“Ah. Sorry I dragged you away.”
“Don’t be. Will you be okay finding a witch spell? We don’t have any spare iron charms here, otherwise I’d loan you one.”
Of course he wouldn’t own any himself, being part faerie.
“Our housemate does custom spells,” I said. “Or we’ll go to the market. Should I come back later? Because that creature knows where the guild is…”
“A lot of enemies know where the guild is. It’s a little difficult to ignore.” He looked at Morgan. “Come back tomorrow. I’ll find everything I can on fetches. Read the rest of that handbook, if you haven’t already.”
Morgan began to walk away as though he hadn’t spoken.
“I’ll watch him,” I said. “See you later.”
Morgan grunted. “What a total knob.”
“Morgan,” I said warningly. “River’s been to a lot of trouble for our sakes.”
Morgan gripped the iron container tightly. “Guess I’ll ask Corwin. He runs a witch stall at the market.”
I hope he’s right. This was a temporary solution, I knew. But I wouldn’t risk Morgan’s life. He kept shooting me disgruntled looks all the way home whenever I not-so-subtly checked he wasn’t possessed again. You can hardly blame me for being jumpy. My whole body ached from where he’d hit me and knocked me into the road, and when it began to rain heavily, blood dripped into my eyes from a cut underneath my hairline. I rubbed half-heartedly at it with my sleeve, wondering if the necromancers’ coats weren’t intended to hide bloodstains after all.
I tensed when the house came into view, seeing someone on the doorstep again. But I didn’t need to tap into the spirit world to see the universe hadn’t finished trampling on either of us for today.
Hazel stood there waiting for us, arms folded, fury in her eyes.
12
Hazel gave my brother a blistering stare. “So it’s true. You’re back.”
“Oh,” said Morgan. “Hi.”
“Hey, Morgan,” said Hazel, icily. “So nice of you to call and check up on me. Really appreciate it.”
“Ah.” Morgan shifted from one foot to the other. “Didn’t know you were coming.”
“That’d be because the phone number I have under your name is a few years out of date. When I tried calling it, I got a witch called MacDougal.”
“Ah. Yeah. The witches stole my phone.”
“The witches stole your phone,” Hazel repeated. Anger brewed in the air, so heated that I expected the rainwater dripping from her hair to evaporate on the spot.
“I’m going to ask Corwin for a spell,” I told them. “Meanwhile, you two can stand out in the rain and yell at one another, or come into the warmth and keep your tempers under control. I’m starving and bruised and entirely too many people have tried to kill me today.”
“Bring me up to speed,” said Hazel, shooting Morgan a look. “I’ll behave if he does.”
“Then try not to blow up the house.” I unlocked the door. “I’m serious. This place isn’t quite as sturdy as home. If you smash the furniture, it’ll stay broken, and I’ll have to deal with disgruntled housemates and angry rental companies. So please try not to damage anything.”
I walked inside. A moment later, the others trailed after me, their glares searing the back of my neck. They needed a good screaming match to get it out of their systems, but that was on them, not me. I took off my necromancer coat and threw it over the back of the nearest chair in the kitchen, where Corwin had left spells strewn everywhere. I guessed he was working at the market today. I went to the corner where he kept his chalk circle supplies and found an iron charm.
“I brought food from the house, by the way,” said Hazel.
“You did?” I looked back at her. “Good, because I don’t have enough for three people.”
“Thought not. Also, if you’re as bad a cook as I remember, I don’t want you poisoning us.”
“Hey,” I protested, handing the iron charm to Morgan. “Hope this doesn’t turn you green, because it’s all I’ve got.”
Hazel put the bags down on the table, completely blanking Morgan. Good strategy, because I wanted my hands on the Lynn house’s divine cooking and nothing else. Luckily, the others seemed to agree, and Hazel seemed more interested in Corwin’s magical props.
“Watch the spells. They sometimes have unintended side effects,” I warned her around a mouthful of pastry.
“Let me guess, Morgan touched them,” Hazel said.
“Got it in one,” I said, then swiftly changed the subject. I brought Hazel up to speed on my necromancer training, including my surprise at Lady Montgomery being River’s mother.
