I considered hiding the body, but there was nothing I could think to do that would keep the enforcers from finding Felicity with magic. And with my luck I’d be caught carrying her into the woods.
I looked from Felicity to the stove. Just one option I could think of; but first things first.
I riffled through the place and found “my” wallet and keys. Nothing in the trailer was really my stuff, not the stuff I left at my family home when I went into exile, and I didn’t find anything that seemed like a Scooby clue to explain who was really behind Felicity’s death. I went outside and made sure the car started, and was an automatic. I’d never learned stick.
Then I returned inside and grabbed a frying pan, lighter, paper towels, and cooking oil, and moved back to Felicity’s body.
Don’t worry. Despite what you may have heard, real necromancers don’t consume the flesh of the dead. In fact, most of us are vegetarians. That just sort of happens when you can sense life energy lingering in the flesh of anything that once had an active nervous system.
I hesitated, looking down at Felicity. I’d helped to destroy bodies before, but always with respect, following the proper rituals.
“Sorry, Felicity,” I whispered. “May your spirit find peace, may your energy bring light to the darkness.” The words were rote, but I felt a flurry of emotions as I said them: regret, sadness, and yeah, maybe a bit of satisfaction that this feyblood witch had paid in the end for what she did to me. That last bit made me uncomfortable, kind of like bad gas. But the self-examination could come later. Now was time for the running.
I dropped the frying pan on the floor, dumped cooking oil over Felicity and the paper towels, and lit the roll on fire after several fumbling attempts. Then I turned on the gas stove without igniting it, and ran outside.
A sorry excuse for a cremation, and cooking oil wouldn’t burn up a body, but when the propane blew it would be good-bye crime scene, hello unfortunate cooking accident. With luck, the body would take time to put back together and identify, and with the mundy fire department and police involved it would complicate the enforcers’ own investigation.
I dropped myself into the car, a Miata so the label read, and sped off along the gravel road.
Time to get someplace safe, and figure out who the hell still had it in for me. And that meant my family—possibly in both cases.
2
Our House
I have to say, I was a bit disappointed the car didn’t fly like in Back to the Future. It didn’t even run on fusion or anything cool as far as I could tell. After twenty-five years, you’d think there’d be more changes than making the cars really small.
At least I found driving easy. My body still felt a bit awkward to control and balance, but for some reason controlling the car, something external to me, came more naturally.
I was three minutes down the winding wooded road when a flash and boom caused me to look in the rearview. An orange glow lined the treetops. At least the tree line stood a ways back from the trailer and everything looked well rained upon, so Smokey the Bear would have no reason to chastise me, I hoped.
I soon found my way to Highway 101 North around the Olympic National Rainforest, and finally to Port Townsend, my hometown. The clock in the car said 9:27 P.M. as I passed the first outlying houses and shops.
Unfamiliar streetlights and strip malls had replaced what once was a wooded approach to the small seaside town. But I had no fear that I would find my family home replaced by a record store or 7-Eleven. Port Townsend protected its funky old houses, and our family would never sell that house anyway. Beneath it lay our necrotorium. The work my family performed there—properly disposing of dead arcana and feyblood creatures saturated with magic—had resulted in the land being contaminated with whatever magic managed to escape our capture.
I heard that someone once built a Dunkin’ Donuts down near New Orleans, and the round donuts became mini portals to a shadowy corner of the Other Realm. The only way to close the portals and stop the invasion of gremlins had been for a group of enforcers to eat all of the donuts, followed by a pot of mushy lentils. Lentils, by the way, are a quick and dirty cure for ingested magics should you ever need one. In fact, there are few foods less magical than lentils.
Anyway, it turned out the land under the Dunkin’ Donuts had been a necrotorium in the long ago, and the records were lost during one of the Fey-Arcana wars. Point being, graveyards and old Indian burial grounds have nothing on necrotorium sites for lingering mojo.
