A Familiar Sense of Dead

by E L Wilder

  “What’s this?”

  A ward, he said.

  “What does it do?”

  It’s a ward of truth. Silas was tired of people stiffing him when they supplied fake addresses, names, and forged signatures. So he enchanted the book. It prevented anyone from signing unless the information they provided was truthful.

  “Impressive.” Again she was astounded at Silas’s skill and ingenuity. Whatever or whoever had gotten the jump on him must have been powerful indeed. This realization only increased her discomfort here.

  Now open the book from the back.

  She did as she was told, arranging the book as if she would start reading it from the back. Hazel was surprised to find the pages filled, though she could have sworn those pages were blank when she’d flipped through from the front.

  At the top of the page, it simply said TRANSACTIONS.

  This account was much shorter than the SALES ledger.

  One book, two ledgers.

  “Amazing,” she said.

  It’s sort of an added layer of security.

  “Security against what?” she said. “Who would take the effort to read a pawnshop’s record of transactions?”

  Silas was a bit of a paranoid guy.

  The information in the back of the book was much more succinct. Just a list of items. No names. No addresses. No signatures.

  “Look at these items,” she said. “The necklace and the medicine case are both accounted for here. And there are other things. Powdered dendrant root. Mermaid oil emulsion. This sounds like a sales sheet for an apothecary.”

  “Seriously, was Silas sick?” she asked again.

  I don’t know. Silas and I had a falling out a few years back. But that knack he had for obtaining rare items sometimes translated into helping people who were. Cases that were beyond the skill level of most physicians—they found their way to him.

  She pointed at the entries. In the margin next to the most recent set, somebody had scrawled a strange set of symbols. Was it some Quarkian language? A personal code? Beneath the symbols, Silas had written “lesions.”

  She heard something scuttle behind her and she jumped in her chair. “What was that?” she asked.

  Sounded like a dinner rat.

  She shuddered. “First spiders, then rats? This place is getting more magical by the minute.”

  The sewers of Quark are crawling with more than just rats. Try direrats.

  “Direrats?”

  Think of a regular rat and then make it the size of golden retriever.

  “I’d rather not.”

  Look out!

  Clancy’s warning came only a split second before something heavy slammed into her from behind, shoving her forward into the desktop. What felt like giant fingers dug into her scalp and back, and for a moment she thought that the troll, Oddlump, must have finally tracked them to the shop. Clancy hissed and howled at whatever had her pinned.

  Hazel braced herself against the desk and pushed back hard. She sat upright, flinging away whatever was on top and sending it thudding to the floor. She leaped to her feet, knocking back the rolling chair.

  She was unprepared for what lay in wait behind her. At first she thought it must have been one of those direrats, but it wasn’t golden retriever sized. It was more like a rottweiler.

  The thing scuttled back, shifted as it arched back on its hind legs, and raised an unsettling excess of long spindly arms ceilingward, and she saw quite clearly what it was. A massive spider, bigger than any spider had a right to be. She tried to yell to Clancy, but all that escaped her throat was a weak rasp.

  The spider feigned an attack and she shrieked and instinctively grabbed the closest thing at hand—the coin pouch and lobbed it at the spider. But it hardly had the intended effect. The pouch bounced harmlessly off the creature’s quivering abdomen.

  “Oh no,” she breathed. What little bravado she’d mustered had rolled across the floor with the scattered coins and she stood, paralyzed, the spider staring at her, its mandibles flexing, the tips of its fangs clicking like knitting needles.

  Some weak voice inside her urged her to move, to do something, anything. But what that anything was, she had no idea. She had lost all sense of herself, of where she was and what she was doing there. Whatever was about to happen, she had no doubt that she was powerless to stop it.

  Suddenly an ear-splitting shriek rent the air. She realized it had been Clancy, pulling out one of his greatest weapons—the painfully soprano-shaming pitch of his double vocal cords.

  The sound was enough to jar her from catatonia—and to spur the spider into action.

