by Izzy Shows
The tension I’d felt in the air seemed to ease.
“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” he said.
We reached the door to his house, and he paused a moment to speak a word I didn’t quite catch, before opening the door and inviting me in. Invitations apparently expire as soon as you leave the building, even if you aren’t done for the day. That’s annoying.
I stepped across the threshold, feeling the familiar bubble. I was starting to figure some of it out on my own. It seemed to be the contained energy of his home, the magical energy that he’d poured into it as well as that which had generated from his existence there. That was interesting. I started to poke at it with my mind, before realising that was probably rude. He shut the door, uttered another word, and locked the door.
My nerves prickled, and I tried to ease them as best I could. I don’t like locked doors, never have and likely never will. I don’t like to be in an area where I can’t get out, no matter how big it is. I need the ability to leave at a moment’s notice, because inevitably something will always, always go wrong. That was the one constant of the universe that I knew I could depend on.
“Sandwiches OK with you?” he asked as he walked to the kitchen.
“Yeah, that’s fine. Anything I can do to help?” Not because I was feeling particularly helpful, but rather because I wanted to hurry that part of things up and get to the information. I didn’t like idle time. It drove me bonkers.
“Nope. Kitchen’s too small for two people to be working in.”
That was true. I bobbed my head in acquiescence. It took him a few minutes, but he came out with two plates of sandwiches and two cans caught between his arm and ribcage.
I rolled my eyes. “I could have at least helped carry things.”
“Pfft.” He put the plates down on the coffee table, then the cans. “Pick one.”
I grabbed a plate without much care as to which one, and carried it over to the chair nearest the sofa. I like to have a little space.
He didn’t seem to mind, sitting down on the couch in front of his plate. He cracked open his can and took a swig of it.
I took a bite out of my sandwich and did my best not to make a face—he might be a bona fide Wizard, but he could not make a sandwich.
“So, what’s the ritual tonight?” I asked, trying to pep the conversation up.
“Ah. We’re going to call down a demon and ask it some carefully worded questions,” he said.
“A demon? Isn’t that…I don’t know, bad?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Eh. It’s not like we’re working with them or anything, they just happen to be the easiest to guarantee calling down. Fairies are all but impossible to command, and if you get one they’ll talk you in circles to the point where you’re giving them information and making promises to do things for them, instead of the other way around. Demons are tricky, but nowhere near as hard.”
“Hm.” I nodded. “OK. So how do you know it’s even going to know anything?”
He gave me a pointed look. “Demons always know something.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, OK. I guess that’s fair. So how is it going to work?”
“Well, I’ve got all the basic components already, we just need one last ingredient. Basically, we draw a circle—yes, a literal circle—and add in all the bonus stuff to secure it for the specific entity we’re working with. Different ones need different things.” He said.
I nodded, taking it all in. It made sense, to say the least. In a weird, you should let go of everything you ever thought was real, kind of way.
“So what are we getting?”
“Grave dirt.” He grinned.
13
WIND CHIMES TINKLED OVERHEAD AS WE entered the little shop. It smelled of incense and earth. It was comforting in a way that I hadn’t quite expected.
The walls were lined with various mismatched shelves that contained a variety of objects—all things you wouldn’t find anywhere near a chain store. Drift wood was on one, crystal balls on another, miniature shrines crammed in besides hand bound leather journals.
I loved it.
At the far back of the shop was a wooden sales counter, and behind it a woman who could best be described as motherly. She was plump, her long thick black hair tied back in a very loose ponytail, and her skin was a beautiful bronze. She was mesmerising to look at as she moved around behind the counter, dusting, checking on little objects on the shelves back there. She looked up and caught me staring, locking her green eyes with mine, and I blushed and looked away.
“She has that effect on everyone who comes in.” Aidan chuckled beside me.
“I didn’t mean to stare…” I whispered.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m pretty sure it’s a charm hidden around here somewhere; she likes to embarrass people.”
I grinned and shook my head. If I ever live to be a middle age or older woman, I want to be the type that screws with everyone’s head.
“How are you, Lillai?” He raised his voice to address the shopkeeper.
“Better now to lay eyes on you, Wallace.” She greeted him with a beaming smile, her words laced with a heavy East European accent.
“Always the charmer.” He winked and crossed the short distance to the counter. I hurried to follow, not entirely certain of where to stand or what to do in this shop.
“Necessity,” she replied. “What brings you to my shop?”
“Can’t a friend check in on another friend?”
“Mmm.” She made the noise with her lips pressed together, shaking her head. “Not you.”
I glanced at him in time to see him pouting.
“How are things in the community?” He shifted gears quickly.
She glanced at me, her eyes assessing me like a teacher would a failing student. I burned beneath her gaze.
“She’s fine, Lillai. I wouldn’t bring someone to your shop who couldn’t hear our conversation,” he said.
I was a little surprised at being vouched for; it wasn’t something I’d ever really needed. It was gratifying in a new way.
Lillai nodded her head. “The community is skittish like a cat stuck inside during a storm. Something is wrong, but no one knows what. We have no information.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Is everyone safe?” he asked.
She gave him a pointed look. “As we walk on this earth, no one is safe.”
