Grave War

by Price, Kalayna

“You know the rules. You’re lucky I let you come inside,” she said.

  His lips curled, ever so slightly, not yet showing teeth, but looking like he wanted to. Then he looked at Rianna. She gave him an apologetic smile and reached up to scratch behind one of his large ears. “Her house, her rules.”

  He kept staring at her, front feet still planted on the couch beside her, then he twisted and looked at where I was sitting cross-legged on the La-Z-Boy with PC curled in my lap. Yeah, my dog was sort of on the furniture. Oops.

  Tamara seemed to follow the barghest’s gaze as well because she said, “PC is all of six pounds and hairless. Also, he’s on Alex, not the actual furniture. Plus, oh-em-gee that sweater is too cute on him.”

  I laughed, running a hand down PC’s head. He did have some hair. Mostly just a white tuft on his tail, feet, and the crest of his head, but yeah, as was typical for Chinese Crested dogs, he was mostly hairless. Which was why he was wearing a little blue knit sweater, since going without a coat in January was a bad idea. And Tam was right, it was adorable.

  Desmond’s head swung back around, and he seemed to consider Rianna’s lap for a moment.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” she said, shaking her head vigorously enough to make her red curls fly. “You weigh more than me.”

  The barghest huffed again.

  “You didn’t have to come with me. It’s girls’ night.”

  Another disgruntled huff.

  “Oh, fine.” Rianna slid off the couch and settled on the floor. The barghest plopped down beside her, rested his front legs in her lap, and then gave a pointed look at her bowl of popcorn. “Girls’ night,” she said again, putting emphasis on the words, but she tossed him a kernel of popcorn.

  His head jerked, his jaws snapping, but he missed. He looked at where it had fallen on the floor. Then he looked up at Rianna again, expectant.

  “You are going to pick that up, right?” Tamara said.

  Rianna tossed him another piece, which he caught this time, before she said, “I’ll get it, don’t worry.”

  Tamara shook her head. “What kind of dog refuses to eat food that touches the ground?”

  I stifled a grin. I knew the answer to that question. The type that isn’t really a dog. Desmond was fae. Not just a fae-dog, but a fae with both a dog and a humanoid form. I had no idea why he remained in the dog form at all times. I’d seen him in his human form only twice, once at a revelry and another time in the realm of dreams and nightmares. I assumed Rianna knew he had another form, as they’d looked pretty close when I saw them at the revelry, but when I’d tried to talk to her about it, Desmond had very nearly bitten my head off. Literally, like with his giant barghest teeth. She seemed content with his constant dog-shaped companionship, so I hadn’t pressed the issue.

  “You never answered my question about the fly,” Rianna said from her spot on the floor.

  That was because I’d thought I’d avoided it.

  “Fly?” Holly asked, frowning.

  “Nori,” I said. “She shares features with a dragonfly if you see her without her glamour. And she hates me. I can do no right in her opinion. I can’t even dress right for the job.”

  Holly and Tamara exchanged a long look before Holly turned back and asked, “Is that what you wore to the office today?”

  I glanced down at my outfit. I’d left the blazer at the castle after dinner, but everything else, yeah. They must have seen the answer on my face.

  “Oh, Al,” Tam said, shaking her head. “Don’t look like that. It’s not like there is anything wrong with the outfit. It was great when you were your own boss as a PI. But you’re, what, director of the FIB?”

  “Agent in charge.” But considering that the only higher authority in my line of command was a king, I got her point. I sighed. “Fine. I’ll go buy some stuffed-shirt suits this weekend.”

  “Hey, they aren’t that bad; I wear power suits daily,” Holly said, but then she sat up straight and pretended a tie she wasn’t wearing was choking her. The effect was rather lost in that she’d changed into an oversize sweatshirt after work, but it still made everyone laugh.

  “Are we going to actually watch Curse Breakers, because I have no idea what is happening in this episode,” I said.

  “Oh yeah, we are doing this. Back it up, I’m lost too,” Tamara said, and then placed a hand on her belly, her brow furrowing. “And you settle down in there. You’re kicking my popcorn bowl.”

