Champagne, Misfits, and Other Shady Magic

by Meghan Ciana Doidge

  “I took care of them both,” Mory said. “That one didn’t even get fully out.”

  “Ah, Mory.” I sighed, disappointed.

  The necromancer dropped her gaze to her knitting.

  Kandy glanced at me. “Do I need to be hunting zombies or not?”

  I shook my head. I could taste how Mory’s magic was confined to our immediate vicinity. And even that was slowly fading as the final zombie disappeared from view. “We’ll need a witch, though. Unless we want the caretaker to find the graves messed up like this.”

  “Burgundy is on her way back,” Mory said quietly. “She dropped me. We were at Tony’s playing board games.”

  I didn’t know who Burgundy or Tony were. But I was much less interested in anybody playing board games than I was in the ‘wasn’t intentional’ aspect of Mory’s necromancy. “This isn’t on your way home,” I said. The Novaks lived in a Georgian Manor in Shaughnessy.

  Mory shrugged. “My magic needed it.” But before I could interrogate her further, the necromancer eyed the werewolf through her blue bangs. Her gaze homed in on the purple dinosaur backpack. “So … you teaching kindergarten now?”

  I snorted, then immediately quashed my involuntary amusement.

  Kandy bared her teeth. Then, somewhat inexplicably, she said, “I shoulder my responsibilities while you sit here knitting and playing with magic beyond your abilities.”

  Mory twisted her lips belligerently but didn’t answer, returning her gaze to her work.

  Kandy sneered at the fledgling’s bowed head, then looked at me with a dismissive shake of her own head. “I’m going to do a circuit. You deal with the dysfunctional necromancer.”

  Great. The green-haired werewolf took off before I could protest being left to deal with the nineteen-year-old.

  Mory peeked at me through her long bangs. “I know, Jade. I know, okay? I didn’t do it intentionally.”

  “But your magic … needed it?”

  “Not like that. Not after I got here … I thought it had settled.”

  I resisted the impulse to start pacing or to raise my voice. Such reactions would have been irrational. But when it came to Mory, my protective instincts were already heightened. Add the itchy feet, the race to get to the cemetery, and the zombies, and well …

  I took a deep breath. “Can I look at your necklace?”

  Mory huffed. But she untangled one hand from her knitting and tugged her necklace from the collar of her poncho without further protest.

  I had stripped the artifact back over the previous two years, removing and replacing elements bit by bit. The only original piece was the thin gold chain, which was now woven through a thick-linked white gold chain. Silver didn’t take to my alchemy as well as gold did. I’d also repurposed the gold bangles and the single wedding ring that had once been part of it, so that the necklace was sleeker — just the chains and the coins. Something Mory could keep tucked away underneath the knit scarves she wore year round.

  I took a moment to contemplate Mory’s current fashion choice — a chunky knit with a thickly striped fringe of orange, purple, and electric blue, which likely fell to the necromancer’s calves when she was standing. Various-sized beads were knotted within the fringe, which I expected meant that Mory clattered while she walked.

  Apparently, necromancers had no need for stealth, or for blending into their surroundings. At least not this particular necromancer.

  Still, the poncho looked gloriously comfy. Though I’d have had to drop twenty pounds and shrink five inches to pull it off.

  I stepped forward. But even before I touched it, I could tell something was odd about the magic of Mory’s necklace. First of all, it was … churning.

  “Did you recently access the power held in the necklace?” I asked.

  “You know I can’t use it like that.” Mory enjoyed reminding me that she wasn’t a witch. Constantly.

  “So, no?”

  “No.” Then she added, “Not knowingly.”

  “Did someone hit you with a spell? Something malicious?”

  “I think I would have noticed.”

  I brushed my fingers along the woven chain and the drilled coins, calming the magic within them. “The necklace might have simply deflected it without you noticing.”

  Mory didn’t answer. I lifted my gaze to hers. Though she’d been watching me intently, she dropped her eyes back to her knitting.

  “What are you making?” I asked. “Socks?”

  “Arm warmers.” Then she hesitated. “I thought … you might like them.”

