Necromancer Revealed: Book 3

by Lindsey R. Loucks

  While I waited for Jon and Echo, I finished everything on my plate. Curious glances kept sliding my way, but no one bothered me or accused me of destroying Amaria. A blessing, really. I could barely tolerate my own blame.

  A loud pop came from the professors’ table at the head of the room. A second after, a huge bubble formed across the top of one of the cauldrons. It popped, too, even louder and flung gravy far and wide. Several professors scooted back their chairs, their eyes bugging, some with clumps of gravy clinging to them. More and more bubbles boiled up and exploded, faster and faster.

  “Impetro rid!” a mustached professor shouted at the cauldron.

  Instead of stopping the spell, the whole cauldron melted and the still-bubbling gravy seared through the wooden table like acid. The professors and several students scrambled to get away. Not me, though, since I couldn’t.

  Mom had mentioned magic had gone haywire since Ryze’s return. I guessed she was right. Maybe no more gravy for me, at least for a while.

  Jon came in then with a rickety-looking wheelchair that I forced myself to go along with. I wouldn't be an invalid forever. With some bread filling the hole in my soul, I already felt a little more like myself.

  "I brought the Book of Gray Stone, too, and a book from the library that’s like a who’s who of dead people here," he said as he wheeled closer with only a glance at the melted table at the front of the room. "Strap in."

  The chair had a seat belt of sorts, as well as thick arm and leg straps I presumed were there to keep you in for a long time. I stuck with just the seat belt and settled the massive Book on my lap, as well as the smaller book, and Jon was nice enough to cover me with a blanket. A helper indeed. This one liked to go all out.

  Echo came back with two shovels, and with Jon pushing me, we were off toward the Gathering Room doors.

  "Dawn!" a voice called from across the entryway. Headmistress Millington floated toward us, her long red dress veiling her feet. A pile of brown hair sat atop her head, and she smiled with her nonexistent lips.

  Echo hid the shovels behind her back as she neared.

  "I heard you’re awake so I rushed to your room, but you weren’t there." She glanced down at the chair and frowned. "Are you...going somewhere?"

  "Just outside for some fresh air," I said smoothly.

  “You just woke up from mage’s oblivion,” she said, her voice incredulous. “You need rest.”

  “We’ll be with her the whole time,” Jon piped in from behind my chair. “We won’t let anything happen.”

  “Promise.” The shovels clanged slightly behind Echo’s back.

  "Well, take it easy and don’t wander from the main paths,” the headmistress said. “When you're up to it, come by my office, and we’ll talk. Classes started up again in January, so I’ll show you my plan to get you all caught up for the year, okay?"

  It was what, March? I’d missed so much, I’d likely still be catching up when I was dead. “Sure.”

  “I really am glad you’re okay, Dawn. I wish we had more time to talk right now.” With a frown, she glanced toward the Gathering Room. “But I better go see about that gravy situation.”

  She hurried inside.

  Echo leaned down to whisper, "I wouldn't go to her office. It's a trap."

  "Huh?

  "You missed like fifty research papers," Jon said. “And that was just in Dying and Reliving.”

  "Yeah, there's no way I'll be catching up." I rubbed my hand over the Book of Gray Stone hidden under the blanket. "I have too many other priorities right now anyway."

  We started for the doors again, and on the way, I spotted my parents chatting with a group of mages in the corner to my right. Dad did a double take when he saw me, frowned, then angled my mom so she wouldn’t see me escaping.

  I blew him a kiss, which of course he caught. Gods, I’d missed them.

  Jon opened the unlocked front door of the school, and blazing sunlight lit up the inside of my skull.

  "Oh," I groaned, throwing up my hands to block it all out. "Horrible nonsense. Make it stop."

  Echo chuckled as she closed the door then slipped by us. "It's madness, isn't it? This whole daylight thing? Necromancers don't ever get used to it."

  "It's the lack of windows in the school, you know," Jon said, pushing me toward the steep stairs. "It feeds the darkness necessary to perform black magic as well as the weird building angles that make you feel like your brain has been flipped on its side."

