"How do you know Danny's uncle died?" I said to her.
She shrugged. "Because Danny said he was gone to ground."
I stared at her. A dead uncle, even a recluse like Remi would have had an obituary. Social workers would check in and find him absent and investigate. A dead man would have a funeral.
And gone to ground was not a phrase people used when someone died. It was a hunter's term for when they needed to hide from public view. It was also a term we used when vampires dug themselves in to the earth to heal. This was not a vampire issue though. None of this had anything to do with vampires. It was golems. Golems and sorcery and a man we hadn't seen in months.
And a golem who was made of earth but exhibited very human expression.
"He said that?" I knelt down to a crouch so I could see her better. "He said gone to ground?"
What if Remi had been hunting and ended up bringing something home with him. Something he needed to hide from, and Danny had thought he'd died. A kid deathly afraid of the police would not call for help.
A sorcerer kid deathly afraid of the police might do something entirely different.
"Wait here," I told the girl.
I strode toward Scott and Danny, taking care not to scare him. I squatted down next to Scott and laid my hand on the golem's arm.
I wasn't good at kids, but I knew the pain of loss and fear. I knew how powerful a bond could be.
"Hey, Danny," I said with all the casual friendliness I could muster. "What if I told you your Uncle Remi could talk to ghosts?"
The boy looked up, intrigued as I suspected he'd be.
"Can you talk to ghosts too?" I asked. "Because I have a brother I'd love to hear from again. He's been gone to ground for a long time and I miss him."
"Graves," Scott said in warning and I held up my hand, placing my palm against his mouth.
"My brother's name was Chris. I miss him. I sure would like to talk to him."
The lights from the playground streetlights played in Danny's eyes.
"Can you talk to him for me? See if he's tired of being gone?"
He shook his head.
I shifted on my feet, trying to ease the ache in my thighs. I tried again.
"Your Uncle Remi promised me he'd talk to Chris for me. But I haven't seen him in a while. Could you do it for me?"
Again, he shook his head, but this time, his gaze flitted over to the golem.
"Graves, I don't think—"
"Be quiet," I said to Scott and he groaned in complaint, muttering I better know what I was doing.
"If you can't do it, Danny, do you think you could tell me where your uncle is, so I can ask him?"
The boy pushed himself onto his knees.
"No," he said, but the bluntness of the word was softened by a pat on my head. As though I were younger than him and in need of solace.
I moved to my knees. "Then could you ask him for me?"
"I can't," he said, wiping his sleeve across his mouth. "He's gone to ground. Your brother is just dead."
Even hearing the words from a boy that young hurt. My brother wasn't dead. Not really. He was trapped in a ghost plane and I'd seen him just months earlier but I wasn't sure I'd ever see him again. And I would never admit he was dead.
"Isn't that what gone to ground means?" I said, although I knew better. I needed to hear what he thought it meant. "Dead. Like my brother?" I said. "If your uncle is gone to ground but he isn't dead, then where is he?"
"In there," the boy said and he pointed at the golem. "He was hurt and he asked me to fix him but I messed up and now I had to turn him off because I didn't do it right."
He glared at Scott with those last words. I shook my head at Scott because I thought he was going to explain and I didn't want him to interrupt.
"You can do magic, can't you, Danny?" I whispered. "And your uncle knew it. He knew if you could, you would help him."
This time the boy nodded and I relaxed out of sheer relief.
"What's going on, Graves?" Scott said.
I pushed myself to my feet and brushed at my jeans with my good hand.
"What's going on is that we don't just have a sorcerer. We have a necromancer."
Chapter Thirteen
A necromancer is never a positive thing to encounter. The very nature of their power brought all kinds of awful consequences to bear when they ultimately tried to do more than just raise a few cats or dogs. They usually craved power, in the end trying to find a way to raise themselves so they would never succumb to mortality. That kind of power always resulted in corruption.
We had encountered and executed only one necromancer. Willy's library was filled with stories of other hunters coming up against them though. They'd all been adult men and women however, and here we had a boy.
A boy who had been traumatized in a dozen different ways. What that might mean as he grew to adulthood was anyone's guess. But right now, he was still just a boy. Scott and I agreed without so much as a word of discussion to bring him back to Rio Grande and Slow Smoke. If something was to be done with him, I didn't want to be the one to make the decision.
The boy's skills turned out to be even stronger than any of us could have suspected, and it took a visit to Joy's, and several pieces of pie and mugs of hot cocoa, before the full of it came out.
It took all of us; Joy, Scott, and I, as well as Terry, who for some reason made an impression on the kid right away. I presumed his gruff nature reminded Danny of his uncle and slowly he let us in enough to see the hell he'd been living. His only outside solace was Tawny the Orphan Annie and her brother, Judah.
Saul wasn't a real brother as it turned out, but a foster his mom had taken in to help pay bills and babysit while she used. So at least she wasn't fully a deadbeat. Just unwell. She cared enough to make sure her kid had an older person to watch out for him and feed him when she couldn't.
