“It’s just replaying the mages resetting the wards this morning.” I let the tracking spell die. “I reckon we’re too late. We should have ignored that bratty apprentice and used a tracker yesterday instead.”
“No, we just need to find a clearer spot.” Isabel produced three more spells. She’d probably spent all night making them.
On the fourth attempt, we finally got a glimpse of the shifter. As the spell activated in a flash of green light, a black-and-white image of the shifter walked up to the gates. His head was down, preventing me from reading his expression. He halted outside the gates, which were unguarded. The mages didn’t always post actual people outside—usually, the wards were enough.
There was a white flash, so dazzling that I winced, certain that if the scene hadn’t been in black and white, I’d have been momentarily blinded. The next second, the man was no longer a man but a giant wolf, shouldering the gates open. He disappeared inside, too quickly for me to see if he had scales on his hands like the spectre Keir and I had seen last night.
“That flash must have been the spell he used,” I withdrew my hands from the circle, glancing at Isabel. “Recognise it?”
She shook her head. “I wish there was a way to make trackers that replay events in colour rather than black and white. If I’d seen what colour that flash was, I might have been able to guess the spell type.”
“If it was a spell that undoes wards, it’d be…” I paused. “Uh. Help me out here?”
“Depends on the ward type, the aesthetic of the witch in question, and a thousand other factors. Let me have another look.” She activated another tracking spell.
I watched her, not participating this time. After a few seconds, Isabel lifted her head, the spell circle collapsing into dust. The chill breeze swept the residue away. Witch magic did leave traces and impressions, but rarely physical ones.
“Anything new?” I asked.
“I was trying to see what the spell looked like before it went off.” She shook spell dust from her hands. “It’d have disintegrated the moment he activated it, so the mages will have trampled over all the evidence by now.”
“It’d be hard to see either way, from this angle.” Isabel’s handmade spells looked like stationary, bands or pencils, but the local ones were typically made to look like pieces of jewellery. Small, inconspicuous, and hard to spot, let alone through the lens of a tracking spell. I’d experimented a bit with my own handmade spells, but found the band-shaped ones to be the most practical and easy to conceal.
“A custom job.” Isabel rose to her feet. “Specifically put together to undo the mages’ security wards—every layer of them. Anti-undead, iron, protection, built-in alarms…”
“Someone got in a few months ago,” I reminded her. “I don’t know how they bypassed the wards, though.”
“Oh, that was a Sidhe,” Isabel said. “Not human, so our wards aren’t as effective against them. I know the mages like to say they are, but there’s only so much you can do against non-humans. Look what happened in the invasion. Half the mages’ wards failed then, too.”
My stomach sank uneasily. “Our last enemy wasn’t human either.”
And from what Ilsa had said, the Ancients had proven too powerful for even the Sidhe, the immortal faeries who’d once worshipped them as gods. If the Sidhe could kick the mages’ wards down like they were nothing, maybe the Ancients could, too.
It can’t be one of them. Not again. I’d know. The shifter had been human, and the mages had easily killed him. Besides, there were definitely still a few rogue witches running around with knowledge of spells I hadn’t encountered before.
“We should go.” Isabel adjusted the spells on her wrists. “Might nose around the market and ask some questions. What about you?”
“The last time I went to the market, Evelyn wouldn’t stop complaining about everything the other witches were doing wrong.” I’d never known her so vocal, and it’d been hard to focus on buying spell ingredients when she kept up a constant stream of critiques. “Anyway, I’m supposed to be helping sort Lady Harper’s crap from her house in the Highlands before my patrol tonight.”
“Sure,” said Isabel. “Wanda and Drake will be in. I’ll probably only be a couple of hours.”
“Sounds good. Let me know if you find anything.”
I made my way to the hotel again, firing off a message to Wanda. The two of us had grown up together after the mages adopted me, and Wanda had been the closest to a best friend I’d had as a teenager. She was also Lady Harper’s granddaughter, not that you’d know it.
