Graveyards, Visions, and Other Things That Byte (Dowser 8.5)

by Meghan Ciana Doidge

  “I barely know Kett. And as best as I can guess, tracking mentions of him through the chronicles I’ve read, he’s over a thousand years old. What are the chances he doesn’t have any children?”

  I cleared my throat, then forced myself to speak. “She’s new. Like you. Even newer.”

  “New?” he echoed. “Newly remade? Did you know her before?”

  I shook my head.

  “But she’s living here now … in Vancouver. And newly turned.”

  “Yes.”

  Benjamin wasn’t writing anything down. I’d never seen him not at least jot down a few notes once he had a blank page ready and had asked his questions.

  “Did my … mother make her a bracelet too?”

  I looked away, trying to organize my muddled thoughts and disjointed feelings. The dog owners were drying their wet pets off with large colorful towels. I imagined sand getting everywhere when they climbed into their cars. Or maybe they were walking home to one of the apartment buildings situated along the seawall —

  “Mory?”

  “No,” I said, still not looking at him.

  Benjamin wore a bone bracelet on his left wrist, embedded into his skin. I’d caught a glimpse of it only once or twice, but I could feel it continually. Its seething magic — a necromancy working — kept him in control. In his mother’s control. Its darkly tinted, churning energy almost completely engulfed the bright pulse of Benjamin’s magic, keeping him confined. Stifled. Able to sit on the beach near humans, chatting with me without desperately needing to drain every last drop of blood from my veins.

  “She walks among you all,” Benjamin murmured. “Jasmine. Because it’s Kett’s ancient blood that remade her, that animates her.”

  He didn’t sound upset. But he still hadn’t written anything in his notebook.

  “I thought you’d met. I think they’ve been in town for a couple of months.”

  Benjamin nodded, capping his fountain pen and closing the book.

  I’d expected more questions, about Drake and Jasmine, and about what had happened the previous night. But Benjamin just kept his hand on his notebook balanced on his jean-clad knee, with his head bowed thoughtfully.

  I wanted to know what he was thinking. And, utterly absurdly, I wanted to fix whatever had broken.

  Then I realized he was so still because he wasn’t breathing.

  I turned away, glancing around at the now-empty beach. It wasn’t like Benjamin needed to breathe, but doing so made him seem more human. Necromancers and vampires were ancient enemies, but Benjamin and I scoffed at the obvious prejudices of our elders — and blithely ignored that the fundamental differences between us were fixed. Unchangeable. Vampires were the walking embodiment of death magic. And that power was the dominion of the necromancers.

  I had no need or desire to control Benjamin — quite the opposite, in fact. But that personal declaration came a lot easier when he was acting human. With Kett, or even with Jasmine and the little I knew of her, the boundary was very clear between us. I knew, deep in my soul, that the magic that fueled the executioner of the Conclave would be my own death if I ever tried to harness it. Because Kett was too powerful to be contained by a single necromancer.

  I couldn’t imagine how Teresa Garrick felt every time she looked at Benjamin. How she felt about controlling her own son, even if she could completely justify the bone cuff she’d embedded in his wrist. Without it, Benjamin would have been locked away somewhere, possibly even chained, for years. Maybe decades.

  I pulled my dead turtle out of my satchel as I crossed toward the cliff at the edge of the shoreline, just below the upper grassy park. The tide was low enough that Ed wouldn’t get too wet during his trek, but I usually needed to let him dry a bit before I stuffed him back in my bag.

  Benjamin didn’t follow me. But then, he usually didn’t. Not after the first time I’d introduced him to Ed, and we had watched the turtle walk through the witches’ wards that hid the entrance to the elves’ prison. Ed could cross through the magic only because of the charm I clipped around his neck. And, possibly, because he was dead. The wards weren’t necessarily set up to repel him. But magic could be unreliable, and that wasn’t something I cared to test.

  When Kandy had asked me if scouting with Ed was possible, I’d requested the charm. I didn’t make him wear the magically imbued dime all the time, though, because he wouldn’t be able to pull his neck into his shell. Technically, the red-eared slider was a corpse, powered and kept from decomposing only by my magic. But I didn’t really like to think of Ed that way, or to risk his safety.

  Every evening after sunset, I used Ed to patrol the halls of the prison. He couldn’t step into the three cells themselves, because the white-tiled rooms somehow negated magic, and I would lose him within. If I concentrated, I could see through Ed’s eyes, but it was a weird feeling and an odd perspective, since he was a six-inch-long semiaquatic reptile. Plus, his eyesight wasn’t great. So I checked only the key positions that I’d sorted out with Kandy, using a map she’d drawn me.

  Mostly, I used Ed like a dowsing rod, feeling through him for anything out of the ordinary. I couldn’t feel for magical traces the same way a witch or sorcerer could. But especially if I was using my own power, I could at least feel it if something had been altered.

  Honestly, at the time Kandy had first suggested it, I’d felt like scouting with Ed was a make-work project. Yet another thing to keep me busy, focused, and using my magic benignly. Like the knitting. But after the previous night — after the elves confronted Jade in the dance club, and those of us with fewer sword-wielding, elf-slaughtering capabilities had been bundled off to safety — I’d come to the realization that Kandy was just trying to keep a check on every little possibility. Anything, no matter how remote, that might tip the balance. The elves were an unknown adversary — and quite possibly many moves ahead of us in whatever deadly game was being played.

