by Amir Lane
“Lindy.”
Lindy forced her eyes open despite the burn and the weight of her eyelids.
“I’m up,” she mumbled.
Selima unpinned her hijab, unleashing the dark mess of curls that Dieter always fawned over. Lindy wondered if it was wrong to wonder how many pens had gotten lost in there. She blamed it on the sleep. Or lack of sleep. Whatever.
“I’m making breakfast,” Yasir said. “Do you want some?”
“Don’t you guys have your own kitchen to cook in?” Lindy asked. “One that’s properly equipped?”
Lindy loved the two of them, really. Yasir was a great cook, Selima was a walking encyclopaedia of makeup tricks, and no matter how much the constant displays of affection between them and Dieter make her eyes roll, they were good company. But if Yasir banging around the kitchen kept her from getting a solid 28 hours of sleep, she was going to give him another scar to match the one he had through his eyebrow.
If either of them responded to her question, her brain missed it.
“Fridge it,” she said, hoping he got the message.
In hindsight, it probably sounded like she was trying to swear. She wasn’t entirely sure that she wasn’t.
How she got upstairs was a mystery, but she thought she might have had Selima to thank for that. She woke up after only four hours from her belt digging into her stomach and her phone reminding her that she had an optometrist appointment today. As tempted as she was to cancel, she knew she wouldn’t be able to get another appointment for weeks. It was too late for that, anyway. Massive cancellation fees.
The house was quiet, empty save for herself. Everyone must have been at work. She dragged herself to the bathroom. Her reflection in the mirror almost scared her; smudged makeup, hair in total disarray… She looked like a wreck. She had to laugh at herself. Scared herself with her own reflection, that was an achievement. At least none of her piercings had given her a hard time. There was still a scar in her ear where a hoop had once gotten caught on a pillow once. She stuck to studs these days. Even though they dug into her head, it was less of a hazard.
Lindy couldn’t remember when she’d last showered. Sometime this week, probably. Dry shampoo was a blessing. She pulled the array of piercings from her ears and eyebrow and nose, setting them on the sink while the water warmed up. Even though she had more than half an hour to get ready, the stinging patches of skin on her feet made her cut it short. Goddamn blisters. But the boots were so nice. It was only April, and it was already a million degrees out — that was Southern Ontario for you — so she was trying to get as many wears out of them as she could. She dragged herself through the house in various stages of undress, warming up the breakfast Yasir had left for her and checking her hair straightener, shoving things into her purse as she went. She was simultaneously eating and straightening her hair while crumbs fell into the sink when she heard Lenna Alvarez, her other actual roommate, come in. The door slammed shut behind her.
“Lindy,” she called, “are you ready?”
Lindy swallowed a mouthful of bread and cheese.
“Just give me two seconds.”
“You’re going to be late.”
Lindy shut the straightener off and tied her hair up into a messy bun. It was all she could manage right now. She’d stopped dying herself out of the blonde category for a few months now, but it still made her do a double-take in the mirror when she forgot. There was always too much going on to remember what colour her hair was. She ran down the stairs, purse slung over her shoulder. It wasn’t until she ran toe first into the couch that she realized that her contacts were still upstairs. She didn’t have time to run back up.
“Fucking fuck,” she muttered, flexing her foot and fishing her spare glasses from the bottom of her purse.
There was a large scratch across the left lens, but she didn’t have time to get her good ones. It was the same prescription, anyway.
As much as she would have preferred taking her little blueberry of a car, she settled into the passenger’s seat of Lenna’s monster Jeep. It always just seemed like a good idea to let someone else drive her to these things. She couldn’t help but feel smug, though, when Lenna couldn’t find a space big enough to park in.
“My car would fit there,” she said.
Lenna snorted, baring her teeth a little.
“Your car is a toy. I’ll just drop you and park somewhere else.”
The appointment was a familiar routine. It wasn’t one Lindy enjoyed, either. Optometrists were almost worse than dentists. But her sight had become a problem since before high school, and she really didn’t need it getting worse. So here she was.
Dr Tim Beaumont was nice enough, if not impossible to read. They ran through the examination at a soul-crushing pace. By the time he sat her across from the chart on the wall, she was beyond ready to go back to sleep. Why was she even here? He wasn’t going to tell her anything she didn’t already know. She started to read, trying to keep her exhaustion from showing through her voice.
“E, F, P, T, O, Z, L, D, E, O.” Lindy paused at the fifth line. “P, E, O, F… O?”
Shit, that wasn’t right. She winced but kept reading. By the time she got to the seventh line, 20/25, the letters were a total blur. She could hear Dr Beaumont scribbling notes as she guessed at the black spots on the wall.
He pulled up a chair and sat across from her.
“Have you been wearing your glasses and contacts?” he asked.
Lindy gave a curt nod.
“And have you been looking at computer screens or reading for long periods of time?”
“Well, yeah. I’m a dispatcher, staring at computers is literally what I do all day.”
