Finn Fancy Necromancy

by Randy Henderson

  “Don’t you have anything else you can tell me, to help me figure out who it is?” I asked. “You’ve had twenty-five years. What’ve you done in all that time to find Felicity’s real attacker?”

  “We did nothing at first,” Giselle replied in an icy tone, “though I now regret it. Felicity contacted us after your trial, and told us that she had framed you for some greater purpose, that we were not to take blood vengeance on your family. I thought she had perhaps at last embraced the way of her people. But then she disappeared. For twenty-five years we heard nothing. And then, two nights ago, she sent me a message via the gnomes.”

  I took a step forward. “You got g-mail from Felicity?”

  “We … do not call it that anymore, but yes. Felicity told me she was going to apologize to you, and warn you of some danger. She said that—” Giselle’s face twisted in disgust. “That guilt had eaten at her heart. She knew I had begun searching for her again, and to … research your family. She said that if anything happened to her, that we were not to blame you, and that we should take no action for we would only endanger ourselves.”

  Zeke grunted. “So you’ve just been good little witches,” he waved back in the direction of the secret room. “It looks to me like you’ve been busy playing Leave it to Cleaver here.”

  Giselle shrugged. “We gather our power and influence. Such things will be needed, I think, when we discover what has truly happened to Felicity, and who is responsible.”

  “The power is not for vengeance, I think,” Zeke replied. “You do that for the fun.”

  “Why, I’m offended,” Giselle said, then looked back at me. “We have used all the magic at our disposal to unveil which of your family tasted Felicity’s soul, and we’ve found nothing.”

  “Then why are you so convinced it was someone in my family?”

  “Because the bones say so, and because I feel it.”

  “Right,” I said. “Okay, look. I don’t know anything about a lover. But it seems we both want the same thing. So why don’t you just agree to leave me alone while I find out who’s behind all this, and I’ll agree not to bring the ARC down on your heads.” Of course, I didn’t promise Zeke wouldn’t do so.

  Footsteps on the stairs again, and the pale girl who’d acted like our waitress the night before burst into the room. “The wards! Something is coming at us, fast!”

  “Is this your doing?” Giselle demanded, looking between me and Zeke.

  “No,” I said.

  Any remaining hint of color drained from her face. “Move aside, then! We need access to our magics.”

  “I don’t think so,” Zeke replied.

  “Damn it—”

  Something slammed into the door upstairs, rattling the house, and everyone in the room jumped.

  Giselle lifted her talisman like a gun, pointed at Zeke. “Move! Now!”

  “Forget it,” Zeke said, hefting the grenade. Or at least he started to. The girl on the stairs threw something at him from the side and Zeke froze, frosting over with spiderwebs. At the same time, the man shouted something and flicked a Bic lighter under his hand, and the gun in my hand burned red hot. I dropped it, screaming in startled pain.

  Giselle barked a command in Witchese, and a ball of darkness and crackling red energy shot from her talisman at my chest, too fast to dodge.

  In the split second before the curse struck, my butt cheeks twitched and felt as though I’d decided to squeeze a burning tortilla between them.

  The curse struck me in the chest—and my chest ate it. Well, to be more precise, a glowing image like Pac-Man with a tribal face tattoo appeared on my chest, and ate it.

  The energy sat in my chest like heartburn. This wasn’t the work of the hex protection amulet. The amulet acted like a shield; it didn’t eat stuff, or, for that matter, make my butt cheeks twitch.

  “What the—?” I said.

  “How’d you—?” Giselle said.

  Crash! the upstairs door said. At the same time something huge and hairy slammed into the glass slider doors to my left and was thrown back with a blinding orange flash. The glass cracked with a sound like Prince squealing over a gunshot, and the orange lines of the ward runes faded.

  Giselle howled in frustration, then said, “Upstairs. We’ll use the attic.”

  The Króls retreated up the stairs. Giselle shouted back at me and Zeke, “We won’t forget this.” And then they were gone.

