A few minutes passed during which I was reminded I was the least fit person in our group. A fact emphasized when I stumbled over Lethe’s outstretched foot and almost ate dirt. She sat beneath a tree, legs crossed, eating a hamburger. The elastic belt sagged around her waist, and she had twisted the fin to one side to avoid crushing the foam against the trunk.
“Did you hide a snack in the woods,” I wondered, “or did you have one in your pocket when you shifted?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” She crammed in the last bite then wrinkled up not one but three wrappers while I looked on with wide eyes. “I’m pregnant, okay? I get hungry.”
“That’s not as comforting as you might think,” Linus mused. “Coming from a shark.”
Lethe stuck her tongue out at him, and proud tears welled in my eyes. I was such a bad influence.
“Where’s the kid?” I scanned the area, but there was no blue glow in sight. “Did you spook him?”
“He’s a ghost.” She grunted as she stood. “What do you think?”
“He memorized the map.” I tamped down the instinctive worry stemming from Oscar and Boaz sharing the same woods at the same time. The Elite had no use for a ghost boy now that the dybbuk had been contained. But still, the concern lingered. “Let’s see if he’s discovered whether X marks the spot.”
The three of us walked together, on two legs, to the location where I had asked Lethe to dig a hole deep and wide enough to accommodate a battered trunk I salvaged from the attic. Filled with glass gems and doubloons cast in brass and zinc, it was a discount pirate’s dream come true.
Oscar wasn’t gloating over his find or scratching in the dirt. He didn’t jump out from behind a tree to scare ten years off my life, either.
Dread pooled in my stomach as I knelt on the undisturbed earth. He hadn’t been here. He couldn’t have dug up the chest alone—he didn’t have that kind of strength—but he wouldn’t have been able to resist getting a head start.
“Spread out.” I dusted off my knees as I rose with a grimace. “We’ve got to find him.”
“He’s a ghost.” Lethe straightened her fin to get it out of her way. “He can’t get hurt, right?”
The question brought memories of Ambrose rushing back to me. The dybbuk Amelie had bonded with fed on spiritual energy. He consumed ghosts, among other things, and he had tried devouring Oscar. That’s why the Elite had used the ghost boy as bait for a trap that nearly killed me.
“Even the dead can be diminished,” Linus said gently, for my benefit.
“I’ll shift.” A grimness settled in the lines around Lethe’s mouth. “My nose is better that way.”
Grateful they supported me and what must seem like helicopter parenting, considering the child was already dead, I waited for her to transform and then pick up his trail.
She backtracked across the property, stalling out between the last place I saw them and where we found Lethe enjoying her snack. The rigidness of her spine warned me I wasn’t going to like what I saw, and my chest crumpled inward when a discarded foam sword, bent in the middle, came into view.
“Oscar,” I called as I rushed over to reclaim it. “Oscar.”
There was no answer as the red magic of Lethe’s transformation splashed up her legs, signaling the end of the trail.
“I was tracking your scent on the sword.” Her nostrils flared, but her lips pinched. “Without it, I’ve got nothing. Ghosts have no smell. They’re visible to us, and we can feel them, but that’s about it. Does he vanish on you often?”
“Sometimes,” I admitted, tucking the foam weapon under my arm. “He was so excited about the treasure hunt. He begged me for weeks. It’s not like him to flake mid-game.”
“He might have expended too much energy.” Linus touched my elbow, offering comfort. “You two got into a sword fight earlier, and he carried it and the map during the hunt. He’s stronger now than he was, but his natural state is incorporeality.”
Intense focus was required on his part—tough for a six-year-old—for him to hold on to objects, no matter how lightweight. Anger helped him manifest too. Yet another reason why I didn’t want to arm him with anything sharper than molded polyurethane foam. Not after what he had done to Marit.
“Maybe you’re right.” The map crinkled in my fist when I tightened my fingers. “You don’t think Boaz…?”
“I doubt he would risk falling further from your good graces while his sister lives on your property.”