  "Accurate description." While peering through my fingers, I pointed at the stairs Jon was hurtling me towards, my stomach pitching. I obviously hadn't strapped in enough if he was going to toss me down. "Um, Jon?"

  Without missing a beat, Echo turned from in front of us and hefted up the entire front of the wheelchair by a wooden bar between my feet. Jon rolled me down slowly with only the back wheels touching.

  Relief loosened my breaths. "Thanks for not killing me."

  "Don't mention it," he said.

  I smiled despite the flush of embarrassment in my cheeks. I gotta admit, it was nice to have help and be carted around like this, though of course it would be temporary. I'd be on my feet again very soon.

  At the bottom of the steps, Echo set me back down, and we started up the path toward the front gate. Now that I could sort of see again, springtime had begun on Eerie Island. The trees were still dead, but instead of spearing toward an overcast sky, bright blue soared in all directions. The sun’s heat touched my skin and warmed straight to my bones. In December, Ramsey and I had cleared this path of snow as punishment, although...it had never really felt like punishment. Not with him.

  I should give him a dead man’s hand too. Might as well. He’d be thrilled. He could use it to find the Staff of Sullivan that was supposedly hidden in the catacomb’s shadows.

  I bit down on my smile as I realized it was growing and then cleared my throat. "What page is the memory grenade spell?"

  "Seven hundred twenty-eight, I think. It's marked."

  I hefted the book out from under my blanket and opened the Book on my lap to the correct page. Next to the memory grenade spell was a list of ingredients:

  “‘Fresh blood that runs sideways. Three eyelashes from a three-eyed skunk. Ground-up petals from the lilywort flower,’” I read. “Seems easy enough.”

  Echo skipped ahead up the path. “Nope.”

  “Three-eyed skunks are fairly rare on Eerie Island. Lilyworts only bloom after a blood offering and during a dark-hour rainstorm, and if you get too close, they bite,” Jon said. “We learned this the hard way in Undead Botany.”

  “Remember Giselle, a freshman?” Echo asked, turning. “Short hair, freckles, couldn’t talk without using her hands?”

  “No...” I admitted.

  “A lilywort took her finger right off when she gave it a blood offering,” Jon said. “The rest of her hand was so mangled, she had to go see a special healer.”

  “Blood everywhere.” Echo shrugged and turned back around. “Now she doesn’t talk with her hands.”

  “Plus, lilyworts are poisonous,” Jon added.

  Huh. Well, I was beginning to like this plan less and less.

  We veered off the path to the left and into the thick forest, the dead trees devouring the light. It became too bumpy and dark to read about the spell any longer, so I closed the Book.

  "Sorry, sorry." Jon maneuvered me over the uneven ground filled with bones and gnarled tree roots that looped in and out of the ground like enormous snakes. "There's another, smoother path up ahead."

  We wound through the trees and then came upon another path that started right in the middle of the forest. A wooden post at the side read Caution.

  I pointed at it as Jon wheeled me on past without slowing. "What for?"

  "You can ignore it," Echo called back from in front of us.

  Another one appeared at the next bend that read Turn Back.

  I'd never gone this way. Never even knew this path was here. Much too lat
e—I should've kicked myself in my own head—panic erupted in my gut and strangled my voice when I tried to shout, "Stop!" So I tried again much louder. "Stop!"

  Jon stopped and zipped to my side. "What? Did I hurt you?"

  Ahead, Echo slowed and turned, frowning.

  "Where are you taking me?" I gripped the arms of my wheelchair so tight the wood creaked. "What's with all these signs?"

  "They're just warnings for what's ahead.” She waved in that direction. “They're meaningless."

  "Tell me what's ahead," I demanded.

  "Quiet." She said it matter-of-factly with a casual shrug, not like an order but like that was an actual place.

  "That's what the pond is called,” Jon said. “You'll see... We went there when we learned about dowsing in Divination class."

  There was something he wasn't telling me. In my weakened state, I'd trusted too easily. Trusted them both. Gods, I was a fool. One of them could be the skin-walker, and the other could secretly be working for Ryze. Their sorrow and helpfulness could be a complete ruse. And I'd strapped myself to a chair and had basically told them, "Let's go to the middle of the woods so you can kill me!" I didn't even have my dagger or proper clothes to die in.

