No one was going to take this belonging from me.
“Did you intend to take on the role of Keeper then? Uneducated as you are? You’re barely a necromancer.”
“But I am, however, an awesome witch. And, take note, this is the important part, what I do or don’t do is none of your business. I bet that the money is wrapped up in whoever is accepted by the house. I am betting that the actual Keeping of the Thinning has often gone with that role, but not even the house could make someone do their job. I am betting that I can be the Keeper or not be the Keeper, but once the house accepts me—you guys can’t do anything about anything.”
I nodded to the others and they stepped inside the house, and more importantly, the wards. I’ll admit that her insults burned a bit. Mostly because they were said under truth serum. I wondered if she even knew that I dosed her? It didn’t seem like it. Where was the outrage? Where were the dire warnings of retribution?
“You’re mean,” Chrysie told the woman who stood in the doorway, uninvited and unable to bypass the wards.
“Yes,” the woman replied—under truth serum.
“She’s a flunky,” I told Chrysie. “She didn’t realize that we doped her and she didn’t realize that her spell didn’t work. She thinks she did something wrong.”
The flunky, Habitha’s eyes widened, and she demanded, “What did you do?”
I smiled evilly at her with all of my monster—I preferred to refer to this monster inside of me as a monster rather than inner-Autumn. Since my mother was, of course, a super-villain.
Anyway, I didn’t answer. I just closed the door.
“What if you hadn’t eaten that pepperoni? What if you hadn’t showered? What if you’d done your own wards first?” Chrysie’s frantic babble was a bit soothing. It was weird, but the truth was—I liked her. And because I liked her, her voice was a sound I liked to hear.
“Look,” I told Jessie, Felix, and Chrysie. “Right now, the money isn’t a concern. What is a concern is that they’re so quick to screw with us. Chrysie, you need to call your mom. You need to ask her what she knows. I assume she isn’t a big liar like mine?”
“She wouldn’t lie,” Chrysie said instantly, but she didn’t look like she wanted to make that call. I didn’t blame her. Even I wouldn’t want to make that call, and my mother would probably have engineered my death and resurrection as a vampire.
“Jessie do you know who is on the council?”
“I only know a few. I think there’s 13. And I know for sure that Dr. Hallow and Dr. Lechner are on it.”
“Is Dr. Lechner a Hallow?”
“The council is more than Hallows sometimes. You have to be invited and the Hallow family keeps control for the most part. But every once in a while, they invite others. I don’t think Dr. Hallow would have been behind that,” Jessie said, looking doubtfully at where they’d shut the door in Habitha’s face. I wasn’t sure if she was still on the other side and I didn’t care.
“We don’t trust him until we know who is doing the killing,” I said flatly. I turned back to the dining room. I had only been in a half-dozen of the rooms in this house and I didn’t think I’d be able to explore any time soon. “Who’s got money?”
The other three raised their hands. But the house coughed. A door opened and we walked into a room that soothed my very soul.
“Oh sweet Hecate,” I breathed, spinning in a circle.
“I read about this place,” Jessie said reverently. “Dr. Hallow told me all about it. I have dreamed of being here.”
It was a library. There were ladders. A second and third floor. There were books everywhere that were heavy with power. There were large leather chairs and wide recliners with old but sort of awesome fabric. There were heavy tables and chalk boards and stacks of parchment. There were quills and art—amazing art.
Felix and Chrysie spun, as entranced as I was. Jessie though, she looked like she was on the edge of tears.
“I guess you come by your inner-Hermione naturally, Rue,” Felix said. “So what are we looking for, house?”
“I suspect it’s that,” Chrysie said pointing towards a wide wall. There was a bookcase that didn’t align with the rest by about a foot and light was coming from the room.
We walked to it together and found another small room inside of this one. There was another table. More bookshelves, but if the ones in the other room were heavy with power these were screaming power at me. The power from them made my skin hurt and my hair crackle, and they filled me with an awe that didn’t include a desire to touch them. They were screaming a warning at me instead. Don’t touch me. Tread carefully.
