A Familiar Sense of Dead

by E L Wilder

  Hazel rushed over and took Cordelia’s hand in her own, checking her pulse at the wrist.

  A familiar voice drifted into her head. Hazel!

  She spun around to see Clancy stepping through the weeds and coming toward her.

  She scowled at him.

  He flinched. No friendly greeting?

  “You’re lucky I don’t throw you down this well.”

  I heard you screaming a block away. He flicked his quartet of ears. Is everything okay?

  “I don’t know . . .” She nodded to where Cordelia lay.

  Who is that? He padded over to her but stopped, his front paw raised midstep. Is that . . . He snapped his head in Hazel’s direction. What is Cordelia Strange doing here?

  “Helping me tracking down leads,” she said.

  Why would she be doing that?

  “I’m a Wand of the Council now.” She tapped her badge. “And she’s my partner. A lot has happened since you abandoned me.”

  You’re partners. With Cordelia Strange. There was no mistaking the flat venom in Clancy’s tone. You can’t partner with Cordelia Strange. Wait, is she dead? It was hard to miss his excitement. Without waiting for an answer, Clancy crawled up onto Cordelia’s stomach and pressed his ears to her chest. Nope. Still ticking. Now with unmistakable disappointment crusted in his tone.

  “What do you have against Cordelia?” asked Hazel. “At least she knows how to not abandon her partner in a time of crisis.”

  Give her time.

  “Hey! You abandoned me at the first sign of the Council and I’ve been tromping around this town all day with no help from my supposed partner.”

  Clancy stared at her, his tails flicking wildly. The Council is not fond of me.

  “That’s your excuse? The Council isn’t fond of Cordelia, but she managed to keep me company all day.”

  Before Clancy could respond, Cordelia suddenly sprang to life, bolting up and rolling into a crouching position, panting, eyes darting wildly around the empty lot.

  “It’s okay, Cordelia. You’re safe,” said Hazel soothingly, hands in front of her like she was approaching a wild animal. Cordelia relaxed, and slumped to the ground, the savage look in her eye giving way to one of confusion.

  “What happened?” Cordelia snapped

  “I was in the well and I heard you scream!” Hazel started.

  The well? asked Clancy incredulously. What were you doing down there?

  “Retrieving this.” She lifted the necklace off herself.

  The necklace from Silas’s shop? How the heck—

  “The spider’s lair,” she said, pointing toward the mouth of the well.

  Clancy crept to the edge of the well and peered inside. His shiver did not escape Hazel’s attention.

  Cordelia rubbed her temples and groaned. “It caught me by surprise. One second I was throwing you the lighter, the next it was here . . .” She shuddered.

  “Are you okay?” asked Hazel.

  “Yeah, I think so,” said Cordelia. “Something must have scared it off.”

  Clancy padded forward. Perhaps it heard me coming and its head was still ringing from our last encounter.

  Cordelia seemed to see that she was safe and traded her panicked look for one of smoldering hostility. “Clancy. What are you doing here?”

  I was just about to ask you the same thing. And while I’m at it, Hazel, what were you doing crawling out of the Silver Well?! That’s insane.

  “It would seem that our werespider has been camping out down there,” said Hazel.

  Smart.

  “How is that smart?” asked Cordelia.

  Who would ever look for it there? Most werecursed that I’ve read about have a bugout spot that they go to when they feel the beast coming on. Someplace that the creature would find comforting and maybe want to hunker down in for a while. A werewolf might retreat deep into a forest. A weretrout I once corresponded with used to go to Upstate New York and find an isolated lake when he was feeling fishy.

  Clancy stopped and looked at Hazel, cocking his head to one side. Why are you working for the Council?

  “Because a lot has happened since you abandoned me in the pawnshop,” she said.

  “Sounds like his MO,” said Cordelia.

  Abandoned you? It wasn’t like that.

  “Please tell me what it was like.”