So it was with relief but little surprise that I found my family home standing much as I remembered it, its peaked towers and gabled roof visible over the madrona trees that screened the property from the road.
I spotted movement in a car parked across the street and a little ways past our house. A pale face framed by an equally pale bowl cut leaned forward, watching. No beard. So not the guy who attacked me at the transfer. But there was something familiar about him—
I turned off our street before passing him, and hoped he took no special notice of me.
Memory clicked, and I knew who he reminded me of. Felicity. Which made him one of the Króls, the Germanic clan of feyblood witches that Felicity came from—or escaped from, by her account—when she moved to America. I’d feared they might seek revenge on me for my supposed past crimes against their kin, but I’d expected to have enforcer protection from them when I returned. Unfortunately, until I figured out who’d just killed Felicity, enforcers were the last people I wanted to see. Going to the arcana authorities last time about Felicity’s assault had resulted in my exile. I didn’t trust her death would lead to better results.
Were the Króls behind the attack on my transfer? Possibly. And equally possible they’d killed Felicity for leaving their clan at the same time they sought revenge against me for hurting her. Witch clans had their own twisted sense of justice that more resembled something from a bad mafia movie than anything sane or logical.
I took the back streets through town and drove around for several minutes to make certain I wasn’t followed. The residential streets were imaginatively named. There was “A” street, followed by “B” street, followed by “C” street. You’d think Big Bird had been the founding mayor.
The town had changed quite a bit since I’d left. Before my exile, a clash had begun between wealthy retirees versus the resident hippies, laborers, and artists, a clash that ran like an undercurrent through everything in the town. Clearly, that clash had continued during my absence, evident in the large golf course, cookie cutter mansions, and a lot of new franchise stores and restaurants versus the funky old houses and artsy Ma and Pop storefronts. I wondered how the culture clash had affected the more one-sided tensions of the arcana community living hidden among the mundies.
I glanced in the rearview. Nobody followed me, and I hadn’t begun to burst into boils or flames or any other subtle symptoms of a deadly curse. I circled back and parked a couple blocks from our house in the lot of a local hardware store, then snuck through backyards, empty lots, and grassy alleyways to the garden gate behind our home.
I paused, one hand on the cold black iron. I’d hoped to deal with my family—their expectations, and my feelings of being abandoned in exile—on my own terms and on my own time. I looked in the direction of the street where the Król witch waited. For all that I was free from exile, I still didn’t have much freedom of choice it seemed. I needed help.
I sighed and passed through the gate.
Mother’s garden filled most of the backyard. After her death, it took on a mind of its own—or rather, its mind was a bit more vocal than other gardens due to the high concentration of magic on the property. Now, its once carefully tended beds had become a mysterious jungle surrounded by a tangled and thorny wall. If I didn’t know better, I’d think a Cthulhu cult had moved in and were trying to breed tomatoes and roses together to create a plant of ultimate chaos, destruction, and evil red yumminess.
I skirted the edge of the garden,
and approached the back door. As I neared the house, a red glow lit up the darkness to my left and caused me to jump. Then I registered the sickly sweet scent of a clove cigarette, and my eyes caught up with my nose. A woman stood in the shadows, smoking.
“Hello?” I said, prepared to run for my life at the first itch of a curse.
The woman stepped forward into the light from a nearby window, and smiled. She had short-cut black hair, thick black glasses, and a nose ring. She looked familiar, and yet not. There was something of Mother in her face, and something of—
“Sammy?” I asked, surprised.
“Hello, brother. Sneaking in the back way? You do realize Father can’t ground you anymore, right?”
“Sammy!” I threw my arms around her. She stiffened for a second, then hugged me back. We stepped apart, and I said, “You still live here?”
“Hell no! I’m here for your welcome home party.”
“Party?” I glanced up at the house. “So the whole family’s here?”
“Well, not the uncles and all, but our happy little nuclear disaster family, yeah. The enforcers were supposed to tell you, but I guess they forgot after giving you their lecture, huh?” She dropped her clove and ground it out.