  Surprised, I glanced down at the thin metal needles she was using. They were purple. Mory continued clicking away, working stitch after stitch. The magic that had accumulated around her hands had faded.

  “Cashmere and a little bit of silk.” The fiber content was offered up with a kind of reverence, and an attempt at enticement. “I harvested the yarn myself. Reclaimed from two separate sweaters. Then I Kool-Aid-dyed it lime green. With blue and darker green speckles. Speckles are super hot right now.”

  I grinned, only really understanding that Mory was voluntarily knitting me something green that I could wear on my arms. “Who’d say no to that?”

  A smile flitted across the junior necromancer’s face. “Is my necklace okay, then?”

  I returned my attention to the magical artifact in question. “What did it feel like? When your magic ‘needed’ you to come to the cemetery? Like a compulsion?”

  Mory shrugged. “It’s like that sometimes. If I haven’t cast in a while. Usually carrying Ed helps.”

  Oh, God. I really didn’t want to know. “Who is Ed?”

  “My red-eared slider. My pet turtle.”

  I really, really didn’t want to know. “And … you … carry him in your bag? Like … dead?”

  Mory narrowed her eyes at me.

  I raised my hands, palms out. “No judgement.”

  “You are totally judging me, Jade.”

  I really was. “I’m not. Carrying Ed is like … using your magic casually, passively?”

  “Yeah, like almost subconsciously. So it doesn’t … leak.”

  I waved my hand toward the grave Mory was still perched over. I’d been careful to step to one side of the churned earth when examining the necklace. “So things like this don’t happen.”

  “Well … this is my first time with people, you know. Usually it’s birds, snakes, rats —”

  “Jesus, Mory!”

  “You asked.”

  “So the corpses were just a … leak?”

  Mory shook her head. “No. That was … an uncontrollable urge to raise the dead.”

  “Like a compulsion?” I asked for the second time.

  Mory locked her dark-eyed gaze to mine. “You know what it takes to get past the necklace,” she whispered. “I would have felt it if someone spelled me. I know what that feels like.”

  I nodded. Mory didn’t need to remind me of the exact circumstances in which she’d been hit with so much magic that the protective barrier of her necklace had been breached. And I didn’t bring Sienna up either. Not out loud, at least.

  “Plus,” the necromancer continued, “you’ve strengthened it. Many times. Since.”

  I nodded thoughtfully.

  “You want to meet him?”

  “Who?”

  “Ed.”

  “Jesus, no!”

  Mory cackled, delighted at her own joke.

  Then the taste of peppermint drew my attention away from the necromancer. I stepped back from her and the magic of the necklace to reach out with my dowser senses, certain for the second time in just a few hours that Kett was nearby.

  I could sense Kandy about a block away, and Warner closer to where we’d parked the SUV. But again, no white-blond vampires.

  A shadow shifted in a deep crook between the branches of the chestnut tree beside and slightly behind Mory. I frowned, shaking my head at it.

  Mory cranked her head, following my gaze. Then she stilled
when she laid eyes on the shadow leech watching us from the thick branches of the tree.

  “What is that?” she whispered.

  “You can see it?”

  “Why else would I be asking?”

  I stifled a sigh. Heaven forbid that the necromancer could give me a freaking break for one freaking second. “I’m just surprised. Not everyone can.” I settled my fingers along Mory’s chain, focusing on adding another level of protection into the artifact. “It’s drawn to my magic. It won’t hurt you.”

  Mory huffed.

  Silence fell between us. I concentrated on interweaving her toasted-marshmallow magic with my own energy, then weaving both into the necklace. She watched the shadow leech over her shoulder.

  “It’s a demon of some sort, right?”

  “Of some sort.”

  “You can’t just give me a plain answer?”

  I dropped my hands from her necklace, shoving them in the back pockets of my jeans. Possibly so I couldn’t wring Mory’s neck. “It’s a shadow leech. A sorcerer obsessed with living forever who willingly sacrificed himself so that demonic energy could be drawn into this dimension. There were dozens of them originally. Warner, Kandy, Kett, Drake, and I killed them all except three. Then, when I murdered their master and absorbed her magic, the leeches were drawn to me. This one absorbed the other two, becoming more substantial, probably because I refused to let it consume the magic from every Adept it wanted to suck dry.”