I quickened my pace as I neared the hotel, re-entered the bright lobby, and made my way to the second floor. The mages had rented all the best rooms. While the other guests complained at the noise—and the occasional blast of fire or lightning—the witch owners of the hotel had raked in a fortune from tips.
Wanda greeted me at the door to her room. She was about my age, tall and willowy and dark-haired, having taken after her mother rather than Lady Harper’s side of the family.
“Hey, Jas.” She waved me into the posh suite, where Drake lounged on the sofa, sipping some kind of fancy alcoholic beverage. The tall, lanky mage hadn’t changed much since I was a teenager, especially his penchant for turning everything into a joke. He stood in sharp contrast to his closest friend and fellow Mage Lord, Vance.
“Where’s Ivy?” I asked.
“Out,” said Drake. “She gets bored being cooped up.”
“I would if I had to sit through as many meetings as you guys,” I said. “All right, let’s see what other crap Lady Harper’s left for me to throw out.”
Ever since Vance had discovered Lady Harper’s secret country estate—up in the Highlands, balanced on a cliff of all places—he and Ivy had been going back and forth between there and here, moving everything pertinent from the house to the hotel so it was easier to search. A mass of boxes covered the floor, and it looked like it’d doubled since the last time I’d come in here.
“The ones we haven’t searched yet are here,” said Wanda, wading into the mass of boxes. “Ivy refused to let Vance leave her junk all over their suite, so I volunteered to watch it all. Most of it’ll probably have to be tossed out, anyway.”
I moved over to the boxes. Cracked ancient wine glasses, crockery… empty picture frames. “Did she not even keep any photos of her family?”
“Oh, she gave them to me,” Wanda said, her mouth pinching. “When I was five or so. I don’t think she could stand to look at pictures of my dad.”
I sat down on the plush carpet, not knowing what to say. Lady Harper’s emotions had ranged from irritable to raging mad with little in between, and it’d been easy to forget the years she’d grieved the family she’d lost in the invasion. After all, we’d all lost someone. A lot of someones. I tossed the empty picture frames aside, my mind conjuring images of faceless Hemlocks I’d never meet. “Wish she’d been as considerate of the living as the dead. Drake, is there a ‘junk’ pile?”
“Right here.” A flame jumped into his hand. “I’ll burn up anything we can’t donate.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be running errands?” Wanda asked.
Drake yawned. “Yeah, Vance told me to talk to Lord Clarke, but he’s a dick.”
“You’ll live,” Wanda said. “Go on. We’ll handle this, right, Jas?”
Honestly, I’d rather be patrolling in a graveyard right now. “Yeah, sure.”
Drake left, while I dove into the box of junk. After a few minutes, the door opened again and Vance walked in. He wore his knee-length mage coat and rainwater dampened his dark hair.
“Hey, Vance,” said Wanda. “Come to help?”
“No, I was looking for Drake.”
“Don’t worry, he went to talk to Lord Clarke,” Wanda said. “We could use an extra pair of hands here.”
“No, I don’t have time. I need the council documents. Lord Sutherland was asking me about them.” He moved to open a new box we hadn’t
touched yet. “Lord Sutherland is insistent that the original Twelve’s documents be searched for evidence of any past encounters with…” He glanced at Wanda. “Our enemies.”
“The Ancients,” I supplied, my heart diving two floors below. Had Lady Harper encountered them before? Given how many other secrets she’d kept from me, it wouldn’t be a surprise. “Why does she have the documents? Wouldn’t they be kept at the mages’ headquarters?”
“Her house used to serve as headquarters,” Vance said. “I did wonder, Jas, if she might have told anything to you or Wanda about the Ancients that she didn’t mention to me.”
“Nope,” I said. Well, aside from the fact that my coven went to war with them. But that’s the Hemlocks’ secret, not Lady Harper’s. “Not me. Wanda?”
“She didn’t,” Wanda put in. “Not a word.”
“Figures.” I rolled my eyes. “I’d have thought she’d tell you, Vance. You’re her successor.”