It was hard not to judge her. My dad had gone to alcohol when I was young and it was awful. I still didn't speak to him, but at least as an adult, I could appreciate that he was sick.
Danny's mother wasn't well either. She couldn't count on Remi because he was never around. So she'd found an older foster brother to help out. But Saul had got tired of doing all the hard work while she benefited. He'd taken off and left Danny to his own devices with his mom.
That was a tricky thing to get out of Danny. He couldn't say it because I suppose he didn't have the sophistication of the language, but I guessed Saul was scared of Danny. The boy had done his best to keep his magic under wraps, but it erupted at times when he couldn't control it.
"He screamed a lot," Danny said when that happened. "And he hit me. Called me a freak. He told me if I didn't stop it, he'd kill me."
So Danny had tried to stop it. He'd made a portal to throw his magic into but it always flew back out. He made dolls to put the magic into, but they got up and walked on their own through the house, terrifying Saul. When he raised a dead bird that had hit the window and broken its neck, that had terrified Saul. When the bird raised with the strange penchant for attacking other birds, Saul had been horrified.
"He called me a demon," Danny said. "He said I needed to be exorcised. But I exercised a lot. I tried everything. I ran and I ran and I jumped and I played basketball but I couldn't get rid of the magic."
He hung his head over his pie plate at that one and my stomach knotted up.
"You're not a demon," I said, laying my hand down over his on the counter. "You are very special."
Everyone agreed. They murmured and encouraged him and soon the rest came out as though he was aching to tell it all.
Saul had run away and left Danny's mother to degrade until the social workers stepped in. Lucky for Danny, his sister reached out to her brother in desperation and Uncle Remi came back from assignment to be guardian while his sister finished her six week rehab.
Six weeks turned to eight. Danny was happy. He loved his uncle and with Saul gone, Remi made him feel as though his magic was okay
. It wasn't a curse, that it was a good thing. He tried to train him and teach him how to control it.
One evening, Remi answered the door when it rang and while we knew him as a careful hunter, we guessed he didn't think anything he'd left undone would find him at his sister's.
But it did.
The boy recounted this last part with a bald tone. I supposed it was a way to distance himself from the pain so he could get through it without breaking down. He was a brave kid. I had to give him that.
The thing attacked. From the description, I assumed a werewolf in human form but one that had the ability to shift at will.
Remi told Danny to hide. Not to come out no matter what he heard.
But the boy couldn't stand the noise. He knew it was bad. He knew his uncle was in danger.
And he knew he had some new control over his powers.
He refused to hide any longer and crept out of the closet to face the beast. He threw blasts of magic at it, red hot magic that turned to flame as it struck and then turned to liquid silver and then again to white hot magic.
The beast died and was incinerated in a howling cacophony that both terrified Danny and gave him a feeling of righteous vengeance. My words. Not his.
But Remi was left near death from the attack, and even if Danny didn't know the whole of what that meant, he knew enough to realize he didn't want it to happen.
So he carted in bucket upon bucket of dirt from the back yard, and he covered his uncle in mud, leaving his mouth and nose and eyes free of debris so he could breathe and see.
"I put my magic in him," the boy said without lifting his gaze from his fourth mug of cocoa. "I put it all in there and I put his name inside his nose so he would know who he was when he came back."
Scott choked on his coffee and swiveled on his stool. I supposed he understand exactly what that meant the same as I did. With no way to know who he had been, there could be no way for Remi to return. If in fact, there ever had been a way in the first place.
"We made you take it out," I said. "Oh my God, I'm so sorry, Danny."
I knew the golem was lying upstairs in one of the hunter rooms. Terry had inspected it with Willy, our librarian and keeper of information, and it did indeed have a human man inside. Except it wasn't as easy as a chocolate casing over an almond.
Willy's guess was that the two had blended with the magic. There was no man anymore. There was no golem. They were both the creature and the man all at once. While the creature was inert, it wasn't exactly dead because it wasn't something with a soul's magic anymore. Or at least, the soul magic had merged with Danny's natural magic.
"Where is the magic now?" I asked him.
The boy took a long pull on the cocoa mug before answering.
"I suppose I have it again," he said, but he didn't look happy about it.
The way his face looked so hang-dog, the slump of his shoulders, even the sad way he regarded the cup of cocoa that had given him such pleasure before, all of it made my throat ache. I reached out to touch his hand as it wrapped around the mug.
"You're not evil," I said, surprising myself with the words. I hadn't meant to speak. I wasn't good at kids or comfort, but I needed him to understand that. "No one blames you, Danny."
He lifted his eyes to mine. "I am bad," he said. "I killed Saul."
I considered the possibility that Saul had found us because of Remi and he hoped we could teach him how to get rid of the demon boy and all other things he considered evil. He wasn't wrong necessarily, but I wished he'd been upfront with Joy. We might have been able to save him and Danny.
"The golem killed Saul, not you."
"With my magic," he insisted. "I wanted the golem to protect me. I wanted Uncle Remi to come back but it went all wrong." He sniffed. "Now he's gone. I killed him too."