  The creature scuttled forward, rushing at her with alarming speed. There was no time for Hazel to think, just react. In one fluid motion, she slipped the satchel from her shoulder, caught it by its strap, and swung it hard, like a ball and chain. It connected with one of the spider’s eyes. The result was instantaneous. The creature shrieked, a high-pitched keen that made her shiver.

  Its head rippled and distorted. Between the nest of black eyes, sprouted a pair of vaguely human ones, and below that the skin split to reveal a human mouth that cried out in agony. Then, as quickly as it appeared, the face was gone, swallowed by the bristling black hair.

  The creature seemed to regain a sense of self, and it wasted no time. It fled toward the front room, exploding through the curtain of wooden beads. Hazel was too terrified to pursue it.

  In an instant, Clancy was beside her, practically climbing her leg as he questioned her.

  Are you okay? Did it bite you? Did you break anything?

  “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

  Apparently satisfied that she would live, he rushed to the doorway where the beaded curtain had once hung, and stood, tail stiff in the air.

  It’s gone. Left the door open.

  “What was that thing?”

  Other than a direspider?

  “Is that the prefix you guys use to mean ‘bigger than acceptable’?”

  More or less. He turned back to her. You’ve got one hell of an arm. Remind me not to get in a fistfight with you.

  “And I thought I had been slouching on my workout routine.”

  Why didn’t you cast a spell?

  “I panicked,” she said. “Spiders have that effect on me.”

  There was a burst of movement from the front room and somebody entered the shop.

  Hazel recognized him instantly, though the last time she had seen him, he’d been wearing a greasy trucker hat, a sweaty T-shirt, and some dirt-streaked jeans. Now he looked like he’d just stepped out of a J. Crew catalog, wearing a collared button-up sweater over a shirt and tie and a pair of chinos. Only the chunky work boots reminded her of the man she’d met last month—hired by Juniper as the assistant groundskeeper on Bennett Farms. That had been before she’d falsely suspected him of having committed the murder that Juniper had been blamed for, and nearly mucking it all up by getting them both killed. She hadn’t seen him since, and she wondered now, as he glowered down at her, if he was the type to hold a grudge.

  “Alex?” she asked, trying to look dignified.

  “You?” he said, the stern look slipping from his face. “What are you doing here?”

  “He brought me here.”

  She looked back, but Clancy was nowhere to be seen. Alex considered her, eyebrows raised and likely pondering if she were crazy.

  “What are you doing here?” she countered lamely.

  “I am here under my official capacity as a Wand of the City Council of Quark,” he said, thumbing the badge affixed to his sweater. “A disturbance was reported on Common Place. I traced it here—but I didn’t think it would lead to you . . . here. In Quark. Intruding on a designated crime scene.”

  “I’m not intruding,” she stammered.

  He considered her coolly. “You have been summoned. The Council is in session and you are to appear before it immediately. Failure to comply will result in your immediate arrest.”

  He piv
oted on one heel and strode to the shop door.

  She looked around the room, saw Silas’s ledger on the desk, and rushed to stuff it into her satchel. She was horrified to see that the mess of cannoli had been crushed turning that pocket of her satchel into a cannoli apocalypse. She nuzzled the book in a separate pouch next to her field spellbook. She’d have to contend with the mess later. For good measure, she stuffed the other objects in as well. The only object she couldn’t locate was the necklace. It must have gotten lost in the scuffle. She’d have to do without it.

  She hurried, for what she hoped was the last time that day, to catch up to somebody. She found Alex waiting outside the pawnshop.

  “We’re walking,” he said.

  “What, no company car? Or a beat-up old pickup?”

  He smiled awkwardly. “There are no cars in Quark.”

  “Quark has fanny packs but no combustion engines?”

  He smiled again and he started walking. “This way. It’s not far.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Today’s episode is brought to you by the letter F,” Hazel grumbled. “As in I am really freaking tired of chasing after people.”