  I’ll explain. Just not here.

  “What he means is not in front of me,” said Cordelia.

  Clancy glowered at her.

  Cordelia went on. “That’s fine. It’s getting late and Siv and I usually have dinner. I think we’ve done enough for one day. Go home and get some rest. Let’s try our hand poking around on the other side of the Postern tomorrow.”

  “We need to update the Council about what we’ve found,” said Hazel.

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Cordelia. “You go home and get some sleep. I’ll handle the Council.”

  “Let’s meet on the mundane side of the Postern,” suggested Hazel. “Bright and early.”

  “I don’t do anything bright and I sure as hell don’t do anything early,” Cordelia said before taking her leave and walking back toward the Silver Path.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Hazel and Clancy made their way back through the Dimwood in silence. She noted that sinister red light—the one she’d seen that morning—seemed to have moved closer the Postern. Hadn’t the Council asked Alex to investigate that? After everything she’d seen in the supposedly tame parts of Quark and its surrounding area, she shuddered to think what the source of the red light might be. She hoped Alex could handle whatever lurked in the Dimwood, and that they would cross paths again soon.

  By the time she and Clancy finally stepped back onto the South Way, it was already dark. She had no idea what time it was, but it felt like a few hours past midnight. She and Clancy headed back toward Bennett Manor. Every part of her ached and she just wanted to collapse into bed and sleep for hours. Maybe days. That wasn’t entirely accurate. She also wanted to question Clancy, but where to start? Did she even have the energy?

  But it was Clancy who broke the silence. Tomorrow morning, bright and early?

  Her jaw dropped. “Are you kidding me?!” Hazel said, aghast.

  What?

  “That’s all you have to say for yourself?”

  He paused and flicked his tail. And be ready to work extra hard?

  “So we can what? Practice that vanishing spell you used today?!”

  Vanishing spell . . .

  “What happened to you?” she screamed, unleashing all the accumulated fury, frustration, and confusion of her day. “I thought we were supposed to be partners, and suddenly you just up and vanish!”

  You seemed to have no problem finding a replacement.

  “Oh that’s rich, considering. At least I didn’t have much of a choice in partnering with her . . . it was either that or go to prison for intruding on a crime scene! I went to Quark to help you out, and you left me alone in the land of the strange! Literally!”

  Cordelia Strange isn’t the kind of person you want to partner with.

  “She said something similar about you.”

  Clancy was silent.

  “Were you planning on telling me at any point that you’d tried and failed to bond with another witch?”

  You had been gone a long time, and I though the Bennett line of witches was done. I tried to find another family lineage to partner with.

  “But it failed,” she said. “That attempt at bonding failed, too.”

  It did.

  “Do you want to share why?”

  Not particularly.

  “You don’t think it might be helpful given our present situation? I mean we’ve been trying to form a link for a month with absolutely zero success and you’ve been giving me hell for it like I was the weakest link. And it turns out—”

  Quiet, he snapped.

  “I will not be quiet!” she fumed.

  Look.

&nb
sp; She stopped in her tracks. Up ahead on the road, the unicorn appeared from the tree line. It cantered to the side of the road and directly into the scar gouged woods, where she had crashed Tyler’s truck just last month. Correction, where Ronnie had used a spell to push their truck off the road and she had frightened him off with a burst of raw magical energy that had turned the truck’s spiderwebbed windshield into a projectile.

  “Is that . . .”

  In the flesh. Hornless and all.

  The unicorn passed through a sliver of moonlight. Though in the day the unicorn had been black and grey, its coat flashing iridescent under sunlight, under the moon it looked downright ghostly. Its coat and mane glowed silver, and the stump of his horn caught the moonlight and seemed to hold it, playing with it and keeping it all for itself. Where had she seen that same effect before?

