nancy werlock's diary s01 - episodes 1-7

by Julie Ann Dawson

  “Yeah.” Houston gets quiet again. I leave him to his thoughts.

  We pull up to the Philadelphia Evocation Academy, the guild hall for the region. Not that it says that on the front door or anything. From the street, it looks like it might be a school, or some research center. It has a private, gated lot and access is by appointment only. At least, that is what the sign says. Guild members can come and go whenever they want.

  “Good morning, Gatekeeper,” I say as I wave my hand at the sensor to open the gate. Gatekeeper looks up from his magazine waves me off like a cranky old neighbor.

  “Wait,” says Houston as I drive through the open gate and look for a parking spot. “He’s not human?”

  “He’s a Gatekeeper. He was here when we brought the gremlin in?”

  “I wasn’t paying attention, then.” Houston is looking back at the gate house. “Wait, I think I know that guy! Uncle Harold did some roof work for him a few years ago. I knew there was something off with him.” I just start chuckling. “Hold on a minute. He’s a demon. And he just…I don’t know…has like a normal job as a guard and owns a house and all that?”

  “Gatekeepers are demons associated with portals,” I explain. “It’s their thing. They like to guard portals.”

  “What do you mean they like to guard portals?”

  “You know how demons require an anchor to maintain a presence on the material plane.”

  “Um…uh huh.”

  “Don’t um at me. That is probably going to be one of the test questions!”

  “I know! They either need to form a pact, possess a body, or form an anchor.”

  “Right, but anchors don’t always have to be physical things. An anchor can be a purpose. For Gatekeepers, that purpose is protecting portals of any type. A gate is just a mundane portal between areas.”

  “This is stuff I’ll learn after I pass my Rank Five trials, right?”

  “Yes, you don’t need to worry about Gatekeepers for now.” I park the car. “You ready?”

  “If I said no, would we leave?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’m ready.”

  Three hours later, Houston comes stomping out of the test room with a sour look on his face. “Argh, I’m so stupid!”

  Panic fills my chest. “What, what happened?” Another student walks passed him, pauses, makes a point of rolling her eyes, and then huffs as she walks off. “And what was that all about?”

  Houston shrugs. “I think she failed.” He hands me a red folder. “Don’t be mad.”

  I take the folder from him and open it. “I hate you.”

  “I can’t believe I missed that one. We went over that one with the succubus specifically.”

  “Well, maybe if you weren’t so busy giggling like a schoolboy over the plural of succubus you would have gotten a 100 instead of a 98!” I slap him on the chest with the folder. “I can’t believe you.”

  “So is beating each other with folders some secret demonologist greeting or something?”

  “Congratulations!” I give him a hug. “I’m proud of you.”

  “Test was easier than I thought it would be. I think half the class failed, though.”

  “The demonology trial is harder than the normal Rank Five Evocation trial. Lots of people fail it the first time. It’s a lot of specialized knowledge. Lots of people have to take it twice.”

  “Did you?”

  “No! I did very well on my Rank Five trials.”

  “What was your score?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember. It was twenty years ago!”

  “96.” I turn to see Archmage Lawrence standing behind me. Even after all these years, he still reminds me of a Marine Corps Santa Claus. He’s standing there with his hands behind his back, feet slightly apart, and his back rail straight. But there is a mischievous grin on his face and a twinkle in his eyes. “You scored a 96.”

  “I beat you!”

  “I hate you,” I say to Houston. “Good afternoon, Archmage. And thank you for the reminder. Do you remember everyone’s scores?”

  “You are welcome, my dear.” He puts an arm around me and kisses my forehead. “And no, I decided to look it up after your apprentice finished his test. Just for my own edification, of course.”

  “I…beat…you,” repeats Houston.

  In your patron’s defense, however, she was the youngest person on my watch to ever take the Rank Five Trials. What were you? Fourteen? Fifteen?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “She was already performing exorcisms by then. Her trial was merely a formality. Two years later she passed her Rank Four trials with equal ease. I hope you appreciate the opportunity you have to study under her.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How is your mother, Nancy? Terrible thing about her accident. We all miss her around the guild. Have you spoken to her since her death?”

  “Oh yes. She’s settled in well.”

  “That’s good to hear. It’s sometimes difficult for our kind to take to the Other Realm. Well, I won’t keep you. I’m sure you want to go celebrate. Tell your mother I was thinking of her when next you speak.”

  As we leave the building, Houston pokes me on the shoulder. “I beat you by two points.”

  “Oh please! You heard the Archmage. I took the test at fifteen!”

  “Yeah, but I only had three months to study! So I beat you.”

  “Two points.” I hold up two fingers.

  “Two points is two points.” He flexes. “Come on, let me gloat. Not like I can tell...” Houston drops to one knee and grabs his head.

  “Houston!”

  “What the Hell was that?” he says as he tries to stand up. He staggers for a moment. “Felt like someone hit me in the head with a hammer.” He leans against the wall.

  “What happened?”

  “I…I don’t know. I haven’t felt anything like that since…God my head!”

  “Since what? Has this happened before? You look so pale.”