“I’ll bet Mum knows her,” Hazel said. “She knows all the leading supernaturals who fought in the war.”
“I didn’t know any of this until I came here,” I said. “I didn’t know the necromancer guild’s practically a fortress, or so… organised. Compared to Greaves’s place anyway. Have they elected a new leader yet?”
“I think so, but they haven’t come visiting. Pretty sure Greaves came back as a ghost and told them himself.” She looked at Morgan, her expression guarded. “I take it you know all of this.”
“I do now. Took her long enough to tell me.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Hazel. “I wouldn’t go around shouting our secrets to someone who ran off eight years ago.”
“She said you cried when I left.”
Thanks, Morgan.
Hazel gave me an accusing stare. “Excuse me? If you remember, it was tears of joy that the scrounging bastard was finally out of our lives.”
“Guys!” I said, before the situation devolved into a shouting match. “Okay, I wasn’t expecting you to show up, Hazel. It’s been a Week. With a capital W. People have tried to kill both of us. Several times. Also, Morgan has psychic powers.”
That shut both of them up long enough to finish my explanation. When we were finally done, I prepared myself for an onslaught of questions.
Hazel spoke first. “So the two of you are like, honorary necromancers now?” Did she sound a little jealous? No way. It was only right that the pair of us got to have our turn in the spotlight.
“Not until I pass training,” I said. “I’m junior level… if I ever get to sit any more exams without being interrupted. And Morgan went to the guild today so we could work out what his powers are. Turns out he’s being psychically haunted by something, and the guild is the only place where it stops.”
“So it’s a faerie ghost?” asked Hazel.
“Fetch,” I said. “For whatever reason, it’s figured out he’s a psychic and keeps tormenting him. And it’s linked to whoever’s summoning the wraiths, but the guy working for them got caught and died, so we’re back to square one.”
“Fetches.” She swore under her breath. “I’ll have to think… they’re death omens, kind of like banshees. But instead of screaming when you’re about to die, they just… show up.”
“None of us actually saw the fetch. It spoke through someone else. Can they do that?”
“No clue,” said Hazel. “Psychic stuff definitely isn’t my area.” Worry laced her tone. Despite her and Morgan’s outward hostility, Hazel’s main reason for embracing her role as the Summer Gatekeeper’s heir was because she’d wanted to keep the rest of us safe. Ghosts and fetches alike were immune to her powers, putting this situation way out of her area.
“You want to stay here overnight?” I asked. “We’re running an experiment where Morgan wears an iron spell to keep the fetch out. If it doesn’t work, he’ll have to stay at the guild. The other night, he ended up sleepwalking on the orders of a murderous ghost and wandered outside.”
“Damn.” Hazel shook her head. “Sure, I can stay. It’s quiet at the house without you there.”
“Is Arden around? He flew after me the other day.”
“He comes and goes. I don’t trust him enough to let him see anything important these days. None of the notes Mum left behind. He
’s still refusing to tell me where she is. I kind of hoped River would have given you an update.”
“Nothing. If there’s anything new, he can’t say.” I exhaled in a sigh. “Not sure I want to explain to her how I ended up joining the necromancers…”
“Let alone me,” Morgan put in. “Thanks for telling me Mum’s been kidnapped.”
“I don’t think she’s been kidnapped,” said Hazel. “She’s just held up in Faerie. It happens a lot. You know that. Remember when she left for a month and we turned the garden into a fortress?”
Hazel hadn’t brought up that memory since Morgan had gone, but I remembered clearly as though it’d happened yesterday. It’d been just after Hazel’s Gatekeeper’s power had manifested, and Hazel had used it to create a proper medieval castle in the back garden. It’d scared the crap out of Mum when she’d come back.
“She still left us to handle it alone,” said Morgan. “Sounds about right.”
“Look, you can take your grievances straight to her,” I said. “I’m dealing the best I can. And so is Hazel. She’s acting Gatekeeper, and I’m—”
“Some other kind of Gatekeeper.”