  “What’s the latest word?” I asked as Holly jumped up to grab the remote.

  Tamara rubbed her hand over her belly again, and her baby bump moved in response. “He’s more than caught up at this point. They now think we might have our dates wrong by as many as five weeks.”

  “Five? Is that possible?” Holly sank back onto the couch, the remote in hand, but she only paused the show. “You said you thought you were in Faerie about a week.”

  Tamara shrugged. “At this point, he might be coming real soon.”

  That earned silence all around the room. Last fall, Tamara had been attacked by a ghoul. To stop her from transforming into a ghoul herself, I’d sent her to Faerie while we dealt with the source of the issue on this side of the door. It had worked, and in mortal reality, only a day or two passed before we were able to safely bring her back. But in Faerie? Time could be funny in Faerie to start with, but the fact that we sent her to limbo where there was apparently no day or night and time was more or less impossible to track . . . Yeah, we really had no idea how long she’d spent there.

  “The latest scan shows that he looks perfectly healthy, though. They don’t know why my fluid is so low, and we are working on my iron still, but now they are saying he might get too big. Isn’t that a change?” Her tone was light, purposefully jovial, but her hand kept running over her baby bump, as if reassuring herself he was still okay in there.

  We all smiled, making light comments, discussing when we should move the baby shower up to, if the baby was likely to arrive a month or more earlier than expected. The mood was heavier, though.

  “Hey, Al, man, it took me a while to find you,” a new voice said as the owner of said voice walked through the front door. Literally through it. In his defense, the door didn’t exist on his plane, so he probably barely considered how disturbing it was when people walked through seemingly solid objects.

  Not that anyone else could see the ghost who’d just walked into the room.

  “Girls’ night,” I said, frowning at Roy as he shuffled over to my side.

  “I know, that’s why I’m here.” He pushed his translucent glasses higher up his nose. “Can you make me visible? I really need some girl opinions.”

  “Girls’ night means it is for girls.”

  “Who just joined us?” Rianna asked, looking over at me, but she sounded more curious than alarmed. In fact, everyone in the room took it as a given that I was talking to someone even though they couldn’t see him. And not that I’d just gone crazy and was talking to myself.

  This was why I loved my friends.

  “Roy just walked in.”

  “Tell him hi,” Holly said cheerily, as she backed out of the Curse Breakers episode so she could start it back from the beginning.

  Rianna gave her a funny look. “He can hear you. We just can’t hear him.”

  Well, technically Rianna could have seen and heard him if she’d expended some magic, but she and Roy had a bit of a rocky relationship, so she tended to intentionally ignore him.

  “Which one is Roy again?” Tamara asked. She had the least experience with the ghosts and other unusual characters my life tended to get entangled with. Rianna and Holly were my roommates—well, castlemates—so they tended to get a whole lot more exposure.

  “Geeky-looking ghost,” Rianna said, her tone flippant. “Glasses. Flannel. Slumps all the time.”

  “No I don’t!” Roy
sounded downright offended as he rolled back his shoulders.

  “You kind of do,” I told him. “Now, like I said, this is girls’ night. We’re going to veg out in front of a couple episodes of Curse Breakers and make fun of the bad spellwork they use.”

  “But, Al, I really need a female perspective here. Come on, just make me visible for a couple minutes.”

  I frowned at him. Roy hadn’t asked me to make him visible in quite a while. In fact, in the last few months, he’d been pretty preoccupied by the fae ghost who had started haunting my castle. Something clicked with that thought.

  “You want dating advice, don’t you?”

  Roy hunched forward a little, as if trying to curl in on himself to hide his embarrassment, but he nodded. “Yeah. I mean, I just want to bounce some ideas off your friends. I don’t have a lot of people I could ask, and, well, the two grave witches I have access to . . . Well, neither of you have very normal relationships.”

