Ashes And Grave

by Aiden Bates

  The formality of it, and the underlying politics, were transparent and a little unsettling. I was not here to establish any relationships between organizations. In fact, Master Laryn had not wanted me to come at all. If not for Vance’s insistence, I might have stayed away.

  Everyone knew that Emberwood Weyr hated mages.

  “I hope this as well,” I said. The alternative would have made the stay more uncomfortable than it already was.

  Nix cleared his throat. “I’ll see you to your quarters.”

  “Thank you,” I told him, and stepped aside as he brushed past me very much like a person who was not in the least happy that I was here.

  I gave the rest of the council a polite smile and what I thought was a courteous nod, and turned to follow Nix out of the ruined council chamber.

  He didn’t speak to me as he led me out of the council building and into the street outside. It was an overcast day, threatening to rain but not yet decided on the matter. The scent of the ocean was faint, but noticeable. Emberwood was not far from Charleston, in South Carolina. Once, if I understood the history correctly, it had been closer to the coast. During the Census, however, Emberwood had elected to turn away the mages tasked with cataloging all paranormals in the United States.

  The Department of Paranormal Welfare had not been very honestly named, however. They pressured the cabals to get the census completed, with threats of sanctions and not-so-subtle implications that there would be mortal consequences for failing to beat the rest of the paranormal world into submission. So, the cabals asked nicely, again.

  The third time, they asked not-so-nicely.

  The death toll was in the hundreds, which for dragons and mages alike was a devastating loss. In the end, the dragons allowed themselves to be added to the census, and the mages got the job done. The government, of course, dusted its hands and considered the whole affair mission accomplished, with no hard feelings.

  Emberwood did not feel this way. Neither did the cabals.

  And it showed, even now, over seventy years and one massive relocation later. Every dragon we passed seemed to know who and what I was. They stared, sometimes with blank expressions, sometimes with undisguised anger and disgust. This is why I had not wanted to come and do this.

  So, why had I ultimately agreed?

  Vance, mostly. But also, hauntings which turned deadly were rare events. Spirits were typically nonsentient, performing some task on a loop because it was related to some bit of business they did not successfully finish at the time of their death. The average haunting is harmless. Perhaps a nuisance, when that task-loop involved things like clearing a wall of pictures, or moving some item around a house, or turning lights on or off. Mostly, that was a matter of confusion, though. Not malice.

  In some cases, a spirit with just enough awareness of its situation might possess another living being, but this manifested as a sudden obsession, mostly. Again—a nuisance, and possibly very inconvenient if the obsession was especially expensive or dangerous. Murder victims sometimes possessed the living in order to carry out justice. That sort of thing needed intervention. A gambling problem from the grave also needed intervention, of course, but it was not life-or-death.

  A spirit killing people, though? That was both rare, and in need of resolution.

  Honestly, I just love the work that I do. I’m an academic, deep down. The chance to address a case like this was the chance to learn more, maybe write a paper. If I did manage to repair the relationship between Emberwood Weyr and at least my cabal of Custodes Lunae? Well, that was a bonus, too.

  “That ass, though,” Gabby murmured, and made a rudely sexual noise. She reached out to the admittedly very well-shaped globes of Nix’s posterior, as if she might grab them and hang on while he walked.

  “Behave,” I murmured.

  Dragon ears are very sensitive. Nix glanced over his shoulder, frowning. “Sorry?”

  I waved a hand, my cheeks burning slightly. “I have a condition.”

  One eyebrow rose, skeptical, but he only faced front and shook his head. I pointed a warning finger at Gabby. She stuck her tongue out at me, and resumed staring at Nix’s ass.

  Which I didn’t blame her for, entirely.

  We came, after quite a long, silent walk, to a small house that still had the marks of nails over the windows, where I suspected boards had recently been attached. “We fixed this place up just for you,” Nix said as he ascended the stairs, proving that they were not rotted to mush despite appearances to the contrary. “I know you necromancers like old places.”