“Guess there’s nothing left to do but go home and wait.” I set out in that direction but pulled up short when Hood, sans fin, came into view. “Have you seen Oscar?”
“No.” He searched my face. “What’s happened?”
“We found his map and his sword.” Guilt bowed Lethe’s shoulders, and misery thickened her voice. “I gave him a head start so I could take a snack break, like it would have killed me to wait an hour before stuffing my face again.”
“This isn’t your fault.” I unstrapped her fin. “Besides, we don’t know for sure that anything is wrong.”
“I’m going to have a flesh-and-blood kid soon,” she fretted. “What if I park his or her stroller at a food truck, get preoccupied inhaling calories, and walk off without him or her? Or worse—what if he or she is kidnapped? The grandchild of the Atlanta alpha is a major bargaining chip.”
“Hear how panicked you are right now?” I rested my hands on her shoulders. “That’s how I know you’re going to be an amazing mom. You would never forget your kid, not even on Two for One Taco Tuesday.”
Eyes glassy with unshed tears, she pushed out a slow exhale. “Thanks.”
“No problem.” Unable to resist, I gave her a playful shake. “Now if it was a churro stand…”
“That’s your kryptonite.” Her watery laugh made me smile. “Not mine.”
“As much as I enjoy hearing you two rank which foods are most likely to result in the child abandonment or kidnapping of our firstborn, we need to focus.” Hood rubbed his jaw. “Oscar is tight with Woolly. She might have an idea of where he’s gone. We should check with her next.”
Hope surged through me in an electric tingle. “I could kiss you right now.”
“Please don’t.” He shot Linus a pitying look. “I remember what happened to the last guy.”
A teensy smile curved Linus’s mouth, but he dropped his chin to conceal his amusement.
I saw it, though. I had gotten good at noticing what he hid from the world. Or maybe he wasn’t hiding so much as no one had bothered looking. He was seen now. And when his gaze met mine and the corners of his eyes crinkled, I was flustered at the uptick in my pulse from a simple glance.
Linus meshed his fingers with mine. “How close do we need to get for Woolly to answer?”
The chills racing up my arm had nothing to do with the temperature of his skin, and my chest tightened.
“I can sense her whenever I’m on the property, but our connection is strongest when I’m in sight of her.” We set out again, and in a little bit her pitched roof came into view. “Close enough.”
I shot the question to Woolly along our bond, and alarm flared, sinking my hope she had a bead on Oscar.
“No luck.” I sweated against his palm. “She hasn’t seen him since we left.”
“Go to work,” Lethe suggested. “Get your mind off things.”
“We’ll worry if he hasn’t checked in by dawn,” Hood agreed. “Lethe will keep an eye out for him and call if he beats you home.”
“All right.” I exhaled. “I don’t have any better ideas, so we’ll go with yours.”
“Where are you guys patrolling?” Lethe cut into my swirling thoughts. “Downtown?”
“River Street,” I said, deciding I would check the Cora Ann in case the magic binding Oscar to the brass button I wore around my neck had faltered long enough for him to be sucked back to the scene of his death.
“Bring home some of those churros you mentioned.” She patted her flat stomach. “
Baby likes cinnamon.”
“Mmm-hmm.” I didn’t bother hiding my eye-roll. “Does baby like caramel and chocolate sauce too?”
“Yes, he or she does.” Lethe ignored my sarcasm. “Thanks for asking.”
Back at Woolly, Linus and I left the gwyllgi to discuss security protocols while we stepped inside to dress for the night.
Since I no longer held a job as a Haint, River or otherwise, I had started joining him during his nightly patrols. While it didn’t pay much—or anything at all, really—I enjoyed getting to know my city through his eyes. The contacts I made now, with him at my side to vouch for me, would prove invaluable after he returned to Atlanta.
Ouch.
The pinch in my heart when I thought of him going home no longer took me by surprise, but it still hurt.
I didn’t want him to leave, but he had a job, a duty. And it wasn’t to Savannah, or to me.
“You’re quiet,” he murmured at the base of the stairs. “Oscar, or something else?”