  Houston slides down to sit on the sidewalk. “Oh, I need an aspirin. Or five.”

  “Houston, since what? What was that that just happened?”

  “After the accident. When my mom first started to talk to me. I’d get this head-splitting pain but then it would go away. I figured it was just a by-product of the accident or Mom doing whatever it was she did to me.”

  “But this is the first time it’s happened since then?” He nods. “Can you stand?”

  “I think so.” I help him to his feet. “I think I’ll just celebrate by sleeping in a dark room for a while.”

  The Lemure

  July 19th

  “His right parahippocampal gyrus has a great deal of scarring,” says Dr. Parker as he points at the X-rays. “Some of it may be metaphysical. There is almost a pattern. But it is hard to really tell from these.”

  “So it isn’t from the accident?” I ask as I pretend to know what I’m looking at.

  Dr. Parker shakes his head. “His mother may have done it during the imprinting.”

  Houston had a paranormal migraine from the lower planes of the abyss a few days ago. It knocked him on his ass and he wasn’t able to function for a couple of days afterwards. I brought him to Dr. Parker to find out what caused it. Dr. Parker is one of the premiere specialists in the field of Arcane Neurology. And he’s in-network, so the visit is covered under the insurance.

  “The only way to know for sure would be to open him up and see if the tissue was damaged by mundane or mystical means. I can’t really confirm with an x-ray.”

  “I’m pretty sure he’s not going to go for that.”

  “Look at these,” he says. He opens a folder with some brain scans. “There is an incredible amount of activity going on in his anterior insular cortex.”

  “If you say so.”

  “It’s the part of the brain that processes empathy. This area is usually quite active with psions but he wasn’t a psion before his imprinting. Are you sure he won’t…”


  “We’re not opening his skull.”

  “Pity.” He looks again at the scans. “Well this would have made it easy for Grande Madame Marchan to do what she did. Frankly, even if he didn’t develop through the blood, with time and training he could have been a wizard. The groundwork is all here.”

  “That would explain why he took to it so easily.”

  “Indeed. It’s almost like his brain was created just to hold magical ability.”

  “None of this explains his headaches.”

  “Nothing in the scans or x-rays indicates a physical problem. He’s completely healthy. His initial pains were probably triggered by first contact with his mother’s spirit. You remember your first communication across the Veil?”

  Do I ever. Mom was teaching me how to use an Ouija board and I contacted Old Lady Maxwell. She started yelling at me about waking the dead and messing with her sleep. My head hurt for hours after that.

  “But what about the other day?”

  “Psionic attack, perhaps.”

  “We were at the guild hall. Gatekeeper would have detected an intrusion.”

  “Only if it was a creature.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Nancy, you know that it is no secret that lots of people have an interest in Houston. WitchNet has been on fire ever since you first got him credentials. And you know the gossip as much as anyone else does.”

  “Wait, you think someone attacked my apprentice? But for what?”

  “I’m a Necromancer, not a Seer. I’m just saying that you may want to consider the possibility.”

  I leave Dr. Parker’s office and head back to Three Wishes. I keep thinking about my conversation with Vice-Chancellor Gavin. The Lord Advocate of the Eighth of the Nine personally pushed through the approval for Houston’s early Rank Five trials. I haven’t told Houston about that, yet. I also haven’t told him about his mother’s warning to me.

  The official story is that Vivika and her second husband were murdered by her first husband. Of course, nobody actually believes the official story. But all the talk of rivals and conspiracies had always been just catty gossip on WitchNet. Like the occasional stories that turn up on the mundane internet about Elvis still being alive. Just rumors and urban legends people swap mindlessly to have something to talk about.

  But then after all of these years Vivika reached across the Veil to imprint on her son, and all the mindless gossip suddenly becomes very important.

  A rapping on my car window breaks me from my thoughts. I turn my head to see Lee Brennon, otherwise dubbed Lee the Lemure, standing next to my car.

  Last month, a wannabe sorcerer with a movie prop grimoire accidentally summoned a lemure. As you can imagine, such things tend not to end well. The idiot summoner died in the ensuing arcane backlash explosion and the lemure escaped by jumping into the body of a drug overdose patient in an ambulance. The lemure has since been living as a skinwalker in the deceased patient’s body.

  I crack my window just enough so I can talk to it. “You should not be here.”

  “I just want to talk. That’s all.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “Please, I need to talk to you.” He looks around nervously. “I’m not looking to cause trouble.”

  I look at my watch. Anastasia is in the store right now. If it was just Houston inside, I’d invite the lemure in and deal with it once and for all. He’s on my friend Steve’s “to-do” list for an exorcism, but Steve has a bigger problem with something going around killing Justicars. And he did originally ask me to take care of this problem for him.

  But I can’t invite him in with Anastasia there because she’s a mundane. And gullible. Sweet. Very sweet. And a wonderful employee. But not someone you bring a lemure around.

  I get out of the car. Lee steps back with a terrified expression on his face. I’m sure he knows what I am thinking. I’m a demonologist. He’s a free-roaming demon. I text Houston: Keep Anast. in store. Lemure in parking lot. Open link.

