I’d been running away from these ghosts long enough. I was a necromancer, for cheese’s sake. I was Finn the Gramarayean, Brother of Pete and Sammy, Uncle of Mattie, Son of Arlyn, Lover of Dawn, Fighter of Evil Assholes, and Protector of the Unjerky. And as much as I regretted the lives lost since my return, as much as I would go back and save them all if I could, every single one had made their own choices, had given or forfeited their lives so that the people I loved would live.
I had made mistakes, but I was not going to make even more because of guilt over those past mistakes.
Fuck these ghosts. I’d been running from them long enough.
“Bangarang!” I shouted. It was time to shove my toe pick up the arse of these phantoms.
At that thought, lightning began to dance around me.
I slammed my foot down on the accelerator, and the motor revved in all its 50cc glory, jerking the car forward again.
“Felicity!” I called as I came up on her first. She turned her mushroom-capped head to look at me as I shouted, “It was your choice to help my grandfather, and to keep silent all the years I was in exile.”
She spat words like venom back at me, “If not for you, I’d still be alive! I want to live!”
“I didn’t kill you,” I replied. “But I forgive you.”
Lightning leaped from me to strike her. She flashed bright like a Star Trek phaser victim, appearing briefly as she had in my youth, happy and beautiful, before fading away.
Sal glanced back at me, then hunched forward even further, speeding up. Banana cream pies began to drop from the back of his kart, exploding after a second to send sizzling whipped cream flying. I swerved madly around them.
“Youself killed sister-mine!” Sal shouted back at me. “Always youself are death-giving.”
“It was the Krol witches who killed her,” I called out, “because she killed one of them.”
“But youself sent the badbright witches.”
“I sent them against my grandfather. It was your sister’s choice to defend him. I won’t accept blame for her death either!”
Another lightning strike, and Sal faded from view.
Zeke with his shell-like shield and massive bulk slowed down to drive beside me, and tried to knock me off of the track.
“I pity the fool who trusts you!” he said.
“Your death wasn’t my fault!” I shouted. “And neither is Vee’s danger!” I swerved hard into him, my lightning leaping out to envelope him. He crashed into the guardrail, and faded away.
Then I reached Alynon, and my confidence wavered. His spiky red hair flapped in the wind as he pulled parallel to me, matched me move for move, and spat insults at me, his tongue his only real weapon, as always. “You are a joke,” he said. “A criminal. A fraud. You complain about exile, yet it saved you. Saved you from abandoning your family to make pointless games for obsolete machines. Saved you from becoming your grandfather even sooner!”
“Screw you!” I shouted back. “Even if that is true, it has nothing to do with you.”
“Does it not?” he asked, easily avoiding my attempt to sideswipe him, his kart dropping around behind me then racing up on my other side, his engine buzzing loudly. He continued shouting, “Do you not associate me in some way with your being exiled, do you not seek to punish me on behalf of those who held you, fed upon you? Since your return, cruelly have you held me trapped here, away from my own family, away from my own love.”
“That wasn’t my choice!” I said. “It just happened.”
“So you tell yourself. Yet you refuse to return in spirit to my Realm where we may fairly inhabit separate bodies. You instead use the excuse of your family’s need and your heart’s desires to stay here. But tell me, who places your family in danger? Who placed Dawn in danger? You create the need to protect them, then hold me captive for it. And you have treated your promise to separate us somehow as a thing only to be brought out and toyed with when convenient!”
“I—” I felt myself shrinking along with the car, growing slower, more vulnerable. The lightning flickering around me dimmed, the arcs growing smaller and weaker. The problem was, Alynon—ghost Alynon—was right. Or at least, he wasn’t entirely wrong. And I knew it. His words hurt too much not to hold some truth.
“I didn’t create the problems that have kept you here. But you’re right. I haven’t done everything I could to send you home. I know I have promised before, but I swear now, not to you, but to myself, that I will do what it takes to send you home just as soon as I stop my grandfather’s plot. You will be home by tomorrow.”