“Anyone else here?” I glanced toward the street, where the pale man watched the house. “Anyone from the local council, maybe?”
Sammy snorted. “As if our family weren’t bad enough.”
That might be truer than she knew. One of the many things I realized during my long exile was that someone in my family likely helped in framing me. Our home is pretty well warded against outside magical influence or unwanted guests, yet Felicity had been attacked all those years ago in our home, in my bedroom, and with necromancy. But now that I stood here, about to face my family, I found the idea hard to accept. We were hardly the Brady Bunch, but dark necromancers? Murderers?
“All right, let’s get this over with,” Sammy said and turned toward the house. She paused, and turned back. “Look, a lot has changed since you … left, Finn.”
“No doy,” I replied.
“No doy? Oh man, I haven’t heard that in years. Glad to see you’re still a dork.” She looked away. “I actually missed you.” She sounded surprised.
“I missed you too, sis.”
“Yeah, well, you got to enjoy exile from this stupid world. Me, I had to deal with our family.”
“I see you’re still a people person.”
“And you’re still a smart ass.”
“Hey now,” I said. “My humor is a legitimate coping mechanism. My therapist said so.”
“Uh-huh. Worst money Father ever spent, sending you to an empath.”
“Worse than sending you?”
“Touché. Come on, dear brother, the sooner we get this reunion over with, the sooner I can leave.”
We climbed the creaky steps to the back porch, and Sammy led the way inside to the mud room. The tingle of the house’s wards buzzed over me like a waterfall of love bees as we crossed the threshold. I glanced back out into the night before closing the door. Whoever or whatever was after me, I felt a little safer now.
A little.
I turned to find my mother’s ghost smiling at me and Sammy. The cascade of straight black hair that had been her pride in life shifted behind her like a cape in a nonexistent breeze, and the glowing tan skin inherited from Grandma Ramirez shone now like brown garnet in a jeweler’s case.
“How was school, kids?” Mother asked. Her voice had a distant quality, as though channeled via drive-thru speaker.
“Holy crap,” I whispered. Mother’s ghost? This shouldn’t be possible.
“Mira, interesting fact,” Mother said, a phrase that I’d heard constantly growing up. “The Catholics have an entire vault full of petrified poopies they think might have belonged to Jesus, and they don’t know what to do with it all. There’s been a fierce war going on for centuries as to whether the holy crap is actually holy, or entirely unholy. On the one hand, it came from the body of their messiah. On the other hand, it is the waste rejected by his body. You would be surprised how many major conflicts in history were really the result of those two factions secretly fighting for power and—”
Sammy sneezed, the kind of sneeze that registers on weather maps, knocking me back a step with her elbow.
“Are you feeling well, sweetie?” Mother asked.
“I’m fine, Mom,” Sammy said. “We have homework to do.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course, sorry dear. Go get yourself a snack, and then right to your homework.”
“Yes, Mother.” Sammy waited until Mother’s ghost drifted off, then looked at me. “You okay?”
“Yeah. No. I don’t know. How can Mother be here? We diffused her energy properly.”
“Apparently it has something to do with the garden,” Sammy said. “She put a lot of her energy into it. And she’s just a ghost, obviously.”
Ghosts were not spirits, or “souls,” but just copies usually impressed on the world by a traumatic death.
“Still—”
“Hey, you’re asking the absolute wrong person, remember?”
“Oh. Right. Sorry.” Sammy could channel magical energy, but she was highly allergic to it. That had made her a bit of an outsider growing up, and grumpy whenever the topic of magic came up. More grumpy, that is. “I didn’t realize how much I missed Mom’s crazy stories.”
“Yeah. It was nice, at first. But, you know, she’s pretty much stuck where she was when this echo was created. I’ve heard the same stories repeated my entire life.”
Stuck where she was at, no memories of the decades since. I was little better off than a ghost.
