Feral Magic

by Nicolette Jinks

  FERAL MAGIC

  FERAL MAGIC

  NICOLETTE JINKS

  STANDAL PUBLICATIONS

  BETHESDA

  Standal Publications

  Bethesda

  King’s Ransom Magical Antiquities

  Copyright © 2011 by Nicolette Jinks

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United State of America. This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to people or events is unintentional and a coincidence. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent except in cases of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address:

  Standal Publications

  5308 Briley Place

  Bethesda, MD 20816

  Zechariah, you know how to push for dreams and you know how to encourage and bring out the best in others such as myself.

  Amberly, I’d never have gotten this far without your early fandom and blunt critiques.

  Sarah, I can’t imagine writing without thinking of the way you helped me to brainstorm and gain confidence.

  Auntie Dar, that week I spent with you at the Log Cabin Literacy Center was one of the most influential weeks of my life.

  And to all of you aspiring writers, have faith, be persistent, keep writing, and make yourself a support group, it’ll be the best investment that you could ever make.

  FERAL MAGIC

  CHAPTER ONE

  I shut the door, closing out the wind, and feeling the letter crumpled in my pocket. This letter had burned to me—that is, it appeared out of thin air starting with a wisp of smoke and ending with a full stationary, envelope and all. It was the sorcerer’s method of formal communication. The the owner of the Black Kettle Cafe would know who sent the letter, and if I should take their case.

  The Black Kettle Cafe was as it always had been: rustic, cozy, and comfortably warm. The walls were stone, the floor wood, and the thick rafters were let to show. Rain came down in sheets outside, and I had only to stand by the fireplace for its spell to dry my clothes. I hoovered there, shivering, until I lost the sensation of eyes watching me. Perhaps I was paranoid, but after a morning spiced with Death, I was not willing to take chances.

  “You going to order or brood in my living space?” Trish’s gravely voice drifted past the other customers, and I gave her a little smile, walking over.

  She was a gnome, but she looked more like a dwarf because she was the queen. Supposedly there were gnomes all over that we never acknowledged, and even more in the underground, but the only other gnomes I knew about were the sentry gnomes. They were stationary, watching, waiting, moving only when there was a thing in the shadows. Humans without magic, often degradingly called lambs by the sorcerers, often placed these grinning sentries as ornaments in their gardens and walkways. A gnome called Snap adopted my barn after a dog knocked him off a birdbath and chipped off his hat and right arm, thereby making him unappealing to most public. On occasion I would catch him speaking to the owls at night.

  Trish looked the same age as I remembered from childhood, but she now had a rounded belly hosting a growing prince or princess. She had been carrying it for two years now, and was almost as round as she was tall.

  “Do you know a Meredith Cole?” I asked, leaning on the granite counter and showing the signature on the bottom of the letter.

  “The baby’s fantastic, thank you so much,” Trish mocked dryly, but I had learned she was keen on the small talk unless it was to bring a person out of their shell.

  “Why, yes I see that. It’s almost bigger than you.”

  Trish’s face soured, and suddenly she did not want to talk about her pregnancy anymore. “Not much known about that Cole family. They’re ruling class sorcerers. Meredith is about as far away from the family as you can get, but that man Gregor is sheer trouble. Stay clear, and don’t let him onto your curse. Play the dumb lamb.”

  Sorcering families obeyed the magic laws, an archaic set of rules that forbade change and glorified the pure bloodlines. Ruling classes often lived entirely in magic, and had nothing to do with the lamb world, though those people were few and getting fewer. Nevertheless, they were very formidable and twisted their laws so they were held unaccountable to their actions.

  “Who are his dependents?” I wanted to avoid them at all costs.

  “No children—at least, none living. Was a son from his first marriage.”

  “And he is a purist?” Purists were as they sounded. They believed only in magic and magic laws, and saw lambs as worse than second class.

  “As pure as you can get.” She clanked out coffee grounds from the reservoir of her espresso machine.

  That boded well for me; not. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if his wife wrote the letter, but I had a hunch I needed information on this Gregor. My hunches were usually correct, and that concerned me. The wise thing to do would be to walk away—but this Meredith had offered me triple pay, and that would last me for a full year. “What happened to the first wife?”

  “What always happens?” The steamer screamed as she pressed the milk carafe under it.

  Marry a purist, and you are doomed to disappear. “Who is the new wife?”

  “Name’s Bliss Bernadette Cole. Get out of there if she shows up—sweet lady, but no one looks at her without Gregor taking notice.”