  I was a little preoccupied by the fact that I had just Pac-Manned a curse. I turned to check on Zeke—and burped.

  All that dark energy in my chest exploded from my mouth and struck Zeke.

  The webbing melted away as if eaten by acid.

  Zeke stared at me. “What the—?”

  “I know!” I said. “What the—?”

  The sliding doors exploded inward, shards of glass showering the family room. A sasquatch stumbled through them wearing clown-sized combat boots. Harry, from Fort Worden, though he looked a bit ridiculous with his hair smoking.

  I snatched up the revolver. It had thankfully cooled, though the burns on my hand still made holding it difficult. Harry turned his glare to us, and his beady eyes widened in surprise.

  “Youselfs?” he said. “Youself not witchbrights.”

  “Uh, no,” I said. “We’re definitely not witches.” The stench of burned hair wafted into the laundry room.

  “Youself hurt me bigbad at fort,” Harry said to Zeke, his voice becoming somewhat growly.

  “We’ll hurt you a lot more,” Zeke said, displaying the grenade.

  A crash sounded from upstairs, followed by a roar.

  “Youself not the job, you rabbit away now.” Harry ran upstairs.

  “Sounds like good advice to me,” I said.

  “Agreed,” Zeke agreed. We stepped cautiously out of the laundry room.

  A wave of ick rolled over me, causing my skin to prickle into goose bumps and my stomach to gurgle in protest. The amulet grew hot on my chest. More dark witchcraft was being used nearby.

  A sasquatch screamed in pain somewhere upstairs.

  “Move it, Gramaraye,” Zeke said. I crossed to the broken slider doors, and Zeke raised the hand grenade, aiming back into the hidden room.

  “Wait!” I said.

  I unplugged the television, and yanked out cables from its back.

  Zeke scowled at me. “Are you crazy?”

  I lifted the television from the entertainment center. It wasn’t overly heavy, though its size made it really awkward, and my hand still stung from the gun burns. “Okay, bombs away.” I shuffled out through the remains of the slider doors as Zeke tossed the grenade.

  Zeke joined me on the back lawn and sprinted to the tree line while I lugged the television along behind him.

  The grenade exploded. A cloud of smoke rolled out of a new hole in the side of the house.

  From upstairs, I heard an inhuman screech that I doubted belonged to either sasquatch, followed by a roar that most certainly did, and what sounded like a sofa, or possibly one of the sasquatches, being thrown against a wall.

  Zeke glared at the television as I joined him in the trees.

  “My brother’s a dick,” I said. “But I don’t want to go back into exile feeling I owed him anything.”

  “Theft is a sign of corruption, whatever the reason,” Zeke said.

  “Hey, they probably paid for this with blood money. And they’re here illegally. And possibly dead. So is it really stealing?”

  “You’re walking a thin line, Gramaraye.”

  “Actually, I’m walking through the woods with a giant television and my fingers are killing me. Lend a hand?”

  19

  Talk Talk

  Zeke and I rode in silence most of the way home, each lost in our own thoughts.

  Finally, I said, “Well, that didn’t go well.”

  “Coulda gone worse,” Zeke muttered.

  More silence. I glanced at my watch. Nearly 10 A.M. My three-day window would be half over soon, and
all I had to show for it were more questions and enemies than when I started.

  “Did you learn anything more about the security around Verona?” I asked.

  “No,” Zeke replied. “But I did learn a way to learn it. One of the ARC’s wardens from the EMP Sanctum recently died.”

  “So … you’re going to get a job there as a warden, get inside?”

  “No.”

  “Then—oh.” Damn it. “If I can Talk to him, he can tell us all about the security.”

  “Exactly. And then we’ll know how truly screwed we are.”

  “You know, if my sister dated men, and I didn’t like her, I might just try to set you two up. You share such a positive outlook on life.”

  Zeke snorted. “And maybe if you’d seen half the sick, evil, stupid crap I have, you’d be a little less of an annoying Pollyanna, fool.”