  “What?” called Alex over his shoulder from a few yards ahead. She stayed silent as he led her down side streets, cut through alleys, and crossed ungated yards while she attempted to process everything that had happened. The only time Hazel had ridden in a truck with Alex, he’d driven like a bat out of hell. Hazel was displeased to see he walked at the same pace—like a man trying to outrun death. It was good to know she could be outpaced by everything from a sweater model to an asthmatic cat.

  Speaking of asthmatic cats, if she ever saw Clancy again, he’d better be able to outrun her. He’d stuck around for a giant-spider fight but cut and run for a man in a preppy sweater. She seethed as she marched behind Alex.

  Alex led her to a town green and crossed it, heading toward a grand marble building that looked something like a miniature Supreme Court with a clocktower—the same one she had seen from the yellowed-brick road—sprouting from its side. Hazel frowned. Was that their destination? When Alex had said Council, she had pictured a group of amiable silver-haired elders gathered in a town hall. Now the idea of appearing before the Council seemed to carry so much more gravitas.

  But at the last second Alex detoured, ducking through an alley between the building and a stately colonial. She saw as they passed that the marble building was cordoned off.

  “Where are you taking me exactly?” she asked as they emerged in front of a giant brick cube of a building with a sign out front that read “Quark Elementary School.”

  “The Meeting House is currently being fumigated for an infestation of flesh-devouring mites,” he responded. “The Council is convening here in the meanwhile.”

  He mounted the steps and pulled open the exterior doors, crossed a small anteroom, and paused at a second set of doors.

  “A few words of advice before we go in there,” Alex said. “The Council has powers that extend beyond your average mundane town government, so you’d do well to watch your Ps and Qs here. Especially with Circe Strange. She’s likely to throw you in the lock-up if you even look at her the wrong way.”

  Hazel gulped. She suddenly felt underdressed and wished she’d gone a little more formal in selecting her Quark outfit. She combed her fingers through her red curls a few times and smoothed her clothes. As good as she was going to get after a spider fight, she thought. She nodded at Alex. “Ready.”

  He pulled open the doors, unleashing a chorus of voices shouting over each other. They stepped into an old-school gymnasium outfitted for basketball. A team logo, a bird in a roundel, was painted at the half-court line.

  Rows of folding chairs had been set up in the gymnasium. They were mostly empty except for a few people scattered here and there, most of them looking bored. Hazel and Alex slipped into the back row.

  The Council itself was holding session from a series of folding lunch tables arranged in a semicircle beneath one of the basketball hoops. She was unsurprised to see that the Council—eight of them in all—was a collection of odd and interesting individuals. A few demanded her immediate attention.

  A flatbed bearing a giant glass tank of slightly greenish water. Inside floated what Hazel could only assume was a merman, his bare torso fleshy and silver, his lower half a giant fish’s tail. A lectern was plungered to the outside of the tank, and a small froglike creature perched on its top, turning pages at the signal of the merman. The name card placed on the table in front of the tank read, Triton of the Merfolk.

  Positioned at the other end of the tables was a giant perch upon which roosted a woman. Well, a woman dressed in a hot-pink sun visor and windbreaker from the waist up, but everything south of that was strictly bird, feathered with mocha plumage dappled black. A placard on the table in front of her read, Marge of the Harpies.

  Everyone else in the Council possessed uniform parts from head to toe, though they were certainly no less curious for it. There was a bored-looking man sporting a pair of diaphanous butterfly wings. His placard read, Oberon, of the Faefolk. Next to him sat a blackened suit of armor, its helm wrought to look like a wicked hawk, tilting precariously in its chair. His placard identified him as Sir Culpepper, of the Functionally Deceased.

  Hazel’s gaze ultimately fell upon the woman that sat in the middle of the tables, arguably the least exotic of the lot. She was an imperious-looking woman, her jet-black hair drawn into a flawless bun, her knitted poncho arranged carefully so that it didn’t interfere with her tented fingers. Her whole décor, from hair to hands, was interwoven with glistening jewels and gems that were as sharp as her wicked nose and as cold as her ice-blue eyes—eyes that were currently boring into a young woman that stood before the Council. The placard in front of her read, Circe Strange, Witch.