  “That is a misconception,” I said as I followed him. “But I appreciate the effort.”

  He opened the door, and I almost took that back when he led me inside. While it was clear that someone had been in the place, cleaning the floors and windows, patching up what looked like a hole in the ceiling, replacing some of the drywall around the kitchenette, and even going so far as to roll out a very used rug that took up most of the main room, that was about all that had been done. There was a smell, but it at least did not seem to be black mold.

  It was a very small house. One room, no stairs. A narrow bed had been placed on one side, and a sofa on the other. There was no television, no desk. A fold-up card table had been placed in the kitchen, along with a single chair. There was an electric kettle, and a large red gas tank to power the stove. If there was anything in the cabinets, this was not apparent.

  “It will do just fine,” I muttered. I pointed to the door off the kitchen. “That is the bathroom?”

  “It has a sink and everything,” Nix said. Was that a hint of self-satisfaction in his voice?

  Gabby disappeared through the bathroom door. A moment later, she stuck her head out. “Shower’s gross. Toilet’s small. They must really like you.”

  “I’ll get settled,” I told Nix. “I would like to begin interviewing those affected within the next couple of hours. Is it possible to arrange this?”

  “Some of them will be at work,” he said, “but I’ll prioritize victims by availability. There’s food in the cupboard. Nothing especially fancy. We don’t get a lot of trade, and mostly sustain ourselves here. I’m sure it’s not the kind of luxury you’re used to at the cabal, but it’s the best we can do.”

  I had seen much nicer houses on the walk over. But, I also preferred my own private quarters to sharing space with someone else. If the choice was a shared space in one of those nicer houses, or my own place here in this recently condemned shack—I did prefer the shack.

  I did not, however, prefer Nix’s attitude. “It seems you are full of misconceptions today,” I said, smiling slightly. “If anything, this is a great deal more spacious than I’m accustomed to. This part, at least, will be a bit of a vacation in that regard. No roommate.”

  “Well, that’s fortunate,” he said coolly. “Hopefully ridding us of a killer ghost is as relaxing.”

  “Poltergeist,” I said, as I put my old messenger bag down on the couch.

  Nix sighed. “Pardon my undereducated use of common vernacular.”

  I eyed him for a moment. Educated—which made sense for any dragon but especially a future leader of a weyr. Argumentative, which I thought was probably from a knowledge of his people’s history. And kind of an asshole. That was probably just genetic. “The word ‘ghost’ doesn’t frighten people,” I said. “It makes them think that maybe it is not so bad. Poltergeist is a word that makes us all nervous. Nervous is sometimes good. It means being on edge, being ready for something bad to happen. What you have here is a poltergeist. I will take care of it. But in the meantime, everyone should be nervous. When it manifests, its range will be limited. To travel far, it has to recede into the etheric realm, where it cannot do damage. So, let your people know that if it manifests again, they should run until it cannot reach them.”

  His jaw muscles tensed again, like they had before, but he gave a nod. “We didn’t know that. Thank you.”

  “You are welcome,” I said, an
d spread my hands. “I am here to help.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We’ll see. I’ll send the first interviewees to you by noon.”

  With that, he left, and I dropped onto the sofa, exhausted both from traveling here and from having to banish a powerful spirit the moment I arrived.

  Gabby sat down next to me. “He definitely does not like you.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I don’t have to be liked to do the job, learn something, and get paid.”

  “No,” she said, “but you do have to be liked to get fucked proper.”

  “Okay,” I groaned, and waved a hand. “To the ether with you. Leave me alone for a bit, I need to rest.”

  She sighed, and began to fade. “Whatever you say boss. That ass, though. Mmph.”

  When she was gone, never far from me but at least out of sight and unable to pester me, I set a timer on my phone, and lay back on the couch to close my eyes and get at least an hour of meditation in before I began.

  It was going to be quite the week, it seemed.

  Yay for me.