  My gaze cut to Rianna, where Desmond lay with his big doglike head in her lap. Yeah, that probably didn’t count as normal. And me? Well, between my commitment issues and the fact that I had feelings for two different guys, neither of whom it was practical or particularly safe to date . . . Yeah, I likely wasn’t a good source either, even if Falin and I were giving a relationship a go.

  “Roy wants some advice on his relationship with Icelynne,” I said, looking around the room. “Any objections?”

  None came, so I sent a tendril of power in Roy’s direction. A few months ago, I would have had to have physical contact to make a ghost manifest on the physical plane. Now I had a radius of nearly a dozen feet.

  Roy looked around, his gaze widening. I wasn’t sure how different things looked for him when I bridged reality for him, but it was obviously something noticeable. Everyone else in the room noticed too, as the ghost was now visible to them.

  “So what’s the problem?” Holly asked, smiling helpfully at the ghost.

  Roy started off on a long spiel. In his stumbling, overexcited narration, it was clear that the root of his issue was that he wanted to do something special for Icelynne because their three-months-dating anniversary was coming up—uh, do people really celebrate that?—but he had no idea what to do because, well, they were both dead. It kind of limited their options.

  Holly and Tamara tried to make useful suggestions, but the ghost dismissed most of them out of hand, his shoulders slumping further as he grew discouraged.

  “It’s so hard,” he said. “I can’t just bring a bouquet of flowers like someone delivered you.”

  “Me?” Tamara laughed. “I don’t remember the last time I received flowers. Though in truth, I prefer live ones I can plant to dead ones that rot in a few days.”

  “Then are the flowers on the porch not yours?” he asked, nodding toward the front door he’d floated through a few minutes earlier.

  A cold chill shot through me. “There are flowers on the porch?”

  “Yeah, I saw them when I came in.”

  I jumped to my feet, the motion dislodging PC from my lap. He gave a disgruntled bark as he hopped to the floor.

  “Al, what’s wrong?” Holly asked, climbing to her feet. Rianna was rising as well. I was already dashing toward the front door.

  As Roy had said, there were flowers on the stoop. Bloodred roses.

  I stared at the bouquet. How . . . ? This was getting too creepy. If this was an admirer, they were a stalker. And if it was Ryese?

  But why would he be sending me flowers?

  “Whoa. Those are gorgeous,” Holly said from where she’d come up behind me. “Tam, do you think Ethan—?”

  “They’re not from Ethan.” My voice sounded hard, distant, and Holly, who had leaned down to gather up the flowers, paused, shooting me a startled glance. Then she snatched the card sticking out of the top.

  “You’re right,” she said, giving a low whistle. “It says, ‘My dearest Lexi, we need to talk.’ Alex, I guess that means they’re yours. Lexi? Is that what Falin calls you?”

  “No.”

  I bent to grab the offending bouquet. I hadn’t told my friends about the weird flowers. I hadn’t wanted to get them caught up in anything—the last few months most of my friends had been dragged through enough because of me. And yet, here were the flowers, on the doorstep of my friend’s house. I wanted to hurl the bouquet into the street, but Tamara’s compost bin would be sufficient.

  None of the other flowers had hidden traps. I was so flustered I didn’t even think to look for one in this bouquet. Which, of course, meant it contained a spell.

  As soon as I touched the stems of the flowers, fae magic tickled across my mind, followed half a heartbeat later by a surge that crawled over my skin. A tendril of silver magic shot out of the bouquet, attaching itself to my arm. The chain of magic was so cold it burned as it coiled around my wrist and then began to sink into my flesh.

  “Fuck!”

  I dropped the flowers, jumping backward. The chain already had me. It dug into the skin of my wrist, sinking straight through my sweater as if it wasn’t there. But that wasn’t the real threat. I could already feel the chain attacking my mind. My will. I’d seen a spell like this before.

  This was a soul chain.

  I dug my dagger from my boot—this might be girls’ night, but I never went anywhere unarmed anymore. My fingers felt too thick as they closed around the hilt. I needed to cut the chain, but already that need was starting to fade. It wasn’t really that bad, having the chain. Kind of comfortable. Like a warm bath.