  I flicked my gaze between the both of them, my cheeks flaming with anger—at myself and them if they weren't who they said they were. "Jon, tell me what you brought Seph for your date that day we met in the library to do osteomancy."

  He winced and jerked back as if that memory had struck him a physical blow. "A yellow daisy and chocolates. Why?"

  He wasn't the skin-walker. Not right this second anyway.

  I turned to Echo. "I made you hate me. What did I do?"

  She rolled her eyes to the tops of the trees. "I'm not the skin—"

  "Then answer the question," I demanded.

  She heaved a long breath, billowing some of the hair that had fallen in her face. "The séance obviously when I told you to stop and you didn't, and also..."

  Oh. I hadn't realized there was an "and also."

  She firmed her lips and kicked a stray dead branch on the path. "There for a while, I thought Craig liked you. Always looking at you. Always talking with the other Diabolicals about you. That was before I knew Ramsey had it bad for you. It was before a lot of things..."

  I'd had one memorable interaction with Craig. Just one when he'd ambushed Seph and me on the stairs to our hallway. Two if you counted a nodding exchange in P.P.E. Hardly the stuff romance was made from, but okay.

  Echo held out her hands, an annoyed sneer on her face. "Did I pass your test?"

  "Yes. I'm sorry about Craig."

  She faced forward again, but not before I saw a flare of pain. "Me too."

  Jon sighed as he looked down at me. "Keep going or...?"

  "Yeah," I sighed.

  He started us up the path again, a little faster since Echo wasn't waiting for us and must’ve gone on ahead. I'd upset her. I'd upset them both, but my trust had been irrevocably shattered, especially after Morrissey. If I couldn't even trust my friends, who could I trust?

  "I don't know that I've even seen the skin-walker,” Jon admitted. “Would I be able to tell? No offense, but what if you're the skin-walker?"

  "No offense taken. The ravens seem to know who's real, though that's just a theory. Other than that, if you really know someone—their quirks and the things that fire them up and cool them down—you can tell. I always knew when I was talking to the real Seph, and I could tell when I was looking at a fake one. Seph doesn't stand still. I don't think she can." Which was why her current state was so unnatural.

  Jon stayed silent, and I couldn't blame him. Talking about Seph hollowed out my chest with painful barbs, and it felt too similar to talking about Leo. Only Seph wasn't dead. I had to hope that she'd be fine. I had to, or I would break apart with too many pieces to ever be put back together again.

  At a bend in the path, the sign read Last Chance, and past it stood Echo with her finger to her lips. Beyond her, the sight chilled my blood. A pond spread like glass wings on either side of a low footbridge. The water mirrored the blue sky and dead trees without a single ripple rolling across the surface. But it was what jutted out of the water that I couldn’t tear my gaze from. Hands and arms up to the elbow stuck out at all angles and grasped the edges of the long footbridge. Hundreds of them glistened wet, the flesh as alive as mine and in varied colors.

  I blinked hard, not understanding what I was seeing at all or why this pond was called Quiet.

  Jon stopped my chair before we passed the Last Chance sign and leaned down to whisper, "These are not good hands, Dawn. You don't want them. Trust me. When we cross the bridge, don't make a sound and do not reach out."

  I jerked my head in a nod, my nerves too tangled to do much else.

  “Also, a few lilywort flowers grow at the base of that bridge. When it’s raining, we’ll have to come here again to get one if you still want to do a memory grenade spell.”

  Sure enough, there were a few dead flowers right at the edge of the pond, their petals dried up and black and their stems sagging.

  When I nodded again, he rolled me past the sign, and at once, I realized the true meaning of silence. Not even a breeze whispered over us. It was as though we'd entered a pocket of magic where outside sounds couldn't penetrate. Only the blood thrumming between my ears and the wheels slowly spinning over the dirt existed here.

