lived, they looked dead. Abused and dead. Grimacing, Sylvie reached into the water. Blood temperature near the surface, cooler and subtly slimy deeper down. Beside her, Wales hissed out a warning breath.
“Easy, Tex,” she murmured. “I’m just getting a closer look.”
“Just be careful,” he said. “I think the water is an insulator. Like silk. Magically inert. Pun aside, it might be a dampening field. Helps maintain the stasis they’re in.”
Sylvie nodded. “What if I keep most of the body beneath the surface?”
“Why mess with them at all?”
“Pictures,” she said. “I know Maria Ruben. The others are still unidentified.” She grasped the woman’s shoulders from behind, her palms pressing flat against clammy shoulder blades. The woman—girl, really—felt dead. Heavy and inert, unpleasantly limp, free from rigor. Her blond hair slithered over Sylvie’s forearms like a swath of clinging weed. She swallowed hard and gently raised the woman’s face; the water rolled back, baring open contact-green eyes with fixed pupils. A symbol was carved into her forehead, blanched white and bloodless. The skin furrowed.
“Do you know this symbol?” Sylvie asked.
“No,” he said, after a glance.
Sylvie braced the woman’s shoulder against her hip, took out her camera, and clicked. One down.
“That’s enough,” Wales said. “Put her back.”
“Sense something?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“It’s a yes-or-no question,” she said. “Do you sense something?”
“Yes, then. Don’t know what. But something’s paying attention. Do the others fast.”
“You could help. You’re the necromancer. You’re the one who’s supposed to be grappling with corpses.”
“That’s the point, Shadows. They’re not corpses, remember?”
“Picky, picky,” she said. She repeated the picture taking with the other women, careful not to raise them too high, careful to get clear shots, not only of their faces, too pale, too slack, but the symbol on each of their foreheads.
She stared down at Maria Ruben’s dark eyes, the color of the mud beneath her, and said, “Maria doesn’t look too good.”
“There’s a good?”
Sylvie said, “There’s definitely a bad.” Maria looked . . . withered. Dry. Even in the water’s embrace, her skin looked parched. Her mouth looked chapped, the edges split. Her fingertips looked charred; reddish black streaks climbing her hands. More symbols nestled in her upturned palms.
Too close to the woman who went up in flames?
Or something worse.
Wales hissed when he joined her.
“What do you think?” Sylvie asked. “Collateral damage or intrinsic?”
Wales tilted his head, listened to Marco, his body slowly tightening. “Marco says she’s close to death. The spell—it’s too much energy to contain. Even like this.”
“What’s the spell for?” Sylvie said. “It’s an awful lot of work to go to if we just have a sicko sorcerer who likes his girls passive.”
“I don’t know,” Wales said. “It’s not . . . It seems nonsensical. If I can figure out what the symbols represent, I might be able to get a better idea. But I can’t do that here. All I can tell you is that the magic feels strange. Like it’s trying to do two things at once. The power’s both coming and going. Like . . .” He crouched, put his hands into the water, licked swamp off his fingers while Sylvie felt her nose wrinkle in disgust. Necromancers. Always with the organics.
“It feels like some ki
nda exchanger,” he said. “Like a person breathing. Changing oxygen to carbon dioxide. Some type of magical chemistry. It’s—” He jerked upright, wiped his hands on his pants, and said, “It’s too complicated not to be fragile. I think we should get ourselves gone before Marco or I have an adverse effect on the holding pattern.”
Sylvie studied the women; she hated like hell to leave them behind. But she’d known that was a possibility the moment she began snapping pics: That wasn’t the kind of thing you did if you expected to solve the problem then and there. Their options were so limited. They hadn’t come prepared to camp out, hoping that the spellcaster would return. They could try to disrupt the spell. . . .
Wales was obviously following along with her thoughts; he shook his head. “We’ve got no guarantee they wouldn’t just burn if we broke the stasis.”
“Can you break the spell completely?”
Wales grimaced. “Not without making a few mistakes first. Which would kill most of them.”
Sylvie tapped her gun barrel, thinking. “If we leave, and you figure out what the symbols mean, what all the spell’s actually trying to do—”
“I might be willing to give it a try,” Wales said. “Even if I can’t break off the spell, I’m a necromancer. I can encourage it toward entropy. Encourage it to break itself.”
Sylvie blinked. “You can kill a spell.”
“Theoretically?”
She sucked in a humid breath, tasting her own frustration. “How long’s Maria got, you think?”
Wales had another one of those whispered conferences with Marco. Sylvie turned away, staring out over the still water that held the women like flies in amber. A drawback to working with necromancers. Hanging out with the person who looked like he had an imaginary friend. Negative points on the discretion factor.
“Best guess? Four days, maybe.” Wales ran a damp hand through his too-long hair; he left dark streaks behind on his cheek. “It’s like . . . stress, right? Too much stress, and the body rebels. For all intents and purposes, Maria’s having the world’s slowest heart attack. The spell can’t hold it off forever.”