“Oh wow,” Jessie said. She reached out to touch the books. I grabbed her hand to stop her. We had no idea what these books were or the nature of their power. Not everything was benign. If my ancestors were anything like my mother, we couldn’t trust them. I’d certainly be wary of anything my mother felt the need to hide away.
“House?” I asked, thinking it needed a name. Something…homely. Like Beatrix or Martha.
The house replied by swinging a painting out and revealing a safe. I, of course, didn’t know the combination, but it seemed the house did. It swung it open and inside I found stacks of cash, boxes that were clearly jewelry, other things that were probably money and a piece of paper fluttered to the floor.
I picked it up and found a will written in Proto-Romanian. I wasn’t a lawyer, but even I could tell that the council wouldn’t win the money fight. That was a battle for another day though. First, I’d like to live.
“Anyone have a car?”
Everyone shook their head.
I tapped my finger against the table before pulling out enough money to buy a car. I told Felix to make a finding spell and ask the house for a truth serum. He was in charge of buying something that was reliable and big enough for all of us.
“Chrysie,” I said, realizing she’d become part of our group. “Make a grocery list and get enough food for a while. And lots and lots of things that will last in case we decide to hole up. Think like before you were a vampire and get a lot more for you now.”
“Jessie, I am going to see Dr. Lechner. I want you to figure out everyone who has died who could be part of this stuff. You’ll have to reference with Chrysie’s mom to see who she can list out.”
“House,” I said, “I’m calling you Martha. Martha, is there a warding bracelet here?”
The door to the room we were in opened. I let everyone else leave before me, and then I said, under my breath, “Martha, you lock this room off.”
I felt along my magical senses a quiet acknowledgment from Martha and I left the inner room, letting the door close behind me and feeling the sealing of the room by the house.
Time to see why they were so determined to keep me from the Keeper role and if that was why people were being murdered.
Without becoming the Keeper myself.
chapter 15
It was weird that they’d just done what I’d said.
I mean…Felix strode off with the money for a car. He had something in mind, and the look on his face told me to be prepared for terrible. There was a lot of money in that safe…but it wasn’t endless, and I had a hunch that we’d need to preserve it. I would get whatever inheritance there was to go with the house…but that was an eventuality.
And my mom hadn’t just prepped me with spells. I could budget and write checks and knew about things like property taxes and electric bills. There was a bit of an appeal to avoid those things longer by staying in the dorms. But I loved Martha. She might be a house, but she soothed the monster in me. It didn’t matter that it had been such a short time.
She was my home.
I was walking towards the campus alone. That’s when I realized.
Maybe it was stupid to split up.
I was regretting our separate assignments as I walked up the campus steps to the Quietus building. I hadn’t realized how creepy the building was. There was a chill in the air, and a
sense of heaviness like a storm was going to roll in. I looked up but didn’t see anything in the sky. I wondered if my weather sense had gotten better or perhaps the weather was just so different here, with different cues than there were in the San Juans. Perhaps the problem was that I was overly paranoid right now, thinking someone was going to jump out around each bend and kill me.
I could just hear my mother in my head. She’d be dryly muttering how she’d thought she hadn’t raised such an idiot at my funeral. Her voice all emotionless as her eyes settled on Branka. Mother would realize she’d have to make do with the other heir. I couldn’t do that to my sister. If there was one thing Bran wanted, it was freedom from my mother’s thumb and the ability to follow adventure full speed ahead.
I shook off my morbid thoughts. No one was going to jump out and murder me. Not with some ancient Presidium vampire on hand to track them down and slay them hard.
There was still a sense of darkness to my thoughts as I bypassed the elevator for the stairs. Someone might think the stairs were creepier. But only until they were caught in the elevator unable to escape, no alternatives for getting away. I needed to shake off the morbid thoughts.