The man was perceptive. I had to give him that. But telling him I was dreading Atlanta yet again was out of the question. My insecurities would drive a wedge between us if the topic kept popping up in every conversation. Instead of venting, I reminded myself I had known what I was getting into, and with whom, and shook my head.
“Let me grab my bag.” It wasn’t an answer, but he didn’t press. Like I said—perceptive. “Be right back.”
I had a thing about ignoring my feelings, bottling them up until pressure built under my skin, ready to explode. I was getting better about letting off steam before I reached that point. Lethe’s friendship was slowly filling the hole where Amelie used to fit. There would always be a gap, a space no one else could fill, but such was life.
Old friends left, new ones took their places. Even if the old ones still lived in your carriage house.
Up in my room, I went to check on Eileen where she gazed out into the yard from the oak podium I had rescued from the attic. I kept track of my goddess-touched sigils within her pages, but she seemed otherwise content to bask in the moonlight like a cat in the sun.
I was scratching her eyelids with my fingernail when the force of Woolly’s mental ping made me gasp.
Images of Oscar flipped through my head, each one brighter than the last.
“We’ll find him,” I promised, regaining my balance. “The kid is family.”
Her relief gusted from the floor registers to flutter the curtains above my window.
“He played hard today.” I located a black nylon backpack crammed with necromantic paraphernalia. It was nowhere near as elegant as Maud’s leather doctor bag, but that statement piece hadn’t exactly been vintage chic when she started carrying it, either. “He might have gone…wherever it is he goes when he’s not here.”
Oscar never volunteered the information, and I had never asked. I wasn’t certain he was aware when he began fading, and if he wasn’t, I didn’t want to be the one who told him.
A knock on the front door brought my head up, and I strained to hear who Linus greeted, but Woolly’s consciousness flared, and a jaunty melody crashed through my mind with her incandescent joy.
“Oscar?” I asked, not quite believing our luck. “He knocked?”
How unlike my little sneak, who preferred popping in and scaring the pee out of people. Mostly me.
Thanks to my connection with Woolly, I was aware of Linus approaching before I heard footsteps on the stairs, and I met him in the hall.
“We have a situation.” His lips thinned, and his hand tightened on the banister. “You have a guest.”
“I thought…” I peered around him, but he stood alone. “Oscar isn’t here?”
Linus hesitated. “He’s downstairs.”
Certain the last thing I wanted to do was find out what put that look on his face, I followed for Oscar’s sake.
The front door stood open, and a young man around my age waited on the porch. He jingled a ring of keys hooked around one finger while clutching the glowing blue hand of my adoptive son with the other hand. The man’s hair was black as midnight, and the soft waves fell across his shoulders, clashing with the hard set of his jaw and the piercing green eyes that measured me from top to bottom. He was handsome enough, but wiry. Lean like he was hungry. And he was…angry.
No, that wasn’t quite it. He was nail-spitting furious. With me. Over what I had done to him.
How I knew all that at a glance made me question my sanity, but his truth beat against my senses.
Behind him, in the shadows, lurked the gwyllgi. Lethe had already shifted, but Hood remained upright.
As I stepped closer, a prickle of awareness swept up my spine, alerting me to the fact our visitor was a vampire, but…there was more. Not the lure of Last Seed, but a resonance that vibrated in my back teeth, an urge to reach out and touch him. Soothe him. Make amends.
“Oscar.” I waved him over, not trusting myself any closer to the vampire. “Come here.”
The ghost boy continued staring a hole in my thigh through unseeing eyes.
“I call to spirits,” the vampire explained. “I don’t mean to summon them.” He opened his fingers, but Oscar kept gripping his hand. With a sigh, he pressed a guiding palm between Oscar’s thin shoulder blades and nudged his toes right up to the threshold. “I figured you’d want this back.”
Ghosts tended to be drawn to necromancers, not vampires, but stranger things had happened.
Just look at me.
Reaching through the wards, I pulled Oscar to me and then demanded, “Who are you?”
“Corbin Theroux.”
