by Anna Abner
“Are you hungry?” she asked, eyeing the mess. “You might be able to salvage something.”
“No.”
She couldn’t possibly eat. There was no way she could keep it down. But the water looked good. She cracked open their last remaining bottle and sipped.
“The weird thing, though,” she said.
“There’s only one?” David laughed without humor.
“Necromancers can cast summoning spells, but I’m a witch. The best I could do is boost a necromancer’s power. So.” She eyed him up and down. “What are you doing here?”
“You think I’m secretly a witch?” He laughed again.
“The guy out there thinks you’re a necromancer.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard yet.”
She agreed. If David was a caster, surely she’d have gotten some clue before now. He seemed genuinely baffled by the supernatural events going on around him.
Footsteps outside, and then the door swung open. Dani stood up so fast she dropped her plastic bottle and precious water gurgled onto the floor.
Damn it. That wasn’t much of a reprieve. The Carver had returned, and he’d brought a friend. A dark-skinned man knelt in a freshly drawn spell circle on the other side of the door’s barrier spell. And both men remained safely out of her reach.
“Jeff,” the Carver said, tapping his friend on the shoulder. Someone hadn’t earned an evil nickname, yet. Maybe Jeff was on probation, just like they were.
The man on his knees said one word, “Constringo.”
Fricking necromancers and their hard-ons for Latin. But it didn’t matter what the word meant. The spell hit Dani, burning from her fingertips to her elbows. A dark spider-web tattoo crawled up both forearms.
“No!” She shook her arms, praying in her panic she could remove the spell like a picture on an Etch A Sketch. But the spell was real and nasty and there for keeps.
He had bound her magic.
Dani was helpless.
“See the extent of our reach?” The Carver guffawed. “We can take your power away, or we can give you even more.”
“No, please,” she cried. “Don’t do this.”
Not in ten years had she been unable to cast. No one had ever taken away her magic. No one had dared.
“Glow.” It was a simple light generating spell she’d cast a thousand times. Her hands should shine like fluorescent tubes. She could even choose the color if she wanted. Orange was a favorite. But nothing happened. Not a single tingle along her nerve endings.
“Let us go.” At his sides, David’s hands fisted. “Whatever you want, I’ll do it. Money? I’ll get it. I have to go home. Now.”
“Good,” the Carver said. “That’s perfect. I’m glad you’re in a hurry. Because you’re going to summon a demon very quickly.”
Dani reeled. David? David was a necromancer? Lord, a caster right under her nose.
“Can we be serious here, please?” David sneered, the tension in his fists quivering up his forearms. If either the Carver or Jeff was stupid enough to drop their barrier spell, they’d be in a world of hurt.
“Do I look like I’m joking?” The Carver tilted his head and scowled. “I gave you a chance to play nice. Your witch friend blew me off.”
He was right. Maybe she shouldn’t have been so mouthy. In hindsight, perhaps she should have been sweeter to the necromancer keeping her locked in a cell.
David lowered his voice as the muscles in his chest and back tensed. “I have to get home to my son.”
Amusement glittering in his cold eyes, the Carver reached for the door handle as David threw himself at the pair of men, bounced off the boundary spell, and sprawled on the cold concrete.
“You son a bitch!” David tried again, scrambling up and kicking at the spell with the heel of his foot. “Let me out of here!”
Jeff spoke another Latin spell, and Dani’s arms tingled uncomfortably, as if they were waking from a long sleep. The webs disappeared, and she sagged in relief, palming the wall. Oh God, thank you. She didn’t know what she’d do without her magic. It was such an ingrained part of her. Like her eyesight or her sense of touch.
The Carver remained unimpressed with either her gratitude or David’s rage. “You have twelve hours to show progress. And then we’ll talk again.” He shoved the door closed, and a bolt slid, metal against metal. Through the steel he shouted, “I don’t like to be disappointed.”
David attacked the sealed door. “No. No!”
He looked the same as he always had. Blond hair, wide shoulders, long legs. But everything she knew about him was wrong. He wasn’t a normal, human man—a civilian in her paranormal world. No, he was a freak like her.
Dani couldn’t catch her breath. “You’re a necromancer?”
He punched the door, but with less force.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” For God’s sake, she’d sat across from him at that Italian restaurant, gazed like a moonstruck child into his eyes, and never had a clue he was a caster.
Car tires drove by their window, signaling abandonment.
“Do you have any idea how to get out of here?” David tore through the contents of the manila folder, and yellow chalk rolled across the floor. A color photograph and a plastic bag containing hair and blood fell at his feet.
“This is sick.” He marched around bread and tomato slices to the window and pulled at the casing, splintering the wood trim.
Dani turned over the photo. It was a snapshot of a good-looking guy in his twenties holding a bag of groceries beside a brown sedan. Dani’s vision wavered. Sick was a good word for it. Did the Carver think she’d ever, in a million years, put a demon into this person?
If Derek Walker was an enemy of the Dark Caster, that made him her new friend.
“Are you a necromancer or not?” She jiggled the photograph at David.
David grunted something, using his feet against the wall to pull at the casing with better leverage. Nails squealed, but the window stayed solid.