He glared back at her. “You know what I meant.”
“La, I know.” she snorted. “But you of all should know to choose your words with care. We are as safe as can be from an unknown threat.”
“I’ll take care of it. I promise,” he said, his voice earnest.
She glanced away from him. “It is ill advised to make promises you cannot keep.”
“Why would you think I couldn’t keep it?”
She looked at him again, then glanced at me.
“You are quiet.” She said.
“Oh.” I blurted out, cheeks flushing. “I didn’t really have anything to contribute.”
Her eyes narrowed in on me, and I fought the urge to squirm. “You are young. At a crossroads where you could yet live a normal life. Why are you with Wallace?”
“Boredom.” I shrugged.
“No.” Her voice was curt.
“No?” My eyebrows jumped up. “What do you mean, no?”
“That’s not it.” She shrugged. “Why are you with him?”
“I, uh…” I glanced around. “I needed help with a case.”
“Mmmm. Why are you with him?” she asked with an idle tone, as if only half paying attention to me.
“Nothing has ever felt as right as magic does, and he can teach me.” I felt the truth pulled out of me, like I had no control of keeping the words inside of me. I wanted to blame it on her, blame it on magic she had worked—hadn’t Aidan said he suspected she had a charm hidden in the store?—but that wasn’t the first time it had happened.
She stared at me for a moment longer before she bobb
ed her head and turned back to Aidan, who looked even more entrenched in thought than he had a moment before.
“What brought you in here, Wallace?” She asked him again, sounding more reproachful than she had earlier.
He sighed. “I need grave dirt.”
“Always something.” She rolled her eyes, taking a rag out from beneath the counter. “I don’t have any, too busy to go out lately. Girl, hand me that cup, would you?”
I jerked my head back towards her, having looked away when she was done with me. I nodded and grabbed the cup, but abruptly dropped it with a sharp intake of air—pulling my burned palm to my chest. “What the fuck?” I gasped, glaring at the offending cup.
“Hm. That’s odd.” She sounded disinterested. “Some boy must have spelled it as a joke. You can be going now, Wallace. I have a shop to run.”
Aidan continued to look confused—it seemed like she wasn’t being as friendly as he’d expected—but nodded his head.
“Yeah, we need to get that dirt. Thanks for your time, Lillai. Let me know if you need anything.” He said, looking at me and jerking his head towards the door.
I followed him out.
“That was really strange.” He remarked once we were outside. “Something must be going on, Lillai’s never been so short with me.”
“I thought you just had that effect on everyone.” I shrugged.
“Haha, very funny.” He rolled his eyes. “Well, I guess we’re going to make a detour for the graveyard then. I really didn’t want to get my hands dirty, but what can you do.”
“We’re really digging up dirt in a graveyard? Isn’t that…I don’t know, rude?” I asked.
“Pfft. It’ll be fine. Come on,” he said.
Now it was my turn to roll my eyes, but I followed him all the same.
14
GRAVEYARDS ARE PEACEFUL PLACES, DON’T LET anyone tell you differently. I had never understood the unsettling feeling that others had reported at a graveyard, but a quick look at Aidan told me that this wasn’t a mage thing. He looked unsettled. Jittery.
“You OK?” I asked, voice softly so as not to disturb anyone. I didn’t see anyone visiting a grave, and there was no funeral procession here, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t someone somewhere to be disturbed.
“You are? Graveyards give me the heebie-jeebies. Not a whole lot that keeps those that are meant to be in the ground, well, in the ground. Lots of spirits floating around, even in the daylight. They don’t usually come out in the open, but those crypts are their favourite things, and you can usually find one in the shadow of a statue as well.”
Huh. The crypts had always been the most comforting area of a graveyard for me. I shrugged.
“So what are we getting?”
“Grave dirt, what else?” His shoulders twitched, like something had brushed against the nape of his neck, and he hurried his steps a bit.
I was lucky I was tall, or else I would probably have struggled to keep up with him. I wasn’t quite as tall as him, just an inch or so shorter, but my legs were plenty long and I kept up with relative ease.
“You’re just going to take some poor person’s dirt? That’s so disrespectful.” I couldn’t hide the accusatory tone even if I had wanted to, and I didn’t particularly want to. It was just plain wrong to go and scrape the dirt from some poor person’s grave. They had been laid to rest here because a person had trusted this place to take care of their soul. Not so some idiot Wizard would steal their dirt for his ritual. I scowled pointedly at him so that he could understand just how disappointed he was.
He rolled his eyes at me. “Not some poor person’s dirt. Duh. I’m going to steal some dickhead’s dirt. It’ll be perfect for what we’re trying to do.”
I frowned, wanting to ask him more about it, but he cast me a sharp look and I felt I should probably keep the questions to myself.
He was a real jerk, dangling bits of information in front of me that I couldn’t expand on until later—and I was bound to forget later. I filed it away all the same, hoping that I remembered before it became pointless to ask about.
We walked through the graveyard for a bit, until Aidan finally found the resting place that he was looking for. I didn’t recognise the name on the tomb stone, but I could tell this was some rich person’s grave for certain. Not a poor soul, to say the least, but I also found myself hoping that they had not been a particularly good soul either. The idea of ruining a good person’s grave just did not sit right with me.