  “You need me out there,” he immediately thinks back to me.

  “Not yet. Says he just wants to talk. We’re going to go to the diner across the street.”

  “I’ll have your kit ready.”

  I nod toward the nearby diner. “Let’s get some coffee.” Lee nods and follows me.

  He waits for the waiter to take our order before he leans forward and starts quickly talking. “Look, just to clear the air and everything, because I know what you are thinking. But I didn’t kill the summoner. His circle was bad from the beginning and there was no way he was surviving the backlash. And then I saw you and you saw me and I panicked but this guy,” he points at himself. “This guy was already dead when I jumped in. Not just clinical dead. Soul departed. So it was a fresh body and I moved in.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “I’m listening for the part that concerns me.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “You are a squatter in a stolen body.”

  “Abandoned body. Soul left. I didn’t steal anything. Come on. You never found a $20 bill on the sidewalk and just put it in your pocket? That’s not stealing, right?”

  “It is if I know who the money belongs to and don’t return it.”

  “But the guy was gone and not coming back. The body wasn’t even useable as an organ donor because of all of the drugs in it. Liver was shot. Kidneys shots. This guy was going in the ground or a crematorium.”

  “And yet the body looks perfectly healthy now. Why is that?”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. So we can come to an understanding and you can take this off of me.” He points at his shoulder where Houston placed the tag. “I don’t want trouble with you people.”

  The waiter brings us our order. I pick at the piece of apple pie I ordered while waiting for him to get out of earshot. “I’m listening.”

  “Mom came to see me in the hospital, and…”

  “Wait, who?”

  “Mom. Mrs. Brennon.”

  “Don’t call her Mom.”

  “But…Okay. Anyway,” Lee takes a deep breath. “She came to the hospital. When I opened my eyes, she was sitting there in the wheelchair crying. But it was weird, because she was happy. Humans cry sometimes when they are happy. It’s strange that you guys do that.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “Yeah, but you know I’m thinking she’s vulnerable and in a wheelchair. Maybe I can make a pact, right? Maybe she wants to walk again or something and then I can stay around. But then she just starts kissing my face and grabbing my hand and apologizing for being a bad mom. And I’m wracking this brain trying to figure out what she is apologizing for, because there aren’t any memories of her being a bad mom. But Lee wasn’t a good guy. You know?”

  “What did you do to Mrs. Brennon?”

  “Nothing. That’s what I’m trying to get at. I didn’t know what to say, because she wasn’t reacting like I thought she should be and what she was saying didn’t match the memories in my head so I just apologized to her for being a bad son. Because I…he…was. And then it was like her face lit up and she was really happy and it felt…it felt good.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then Dad…I mean Mr. Brennon, he came in. And he yelled at me at first for upsetting my mom. Um, Mrs. Brennon. And then I asked him if I could go home, and they took me home. And I like it there. I want them to like me, because it feels good. Being liked, I mean.”

  “Do I look stupid?”

  “I’m telling the truth!”

  “Do you think just because I’m a woman I’d fall for this sappy story?”

  “He’s telling the truth, Nancy,” says Houston as he sits next to me on the booth seat.

  “Where is Anastasia?” I ask him. “And what are you doing here?”

  “She’s fine. She can handle the shop by herself for a few minutes.”

  Lee leans back in his seat as if to put dist
ance between himself and Houston. “I wanted to talk to you alone,” he says to me. “Not with him around. He did this.” He points at the tag again.

  “Buddy, you probably want me here.” Houston picks up my fork and takes a bite of my pie. “Weren’t you just complaining yesterday about not fitting into your jeans?”

  I push the plate toward him. “You can’t believe him.”

  “He’s telling the truth.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I’m been studying up on my colorology. Practicing my aura reading. You know you really had the hots for me when we first met.”

  “Houston!” I lower my voice as the couple at the table next to us look over. Lee chuckles. “You stay out of this.” I slap Houston’s forearm. “Well in that case you know what his green aura means. His vice is envy. He’s feeding off of the Brennon’s desire to have their son with them.”

  “Yeah, but when he talks about them, his aura around the edges turns pale green and there are spots of blue. He genuinely cares about them.”

  “Houston, lemures can modify their secondary auras.”

  “Yeah, but can they modify their surface thoughts?”

  “Warlock, who is this guy?” asks Lee. His breath becomes shallow but rapid like he might hyperventilate.

  “I ask myself that question sometimes.”

  “Did you just scan the surface thoughts of a lemure?”

  “Yeah, you know I can do that.”

  “On mundanes. Not on demons!”

  “It wasn’t that hard.”

  “It should have been. He didn’t even realize you were in there.”

  Lee gulps down the glass of water in front of him. He looks scared witless.

  In their true forms, you can’t read a demon’s thoughts. That’s because even their true forms on the material plane aren’t really ‘real’ in any way we understand them. Their forms are more a solidification of raw energy that carries a portion of their being. The rest of their self remains in the Outer Planes. Their brains, for lack of better understanding, stay in the Outer Planes. The most powerful of psions can’t read minds from across the planes.