  Mory was staring at me, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. She had finally stopped knitting.

  “Happy?” I asked pointedly.

  She snapped her mouth closed, then started knitting again. “So it can’t be vanquished.”

  “I can kill it. But …”

  “It has a soul. Some of the life essence of the sorcerers.”

  “So it appears,” I murmured. I watched as the shadow leech shifted closer along the branch.

  “Well … that’s one way of living forever.”

  I didn’t have an answer to that. Just an opinion. Immortality wasn’t something that appealed to me. In fact, it seemed as though living forever might well be more of a curse than a gift.

  “I shall name it Freddie,” Mory declared.

  “What? The leech?”

  She nodded sagely. “Yes. You’ll feel better, having accidentally tamed it, if it has a name.”

  “It isn’t tame. Don’t think it’s tame, Mory. Do not try to befriend it.”

  Mory shrugged noncommittally.

  Jesus. Like I didn’t have enough to worry about when it came to the junior necromancer. Zombies, leeches … what was next?

  Perhaps sensing my mood, the leech retreated back into the shadow of the chestnut tree, taking its cinnamon-toast-scented magic with it.

  “Who’s Burgundy?” I asked, seeking to change the subject. Mory had mentioned the name when we’d talked about needing a witch to clean up her mess in the graveyard.

  “You know. Burgundy.”

  “Nope.”

  “My friend Burgundy. She’s been in the bakery like a dozen times.”

  I shook my head.

  “Amy,” Mory snarled, as though I had just asked her to skewer her friend through the eyes with hot pokers.

  Which was a seriously creepy image. Where the hell had that come from? I blamed the current environment. What with the corpses set to rise out of the ground underneath my feet at the merest thought of a necromancer who delighted in needling me.

  Mory was glowering. A huffy, pissy pixie swathed in knitwear and perched on a gravestone. “My friend, Amy,” she repeated, clicking her thin metal needles together viciously. “You bought us ice cream. She’s Burgundy now, training with Pearl.”

  “Oh! She’s like, what? A quarter-witch?”

  The further furrowing of Mory’s brow gave me a sense of what fragile ground I was on. Which was fine, really. I was way more comfortable being the instigator of mayhem rather than the person who cleaned it up. I only ‘adulted’ completely willingly around bakery business.

  “She’s hoping to focus on medicine at UBC. And on training in healing spells and such.”

  ‘And such’ covered a hell of a lot of ground when it came to witch magic, but I let it go. “Huh. Okay. So she can …?” I waved my hand at the disturbed grave underneath Mory’s dangling feet.

  “Yep. At least I think so.”

  Catching another hint of magic, I asked, “Does her magic taste like … jelly beans?” I smacked my lips thoughtfully. “Sour grape, maybe?”

  Mory gave me a withering look.

  Right, not a witch. And as far as I knew, I was the only half-witch who could taste magic. So it was a stupid question, which I tried to cover by explaining. “It’s an odd taste for a witch …”

  But then I caught a hint of a darkly tinted spice that I knew intimately. A flavoring that I still couldn’t identify …

  It wasn’t cardamom or coriander or cumin … I’d come to believe that its root was so ancient that even though the magical blood that carried its taste continued on, the plant itself was extinct.

  But in any case, that spice had no business being paired with the taste of sour-grape jelly beans.

  I pivoted toward it, peering into the darkness toward Fraser Street. I could hear traffic from that direction and sense Kandy moving toward me. But I couldn’t see any intruders.

  Mory laid her hand on my arm, her gaze riveted to something near my waist. “It’s okay, Jade.”

  I glanced down. I had called my knife into my hand without even noticing. Not wanting to freak Mory out further, I loosened my hold on the hilt and the blade immediately settled back into its invisible sheath.

  “He’s okay.”

  Mory knew the source of the magic I had tasted. Damn it.