While Aidan started collecting the dirt, I had nothing to do but wait. I crossed my arms over my chest and planted my feet, not fully aware that my stance was aggressive. I stared at the tombstone, though I guess it was more of a glare.
Who are you? I thought to myself, pondering it for quite a few moments. I wanted to know who was buried there, I wanted to know that they weren’t worth the effort of defending, I wanted to know that I didn’t have any reason to feel bad about what Aidan was doing. I knew that it was unlikely that I was going to figure that out, though, which was disappointing.
The information hit me like a freight train. I was suddenly shown images of a man hurting people, so many people. Children. Children being hurt. It was like I had been plucked out of the graveyard and dropped, like a ghost, into a scene. I watched, mute, in horror.
There was a man kneeling over a corpse, too small that corpse was, too small…
A knife in his hand, so much blood, all that blood, a body couldn’t contain that much blood, certainly not that small body. Oh Gods, that body was so small. What was he doing? How could he do this?
I tried to lift my hand, but found that I couldn’t, it weighed a ton and hung at my side.
I opened my mouth to scream, to give a warning, or to stop him—but nothing came out.
I came back to myself just as quickly as I’d left, Aidan shaking me. I was suddenly aware that I was lying on the ground, and my face was wet. Why was my face wet?
“Damn it, girl, come back. Get out of there.” He was growling, cursing, and shaking me.
My eyes snapped open and connected with his for a brief second before he averted his eyes. Didn’t know why he always did that. Never looked me in the eye. Rude. What was he hiding?
Oh, Gods the blood.
My face contorted in agony at the memory.
“Let it go, just let it go. Shh. That’s long ago and taken care of. Why would you go there?” He pulled me by my shoulders and I thought he was going to make me stand, but he held me to his chest for a moment.
I sobbed. Chest racking sobs that hurt, but I couldn’t stop. Quiet sobs, because I couldn’t draw attention to us. Couldn’t let Aidan down.
It hurt. It felt like my mind, my soul, had been torn and tattered and I couldn’t stand to think of it and yet couldn’t stop thinking of it.
“Build the wall. Listen to me, hear my words and my heart. I’m here, I will steady you. Listen to me. Build the wall. Listen.” He kept talking, his voice a comforting pattern.
My sobs started to die down and I listened to his voice for a moment before I heard the order. Build the wall. Yes.
The wall. The wall would keep me safe. I laid it, brick by brick, in my mind, around the memory. Sealed it away, with no door. It took far too long, but I did it. The pain was still present, but muted.
“Did you, um…did you get the dirt?” I croaked the words out, sniffling as I did so.
He was quiet for a moment, and I thought he might not let me change the topic. “Yeah, I got it. We can go.”
He held me for a moment longer before we stood up together. I glued my eyes to the ground as we left, not wanting to accidentally start a conversation about what had happened.
I didn’t want the wall to break.
15
THE GRAVE DIRT HAVING BEEN THE only thing that we’d needed to collect, Aidan took us back to his home. I didn’t ask questions or engage in my normal snarky behaviour—I was feeling too weak to do that. I needed to recharge, but I didn’t
have much time. The day was almost over, and we still needed to do the ritual to try and track down the…well, it still sounded silly to say even in my head; the necromancers. I didn’t know exactly what we were going to do, and I was hoping it wouldn’t require too much energy.
I didn’t have a lot left to spare.
When we got back, he grabbed his bag from the backseat and walked to his door without a word towards me. He muttered the same words as before, I still didn’t catch them, and let the both of us in.
“Sit,” he said, gesturing towards the settee, and walked into the back of the house.
I sat in the chair without a word; not petulant, just beat. I wanted to curl up into a ball, but I couldn’t do that. Not here. Too vulnerable.
He came back into the room, hesitated for a moment when he saw me sitting in the chair, and sat down on the settee.
“We should probably talk about what happened.” He didn’t sound like he wanted to.
“We don’t have to.” I answered too quickly. We probably did need to, because I didn’t know what I’d done to enter that…place, and I didn’t want to do it again.
“Yeah…no, we have to talk about it. Look, I didn’t think that would happen. I should have, but you seemed so at ease in the cemetery, I didn’t think it would be a problem.” He heaved out a sigh. “You’re going to need to be more careful when you’re in areas like that, with high spiritual energy. The more you exercise your magic, build it up and strengthen it, the more open you will be to that kind of energy. That’s why the shields are so important. Most of the good spirits, and there is a fair amount of them, they aren’t active. They sleep, they don’t bother people. But the bad ones, you give them even a little bit of an opening, and they’ll yank you into their torture chambers just for the fun of it.” He dragged a hand over his hair, shrugged his shoulders. “Remember the wall. Keep it present in your mind.”
“I’ve never had to be careful of my thoughts before,” I said, grimacing. I didn’t like this constant vigilance nonsense.
“Yes, well, you have to now. That’s just the way it is. You don’t know if the man on the subway next to you is a warlock, and you can’t afford to have your shields down and let him in. Be careful,” he said.