Granted, she didn’t work 9-5. Even though she and most other dispatchers worked the full 40 hours a week, the hours were more scattered. Depending on the week, she might work sixteen hours for two days and eight for one, or sixteen hours one day and only four for the other six, or any other weird combination. Even though she didn’t use the computer much outside of work, she still read just about every book she could get her hands on. Her bedroom was practically a makeshift library with books on just about every subject. She kept as many as she could find on her eReader, zooming in an almost comical amount, and filled her phone with audiobooks, but it wasn’t the same. Besides, most of her collection could only be found in print. Not large print, either.
Tim nodded in understanding.
“I think the best option right now is to get you a stronger prescription. I’d also like to have you tested for glaucoma and cataracts.”
Lindy swallowed but didn’t say anything. The thought of being blind by thirty made her stomach twist. Yeah, her vision had been shit for ages. But it wouldn’t get that bad. No-one in her family had ever had vision problems. Even her father, somewhere in his mid-50s, didn’t need glasses. She knew she could always ask one of the many Seers she knew if they saw that coming. But between false hope and the worst case, she didn’t want to know.
Dr Beaumont clasped his hands together, leaning forward. His expression was somewhere between solemn and stern, Lindy couldn’t tell. She could only see half his face.
“If you’re lucky, it won’t get any worse. You might need some surgery if it is one of those, depending on how it progresses.”
“What if it still isn’t glaucoma or cataracts, though?” she asked.
The back of her shirt suddenly felt damp, sweat rolling down her spine and pooling at the small of her back.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”
She saw Dr. Beaumont shaking his head with an apology at the back of her mind. She wanted to tell him that it wasn’t glaucoma. It wasn’t anything. There was no reason for the way her vision she was declining. Maybe they could slow it down, but there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Not really.
Lindy was going blind. It was only a matter of time, and as much as she tried to pretend otherwise, she knew it.
3
Between their work schedules, Dieter and Lindy didn’t see each other much, though they saw more of each other now that he was off school for the summer. When she had the time to think about it, she really did miss her brother.
She found him and Lenna smoking on the porch, late in the evening. While she wasn’t a fan of the smell, she was used to it. Almost everyone she knew smoked. She leaned forward over the wood railing.
“You know,” she said, “they say one out of every two smokers dies from it.”
Lenna grimaced and put her cigarette out on a metal nail sticking out from the wood.
“Thanks for the reminder,” she said dryly.
As a general rule, it wasn’t a reminder Lindy threw around often. If someone wanted to rot their lungs, that was their call. But Lenna was trying to quit for what was probably the seventh time in three weeks and had actually asked for the reminder, and Dieter… Dieter should have been quitting. Not even Lenna, who practically turned smoking into a hobby, smoked as much as he did. But if he had any intention of quitting the way he kept saying he would, Lindy had yet to see any proof of it. It wasn’t like she was his mom — she had never tried or wanted to be –– but it would be nice not to have the house smelling like an ashtray all the time.
She watched Lenna pop a piece of gum into her mouth before squeezing past her to get back inside the house. Her high heels clicked against the wood. At just over six feet tall, the extra height was just ridiculous. But Lindy wasn’t about to tell that to Lenna or Aldo, the black jaguar that had made himself her Familiar. It was just rude.
With Lenna inside, it was easy to notice just how quiet it got at night. The Morrighan House was pretty out of the way, tacked on at the edge of town like an afterthought. Between the massive wildcat and the spirits that flocked around her Necromancer brother, there weren’t many animals who ventured close enough to hear, and there was almost no traffic going by outside of commuter hours. While it was only a half hour walk to the University, it was far from everything else. But the rent was crazy cheap considering how nice the place was. Small, but nice. Lindy figured no-one wanted to live in a three bedroom, mid-19th century, former tourist not-so-hot spot next to nothing and nothing.
“It’s nice out,” Lindy said.
Dieter exhaled a lungful of smoke and nodded. The smell hit her nostrils, and she grimaced.
“You know, those’ll kill you, too.”
He shrugged, taking another drag.
“Not like Necromancers have a long life expectancy anyway.”
Wasn’t that a comforting thought? He wasn’t wrong, according to every source she could find. That didn’t mean his passive suicidal thoughts were okay.
“Dad’s pretty old,” she said. “He’s what, 55?”
Dieter shot her a hard look.
“Look, all I’m saying is that not all Necromancers die young,” Lindy said with as much optimism as she could manage.
“Alistair did.”
She had to stop herself from grimacing. She’d never trusted Alistair Cudmore, and with good reason. The fact that he was dead didn’t make her any more sympathetic to him, not after he’d killed two people and left her moron twin brother catatonic for a good half a year.
“That’s different,” Lindy pointed out.
It was not different. While a particularly rough personality disorder and a predisposition to bad ideas had influenced at least some of Alistair Cudmore’s actions, it might not have gotten him killed if not for the Necromancy. And fuck knew that Dieter wasn’t exactly the poster child for solid mental health.
“Is it wrong that I miss him?” Dieter asked softly.