I shrugged. “It’s to do with the gates between the veil and Beyond. The afterlife. Specifically, faerie ghosts.”
“And you mentioned a book? Can I see it?”
I hesitated, but I’d chosen to trust him. Pulling the book from my pocket, I held it up. At least it wasn’t glowing.
“I wouldn’t touch—” But of course he’d already snatched it from my hands, flipping through the pages.
“How much is this worth?”
“Several lives,” I said.
“If you steal it,” Hazel put in, “Grandma’s ghost will appear and smite you.”
“It’s also cursed,” I added. “And only works for the Gatekeeper. Hence the blank pages. Give it here.”
I ended up having to tug it from his hands. Morgan’s expression was a little glazed, and I hoped it was just the book’s magic, not anything more sinister. He’d said the fetch’s link to his head was one way… that it couldn’t read his mind. And nobody could take the book, especially not a ghost. Still, I’d be sleeping with the damn thing under my pillow tonight.
“Also,” I said, “its magic means that we can only discuss it within the family and people who already know. So it won’t let you tell another soul. It took ages to figure out how to tell River. It’s also been mostly blank until fairly recently, so I’m learning how to get it to tell me what I need to know. I wish it had more info on psychics and fetches, but I think its speciality is dark faeries.”
“Fetches are dark faeries, though,” said Hazel. “If it’s been following Morgan, it must have been in this realm a while… I wish we could track it.”
“Me too, but he can’t hear its thoughts without getting a headache, and it damn near killed me earlier. We’ll go to the necromancers in the morning and see if they have any more ideas.”
“I thought they knew the Summer Gatekeeper here,” said Hazel.
“They know of the Gatekeepers,” I said. “Not necessarily the details. Lady Montgomery does, but that’s because she’s been poking around trying to learn as much as possible.”
Her brows rose. “She knows about Aunt Candice?”
“She does. That’s why she’s reserving judgement on whether to trust us or not. But she doesn’t know what I am, or about the book.”
Nor how I might have drawn the enemy’s attention by using its magic. It’d been risky enough to use it at the Winter estate, but the Ley Line went through Edinburgh, too. Maybe our enemy was counting on exactly that. The curse of the Gatekeeper was that I held all these lives in my hands, whether I acknowledged it or not. Not just the lives in this room.
Maybe the fetch hadn’t come for Morgan at all.
Unsurprisingly, I didn’t get much sleep that night. Hazel and Morgan kept bickering all evening, and while my housemates tolerated the arrival of a new Lynn, the peace lasted up until she brought out a bottle of elf wine. Within an hour, Hazel and Morgan were metaphorically off their faces and literally at one another’s throats.
As for me, I woke with a raging headache at five in the morning to a bright light in the corner of my eye. I turned over, seeing the book glowing under my pillow. “Stop it,” I mumbled. My mouth tasted like I’d washed it out with swamp water, and my head pounded with the drumming insistence of an oncoming hangover. I squeezed my eyes closed against the glare, but the book, if anything, grew brighter. “What?”
The bedroom door rattled, and my throat went dry. Intruder. Even my spirit sight was fuzzy, but there was definitely something outside the door that shouldn’t be.
Crap. What is it now?
Hazel lay on my floor on the spare mattress I’d borrowed from one of the others, dead to the world. Grabbing a knife and some salt as well as the book, I crept past, opened the door, and paused. Shadows trailed up the staircase. Not regular shadows, but solid-looking ones.
“Hazel!” I hissed. “Get a weapon. Now.”
She woke up, mumbling in confusion. I backed up to the door, trying to see through the shadowy haze. Death faeries… in the house. We had iron wards up. Someone must have turned them off.
I’d given Morgan my iron filings, so I used my knife, which passed straight through the shadows. My hands felt cold, clammy, and the temperature had plummeted overnight. Hazel crept out of the room behind me, her hands glowing with Summer magic along with the circlet on her head.
“Show yourself,” I whispered to the shadows. “Go on.” My Sight worked fine, so the creature must be trying really hard to hide itself. The shadows lengthened, creeping along the walls.
“Gatekeeper,” a voice whispered.