  Getting noticed was possibly the last thing I wanted. I had already formed a reputation, and it was getting hard to avoid photographs, especially with all the electronic devices that had a camera anymore. Not that there was much wrong with pictures, unless it was taken to a specialist. I don’t know why I worried about it, really. I doubted I could gain much power using secondhand trinkets. Sighing, I asked, “Should I know anything else?”

  I learned to ask that question out of necessity. Trish was a library of information, full of centuries of knowledge, but she only spoke of it if you asked the right questions. If most people were to ask that question, she would doubtless not give them a good answer. But I wasn’t most people. I was almost family.

  Trish turned her eyes, round as marbles, onto me and blinked massive eyelids. It still disoriented me when I wasn’t expecting it; all part of the gnome queen’s defensive abilities. I knew what subject she was going to touch on, and I swallowed painfully. It was about Railey’s death and my curse. Railey was my personal ghost, but she was old and fading. Most days she was not present, and it was going to be dangerous for me to go about my work alone. If I took this one final case, I could find a way to help Railey pass on and possibly I could find a new partner.

  “That spook house you and that Fitzgerald girl were at? Her death started an investigation, and next thing, that Cole bought it and declared they were trespassing.”

  That meant no more investigation. The lump in my throat hardened. Trish asked the question I knew she would.

  Trish leaned forward. “What brought you there to start with?”

  The gnome had been trying to worm that out of me for ten years—same with the rest of the sorcering community. I still paled at the memory. I gave her the same reply as always, “I will tell you. When the time is right.”

  Trish blinked at me again, threatening to engulf me in those massive, watery eyes. She sighed and clattered a syrup bottle to the counter. “Go to the bathrooms. Meredith is waiting in the white couch by the fire.”

  “Can I get an espresso shot? You know how your portal is.” Portals were links from one place to an entirely different place. It could be as simple as walking into a closet and stepping out into a street, or as dramatic as opening a cupboard and reaching into a lava pit. While in sorcering houses and haunts, one was wise to not go through a door they had not been shown into.

  “Go. I got customers,” grumbl
ed Trish.

  That translated to a yes.

  I walked into the women’s restroom and pretended to fuss with my hair until the other gal finished washing and left. Trish’s portal door was peculiar amongst portals. If you did not know about it, you would wonder why you suddenly felt sleepy—and why when you walked out, you entered an identical coffee house in a different city. Now, that only happened on accident. It was rumored that Trish’s portal spell was self-aware, thought to be theoretically possible but not without significant difficulties.

  Once I felt a wave of exhaustion set in, similar to jet lag but it happens all at once, I washed off my face to take the shock away, and then re-entered the Kettle. Trish greeted me with an espresso and a pointed stare I was not sure how to translate. She was the only creature I knew of that could exist across time and places, and I tried to not think about how magic allowed it to happen. On the flip side, I never saw her leave the Kettle. I did not think that she could.

  Midday sun shone through the windows, and I reasoned we must be in the east. The streets were smaller, the cars were, too, and they were bumper to bumper and the brave stray even drove down the sidewalk.

  “The city,” I muttered, this job tasting already more sour than before. Too many grimy people, too many cars, too many opportunities to get jumped or open a door into a pit of boiling lava.

  As promised, Meredith sat on the white couch in front of the fireplace. It was where I would have sat. Her face was angelic and soft, and she was framed like a ballerina. A dainty nose was on her face, and with a bit of concentration I placed her as belonging to the Banks family in some way. The Banks were a good sort of family, the sort who sought moderation and kindness first. They were technically one of the ruling family, but they were just as much of an outcast as I was. Father was portal door friends with the Bankses, meaning that they would deny each other in public but they trusted each other in private. It was all about appearances. I did not know what the Coles looked like, and that was very unfortunate considering the situation.

  I sat down close to her, causing her to jump and draw in a breath.

  “I’m Feraline,” I said before she could cast a spell. It had been a while since I worked with sorcerers, I forgot how jumpy they are.

  “Good,” she said. Then rushed, “were you followed?”

  “No,” I said, though I was not sure about that. Trish’s portal was supposed to be the most secure of any portal, but she still had problems.

  “I was expecting...where’s your partner?”

  Cleansers, as they call me, always work in pairs. The most obvious reason is because a lone cleanser normally meets a foul ending very early in their career.

  “Doing errands,” I lied. Railey was usually more trouble than she was worth during these client meetings, but her absence made me uncomfortable. I tried to not show it, and my distressed client did not seem to notice. “Tell me about what has been happening.”

  So she did, in bits and pieces, sometimes glossing over details, sometimes going into depth about things I did not care about. But I listened. What she told me confused me. It seemed to be a combination of malicious, curious, calling for help, and residual. Railey would have helped me piece together what was relevant and what was not, but I thought Meredith was frightened and noticing normal occurrences in a strange light. I had her sign a contract; she hardly read it. I did not like that, not at all. I decided to repeat my questions again, to see what stands out upon retelling.