And I meant it. I felt the shift inside of me, a decision I had been avoiding for some time in the hopes that a better option would present itself, made at last. I’d figured out a way to separate us. It was just not going to be pleasant, for me at least. But I would do it. It was time. It was fair.
The lightning flickered brighter once more.
“Forgive me,” I said.
Lightning leaped from me at Alynon, and he faded away. I grew back to my normal size, the kart lurching forward as it grew in bounds, spitting gravel out from beneath its tires.
Mother looked back at me, her head entirely bald now, her rotting pink princess dress too loose on her shrunken limbs. I pulled up behind her, and said quietly, “I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you more. But I know you forgive me. I know you understand. If you were here, you’d tell me some crazy story about Cinderella and her real mother and forgiveness or something. But I just have to forgive myself, and make you proud of the choices I make now.”
Mother lit bright for a second, wreathed in my lightning, her long beautiful hair flowing once more behind her like a cape, her loving smile radiant, then she, too, faded away.
Pete rode in the next car, looking ridiculous in the green overalls and too-small cap despite the blood covering them. He looked back at me, and his eyes went from dark brown to wolf blue. “You—”
“No,” I said, simply. Lightning struck, and Pete spun away, fading.
And then it was just me and Dunngo racing around the track.
Dunngo’s stone turtle head rotated like an owl’s so that he stared at me over the shell of stone and gravel on his back.
“You destroyed me,” he said.
“Yes. You told me to.”
“You said no choice.”
“I had no choice,” I replied. “Petey would have died. Sal and Silene would have died.”
“You no do it for them. You do it for you.”
“I didn’t know the effect using dark necromancy would have on me. If I had—”
“Not effect. You don’t want pain of losing brother or friends. Not for them. They go to spirit place when die. You the one who suffer if they die. But instead you destroy me forever. I never go to spirit place now.”
As with Alynon, there was truth in what Dunngo said.
“It was unforgivable,” I said. “I should have tried something, anything, else. Even if it meant we all died.”
And having said it, I accepted it. Not on the theoretical level, not on the philosophical level, where I had been told since childhood that dark necromancy is bad. I knew it as a certainty, I had certain proof of it, a personal understanding of it. Dark necromancy had destroyed everything that was Dunngo forever. I had created a void in the universe, and there was no way to fix it, no hope that things would be balanced in some future life or land beyond the veil of death.
I’d fucked up. Big time.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and felt it, like a willingness to leap into a volcano to prove my sincerity, like a readiness to let Edward Scissorhands give me a full body massage if only Dunngo would accept that I truly meant it.
“Sorry no good enough. You live for two now,” Dunngo said. “You, and me. You understand.”
The dust of the track was replaced with a warm breeze that carried the smell of popcorn, and my kart spun out of control, the world whirling by, making me dizzy—
* * *
&nbs
p; Dawn caught me before I hit the checkerboard floor of the snack bar.
“Finn!” she said. “Are you okay?”
I blinked up at her.
And then I began to cry.
I was only vaguely aware of the Silver Archon’s voice tinged with surprise and perhaps fear coming softly out of the speakers. “You … may enter.”
31
HEY JEALOUSY
A door clicked open behind the snack bar, and we filed through it. Stairs descended into a concrete tunnel that led us to a steel door. The door swung open as we approached it. One of the Archon’s loyal henchfauns greeted us, and led us through the Silver Archon’s underground compound beyond as I regained my composure and wiped at my face.
The compound was plush, though behind and beneath the modern fixtures could be seen the original 1958 design. The brick wall, the pink and sea-foam green tiles, the mural on one wall of forest, it all had a faded, Polaroid feel to it. It had the cool damp feel of a basement that never gets warm, and smelled like clothes that had been in the closet far too long.
We soon reached an ornate wooden door, and the faun opened it but did not pass through, waving us on instead.