  The young woman in question stood with her feet firmly planted on the free-throw line, arms crossed in defiance. Her back was to Hazel, but Hazel already liked the vibe she was putting off. She wore a pair of black leather pants scored with silver zippers, a short-waisted black leather coat trailing buckles and straps. Her hair swept down her back in a purple tidal wave streaked with black.

  The rest of the Council seemed content to sit back as the two women, Circe and this young spitfire, sparred. The winged man shuffled papers from folder to folder, the harpy picked something from her plumage, and the merman nodded at his attendant to turn another page for him.

  “The Council will not suffer your disrespect,” said Circe.

  “And exactly how long is the Council going to make me suffer?” retorted the young woman.

  “The terms of your probation were crystal clear, Cordelia,” explained Circe.

  “I don’t know how you expect me to fulfill my duties as a Wand of the Council if you’ve gimped me, and while we’re at—”

  Circe’s already dangerous glare became positively deadly as she snatched up a gavel and started hammering away, drowning out Cordelia’s next words.

  “You are dismissed for the moment, Miss Strange,” barked Circe. “Please take a seat.”

  Hazel leaned over to Alex. “Strange?”

  Alex merely cast a sidelong glance and a tight-mouthed frown that clearly told her it was not the time to ask. But Cordelia answered the question as she barked, “You can no longer tell me what to do, Mother.”

  Mother? And she thought her own mother was overbearing sometimes.

  “As Council chair,” said Circe, “I most certainly can. And you’ll take a seat or I’ll ask for your removal and this Council will consider your demotion.”

  Cordelia snarled, turned on her heels, and stormed down the aisle, her combat boots echoing her anger as she found her seat in the back. Half of her face was shielded by a curtain of purple hair, but Hazel could see that she was stunning. Her face lacked all of the wicked angles of her mother’s, and what remained was soft, warm, and inviting. Except for her eyes, which were the same ice blue as her mother’s.
She locked gazes with Hazel, and for a moment looked a little taken aback. Hazel recognized it as the look of a performer who hadn’t realized she’d had an audience. Hazel tried to smile grimly, but Cordelia’s face suddenly darkened and she returned only a glare.

  Circe barked her next decree. “Agent Alestranos, please rise and appear before the Council. And bring your charge.”

  “Here we go,” he whispered, rising from his seat. Even though she had no clue why she was here, everything about Alex’s demeanor—and Circe’s cutting gaze—told her that she was in trouble. She only hoped, whatever she had done, they had heard of the phrase first offense in Quark.

  Hazel and Alex made their way to the spot the young Cordelia Strange had just vacated, and Hazel toed the free throw line nervously as the disinterested Council members turned their attention to her. Observing the Council from the sidelines had been one thing, but to stand under the intense gaze of so many strange and presumably powerful individuals was entirely different.

  This was like the casting audition from hell.

  Something like hope fluttered in her chest at that thought and she seized on the idea. She didn’t need to be nervous. The setup was familiar enough: a table of important individuals deciding her fate. She would just fall back on the strategy that had gotten her through the last month. She would pretend this was just another acting gig.

  “Identify yourself,” said Circle, her voice as cold as a winter draft.

  “Hazel Roisin Bennett,” Hazel said, slowly and clearly.

  “Hazel Roisin Bennett,” repeated Circe, as if rolling the name carefully across her tongue to see how it tasted before she committed to grinding it between her teeth. “Your actions have come to the attention of the Council. Fortunately, we were already in session, otherwise we would have needed to convene an emergency session, and emergency sessions always put me in a foul mood. Would you care to explain what you are doing here in Quark?”

  “I brought her here,” said Alex. Hazel tried to hide her surprise that he had just outright lied on her behalf.