Vance lifted the box over to a more central spot on the floor. “I wouldn’t put it like that. She never wanted to serve on the mages’ council the second time around, and after the invasion, she didn’t think anyone would live long enough to succeed her.”
“I forget how cheery she was.” I moved to the box he’d opened and coughed at all the dust. “Has this not been touched in decades?”
“It was hidden in the attic of the estate she hasn’t been to in at least ten years, so quite possibly,” Vance said.“These are old council documents from before the invasion.”
Dusty stacks of paper filled the box’s space. I dug down and pulled out a stack, and a loose sheet of paper fell out. A map, covered in so much dust that its lines were barely visible. I turned it over, trying to figure out which way up it went. A blurred X marked the corner, but the other lines were too faded to make out.
“Good god, her handwriting’s worse than yours is,” I said, trying to make sense of the scribbles at the page’s edges. I’d need a magnifying glass to read it.
Wanda laughed, covering it with a cough as Vance scowled. “I believe her goal was that the documents couldn’t be copied.”
“Or read.” I squinted at the page. “Honestly. For all the hours she spent lecturing me about my note-taking skills…”
“That sounds familiar.” Vance lifted a stack of documents aside.
“She did that to you, too?” I blinked at him in surprise.
“All the time,” he said. “It got worse when she put me in charge of mentoring Drake, because he absolutely refused to do anything I asked.”
“Only because you were a brat,” Drake said, walking into the room.
Vance looked up. “Aren’t you supposed to be talking to Lord Clarke about security?”
“Done. I assume you’re supposed to be doing something more important than reminiscing with Jas.”
“We’re looking at Lady Harper’s crap,” I told him. “Just in case she left any last requests. Know what this map is?”
“A treasure map?” said Drake, leaning over me. “Let’s see.”
I passed the crumpled page to him. “Might be the map to her wine cellar for all I know.”
“Holy crap, it’s an actual treasure map,” Drake said. “With an X marks the spot and everything.”
“Can you picture Lady Harper hiding treasure for fun?” I stood, stretching my legs. “When I was an apprentice, she once tried to kick-start my witch magic by levitating me off the roof. It’s probably from a board game or something.”
“Are we going roaming around the Highlands in search of hidden treasure?” asked Drake. “Awesome.”
“Sorry to burst your bubble, but Lady Harper would rather have cut off her own hand than dug up the ground to bury treasure.” I sat down beside the box again. “She used to complain about her countryside house having too much scenery.”
“She did at that,” said Vance. “Frankly, I could have used a map to find her house. It took nearly three hours of walking around the Highlands before I tracked the place down.”
“I thought you could teleport anywhere,” I said.
“Only places I’ve already been.”
Drake snickered. “Yeah, otherwise his ability gets confused and we end up in places we’re not supposed to be in. He’s not kidding, though. Lady Harper hid that estate well. It’s covered in so many wards that you could walk right into it and not know.”
“The Highlands house wouldn’t make a bad safe house,” Vance said. “If it wasn’t so isolated.”
“Oh, come on, Vance, there’s not really going to be another war,” Drake said, rolling his eyes. “Chill out.”
“War?” I echoed, looking between the mages. “What war, exactly?”
Drake shrugged. “Things are getting heated lately, but that’s nothing new.”
“Heated in what way? I mean, aside from the murder.” I thought of the shifter-ghost and my heart gave an uneasy flip. Trouble in the spirit realm… and a mention of the Ancients. Maybe the mages were taking it more seriously than I’d thought.
Vance rose to his feet, brushing dust off the front of his tailored clothes. “Supernatural relations are fragile. Lady Harper’s death came at a bad time.”
“Yes, because you’re paranoid,” Drake told Vance.
“It’s the reason I’m still alive. I’m going to find Ivy.”
“She probably ran off to get away from your overprotective—” Drake said after him, but he was gone in blink.
I raised an eyebrow at Drake. “War? Seriously?”
“It’s nothing,” said Drake. “He’s probably channelling Lady Harper’s spirit. Look at how many times she saw enemies following her around.”