Beyond was a library that was, for all intents and purposes, also a throne room. Rich cherry wood bookshelves lined the walls, stuffed with books and scrolls. Above them a balcony ran around the entire room. Six pillars held up the domed ceiling with its mural depicting a great celebration of brightbloods, all illumined by the giant chandelier that hung from the dome’s center. And the heat in this room had been cranked up to the point where it felt nearly like a sauna.
The Archon sat upon a dais at the far end of the room on a wide cushion of red velvet. He appeared much as I’d expected—the body of a winged lion, the head of a man with sharp, hawkish features, his hair and beard shimmering in black ringlets beneath the glow of a smaller globe chandelier. And he wore headphones.
Mort stood on the middle of the dais’s three steps, to the left of the Archon, dressed sharply in one of his black bespoke suits that still hung a bit loose on him after the weight he’d lost. And he looked ready to throw a tantrum. I got the sense he wasn’t completely surprised to see us, but that he had not truly believed that he would, or at least had seriously hoped he would not. And I couldn’t blame him. Sammy alone was likely to beat him senseless at this point.
The Archon stood, and his lion body morphed into a human’s with white robes, though the wings still rose from his shoulders, and a lion’s tail swished behind him.
“I am surprised to see you,” the Archon said to Silene, removing the headphones and tossing them back down to the cushion. “Should you not be with your clan attacking the Shadows’ compound?”
Silene said, “My clan is at Elwha, where they belong.”
The Archon’s nostrils flared. “You would defy the orders of your Archon?”
“I would,” Silene replied. “If they are dangerous and foolish.”
The Archon’s entire face went red, and he said, “Ware, dryad. I can have you exiled from the Silver for such insult and disloyalty.”
Silene stood straighter. “Where is your loyalty, Archon, to the brightbloods you were chosen to protect?”
“I protect you in many ways,” the Archon said. “Including by not concerning you with the terrible knowledge of all the ways the Shadows threaten your clan. You would not sleep well knowing what I know.”
“Such as?” Silene asked.
The Archon blinked, then cleared his throat, and said, “I feel no need or desire to bring such an unreliable and rebellious vassal into my confidence. Suffice to say, that with the help of the ARC,” he motioned to Mort, “the Silver Court shall have the greatest peace and prosperity in this region since the PAX was first established.”
I stepped up beside Silene. “That guy there is playing you for a fool, Archon. He’s part of a group seeking to destroy your patrons.”
“You see?” Mort said to the Archon, and gave a pitiful imitation of a laugh. “Exactly like I said.” He turned back to me. “You’re wanted for arrest by both the ARC and the Colloquy. You’ve been busy making yourself popular, as usual. And yet you storm in here with a bunch of rebellious feybloods and expect anyone to believe your lies?”
“Lies?” I demanded. “You want to talk about lies? How about—”
Pete shouted, “Stop it!”
I turned in surprise to see him red faced and panting, his eyes gone wolf blue. “Pete?”
“Stop fighting! Mort, come down here. Make this stop. Please. I don’t like it when you guys fight.”
I blinked, then looked up at Mort. This felt so far removed from the old fights we’d have over who got control of the ColecoVision, or got to ride shotgun, or got to hold the mana vial as Grandfather or Mother funneled magical energy into it.
That realization made me sad.
Damn it.
Mort actually looked embarrassed as he glanced from Pete to Father to the Archon and back. “Pete, don’t let Finn get you in trouble again. Don’t forget who took care of you and Father while Finn was gone. Don’t forget all the bad things that have happened since he’s been back.”
“No,” Pete said. “Finn tried to help. You were sick, and he tried to help. Now come home and we can be a family again.”