  3

  Nix

  Much as I hated having a necromancer in the weyr, I was able to set that aside to get the job done. The faster this was all resolved, the sooner he could go back where he came from. I contacted the survivors of previous attacks, as well as the weyr’s historian, and made appointments from noon until almost seven in the evening. A full workday. After all, we were paying the fucker.

  It didn’t seem fair that a necromancer should look like Mikhail did. These were people who had power over life and death. They could drag your loved ones’ spirits from their rest to bother them with questions, make sure a person never did really rest at all, and even take the soul from a person’s body and turn them into slaves with no hope of escape. All of them ought to look like what they were.

  Monsters, waiting to show their ugly side.

  “Wow,” Rezzek murmured when I ranted to him about the matter. “Tell me how you really feel, Nix.”

  I glared at him over my coffee. “Tell me you don’t feel the same.”

  He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I mean, I agree they’re dangerous. But, this one is also here when we happen to really need the help of someone like that. So, at least for now, you should play nice.”

  “I’m neither playing,” I pointed out, “nor required to be ‘nice’ at all. We’re paying him. Which is outrageous in the first place—Blackstone didn’t pay for the services of that esper they’ve got living there now. You know Tammerlin Blackstone actually mated a mage. Claimed him and everything. The fuck could he have been thinking?”

  Rezzek snorted softly. “Not everyone has the history we do, man. Not everyone has seen the dark side of the cabals. Besides, espers can get in your head and control your thoughts. Probably something like that going on.”

  I shook my head, disgusted by the very idea of a mage living in a weyr. “It’s wrong. And it used to be, we all knew it.”

  He sighed, and stood from the cafe table. There was just the one in Emberwood—we didn’t need more than a few such places, with a population as small as ours—and it was usually crowded this time of day. Now, though, everyone was worried about leaving their homes. And about being in them. The whole weyr had seemingly gone quiet since the haunting began. All but a few of us, Rezzek among them, tended to just hunker down and stay out of sight lately. “Okay,” he said, “come on. You’ve been sitting here simmering for half an hour. No offense, Nix, but I can’t take it anymore. You’re stuck in a loop. Let’s take a walk, or fly it out, or something.”

  I looked down at my empty mug. I didn’t remember finishing it. Maybe he was right. “I can’t,” I complained, realizing the time when I looked past him to the clock on the wall. “I’ve been away from the house most of the day, I need to check on Pop.”

  “I can come with you,” he said.

  “If you want,” I replied as I stood and dropped ten dollars on the table to cover our coffees and a tip. “He’d like to see you, I’m sure.”

  We left the cafe and made our way to the center of the weyr, where the Emberin house had stood since it was first built almost sixty years before, when our people had been forcibly pushed away from the coast to make way for the expansion of human communities there. That was before my time, of course, but my father had told me the stories, told me about the Census, and the days of war with the mages who had demanded we comply when we refused to take part. Census, he’d explained, was how they made their catalogs, their lists. It was how they assessed the enemy numbers, and eventually they’d use that information to wipe us all out.

  No one had really believed him, or his father, at the time. There had been mixed reactions. Right up until we said ‘no’. Then it became clear what the ultimate objective was.

  The house we lived in now was, in a way, a testament to our failure to protect our people. Even if I wasn’t involved in it myself, it was part of my legacy. I had inherited that failure, and Pop never let me forget it.

  Now, here I was, inviting a mage right into the community. Not just a mage, even—the worst possible kind.

  It made my blood boil, made my dragon twitch nervously under my skin. “I mean what would my grandfather say if he knew—”

  “Oh, my gods, dude,” Rezzek groaned as we ascended the steps to the front porch. “I get it. We all get it. For fuck’s sake, just keep it to yourself, it’ll be over before you know it.”

  I swallowed the rest of what I was going to say, and opened the door to let us both in.

  To a human, the place probably smelled sterile, well-cleaned. Maybe like it hadn’t been used much recently. To me, the house smelled like sickness. And to Rezzek as well. He sniffed the air, and his expression fell. “Damn.”

  “Yeah,” I muttered. “He’s upstairs.”