  I didn’t respond. He might be right. Instead, I considered the challenge of Talking to a dead ARC warden.

  Wardens were little more than glorified security guards, so there was a good chance he wouldn’t be personally warded against Talking, or in a Sanctum like Verona. But his remains would be housed in an official ARC crypt. As licensed necromancers, our family had access rights to the ARC crypts, so that was good. But my name had likely been removed from the access rights during my exile, and I doubted they would be restored without following some complicated official process first.

  That left me with one unpleasant option.

  Good thing I’d grabbed the television.

  * * *

  I set the television down by my bedroom door, and went into the upstairs bathroom.

  I won’t describe the contortionist act that followed, but I confirmed a disturbing fact—I had a tattoo on the inside of my butt cheeks. This was disturbing not only for realizing the uncomfortable way (in every sense) that the tattoo got there, but also for the fact that it could only have been done by the changeling. Which was not only forbidden, but the tattoo had not worked like wizard tattoos, at least none that I knew of.

  I spritzed my burned hand with spray from the medicine cabinet that was magical only in the relief it brought, then hauled the television down the hall. I tapped on Mort’s door with my foot, and leaned the television against the wall to relieve the weight of it.

  “Who is it?” Mort said.

  “I have something for you,” I replied. “A peace offering.”

  A pause, then, “Come in.”

  I awkwardly managed to turn the doorknob and pushed the door open, then carried the television into the room as Mort finished tying a robe around himself.

  “One replacement television.” I set it on the entertainment center, and stretched my aching back. Did I mention that getting older sucked?

  “Holy— Is that from your trailer?” Mort asked.

  “No, but it’s bigger and thinner than your last one, right? So, no hard feelings?”

  “Not about the television,” Mort said. “Does it have a built-in HD tuner?”

  “Uh, I don’t know.”

  “Well, how about—”

  “Look,” I said. “All I know is it’s a huge television, and it’s yours. And I’m sorry your last one got broken.”

  “Wow, that’s your way of apologizing?”

  I sighed. “Mort, why does this have to be so hard? Look, I get that Grandfather was snobby about the whole Talker thing, and I got a lot of attention because of it. But I swear, I don’t want to take over the family business. I’ll admit, I’m not exactly thrilled you’ve been selling off our family heirlooms—”

  “Oh, well, sorry for not asking your permission, but you were a little hard to get hold of.”

  “That’s not—”

  “If I hadn’t sold that stuff there wouldn’t be a family business left! Between our uncles, and the necrofams that’ve started franchising out, taking over the smaller families, and—”

  “Okay!” I said. “I just—there’s enough crap going on, we don’t need to be fighting on top of it, you know? We should be working together, as brothers. Like I said, I really don’t want to run the family business, but if you need my help, I’ll give it. And, well, it would be nice if I could count on your help to figure out who really attacked Felicity, and who keeps attacking us.”

  “Ah. So you need my help.”

  “That’s not the only reason I’m talking to you, Mort. I meant what I said about us acting like brothers again. But yeah, I need your help.”

  Mort smiled. Oh, gods. I knew he’d enjoy this, but I still struggled to hide my annoyance.

  “I don’t know, Finn,” he said and rubbed his stupid little evil Spock beard. “You say you want to help the business, but I’m the public face of our family business now. So if you’re in trouble with the ARC again, the less I get involved the better, you know?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “The thing is, Mort, someone’s trying to kill me, or at least frame me again, and that means our whole family’s in danger. So if you don’t help me, there might not be much family left in our family business.”

  “Oh, okay, so you’ve endangered us all and now you need me to fix it.” He shook his head and sighed, as though at a child who’d spilled Kool-Aid on the carpet. “I’m not going to put our family and the business at risk to fix your problems. Do you know how hard it was to rebuild our reputation after what you—after what happened before?”

  I smiled through gritted teeth. “I don’t need you to fix it, I just need you to help out.”

  “Right. But help with what, exactly?” Mort asked.