“Answer me.”
“I don’t know what that is!” He stumbled off the wall.
“Don’t raise your voice to me!” She lost her cool, picked up a piece of yellow chalk and threw it as hard as she could at his chest. It missed and shattered against the wall behind him. She was no better than her bully captors, and it embarrassed her.
Looking at the remains of the chalk, he asked, “Are you done? Because maybe you could help me over here instead. I might be able to pull this window right out of the frame.”
She wasn’t done being furious. “Great idea! Will you pull out the nails with your fingernails or your teeth? And unless you can manage it in less than twelve hours, those morons are gonna see the mess the second they open that door.”
He pulled on the frame and then slipped on a smear of mayonnaise. “I have to get out of here.”
She forced herself to calm down and find a logical way out of the basement. Yelling at David wasn’t getting her anywhere. “It’s no use. The window’s spelled. You’d have more luck tunneling through the wall.”
“I have to do something.”
She was a witch not a carpenter. Her power was their best bet at getting out of there alive. She inspected her hands and shivered at the memory of those dark, twisting webs Jeff had used to bind her magic. But it wasn’t bound now. She wracked her brain for a helpful spell.
David grunted and tore another chunk of plaster loose. Both the Carver and the Dark Caster believed this regular guy in the slacks and white button-down was a necromancer? There were two ways to be one. David either had to be born one or be touched by the other side and made one.
Cole’s friend Holden was a made necromancer because he’d died, crossed over, and then been brought back.
Was David a made necromancer, too?
But he was way too agitated to have a serious conversation. She needed to get him to relax so she could question him. And there was something she could do that might help, the least s
he could do, really—get rid of the evidence of the Carver’s hissy fit. She bent and touched her index finger to a slice of bread.
“Dry up and blow away.” Poof. The bread’s natural decomposition process sped up. It dried out, turned to dust, and was gone.
Her power was rocking it overtime today. For years her innate power had been a curse, and she’d prayed many times for it to vanish from her cells, but the more time passed when she didn’t hurt people—on the contrary, she helped people like Rebecca—the more pride she felt. Like today. Because of her magic David knew his son was safe, and now the Carver’s mess was gone.
The moment the last of the food dissolved, the sun set and light faded from the broken window, casting the basement in cool shadows. The temperature dropped rapidly. Though it was springtime in North Carolina and warm during the day, the basement was chilly, made worse by the bare concrete floor and shattered window.
Rudderless, Dani wandered. Like David had already done, she inspected the room from brick wall to brick wall and concrete floor to sheetrock ceiling. She had power. Real, scary, glittery witch power, but she’d never been held captive before. It was hard to think where to focus her magic. She couldn’t tear down an entire house. She’d freeze herself into a Popsicle just trying. And the exits were spelled.
Starting a fire might kill them. She could, maybe, push some kind of distress signal into the sky, but no human would be able to rescue them and anyone who crossed the boundary spell would be as stuck as they were now.
It might be possible to make it look like the house was on fire and bring in outside help, but there was still the barrier spell to deal with.
A necromancer could send messages to others like him through his spirit companion, but she couldn’t see spirits. She had to touch something to affect it. She could only cast on the house or their furniture or each other. The only way out of the puzzle, that she could figure, was to wait for the Carver and his buddy Jeff to return and talk their way out. If the cabal needed casters this badly, they must be willing to negotiate.
“Don’t waste your time,” Dani said, gesturing at the torn up window frame.
“I can’t believe this is happening.” David clapped the dust from his hands and then knelt in front of the recliner and felt along the base. “It’s like a dream.”
More like a nightmare. Out of ideas, she sat and wrapped her arms around her knees to conserve what body heat remained. She could have cast a light spell and illuminated the room, but she’d already used so much magic today that she didn’t want to risk hurting herself.
David paused in his frantic work to stare. “How can you sleep?”
“I’m not.” She’d done enough of that, thanks to the Carver’s spell. Dani lay down flat on her mattress and hugged her middle. “I’m cold.”
Because she’d cast more today than she had all week. It had drained some of her body heat, leaving her chilled. She couldn’t push herself like this for too long, or she’d reach her breaking point.
She’d been there before. She’d once hit a deer on her way home from work, and the unlucky animal had been crushed and near death. Right there in the middle of the road she’d cast a healing spell. The deer had been so wounded, though, that it taken all her power. The spell had sucked the warmth from her every cell and fiber and bone. Afterward, the deer had bounced to its feet and disappeared into the trees, but Dani hadn’t been able to get her fingers to straighten out. She’d sat in her car with the heater blasting for half an hour trying to warm her muscles enough to drive home.
She’d never pushed it further. Was terrified to. People died from hypothermia.
“I’m okay.”
“Do you, uh.” He poked at a spot on the wall. “Want to push the beds together and share body heat? So we don’t freeze?”
“No,” she blurted out, all kinds of horrors flickering through her thoughts. Like David unconscious and seizing on the floor from a magical overload. “No, thank you.”
David attacked the wall with renewed vigor, kicking flakes off the bottom row of bricks and mortar. “Does all this have to do with you?”