"No," I told him. "Whatever killed Remi is gone because of your magic. You tried to save your uncle."
"You're one of the good guys," Scott said and I could have hugged him for saying what I couldn't.
"That's right," I said, easing my sore hand onto the counter so I could lean closer. "You're one of us."
His little brow furrowed. "One of you?"
I nodded and Joy started fishing around in the cash register.
"We protect people," I said. "From all the bad things out there. That's what you did. You protected your uncle without thinking about yourself. That makes you special."
He made short little hitching sounds that I guessed were his way of struggling to stop from crying. We all averted our gazes to give him some space to do so. When he seemed collected, Joy pushed something across the counter toward him. It looked like one of our old trial badges. It was tarnished and it had gouges across the surface, but I recognized it and was happy she'd thought to give it to him.
"This makes you official," she said. "We don't take new trainees on without rigorous testing. New recruits have to pass a series of tests and they aren't easy. Are you ready for that, recruit?"
"Who’s official?" Chase said as he came down the stairs. He was wearing a new leather jacket and he had a bottle of Canadian Club in his hand that he lifted in my direction.
"The boy's going to be a hunter, aren't you, Danny?" Scott said.
"Looks like he's hunted down a few slices of pie already," Chase drawled as he slid onto the stool next to me. He smelled of aftershave and soap. My whole body went tense with the feel of him so close.
"We aren't pressuring you," Joy murmured. "It's your decision." She tapped the top of the badge with her nail.
The boy looked at it for a long time. I didn't think he was going to speak and my mind went to all the places dark and shadowed that the boy could go if he wasn't properly schooled now. I envisioned myself or one of the other hunters neutralizing him in a few years. Maybe that's what Remi realized. Maybe Joy had already and that was why she was offering him the discarded badge.
Scott spun on his stool and slapped the counter. "You'll be a hero, Danny," he said. "You'll belong somewhere good. With people who try to make a difference."
"You just have to say yes," I urged.
"And when you're done training you can have your Uncle Remi's old badge," Joy said.
This time, his head snapped up. A spark lit his eye. "Uncle Remi was a hero?"
"Oh, yes," Joy said. "The best of heroes."
I watched the way the kid worked through all the information as though it were a math problem he couldn't quite cipher at first. I noted his expression when the light came on of all the possibilities this might mean for him. It was good. He knew it was good, and he was excited at the possibilities, but I also knew it was this last offer of his uncle's badge that clinched the deal.
I knew right then he'd be a hell of a hunter. I didn't know what to do with a sorcerer let alone a necromancer except to neutralize him, but maybe this was what we all needed. Maybe we could make magic work in our favor, and save a kid at the same time.
Who knew what kind of things we could accomplish with a hunter on the team as powerful as the boy. I just knew that the possibilities might be endless. Good could come out of horrible.
I wanted to be part of that. I wanted more to be part of helping the kid heal. I'd had no one to care about for years. Hunting had been my only purpose for a long time. I looked at Chase out of the side of my eye. He'd paid dearly for that full bottle of whiskey he held onto, I knew. Terry didn't let anything leave the bar without purchase. No doubt Chase hoped he could make up the time we'd lost and was trying to tempt me with a few shots out of reach of the nosey hunter community.
He was no doubt a perfect dalliance and distraction. He was good looking. He was easy going. He didn't expect much from me afterward. Just a bit of companionship and things could go back to normal.
But could they ever? I didn't know how I felt about him or Scott. I cared about them. I desired them. But I didn't need distraction. I needed intimacy and the chance to start over or at least feel as though I was. I wanted to go back to square
one and get my brother back, but that was impossible. Though I didn't have to lose myself to the despair of it. This kid had no one at the moment. He needed us. I needed him.
I patted Chase's forearm as I slid off my stool. I stood in front of Joy on my side of the counter and I squared my shoulders. Cleared my throat until she looked at me.
"I'd like to train him," I said. "If you'll let me. I'm not the strongest or the smartest, but I am committed. I think I can help him navigate it all."
Joy ran her hand over her red hair, smoothing down a few fly-aways against her ear.
"It's perfect," she said. "If Danny is willing, you can start tomorrow. Then the rest of us will begin the search for a mentor for his powers."
Danny bit his lower lip as he looked at me, his eyes wide and uncertain. I expected he would rather have Scott than me, but I knew the heart of pain while Scott did not.
"I told you I miss my brother," I said to him. "I can't get him back, but I can help you. I don't have anyone who will take up my time. I can be there whenever you need me."
"Uncle Remi said the same thing," he said.
My heart clenched as I worried the kid meant that his uncle had left him in the end, in the worst possible way.
"There's a big difference between me and your uncle," I said. "I am one stubborn, nasty-assed chick."
The boy grinned. "So was uncle Remi. Except he was a dude." He laughed and it was a nice sound. A reprieve in the tension.
It gave me hope, and that was a feeling I hadn't felt in a very long time.
Life was really was full of surprises, it seemed.
-30-
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