But I couldn’t.
I tried not to think after as I made my way up to Lechner’s office with an entirely different attitude than I had on the last occasion. Last time I had been so hopeful. So controlled. I’d kept my thoughts to myself and gone into her office with dreams and come out crushed. I wonder how’d she feel about me this time? Perhaps I should be visiting Dr. Hallow, but…
But the thing was, he wasn’t the alpha dog in all of this. Of that I was sure. He’d given away too much at my testing. He’d…I bet he didn’t do testing normally. I bet…I bet he’d been there to see me. What were grad students for if you didn’t make them do things like test the freshmen?
I shook my head, remembering how confident I’d been in my skills and also how it had been for nothing. Skilled as a witch or not, I wasn’t a necromancer. I wasn’t good enough for these people because Autumn was my mother and she’d taken my heritage and decided not to share it. I wasn’t sure what to do about that. I wasn’t sure Mother had been wrong. I mean…Hecate’s eyes…people were dying.
It didn’t even make any sense. Why would anyone want to slay the Hallow Keepers and their heirs? Did it even have anything to do with that? Was it some other vendetta against the family? I mean…I hadn’t known my grandparents maybe they were morally challenged like my mother. Maybe someone had a solid reason to kill them. I didn’t endorse murder, but I could sure see why someone would be driven to murdering Mother. She was certainly a super-bitch.
I opened the door to Dr. Lechner’s office without knocking. Mandi wasn’t there to stop me, and I wanted a little vengeance. I wanted to show her that she didn’t get to push everyone around. That I wasn’t there as some needy scholarship student. I was there to show her that I was the Hallow heir. That she couldn’t just kick me out of my heritage.
What I got..
…it was the smell first.
Rich, warm, and coppery. And offal. And a psychic scream that told me before I even laid eyes on the scene that someone had died. It took me long moments…minutes…longer, I wasn’t sure—anyway, it took forever to identify what I was seeing.
First there was the blood. That was the obvious part. But then I identified bones.
Oh, gods. Bones and then…scalp.
She’d been torn to pieces and left on the floor, the walls like so much rejected meat. Sprays of her covered everything. Her spell books, her magic paraphernalia. Her little metal Eiffel Tower. A family picture that showed no people for her very blood had blocked them out.
I had no idea if she was all there—I hadn’t even been sure what I was seeing was human until I saw her silver pixie cut of hair, partially coated in blood. It was that silver hair. The small gold ball earring on the ear that was still attached to her scalp but detached from her skull.
The recognition of that small piece of her with the carefully tasteful earring was what sent me reeling.
Before it had been a scene from a horror movie.
After…it was a person.
Someone’s grandmother?
Someone’s mother?
I had no idea, but whoever loved her would be crying later, and they wouldn’t be able to squeeze her hand and kiss her forehead one last time.
Gods, what did I do? Do I leave? Run away and pretend like I’d never been there? Did I call for help?
The scream behind me gave me my answer. I had been frozen, processing the madness in front of me. Whoever came behind me was far better able to respond than I was.
“Oh, my!” A sniffle, horrified and filled with emotion, followed as I turned slowly around. “What did you do?”
“Me? Nothing.”
I could hardly believe the question. How could anyone think that I had done this? That anyone had? This was no still pretty but dead Chrysie. This was no body by the lake.
This was horror, madness, terror, it was magic that—despite my carefully selected arsenal of spells—was far beyond me. This was something that…that….that was so inhuman I couldn’t believe it of a witch, vampire, or shifter.
This was something…else.
“Don’t lie.” The voice wailed and I recognized the speaker as I turned to her. It was Dr. Lechner’s assistant, Mandi. The eyes were flat as they looked at me. I wanted to remind her that I was just a kid. That I couldn’t have done this. That I wasn’t even allowed in the Dream Magic classes—this…
But she didn’t let me protest, she continued accusing me with a cold voice, “After Chrysanthemum, I didn’t think you had killed your roommate. You had been so sad about the classes and seemed so young and innocent. But this…no one will believe you now.”