  The unicorn stopped in the road long enough to look at Hazel and Clancy disinterestedly. Then the unicorn dipped its head, touching its nose close to the ground. Then it looked at her one last time and stepped gingerly into the Tanglewood, its brilliance fading as it stepped out of the moonlight, blending into the night.

  “Well that was odd,” she said.

  She approached the place where the unicorn had been, but she couldn’t see anything that would have attracted its attention, except for the turned-up earth just now giving life to weeds and brambles.

  Stop.

  She wasn’t particularly in the mood for Clancy’s directives at the moment. She had gotten along just fine all day without them, and she wasn’t going to start listening now. She stepped forward.

  Stop!

  Suddenly Clancy leaped onto her back, sinking his claws into her shoulder and hissing and yowling in her ear. “Jesus H. Christopher!” she shrieked, as she tried to dance her way out of Clancy’s grip. “What are you doing?!”

  Getting your attention. Clancy retracted his claws and settled around her shoulders like a living shawl. You are ridiculously stubborn sometimes.

  “What?!” she snapped. “What is so urgent you had to turn me into a scratching post?”

  Do you feel that?

  “Feel what?”

  Now that she had stopped, she could sense something in the air, like the almost imperceptible hum of a television left on to a blank channel—almost more a pressure in her ears than an actual noise. And she could feel something too, a static electricity tickling the hairs on her neck and arms. And then she caught the scent of something strange that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. It reminded her of lazy Sunday afternoons spent working her way through a good novel. The library, she thought. It smells like the Bennett Manor library.

  “Do you smell that?” she asked.

  Mmhmm.

  “What does it mean?”

  Clancy leaped from her shoulder and circled the site of Hazel’s car accident, sniffing at the air, crouching low, and flicking his tail, like he was stalking prey. It can’t be . . .

  “What?”

  A lesion . . .

  That word again. “What’s a lesion?”

  Sometimes the fabric between the mundane and magical worlds becomes thin. Sometimes it becomes so thin that frays, leaving a fissure. A wizard of great skill can contain the fissure, give it boundaries so that it’s stable and contained. Hence the Postern. But an uncontained fissure, that’s a dangerous thing. It is a blight—a lesion—on existence. Left unchecked, it could do untold damage.

  “Like what?”

  It’s untold for a reason. These things don’t exactly happen on a regular basis. The pool of knowledge is shallow at best.

  “How did it get here?”

  I don’t know. It would take an incredible surge of magic power to tear the fabric of existence.

  This had been the site of her battle with Ronnie. If there had been any magical surges, it had come, at least in part from her. What that meant, exactly, she didn’t know, but the implications made her uneasy.

  He bounded to the edge of the road.

  “Where are you going?”

  Back to Quark.

  “What?”

  Meet me tomorrow and maybe I’ll have some answers.

  “I won’t hold my breath.”

  Clancy sprinted back up the road they’d just walked, apparently undaunted by his asthma.

  She turned and headed for home. As she emerged from the woods and came into sight of the caretaker’s cottage, she heard the sounds of a strumming guitar. Tyler sat on the cottage porch, feet kicked up on the railing, illuminated by the light of a few citronella candles.

  She approached the gate to Tyler’s yard. “Do ‘Free Bird’!” she called out.

  Without skipping a beat, he went into the opening lick of the song. “For you, my lady,” he called back. “If you’re waiting for an invitation, my gate is always open to you, Hazel. Besides, you’re my boss and landlord, so you kind of have run of the place.”

  She let herself in. “Not true,” she retorted. “That would be my mother and sister. I’m just here to perform the menial labor.”

  She crossed the yard and climbed the porch and took a seat in the remaining wicker chair. Her body screamed in ecstasy at the comfort the cushion provided. She wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to get back up. “I didn’t know you played,” she said.

  “I picked it up a few years ago. I’m in a band, you know.”

  “Oh really?” she said with genuine surprise. “Do you sing?”

  “Only at gunpoint.” He stopped “Free Bird,” and went into a snappy tune she immediately recognized as the opening riff of “Enter Sandman.”