Yes. Probably. “My friend Cole was looking for a cabal in Auburn that was causing trouble. But, as far as I knew, I was off their radar.”
“What kind of trouble?” He gave up on escaping through the window and sank to the pallet across the room.
“A necromancer is casting a demonic-summoning spell into a real estate agent named Rebecca Powell.” Or, was a week ago. God knows what had happened while Dani was asleep. All her friends could be possessed. Or dead.
“A demon possession.” David still didn’t sound convinced.
She thought back to everything Cole Burkov had taught her about necromancy. There was a lot to it—spirits, spell marks, drawn circles, channeling… She was no expert, but of the two of them, she knew the most.
“There are three planes of existence,” she explained. “Heaven, hell, and earth. If a necromancer is dumb enough to try, they can channel a spirit’s power and pull a demon from the hell dimension into a living person. The tricky part is, demons aren’t allowed here. If agents of heaven find one breaking through, they will punish the necromancer responsible and exorcise the demon.”
“Punish how?”
She smirked. “You should ask the Dark Caster. He overreached and had his channeling powers stripped.”
“Is Rebecca gonna die?”
Dani hoped not, because Rebecca seemed like a nice girl. A little high strung, but nice. And Holden really liked her.
“She’ll be possessed. Well, if we can’t stop the caster. I was trying to help her and my friends find the caster before he finished. But then.” She gestured to the room around them.
“What does a cabal do?”
“It’s a group of people with power. It could be devoted to helping others. This one is more like a bunch of jerks trying to be big shots.”
“A cabal.” David shook his head, a hint of a smile on his face. “Necromancers. Witches.”
“It’s all real.”
“Yeah,” he rubbed his eyes with the heels of both hands, “I’m getting that. But what does any of it have to do with me?”
Good question. Dani scrutinized him again through the shadows. No spell marks on him. If he’d secretly called a spirit, she wouldn’t know, anyway. Witches couldn’t see the dead. If he was a necromancer, he must be a new one.
She chewed on her fingernail, worrying a strip of nail clean off. “David, did you die?”
Chapter Three
Cole Burkov picked up the nearest item at hand—an extra large Bakugan ball—from the front counter and hurled it through his empty comic book shop. It bounced against a shelf of new releases and rolled to a stop under the game table. Pathetic. Like him.
Rage boiled up inside him like a foreign substance. And it probably was, but after so many years carrying around another man’s flesh and blood in his chest, it was difficult to say whose rage it was—Cole’s or its. Fisting both hands, he marched for the front door, slammed it closed, and jerked the lock in place.
Eight days. Eight fucking days. Daniela was still missing, and not a whisper had been heard about her whereabouts. Her car had been abandoned on the side of Highway 55 between her work and her apartment. She’d vanished.
Absolutely anything could have happened. God, and he’d brought her into this mess. He’d called her for help. He’d given Holden her number.
She could be chained up. She could be bleeding or starving or beaten. Or dead.
Cole didn’t want to let that thought in, but her death was becoming more and more likely. When he drove by her apartment twice a day, it was always dark and empty. She hadn’t contacted him or her boss or her friends. He’d sent Steph, his spirit companion, to search the city for her, but so far she’d returned empty-handed. The police had no luck following a trail that led anywhere helpful. And locator spells couldn’t find her.
Either she was dead or magic cloaked her whereabout
s. And twisted magic like that meant the Dark Caster and his cabal.
That bastard was causing all sorts of trouble. Luckily, his plot to possess Rebecca Powell had been thwarted. Holden had stopped it, and he might be able to help find Dani, but he was on vacation in Turks and Caicos with Rebecca.
Cole had no leads and no help. All he had left was hope that his friend was still alive.
One person he hadn’t talked to was Derek Walker, the son of a bitch that had been doing the Dark Caster’s dirty work and hurting Rebecca. The problem was, he was under Holden’s memory-wiping spell and wasn’t supposed to know his own name, let alone the Dark Caster’s identity.
But Cole was running out of ideas. He turned his car toward Richlands.
Outside Auburn, strip malls and parking lots gave way to green fields and thick forests. Past a Tractor Supply store, he turned right onto a long dirt road. At the end of it, no other neighbors in sight, sat Derek’s ranch-style home.
Cole banged on the front door. It swung open a moment later by a young man who might have been good looking if he’d bothered to shave, wash his hair, or change out of gray sweatpants and a wrinkled tee.
“Derek Walker?” Cole asked, pushing his way into the foyer.
The man sighed heavily. “So they tell me. And you are?” He shut the door and wandered into a family room as if he really didn’t care what the answer was.
“Cole Burkov.” As he followed Derek, he scanned the house. The windows were all covered in blinds, and the only light came from the family room.
The whole place smelled burnt, as if there had been a fire. But it wasn’t property damage. It was heavy-duty necromancy from Derek’s and Holden’s competing magic. Spells, especially dark ones, left behind a lingering odor like fire and brimstone.
Cole caught sight of a young female spirit in the shadowy hallway. They made eye contact, and then she vanished.
Either someone was watching Derek or watching Cole.
“Welcome.” Derek flopped onto a sofa and clicked on the TV with a remote. Cable news blared. “Do we know each other?”