That’s when the anger sparked through the shock. “They don’t have to believe me, they have to have eyes.”
Mandi’s cell phone was in her hand and I could hear the phone dialing. I assumed she was calling the Presidium sharks to take me away. I didn’t have a phone or a number for anyone…other than my mother.
I walked to the desk and used the phone there. Mostly because if I didn’t escape the horror and smell of Dr. Lechner’s office, I wasn’t going to be able to keep functioning. I needed to cry and scream. I needed to run way. But I didn’t. I didn’t try to leave, Mandi’s sharp eyes told me I would regret any attempt, but I slid down the wall outside of Dr. Lechner’s office, away from where the blood was rolling into the hallway and called my mother.
“Veruca,” she said.
“Louisa Lechner is dead.”
My voice was shaking. I wanted my mommy. I wanted her to save me. I wanted her to come and make it all go away. I knew what she was, and I doubted she’d rescue me. She expected me to rescue myself, but I needed to know she would stand with me.
And despite who she was—I had little doubt she would.
“I found her.”
Mother had said nothing, but I felt the full focus of her attention and knew her diabolical mind would be working on my behalf.
“Mandi found me at the scene. She’s assuming I killed the professor.”
I didn't need to tell Mother I was terrified. I didn’t need to tell her I was barely holding it together. But the knowledge that she expected me to stand tall was helping me do just that.
“Girl up,” I whispered. Mother heard me, but she didn’t comfort me.
Instead, she said, ““A part of me would be grateful if you had killed her. She always has made my life difficult and these last couple of days have been no different.”
I closed my eyes. What she was saying was horrible, but I heard the huff of her breath and felt the pull of her spirit coming closer. She was coming. I just had to make it until she got here. Then she would—she wouldn’t do any of the mother things. She wouldn’t wrap me up in her arms. She wouldn’t tell me everything would be okay. She wouldn’t caress my hair or whisper encouragement.
But she would stand tall in front of me. She’d girl up. Sure she’d be a villain if she had to, but she would protect me.
She was my mother.
Jackal or not.
And I was her daughter.
“She’s in pieces,” my voice was a stark whisper. I didn’t add that I was trying not to lose it. I didn’t tell her how the smell was making me want to curl into a ball and hide. I didn’t let the cry that was desperate to escape come out.
“I’m coming,” Mother said. It was the most comforting thing I had ever heard her say.
“Where are you?”
“Near the coven grounds.”
Gods. That was a ways on foot. Especially for a mother who was not a small woman.
“Alone?”
“Of course.”
“Did you kill her?” I didn’t really think she had, but I needed to hear her say no. Did I think she would lie to me?
Yes.
Gods. Yes. I did.
But I thought back to the horror I had seen and knew that she hadn’t killed Dr. Lechner. My mother was the poison you quietly type and never even betray that she’d cared if you’d lived or died. My mother would not get caught being a murderer. And this type of crime. There was so much madness that the Presidium would never let it go unchecked. There was no doubt in my mind that they would find the killer.
I just hoped they didn’t make a mistake and pin it on me.
“If I were going to kill Louisa, I would have done it years and years ago and kept my birthright.” Mother’s voice was struggling which filled me with a warmth that was powerful beyond belief. She was struggling…to get to me…her daughter.
Gods, how I loved her. I never, ever wanted to live with her again. But I loved her to the depth of my bones.
“You didn’t tell me about the Keeper thing.” There was no accusation in my voice. There was never a need for an accusation. There was just a need to be heard. At this moment, I needed to distract myself from the smell and the horror and the knowledge that the Presidium sharks would be coming for me. Would Elizabeth and my mother be enough against their willingness to throw this crime on me as well?
Hallow Graves: A Rue Hallow Mystery Page 13