  “Heavy Metal Detox,” he said. “We do folk covers of heavy metal songs.”

  “I need to see this in action sometime,” she said.

  “We’ve got a gig at Four Score and Twenty Beers Ago next Friday,” he said. “If you want to make the long trek across the farm to see us.”

  “You’re playing Bennett Farms?”

  “Haven’t you heard? Four Score is all the rage these days. It’s downright packed on a Friday night.”

  “Can you offer me a sampling?” she asked, teasing him. “Just to make sure it’s worth my time.”

  “Was ‘Free Bird’ not enough?” he gasped in mock offense. Without waiting for a reply Tyler jumped into an acoustic version of “Enter Sandman.”

  When he got a few riffs in, he let the tune die away and fell back into some peaceful strumming.

  “You guys going on tour soon?” she said, giggling.

  He chuckled. “Naw,” he said. “I just landed a pretty sweet job and I don’t want to jeopardize it.” He stopped strumming and set his feet firmly on the porch.

  Hazel smiled. “Speaking of,” she said. “I just saw our friend out on the South Way, not even a hundred yards yonder.”

  He stopped strumming. “No kidding. What was he doing?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Eight-thirty,” he said.

  “You’re kidding me,” she said. “Feels more like midnight.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” he said. “But we can sleep when we’re dead.”

  “Mind if I die on your porch then?” she joked.

  “Not at all,” he said. “Though you should know I don’t have enough candles to guard you against the mosquitos until morning.”

  “I’m working on a spell for that,” she said sleepily. “Play me something pretty.”

  “Of course, m’lady,” he said. He plucked at the strings, playing a shapeless, meandering tune that waltzed up and down the fretboard. He looked across the table at her, and she saw something in his eyes that was soft and inviting. He smiled.

  There was something hypnotizing about it all, the flicker of the candles, the drifting melody, and the way that Tyler looked at her. She suddenly felt vulnerable—as drunkenly tired and as in as much pain as she was—and on the verge of making a bad decision or a good decision made at a bad time. She was too exhausted to te
ll the difference. She needed to be alone, if only for a few minutes that day. If only to sleep.

  She stood up suddenly.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Not especially,” she said. “I can’t begin to describe the day I’ve had. I need to get to bed.”

  “You’re welcome to crash if you want,” he said, nodding toward the door.

  “NO!” she blurted more forcefully than she had intended. “No, that’s fine. My bed isn’t so far away that I can’t make the walk.” Though the way her legs were already tensing up from just a few minutes of sitting, she wasn’t sure that was entirely true. Somebody would likely have to peel her off the manor lawn in the morning.

  Still, she hobbled down the front steps. “See you tomorrow,” she said over her shoulder. “Thank you for the song. It was lovely.” She could feel Tyler’s eyes on her as she retreated down the walkway and let herself out the gate.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  That night, she dreamed.

  Hazel walked inside a hedge maze, looking for something—what? She couldn’t remember. She knew only that she desperately needed to find it. The hedges were interwoven with climbing rose bushes, but all the flowers were dead, their withered petals clinging tightly to the plant. In contrast to the flowers, the air around her was very much alive. It hummed with a near-silent energy.

  As if finding her way through the labyrinth wasn’t hard enough, there were the spiderwebs to contend with. The gossamer strands caught her in the face, the arms, the legs every few feet, and the farther she went, the thicker the mass became until she was fighting for every step, ripping them away from her mouth and nose just so she could breathe.

  At last, she broke through the thatch of webbing and into a clear corridor in the maze. Up ahead, stood a small tea table, with a single teacup placed upon it filled with a chalky white liquid.

  Drink me, read a placard next to the cup.

  “How Alice In Wonderland,” Hazel said to nobody in particular as she picked up the teacup. “When in Rome.” She downed the contents of the cup in one gulp, her face puckering at the overpowering sourness of it.