  “Here’s a phone,” I said, handing her a prepaid one. “You turn it on by...”

  She nodded. “I know how to use it.”

  She shouldn’t, not if she were from the Cole family, though it did make me feel reassured about taking her case. The purists shunned technology altogether, but the rest of the sorcering community accepted those items had been invented by a sorcerer. I reasoned that perhaps Meredith had been more closely raised by her Banks relatives than the Coles.

  “I’ll stay with friends tonight so I don’t...contaminate the scene,” she said.

  “Good,” I said. I thought I saw a dark shape dash behind me, but when I turned my head all I saw was the Kettle in its usual activities. “What’s been happening?”

  The woman sighed as though I hadn’t heard her the first time, then humored me. “Ever since I got marr—I mean, since I moved into my house, I get the feeling there’s something watching me all the time.”

  “Any old wiring?” That stuff gave the feeling of being watched, nausea, and a list of other things that many people mistakenly perceived as supernatural.

  “You mean electricity? No, nothing. That is, I looked into the high electro-magnetic stuff, and the house doesn’t have any. There’s something...evil in there. I hired others, but they weren’t as authentic as you...you could do better marketing.”

  Sure, I could if I wanted to go out on every house call that included overactive imaginations or residual haunts. People found me when they were desperate. “Anything else?”

  “There’s this odor that comes and goes. Like cooked or rotten meat, but I don’t let anything go bad and I’m not much of a cook...”

  “Anything else, at all?”

  “It chases me some nights.”

  “What does?” I asked. Rotten meat smell and being chased? This was starting to get interesting.

  She clasped her hands nervously. “That’s what I want you to find out. And get rid of it, if you can.”

  I really wished Railey were here, but hopefully she would be present tonight to help out. “No promises, other than I will do the best I can.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Meredith showed me to her house and mentioned once that her husband wasn’t due back for another two days. While this made me raise my eyebrows, it was fairly common for one person to act without the other if the partner was a skeptic. Whatever was in this house, it wasn’t right. There was no clear signs how so, but I felt it in my bones. I wanted to run away screaming. At least once Meredith left, I felt a welcome presence near me, a warm feeling and one of protection in a house that seemed to hunt me.

  “Railey?”

  An overall-clad ghost formed next to me in the dust caught by a beam of a nightlight, her pigtails ruffled with spider webs as though she’d been snooping around. Her round nose wrinkled in disgust.

  “I’m not having any better luck than you,” she snipped, stamping a bare foot without making a sound. She glared at the floor and stomped again, and was rewarded with a pat similar to a cat landing. It made her half-smile, but I saw worry wrinkle her eyes. The fading was worse.

  “Are you sure it’s not a bogart or wisp?” I said, taking a long swig from my water bottle. For each tick of the grandfather clock, I had been hopeful that the spirit would decide to come see us, but we weren’t having much fortune. When we tried rearranging the rooms and burning sage, we received a response that seemed scripted by a spell instead of a more human reaction.

  “It is a boy, or at least his soul,” she said.

  I shrugged and said, “Are there any spells on the place?”

  “There’s something cold coming from that room we aren’t supposed to go in.”

  I’d had a feeling we were going to have to violate the one condition Meredith had given us, and I mentally debated between breaking in and risking any trap spells—or being dumped into a lake of lava—and asking Meredith to open it.

  “Railey, is there any way he will come talk to us, even if we break into that room?”

  She closed her eyes and glowed a little, then the glow left with a breeze. “No. He wants a mother.”

  I raised my hands and said, “We need to call Meredith.”

  Railey tsked at me, slung her arms into a hard cross, and stuck out her bottom lip. While I was hesitant to call in more people, she downright deplored the very thought. She thought other people ruined our system, demanding explanations, jumping at nothing, talking over real noises, and in general getting in the way. I wished it wasn’t that way,
but not everyone grew up raised by demon-hunting parents, being taught what was and wasn’t good to do. While Railey was alive, she hadn’t cared to know. She just ran into whatever trouble she found and hoped for the worst to not happen.

  I looked at my phone and wished I could use my slim roll of unused parchment and a lighter that I used to have late-night conversations with Railey and Lilly. I hadn’t ever mastered fire, not even forming a small flame. While I could still receive burned messages, I couldn’t send them. My parents had a phone, and so did my brother, in case I ever had something follow me home from one of their visits. It had happened before, and I felt barely capable of delaying the thing until help arrived. Ghosts and bogarts and brownies were about my limit, not particularly powerful creatures but they could be cunning and sly.