  We went up the steps to the second floor, and then to the room at the end of the hallway. When we opened it, Pop was still in bed, like he had been when I left him. Though, his slippers had moved. Maybe he’d gotten up to use the bathroom, or maybe he’d actually eaten something today. “Pop?” I asked softly as we entered. “You awake?”

  He stirred and rolled over.

  Once upon a time, my father was a strong, youthful-looking dragon. He was barely a hundred years old. He’d had gray in his hair since I was a kid, but he’d always looked vital, healthy. Powerful.

  That had changed in the last few months. We’d kept it quiet, tried not to let the news spread outside the weyr, but he was sick. And no one knew what plagued him. Whatever it was, it had wasted his muscle away, hollowed out his cheeks a bit at a time, made bags under his eyes that were dark and bruise-like. It made his lips thin and so dry that they cracked. It made his body into a thing of puppet-like joints, all sharp angles and weakness.

  It made my heart crack down the middle every time I saw him now.

  “I’m awake,” he said, and squinted. His eyes flashed gold, but only for a second, and even then he couldn’t quite see us clearly. He sniffed the air instead. “That Rez?”

  “Yes, sir,” Rez said, smiling. He went around to Pop’s side of the bed. “Thought I’d come check on you, make sure this shit isn’t treating you poorly.”

  “Well, he won’t hire me a hooker,” Pop said with mock bitterness. “But other than that, he does okay.”

  Rez snorted a laugh. “Huh. Well, you know… maybe I can help with that. Fly some hot piece in for you?”

  “It’d be good to find out if my dick still works,” Pop said, his eyes glinting with humor.

  My cheeks burned, both because I didn’t like to think about that, but also because Pop never joked with me like that. Not since his other son, the original Emberin heir, had died almost ten years back. Rezzek had been my best friend since I was born, more or less. Pop had always seemed to like him more than me, even before Pendrig was killed.

  “Can I get you anything, Pop?” I asked.

  He took his eyes off Rezzek and some of his humor faded. He started to spea
k, but was taken by a fit of coughing before he could. Rezzek helped him sit up, and I fished Pop’s inhaler from the side table and pressed it into his hand.

  Pop put his thin lips to it and pumped it twice, inhaling with some effort to ease his throat and lungs. When the fit passed, his heart pounded weakly in his chest. “S’good,” he assured us, waving us off him. “I’m fine. Not dead yet. Just got a tickle in my throat is all. Coffee wouldn’t be out of place.”

  I sighed. “Miral says you can’t have coffee, Pop. Your heart.”

  “Miral’s a bitch,” Pop grumbled. “And she’s always hated me, you know. Like half the other females in this place.”

  I held my tongue. Pop’s blatant displays of sexism were practically legendary. He was respected, and he had held his position by right and tradition for a long time, like his father and grandfather before him. But, it was true that most of the women in the weyr at the very least steered clear of him, if they didn’t outright dislike him. We were creatures of tradition, a side effect of living long lives and putting older dragons in positions of power, I supposed. So, that wasn’t likely to change anytime soon. But I at least had promised myself that I wouldn’t carry on all of Pop’s traditions.

  “She’s taking care of you the best she can,” I told him.

  He grunted, and waved at his wasting body. “Clearly.”

  “A little coffee can’t hurt,” Rezzek suggested. “I can make it.”

  I know that he didn’t mean to undermine me in front of my father, but that was what it felt like. And Pop seemed to think so, too. He gave Rezzek a pat on the arm. “Thank you, Rez. Cream, no sugar. If there’s even cream in the fridge anymore.”

  “There is,” I assured Rezzek, and gave him a tense nod as he left. His eyes told me he was just trying to keep peace.

  “So,” Pop said once he was gone, “heard the council meeting was a shit-show.”

  “Not at first,” I said.

  “Oh?” he wondered, giving me a familiar critical eye. “Samar said you were all excuses and patience and do-nothing. Why do you think he’d say a thing like that?”