“Home to what?” Mort snapped, appearing to forget the Archon for the moment as he took a step down toward Pete and gave an angry wave of his hand. “You’re never there, and you can’t help with the necromancy if you were. Father, I love you, but you can’t help, you need help. And Finn”—he didn’t look at me—“if he’s not trying to get one of us killed, he’s playing his stupid games. I’m tired of working my ass off just to wake up the next day wondering if we’ll be able to stay in business another week, or what disaster Finn’s going to bring down on our heads next. So excuse the hell out of me for being just like the rest of you and doing something for me and mine.”
Sammy snorted. “Cut the crap, Mort. You’ve never done anything that wasn’t for yourself. You liked playing king of the castle. And you always had enough money to blow on your asinine outfits and expensive toys.”
“You have to look successful to be successful,” Mort said. “Not that you’d understand anything about the business, Samantha, since you ran away the first chance you got. That didn’t stop you coming around guilting me for money though whenever, surprise surprise, your job ‘saving the world’ didn’t pay the rent.”
“Once!” Sammy said. “I asked for money once! Okay, maybe twice. And how often did I save your ass by sending clients your way?”
“Okay,” I said. “Obviously, we could all use some family therapy. But Mort, I can’t believe you’d hurt all of these people just to protect the business, or your position. Mother raised us better than that. You’re better than that. Pete’s right. Come on, man, just … stop this. Please. We’ll find a better way, together.”
Mort crossed his arms, and looked petulant, but I sensed him wavering. Or perhaps I just wanted to believe he was.
“Very entertaining,” the Archon said. “But I am not amused by rebellion.” He raised his hand, and brightbloods poured into the room from the door behind us, and the door behind the Archon’s dais—at least a dozen serious-looking fauns, a centaur, and a couple of human-looking brightbloods who might have been waers or sirens or a hundred other possibilities, many holding crossbows or swords.
Sal’s fur fluffed up, and he growled slightly before saying, “What youself doing?”
The Archon’s wings spread, and he said, “If you do not follow my orders and attack the Shadows encampment, then you will be stripped of your bond to the Silver, and transplanted to the Turnbull Refuge.”
Silene put a hand in one of the pouches on her belt, and said, “Either would be a death sentence for many of us.”
“The Shadows will never see an attack coming,” the Archon said. “This will not be some raid or blood vengeance, this will be a full-scale assault. Overwhelmi
ng.”
“It is beyond reason,” Silene said.
“We will get rid of the threat in our region once and for all. And when we do, the ARC will grant us their lands. What better reason?”
I stared unbelieving at the Archon. “You’re going to start a war!”
“No,” Mort said. “The ARC is prepared to share intelligence with the Colloquy showing that the Shadows were plotting a massive attack against the Silver. This will be self-defense.”
“Right,” Sammy said. “Because the whole preemptive strike thing always works out great.”
“Why?” Silene asked. “Why risk this without the blessing of the Bright Lords and Ladies?”
“Because of them!” the Archon shouted, his voice suddenly like a lion’s roar, and he jabbed a finger toward Pete and Vee. “Do you know how many times I have asked to be transferred to the Topanga compound, to take over the California Region? Begged even? A hundred. A thousand. But do they grant my request? No. All I ever heard was what an amazing job the Archon there was doing, and that rewards come to the deserving when the time is right. And then, they bring these two in. The message is pretty damn clear to me: do something impressive, do something deserving, or lose my position altogether!”
Pete and Vee exchanged looks, and Vee said, “We didn’t ask for any power, Archon. And we’ve tried to stay out—”
“So you say! But that doesn’t keep the other Archons from laughing about it behind my back. There haven’t been Vice-Archons in generations, so why now, why do I need them?”
“Wait,” Sammy said. “You are going to start a war because of job insecurity and promotion bullshit? Can’t you just implement a trendy new buzzword or do a reorganization thingy like any other executive?”
“Not helping,” I muttered at Sammy, then louder, “I’m the one who asked Oshun for a way to help my brother and Vee. Making them Vice-Archons was just an honorary title, it had nothing to do with you, I promise.”
*Except now we know it likely did.*
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