Lindy’s first instinct was to say yes. Yes, it was a little wrong to miss a guy who killed two people and put Dieter in the hospital. But she couldn’t exactly blame him, either. Dieter had always been lonely, and Alistair had been the first person to know what to do about spirits. Apparently, there was something super isolating about being a Sensitive. Meeting another one had been good for Dieter. That Alistair had been the one to trick Dieter into becoming a Necromancer himself was also beside the point.
“No, it’s normal. Alistair was important to you,” Lindy said.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love Yasir and Selima, and they love me. But… I loved him too. It wasn’t his fault, you know. Shadows are just stronger than people.”
There it was, another painful reminder that he was screwed either way. Lindy inched closer and settled a hand on Dieter’s back. He stiffened only momentarily before relaxing.
“I’m sorry,” Lindy said.
Even though Lindy hadn’t done anything to be sorry for, there wasn’t much else to say. She was sorry, though. Sorry for the hell Dieter had gone through, sorry that she couldn’t know what would happen, sorry that she couldn’t help him through any of it. Maybe it was on their father, the biggest Necromancer this side of Montréal, but that didn’t make her feel any less guilty. It wasn’t her fault Ekkehardt had decided that pretending Dieter had schizophrenia was better, easier than just dealing with the reality of it. And, yeah, it was hard to tell where schizophrenia ended and Sensitivity began, she would admit that. Plus, Dieter did have a ton of other issues that needed working out. But she figured that he, of all people, would know better.
It wasn’t the same for her. Seers were common enough. Diviners were a dime a dozen. And there was more than enough literature to help her through what Ekkehardt couldn’t be assed to. It was half the appeal of Hellenism. So she’d more or less figured it out on her own. Internet forums had helped her more than Ekkehardt ever had.
“Do you work tonight?” Dieter asked.
“Not until three.”
“AM? That’s not tonight, that’s tomorrow morning.”
Lindy snorted. He wasn’t wrong on that one.
“Fine, I work tomorrow morning.”
She should have known what Dieter was from the start. Something should have tipped her off. The fact that in all her divining, she’d never been able to see anything about either Ekkehardt or Dieter should have been the reddest flag in the world. Most Seers dealt with spirit blindness, the inability to see anything through the dense whatever of spirits. The possibility of her dad being a frigging Necromancer had never even crossed her mind. It made so much more sense than that she just couldn’t see someone she was that close to.
Hindsight.
Dieter flinched away from something Lindy couldn’t see. Something she'd never been able to see.
"Let's go inside," he said, his voice suddenly shaky. "I don't want to be out here anymore."
She didn't blame him, and she didn't wonder at the randomness of the comment, when he was usually so at ease with being outside. Something about giving his Shadows more space to roam. And while it was awkward and uncomfortable not being able to see them – or anyone they surrounded, so to speak – she didn’t envy him. From the way people talked about them, they were terrifying.
Dieter held the front door open for her. The sudden brightness made her eyes burn. She tried to keep herself from wincing to avoid giving herself away, but she couldn’t stop herself from looking down. It still felt like she was staring right into the lamp.
“You okay?” Dieter asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m going to get some sleep before work.”
She made her way up the stairs, squinting as soon as Dieter was behind her.
Lindy was on her third cup of coffee when the call came in. The paper was still warm, brought in by another operator when he came back from his break.
“Nine-one-one, what’s the location of your emergency?”
“It’s not my emergency, Dietlinde.”
She stiffened, both from the familiarity of the voice and from her full first name. She jerked upright and pulled her notebook close, jotting down anything that might be helpful. Background noise, tone, enunciation. Anything.
“Whose emergency is it?” she asked as evenly as possible.
It wasn’t often that she spo
ke to the actual committee of the crime, especially if they weren’t turning themselves in. It was even less often that she got absolutely nothing from the caller; no sense of who they were, where they were, what they were. He could have been two feet away from her, and she wouldn’t be able to tell.
Frankly, it was fucking terrifying. Blindness in any form was not a fun thing.
“Hello?” she said. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“Can you tell me what you did?”
“I could. But why don’t you tell me something first.”
Lindy squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed the bridge of her nose. She was still waiting on her new glasses. No matter how much she zoomed in on her computer, her eyes ached. And this call was absolutely not helping.
“Okay,” she asked as patiently as she was physically capable, “what do you want me to tell you?”
“Does the name Bad Omen mean anything to you?”
She hadn’t been able to find her pen when she’d come into work. She couldn’t remember when she’d last taken it from her purse, but it wasn’t there. At the time, she’d been annoyed. But now, feeling the pencil snap from the force of her grip, it seemed like a small blessing.
“Where did you hear that name?” she demanded.
“So it does.”
“I didn’t say that.”
As if the taunting phone calls weren’t enough, as if the ‘I know who you are’ bullshit wasn’t enough, now he was throwing around Bad Omen as if– How would anyone who wasn’t a witch know that name?
Anonymity was important to witches, always had been. It was almost tradition more than anything at this point, going by nicknames. But those nicknames were guarded. No-one should be able to connect it to her. Well, no-one who didn’t frequent some pretty underground forums back in the early 2000s.
“You didn’t have to,” the caller said. “I can hear it in your voice. I just killed him.”
“You what?”