“Probably because the one time she dismissed the signs, the world got invaded by faeries,” Wanda said from the corner.
“What, she told you that?” Wanda and I had both been a year old at the time of the invasion, not old enough to have concrete memories of any of it.
“Erm, not exactly,” said Wanda, flushing a little. “I kind of eavesdropped on her on the phone once when I was little. She was on one of her rants.”
“She never ranted about the faerie invasion before,” I said. “That I know of, anyway.” If anything, she avoided the subject. She’d lost her entire family aside from Wanda.
Lady Harper wasn’t the only paranoid one. The Hemlock witches seemed convinced there’d be a war, too. I looked down at the stack of documents like if I stared hard enough, the word Hemlock would leap out at me. She’d hidden her connection to their coven even from the council, as far as I knew, and the Lady Harper I knew would never have left that information open to discovery after her death. But it was worth a look, if just for an insight into who the bad-tempered mage who’d tried to train me in witchcraft had really been.
I grabbed another box, and dove in.
5
Lloyd and I walked through the graveyard, shivering in the cold night air. I wore three layers under my necromancer coat, but nowhere was as freezing as a cemetery at midnight on top of a spirit line. And quite possibly, nobody was stupid as a necromancer who willingly walked into it.
The locals had been complaining about creepy howling noises from the cemetery every night. After three attempts to search the place in daylight hours with nothing to show for it, we’d drawn the short straw and been sent here to catch and banish the pesky spirit. Ordinarily, it’d be a rote mission I could have done while sleepwalking… except we’d landed up right in the middle of the spirit line the Soul Collector had tried to break.
“I c-can’t feel my toes,” Mackie grumbled from behind us.
“You’re the one who volunteered,” Ilsa said to her.
“I sure as hell didn’t,” Morgan said, scowling.
“I can light a campfire,” said Lloyd. “Don’t look at me like that, Jas. If this ghost appears at midnight on the dot every single day, it won’t be put off by a few flames.”
“Or we might draw something worse here,” I said. “This howling ghost is
restricted to midnight, but that doesn’t mean everything else is.”
“You’re so sensible today,” he said, pulling a face.
“No, she’s right,” Ilsa said, resting her hand on the nearest gravestone. “This isn’t a key point, but the energy here… I don’t know, it feels kinda charged.”
I tapped into the spirit realm, unsettled by how blurred it looked. On a spirit line, the blurriness was par for the course, but Ilsa, being Gatekeeper, was more tuned into the line than I was.
“I don’t sense anything,” I admitted, “but I want this done before we freeze to death. No funny business, and definitely nothing that’ll make Lady Montgomery give us extra paperwork. She’s being twice as pedantic as usual now the Mage Lords are in town.”
“She bloody is,” Mackie muttered. “I thought she was gonna handcuff us together to stop me wandering off.”
“If you don’t want to get devoured by a howling ghost, you’d better not,” Morgan said.
“Ghosts don’t eat people,” she shot at him.
“What makes you think it’s a ghost?” He folded his arms. “People are hearing howling noises at night. Sounds more like a werewolf.”
“It’s not the full moon,” I reminded them. “Besides, it’s a graveyard. Probably a ghost having a laugh.” Creepy howling at midnight was such a poltergeist thing to do, not that there were any signs at the moment. A chill breeze swept through the fog, getting into every gap in my coat and forcing me to use one of my warmth spells early.
“Give me that.” Lloyd grabbed me from behind, wrapping his arms around me in a bear hug. “I should have known you were hoarding all the warmth for yourself.”
“Hey, back off,” I said.
“Lloyd, stop assaulting her,” said Ilsa.
“I’m not!” he said, letting go of me when he saw the others watching. “She’s hoarding witch spells to keep warm while the rest of us freeze to death.”
Morgan raised an eyebrow at him. “All right, then. If anything, we’d be warmer if we moved closer together.”
Witch's Spirit (The Hemlock Chronicles Book 3) Page 5