“Sorry,” I said. “I can imagine it’s been hard for you especially, seeing Mom all the time, but it not really being Mom?”
“Sometimes. But not as hard as when Father forgets who I am.”
“Father? What’s wrong with—”
A young teen girl burst through the swinging door from the hallway into the mud room, and stopped short when she saw us. She looked amazingly like a fifteen-year-old Sammy. “Auntie Sam!”
“Hi, Mattie,” Sammy said.
“I’m so glad you came!” Mattie said. “Oh my gods, Uncle Finn? It’s so cool to finally meet you!”
Mattie threw her arms around me and gave me a hug that would have put a pro wrestler to shame, then bounced back and said, “Dad’s really excited to see you. He’s in the dining room. I have to run, I’m helping downstairs. Love you!” Mattie ran through a door on the left that led down to the basement.
I blinked, then said, “Is she hopped up on Pixy Stix or something?”
“No. That’s just Mattie.”
“Wait. Uncle Finn?”
“Oh, yeah, Mort spawned offspring. You’re an uncle. Congrats!”
For some reason, this hit me harder than seeing myself and Sammy aged, or even finding a dead body on my return. All of that had felt a bit surreal yet almost normal after what I’d been through before. But seeing Mattie, a girl barely younger than Mort or I had been when I was exiled, and discovering she was Mort’s daughter? My brain started to feel like, well, any one of the computers Captain Kirk caused to self-destruct by arguing with it—reality did not compute. I really wasn’t the age my brain kept insisting I was. I couldn’t just pick up my life where I’d left off, with everyone a little older. I’d missed a lot, lost a lot, in being gone for twenty-five years, things more important than movies and music. Adult things.
I might have been a parent by now.
I might have had a wife by now.
Or at least had sex.
I thought of Heather, the girl I fell in love with the year before exile, the kind of deep, true, certain love that made me feel like I could do anything. Anything except, of course, tell her how I felt.
“Hey,” I said. “You know whatever happened to Heather?”
“Heather Flowers?”
“Yeah.”
“Ask Mattie,” Sammy said.
“Miss Brown’s her teacher.”
“Who’s Miss Brown?”
“Heather.”
“Wait. What? I—Oh! Oh.” Heather had married. Of course.
“Yeah.” Sammy shrugged. “She’s divorced now though.”
“Oh?”
“And she had a kid when she was, like, nineteen. And stop saying ‘oh.’”
“O … kay,” I said.
“You can always stalk her online, see what’s what.”
“On what line? You mean call her?”
Sammy stared at me as though I’d just asked what music was. “Oh my motherboard,” she said. “You really don’t know, do you? And you didn’t even know about Mattie. Weren’t you supposed to get a bunch of memories from that Fey jerkling?”
I realized my mistake too late. As much as I wanted to trust Sammy, I couldn’t know for sure who to trust, not yet. The last thing I wanted my enemies to know was how much I didn’t know.
“Yeah, of course! I was totally kidding.”
Sammy shook her head, her eyes narrowed. “Nice try, but I can tell something’s up. Come on, out with it.”
“It’s nothing. I just—something didn’t go right in the transfer is all. I didn’t get all the changeling’s memories.”
“Shit. That sucks,” Sammy said. “Or maybe not. At least you get to experience stuff yourself, rather than second hand. Hell, I envy you. To hear Nirvana for the first time? Or Sleater-Kinney? But look.” She glanced up the hall, toward the dining room entrance, and stepped closer to me. “Don’t let on to Mort or the others that anything went wrong with the transfer.”
“Why not?”
“Mort’s been running things here, but you know everyone kind of expected that you’d take control, being the Talker and all. And Grandfather definitely wanted you in charge. Or at least, he put all that stuff in his will about wanting a Talker to take over. Mort definitely hasn’t forgotten that.”
I shrugged. “Grandfather also wanted someone with children to take over, to continue the line. He didn’t know I’d be exiled for twenty-five years.”
Finn Fancy Necromancy Page 2