“Which one of us?” Hazel asked. “You picked a fight with the wrong—”
The house trembled as though a heavy blow had struck it from the side. Morgan’s shout came from downstairs.
Hazel threw Summer magic into the gloom, lighting the dark, and revealing a creature hanging upside-down from the ceiling by its suction-cup-covered, tentacle-like arms. It resembled a two-armed octopus, flesh-coloured and hideous. Its flat face was made entirely of a huge mouth, toothless and covered in barbs designed to snag its victim and rip their skin clean off. One of the Vale’s nicest creatures.
“Your illusion skills are crap,” I told it, stalking forwards, dagger in hand. Hazel’s Summer magic wouldn’t be as effective as usual, but iron worked as well as anything.
The walls rattled again. Shit. This guy was the diversion. And Morgan couldn’t defend himself. Certainly not as well as Hazel or I could.
It let go with one arm and swiped, and I stabbed it. The iron cut through its fleshy arm and it wailed, letting go and dropping to the floor. Shadows extended behind it, revealing it wasn’t alone, and another creature was behind the illusion. Death stealer. Three of those things had nearly killed Hazel and me a few weeks ago.
The skin-eating faerie lunged at me. If I let any part of my skin touch it, I was dead, so I flung the knife through its head instead. Dark blood splattered the hall, and the death stealer moved forwards into its place. Damn. I’d had no choice but to throw the knife, but now I was unarmed.
Shadows lunged at my heels, cold on my bare skin. I jumped backwards, dropping the salt canister but managing to keep hold of the book. Cold power leapt to my hands, drawn from the same darkness that powered this Vale creature. You’ll die before you hurt us.
Hazel attacked. Her magical assault knocked the creature off the wall, right into the path of my necromantic magic. The beast screeched, burned all over by punishing white light, and exploded into nothingness.
“Nice,” she said. “I haven’t seen you do that before.”
“I got a lot of practise.”
A bone-chilling laugh came from below.
“Morgan.” I ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time. “Get the hell out of here, faerie.”
The wards must be down. One of
us would have to go outside to switch them back on, but the attacker’s laugh came from the living room. I kicked the door open. Discarded spell residue, ingredients, beer bottles… but nobody living.
“Did they take him?”
“No,” growled a voice. Morgan jumped from behind the sofa. “Die, Gatekeeper.”
A horrible cackling laugh came from my brother’s throat. He was being possessed? I’d thought the fetch couldn’t do that, let alone turn him into a faerie.
He lunged with blinding speed, his hand wrapping around Hazel’s throat. What—no, his ghost. His transparent hand latched onto Hazel’s neck, lifting her with inhuman strength.
“Morgan!” I held my knife up, left my body in a defensive position, and leapt out, straight at the ghostly figure strangling Hazel. In ghost form it was plain to see it wasn’t him. The spirit looked like my brother, but when it turned on me, eyes glowing with eerie white light, the smile was a stranger’s.
“Gatekeeper,” purred the voice. Hazel screamed and flailed, but couldn’t fight off a ghost. It was trying to rip her out of her body like a necromancer had once done to me.
“Let her go, you bastard.” I grabbed the ghostly assailant’s arm, wrenching it loose from Hazel. White light shone from my hands, and I willed the book’s power to flow into me. My fist connected with the spirit’s nose and it stumbled backwards, its appearance warping. Pointed ears. Smiling face. A… faerie? No. They couldn’t die, not here. But half-faeries could.
“You can use glamour as a ghost?” I said in disbelief.
“I’ll be able to do more with that book of yours,” he said, grinning.
Horror filled my chest. Morgan’s hands were on the book, held in my body’s limp hands. If the monster possessing him used him to try to claim it—one of us might die.
I dived back into my body in time to wrench the book out of reach. Morgan fell forwards, his expression confused. “What—?”
“Oh good, you’re back,” said Hazel, her hands aglow. “What in hell is going on? Who attacked me?”
“Half-faerie ghost possessed him,” I said. “Can you stop him from touching the book? Same goes for her.”
The Gatekeeper's Curse- The Complete Trilogy Page 33