  The blade urged my hand up, and I frowned at it. Why was I holding a dagger?

  Oh, yes, the chain. That soft, cold, shiny chain. It was kind of pretty.

  The dagger sliced through the magic, severing it. Reality crashed back into me, piercing the fog in my mind like an ice pick to my skull. My friends were yelling. Rianna’s eyes were glowing, an enchanted spear having appeared in her hand. Holly had summoned magic, though she hadn’t directed it yet. Even Tamara had hauled herself to her feet.

  “Light up the roses,” I gritted out between clenched teeth.

  Holly didn’t hesitate. She was one of the best damn fire witches I’d ever seen, and the roses burst into flames as she released her magic. The fae magic I’d felt in the bouquet sputtered and then sizzled, burning away with the flowers.

  Within moments, nothing was left of the bouquet but a sooty pile of ash on the front stoop.

  “What just happened?” Tamara asked, breathing heavy as she joined us at the door.

  Someone had just made a damn good attempt at binding my soul. I stared at what had been the flowers. The last time someone bound me with a soul chain, they’d commanded me to merge reality, and I’d hemorrhaged so much magic, I’d unintentionally torn reality apart and rewoven it in a mad conglomeration that created its own pocket of Faerie spliced with the land of the dead, the Aetheric, and dozens of other realities I couldn’t name. I hadn’t even known I was a planeweaver then. I’d grown into my powers a lot since then. What would happen if that were to happen again? I shuddered.

  “Was that a soul chain?” Rianna asked, stepping forward and staring at my wrist where I’d been snared.

  I nodded, glancing at the spear she still carried—a spear she hadn’t been carrying earlier. I recognized it. It was an artifact that allowed the user to reach other planes. I hadn’t realized she still had it, let alone that she’d been carrying it around. It was supposed to be locked away, as it was dangerous as hell. Of course, considering I touched other planes naturally, maybe that was a hypocritical thing to think.

  “Who . . . ?”

  “Ryese.” It had to be. Which meant I needed to talk to Falin. Now. “I think we’ll have to cut girls’ night short.”

  Chapter 6

  I had Holly take me to the Eternal Bloom after we left Tamara’s. Unfortunately,
after some wandering around and being passed between guards, I was finally informed that Falin was not presently in the winter court. I was hoping that meant he’d received my message and was waiting for me back home, but when we reached my castle tucked away in the small pocket of Faerie attached to Caleb’s house, he wasn’t there either.

  I waited up most of the night, but he didn’t show.

  “What took so long?” Nori asked as I pulled open the door of my loft the next morning. I was sweaty and out of breath from running from the castle to this room, hoping to beat Nori to what was supposed to be my front door. Clearly, I hadn’t been successful.

  “Didn’t have time to shop, I see,” she said as I locked the door, the sneer in her voice obvious.

  I chose to simply ignore the comment. Yeah, I was wearing the same blazer as the day before, paired with a different sweater and my second-best pair of pants as I’d worn my best for my first day. It was what I had and I rather liked the outfit, but after talking to Tamara and Holly I had decided I’d get some more professional clothes. I wasn’t going to admit that to Nori, though.

  “So what is on the agenda today?” I asked as we made our way to her car. I nodded to Tem, who had waited in the backseat today, thankfully not deciding to put me through any more tests.

  “You still have the rest of the paperwork to go through this morning. And the king has recommended you start firearms training this afternoon.”

  I didn’t groan. It was a near thing, but hey, I was an adult, right? Of course, when we reached the office and I saw that the mountain of papers appeared to have grown, a tiny disgruntled sigh might have hissed out. Wasn’t my fault. It was the fact that I could barely even see the desk under the papers.

  My gaze landed on the small stack of files I’d set to the side the previous day. I scooped them up, flipping through them. “I think we should take a closer look at these,” I said, pulling the one from the floodplains and moving it to the top. Walking around a swamp in January didn’t sound like a ton of fun, but cold and mud were still better than spending the day wanting to claw out my eyes while reading through paperwork.