  “He’s a vampire,” I spat. “Loitering outside a cemetery.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s the third evening. I think he’s trying to … you know, say hi.”

  I looked at her incredulously. “A vampire is attempting to open up a dialogue. With a necromancer. In a graveyard.”

  My tone was nearing ‘unbecomingly strident’ territory. But what the freaking hell? Vampires weren’t friendly with necromancers. The immortal undead didn’t take kindly to the fact that some necromancers could control them. Also, for some strange reason, zombies could hurt the fanged. I was fairly certain that few knew that last little tidbit, thanks to the vampires having obliterated many of the necromancer bloodlines. Though even that destruction was more rumor than concrete fact.

  Mory herself had informed me of the animosity between the two Adept races. Plus, she had always maintained a careful distance between herself and Kett. And what the hell was a sour-grape-jelly-bean-tasting bloodsucker doing in Vancouver anyway?

  “Jade,” Mory said soothingly. “His mother is a necromancer.”

  That gave me pause. Because it forced me to remember that Vancouver now boasted two full-fledged necromancers. Danica Novak, Mory’s mother, and Teresa Garrick, who was pending trial with the Convocation. A trial that had something to do with why her son Benjamin was a fledgling vampire without a master.

  “Benjamin Garrick?” I said. It wasn’t like I hoped he was chained up in a basement somewhere, but I hadn’t thought about Benjamin having free rein to wander around Vancouver stalking necromancers under my protection.

  “Yeah. I think so, at least. I haven’t met him. But he feels like —”

  “Be right back.”

  I took off without another word, darting between gravestones and feeling Kandy immediately chase after me from the parallel edge of the property. Then Warner’s black-forest-cake magic was moving with me as well, from where he was likely still on the outer sidewalk.

  “Jade!” Mory called after me. “Give him a chance!”

  A dark-haired vampire lurked among the thick-leafed branches of a massive chestnut tree at the eastern corner of the expansive cemetery property just inside the gate off Fraser Street. He might have been able to se
e Mory from his perch, but he didn’t see or hear me coming. Though I couldn’t blame him. I moved quickly.

  He also missed the werewolf and the dragon. But then, Kandy moved through the grass and around the gravestones without a sound, and Warner pretty much became one with the shadows when he wanted to, as a result of his chameleon abilities.

  I waited a couple of seconds for the vampire to notice me standing in the dry grass underneath the tree, but he kept his dark-eyed gaze riveted to the pixie necromancer. So I jumped up, grabbed his ankle, and ripped him from the branches.

  He spun in midair, losing hold of a worn black-leather satchel as he crashed onto his back. He didn’t make a sound, not even a peep of disconcertion.

  Bonus points for him.

  Of course, he hadn’t seen my knife yet.

  The slightly built vampire yanked his leg from my grasp, scrambling back and slamming up against the base of the chestnut tree. It was thickly trunked, easily forty years old, but it still shuddered at this mistreatment. So he was strong. Nowhere near as strong as Kett, but way, way stronger physically than the petite necromancer he was apparently stalking.

  His pale skin had an olive undertone. His eyes were dark brown, almost black in the filtered moonlight. Appearing to be around nineteen or twenty, he stared up at me, self-consciously tugging at the sleeve of a thin, dark-navy wool sweater that was slightly too large for him, hanging past his wrists. Dark-washed jeans and lace-up ankle boots of black leather completed his outfit. He was about my height, as long as I wasn’t wearing heels.

  Warner and Kandy appeared at my back, standing to either side like silent, brooding sentries. Not bothering to pull my knife again, I leaned over the fledgling vampire, watching his eyes finally widen with fear. But interestingly, I didn’t see even a hint of the red of his magic.

  “Hunting necromancers is frowned upon in Vancouver,” I said, pointedly but not nastily. I liked to be nice, after all.

  His jaw dropped, revealing teeth that were so perfectly straight he must have worn braces at some point. Before he’d been remade into a vampire. As with the eyes, I didn’t see any hint of fangs. But as far as I could figure, a young vampire confronted by three unknown and greater predators should have been instinctively fighting back.