“That doesn’t give me much to go on.” I examined his face, trying to place him, but memory failed me. “You look familiar. Have we met?”
“Only once.” His hard smile showcased elongated fangs. “I’m your progeny.”
“Oh.”
Fiddlesticks.
Two
Progeny.
My progeny.
Corbin Theroux.
Black edged my vision, and Linus cupped my elbow to steady me. “Why are you here?”
Never is a long time for a necromancer, but I hadn’t expected the Grande Dame to allow this meeting.
Labeling Corbin as an accident was harsh, but that’s how I viewed his creation. I had no memory of coaxing my first vampire into existence after his mortal death at the hands of a fellow inmate. Most of my time in Atramentous was spent in a drugged haze, and I hadn’t blinked clear of it when I made him.
“I escaped from my cell.” He flashed the keys in his palm. “I stole a car and drove to Savannah.” Bitterness tightened his mouth. “I can’t go home. Not like this. My parents would kill me.”
“You can’t tell them you’re a vampire,” I said through numb lips.
“They would see me coming from a mile away. My folks know all about you, and your world.” A world of pain darkened his eyes. “I’m not being dramatic. I’m being literal. They would see their son had fangs, and they would plunge a stake through my heart for the sake of my immortal soul.” He spread his hands. “That’s why I’m here. I have nowhere else to go.”
A human with working knowledge of our world was rarer than hen’s teeth, at least one not confined in a cell for life, but he wasn’t human. Not anymore. Thanks to me. “How…?”
“I come from a family of hunters.”
“Hunters,” Linus repeated softly.
“Break it down for me.” I massaged my temples. “I feel like my head’s about to explode.”
“That’s why he was in Atramentous.” Linus raked his gaze down Corbin. “Few humans are sent there. He must have committed a major crime against the Society. Killing vampires is the worst offense, due to the loss of revenue. It’s punished more severely even than the murder of a necromancer.”
The Grande Dame had once mentioned I might be surprised by the diversity of my cellmates. I don’t recall her ticking vampire hunters off her list, but there was a lot the night she re
instated my title that I had been too stunned to retain.
“I got sloppy. I was recorded beheading a vamp who had been preying on homeless kids. The clip went viral, and the Elite showed up at my day job two days later.” Corbin examined me with naked curiosity, his gaze roving my face. “If you hadn’t done what you did, I wouldn’t have seen the sky again. Granted, in my fantasies, it was blue, but I’ll take black.” A sigh moved through him. “That makes me the worst kind of hypocrite. Death over undeath is the family motto, but I didn’t hesitate.”
The twisting in my gut eased. “You…chose this?”
“Yes.” He looked at me oddly. “You let me decide my fate.”
Eyes pinched closed, I exhaled through the knot of guilt unfurling in my chest. “I didn’t know.”
A portion of that white-hot anger in him fizzled when he understood I had no idea what I had done.
“I don’t remember doing it.” Yet here stood the proof I held power over life and death in my hands. “Not that patchy memory absolves me from responsibility, but I didn’t know you existed until the Grande Dame informed me I had progeny.”
“The drugs.” Corbin raised his lip then tapped one of his fangs. “For a long time after, I thought these were a hallucination.”
Clear in his tone was the wish they had been. I had turned him into what he must hate the most.
Funny how relieved I had been a moment ago to learn he had chosen this life.
That small reassurance hadn’t lasted for long.
Linus derailed my guilt trip before I traveled far. “Mother will be searching for him.”
“The Grande Dame will be desperate to get him back,” I agreed. “He’s proof of what I am.”
“Clarice Lawson is your mother?” Corbin took an involuntary step back. “The Grande Dame?”
“Try not to judge him too harshly.” I smiled over at Linus. “You don’t get to choose your parents.”
“No,” Corbin agreed slowly. “You don’t.” His shoulders loosened. “She told me about you.”
Too bad she hadn’t returned the favor on my end. “I’m sure it was all very complimentary.”
How to Live an Undead Lie (The Beginner's Guide to Necromancy Book 5) Page 2