  “I need to get to a body in one of the ARC crypts. I need your necromancer rights of access.”

  “Meaning they’d have my name on record. What do you plan to do?”

  “Just Talk to someone.”

  “About what?”

  “Well, that’s the part you don’t want to know if an enforcer ever questions you.”

  “That’s what I thought. So you want to perform an unauthorized Talk and gods only know what else with an ARC-protected body, and you want me to put my name all over it. Are you determined to destroy this family? If I got sent into exile, we’d lose the house, the business, everything. Father and Mattie, they’d end up…” He shook his head. “The safest thing is to let the ARC sort it all out.”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “We reported Felicity’s attack to the ARC and I got exiled for twenty-five years! And even with that, the business still suffered, right? And the problem obviously didn’t go away. We need to handle this ourselves, and I have less than two days left to do so. So can you help me? Can we do this together as brothers? Please?”

  Mort looked at his reflection in the mirror over his dresser for a second, then sighed. “Fine. Okay. I’ll help.”

  I waited for the “but.”

  “But,” Mort said, “you have to use your Talker gift when I ask. And sign papers giving me full control of the family business.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I mean, thank you, Mort. Really.”

  I left him hooking up his new television, and closed the door behind me. If Mort really was part of the Legion, he played dumb really well. He hadn’t asked which ARC crypt, hadn’t pressed me on my reasons.

  One brother down, one to go. I stopped in front of Vee’s door.

  Pete’s anger at me was understandable. But I’d realized that part of it might actually be fear. Fear of losing Vee when she found out he’d lied to her about being a waerwolf. So to truly make things right with Petey, and hopefully speed up his forgiveness, I needed to be the one who told the truth to Vee and explain how it was all my fault. Hopefully her anger would be aimed at me then. And hopefully Zeke wouldn’t punch my face through the back of my head when I upset Vee. That would make eating really difficult. Still, I’d rather go back into exile with Pete happy than not, even if it meant a few broken teeth.

  I just wished there was something I could say, some way to handle this, that wouldn’t lead to more hurt and anger.

  Mo
ther’s ghost floated up the hall. “Hello, kiddo,” she said in her distant voice. “You look sad. Everything okay?”

  “Yes,” I said, ready to send her on her way. But then I reconsidered. A talk with Mother, even just an echo of Mother, sounded really good right then. “No. Pete’s mad at me. And I have to tell a girl that I lied to her.”

  “Mira, interesting fact,” Mother said. “Did you know that in real life, Gipetto was a lonely old thaumaturge?”

  “Yes, Mother. You told me. What has that got to do—”

  “Gipetto decided he wanted the company of a young mundy maiden in his village. But he’d been lying to her about many things to hide the fact that he was an arcana, and she’d begun to distrust him. So he made her a simple puppet out of wood that could talk, and if made to tell a lie, it’s bulbous nose would grow long. He took the puppet to her, demonstrated its use, and had her ask the puppet if Gipetto loved her and if he would care for her always. These were not lies, not that a wooden puppet could tell, and Gipetto was wealthy from selling his inventions, so they were married with her family’s eager encouragement. But on those nights when Gipetto was away traveling and selling his wares, the neighbors swear they would hear the young woman telling the puppet to lie, and then tell the truth, over and over and over again. Because, you see, sometimes a girl wants the truth, and sometimes she doesn’t, as long as it makes her feel good.” Mother laughed and patted my head, or at least she made the motions. “Someday, you’ll understand, Finn.”

  Wow. I’d pretty well forgotten about that story. And now I could see why.

  “Uh, thanks, Mother. But how do you tell that girl the truth when it will make her unhappy, but you have no choice?”

  Mother shook her head. “Oh, mi hijo, look at you. You know better than to play in the snow so long,” she said. “You go get out of those wet clothes and I’ll make you some cocoa.”

  She floated off down the hall. I watched after her for a second, my chest aching. She wasn’t my mother. She was just an echo of my mother, and this had just reminded me what that difference really meant.