  Slowly, Echo turned away from us and set her foot on the bridge. It creaked under her weight, and the hands and arms instantly twitched. So fast I might've missed it. It was as though they were listening. She took another slow, creaky step, and they twitched again, this time their fingers reaching over the edges of the bridge. I gasped and jumped, but then sealed my lips shut tight. Then she ran across, her feet slamming the boards, and the hands snatched at her cloak with their lurching, weird movements. They missed, but what would happen if they didn't?

  I shuddered as Jon wheeled me closer to the bridge. The arms and hands jerked toward us, making me jump again. Water dripped from the fingers, but it didn't make a single plink or ripple when it fell back to the pond. It was unnerving, especially since they looked so alive and were surely attached to...something.

  Jon rushed me over the bridge. The wheelchair squeaked at the speed, and the bridge creaked underneath us. My stomach climbed into my throat as the hands snatched toward us. One grabbed the corner of my blanket and yanked it from my lap so hard it snapped in the air. Then it plunged into the water without a ripple and vanished. I could only imagine if that were me instead of the blanket. A long shudder ripped up my back.

  Jon made it to the other side and didn't stop until we made it to the low, iron-barred fence surrounding a medium-sized graveyard. A breeze stirred the branches in the trees towering over us. The pocket of no sound had vanished.

  "Dawn, meet Quiet," Jon said, breathing hard.

  "What was that?" I hissed.

  Echo handed a shovel to Jon. "Some mage is buried at the bottom of the pond. It's rumored he tried to make himself go deaf because noise bothered him."

  "But...why? What's wrong with sound?"

  Jon pushed me closer to the graveyard. "Nothing if you're sane."

  "Unless you hear the sound of someone you love, day after day, and they don't love you back. He was supposedly in love with Marjorie Effman, a professor here at one time." Echo clambered over the fence with her shovel. “The feeling wasn’t mutual.”

  Marjorie Effman, the dark, dark mage who'd been buried in the small graveyard underneath a cage. Morrissey's relative with the initials ME.

  I gazed back at the pond and did a double take. "Does...does the water look red to you?"

  "Yes." Jon gulped. "I've noticed it's much better not to think about why."

  Echo wandered around the graves and peered closer at the names on the worn headstones. "Students aren't too bright sometimes. Some have tried to impress their friends by making loud noises, and it didn't go so well for them."
/>
  "I was trying not to think about it, so thanks." Jon started over the fence with a sigh.

  "They died?" I asked.

  "Supposedly it's ugly when you make too much sound.” Echo swiped the hair out of her face. “I've never done it. I never plan to either."

  A slow shudder rippled down my back. "Sounds like a purposeful death trap."

  She stopped in front of one gravestone with two skulls on top appearing to take a bite out of it. "Oh, there's a ton of those around this academy."

  "Lovely. I've been traipsing around while completely oblivious, then."

  "That's the definition of life, isn't it?” Jon turned a smile toward me then followed after Echo. “Never knowing when you're going to fall.”

  “Or who you'll fall for," Echo added, her shoulders drooping some.

  "True enough," I said.

  Echo took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Enough with the deep thoughts. Let's dig someone up."

  After some cross-referencing in Jon's book with the gravestone names, we found ourselves a murderer. Peter Blackwell, the black sheep son of an old headmaster who killed his entire family.

  Echo let out a low whistle after I read that part out loud. "Is that dark enough for you?"

  I shrugged like it was no big deal. "He'll do."

  She snorted and shook her head as she rammed the tip of her shovel into the earth. "I like your style, Dawn."

  "Really?" I smiled down at my infirmary gown. "I was thinking it was a little threadbare myself."

  "Not what I'm saying at all," she said with a chuckle.

  This felt good, laughing and joking, and being awake and alive. Other than digging up a murderer to chop off his hands, this is what normal people did. It was exactly what I needed, just a tiny bit of normalcy before waging war against my enemies once again.

  With the help of Jon's magic and Echo's strength with the shovel, I had two bony hands in my lap in no time. The one I'd had before still had flesh on it, but a skeletal hand would work just as well.

  Before we started to go back, a plop sounded behind us, like a rock had broken the surface of the pond. But...that didn’t seem to be the way Quiet worked. The three of us stared at one another and then slowly turned to look between the branches of trees.