  I glanced back at Benjamin. Using Ed had been his mother’s idea. Or, more specifically, Kandy had gotten the idea of using the red-eared slider to scout after talking to Teresa at Jade’s engagement party. Teresa had an affinity for birds. Dead birds. I’d overheard her talking about trying to acquire a raven from an apiary over on Vancouver Island, after it had passed on naturally. My mother preferred to work with ghosts — her uncle specifically, who she had kept tied to her since he’d died when she was a child. But even still, she had a bone collection that occupied almost as many shelves in our house’s library as the books did.

  I set Ed down in the sand about two feet from the rocky cliff. Any closer and the witch magic anchored in the stone would attempt to convince me that I needed to go home. I stroked his hard-shelled back. He blinked, then shimmied into the sand like he was contentedly scratching his belly, though I wasn’t sure he felt such things anymore. I checked that the tiny witch charm was secured around his neck. Then I fed him a little more of my magic, giving him a mental push.

  Ed crawled forward, moving steadily through the sand.

  I stepped over to a nearby log, sat down, and pulled out my knitting. The yarn running from my work in progress to the wound balls nestled in my bag mimicked what my connection to Ed felt like. As if a long tether of my necromancy was unwinding as the turtle slipped unhindered through the witches’ wards, then paused so I could take a look through his eyes.

  I closed my own eyes, which made it easier to focus. Visualizing the tether between Ed and me, I mentally traversed the energy that bound us until I could see smooth rock underneath me and a sheer, smooth wall to either side.

  Sensing nothing off or unusual in the mouth of the tunnel, I sent Ed onward, pulling my attention back to my hands and to the steady clicking of my knitting needles as I churned through stitches.

  Benjamin had settled on the surf-bleached log to my left.

  I could feel the low, slumbering pulse of his magic. And, before I could quell the impulse, I was imagining what that energy would feel like if it were freed and
connected to me. Tethered like the yarn steadily slipping through my fingers. Knotted, woven together with my own magic until we were —

  No.

  That wasn’t how it would be between us.

  And it was foolish to romanticize a possible relationship anyway. Love wasn’t about binding another person to you against their will. And Benjamin could never love anyone who had the capacity to control him. Who could? Plus, necromancy lore dictated that vampires weren’t even capable of love, just lust. And that was only for blood.

  But whether or not he was a vampire, Benjamin was also a person. He wasn’t Ed. He wasn’t the corpse of my pet, or a ghost to be used and moved as I willed.

  I opened my eyes.

  “Everything okay?” Benjamin asked.

  He meant everything with Ed. Because that was our job. To check that the elves hadn’t returned, to watch that no one else messed with the prison, and to report back. There was nothing more between us, and there never could be.

  “Yes.”

  After carefully brushing dried sand from Ed’s webbed feet, I ran my fingers over his carapace, checking him for any soft spots or other signs of decay. Perpetually fueled by my magic, whether I was wielding it consciously or not, Ed might well have remained in an undead, reanimated state for dozens of years. But magic wasn’t always predictable. And if decay ever set in, spreading because I wasn’t paying attention, I might not have the power to reverse its effects.

  Benjamin abruptly closed his notebook. He slipped back into the shadow of the cliff face.

  I glanced around, seeing nothing but a dark stretch of sandy beach and hearing nothing but the surf behind me. Then a dark-haired sorcerer stepped into the pool of light at the top of the concrete steps that ran down beside the Maritime Museum from the grassy park. He scanned the shoreline, spotted me, and jogged swiftly down the stairs.

  Liam L.T. Talbot. A newly promoted Vancouver Police Department detective in his midtwenties. Brother of Tony, Peggy, Gabby, and Bitsy. He was currently dressed casually in jeans and an unbuttoned wool jacket, with a machine-knit scarf knotted loosely at his neck. But everything about him was a little too starched for my personal taste.

  Or at least that was what I told myself. Because otherwise, I’d be forced to admit I just didn’t like sorcerers in general. And that prejudice was based in fact and experience, not just an ingrained reaction to anyone who was remotely different than me.

  A sorcerer had teamed up with Sienna. Two different sorcerers, actually, though only one of them was still alive, as far as I knew. In Oregon, Blackwell had run from the greater demon that he’d help summon, leaving the cleanup to Jade, Kett, and Desmond. And in London, Sayers had turned against two of his own and had tried to kill me as part of a ritual demon summoning.

  So, surprise — I didn’t trust sorcerers as a rule. And no one blamed me. Not even Jade, who liked to like everyone.

  Though Liam’s brother Tony was different. His kind of sorcery dealt in tech, not the accumulation of magical objects. Or demons, for that matter. Tony hadn’t ever given my necklace a second glance.

  The same couldn’t be said for his older brother. Or either of his parents, for that matter.

  If I hadn’t been inclined to dislike Liam, I might have thought him handsome. His skin was naturally tanned, and he was fit enough that even the loose T-shirt he was wearing underneath his open jacket stretched across his chest. His dark eyes were shot through with green and blue, and he had strong, capable hands.

  Not that I’d looked at him all that closely.

  Not much, anyway.

  “I thought I’d find you here.” Liam strode across the sand between us like he owned the beach. His accent was clearly American, but my ear wasn’t good enough to narrow it down by state. “I thought that bloodsucker was supposed to be watching over you.”

  “He is,” I said mildly, carefully brushing sand from Ed’s hard-shelled underbelly.

  Liam stuffed his hands in his front pockets and rocked on his feet, like he would have preferred to keep moving but was being forced to stop and talk to me. “Anything to report?”

  I gave him a withering look.

  He was gazing at the cliff face, maybe feeling the magic of the witches’ wards or sensing Benjamin in the shadows. As such, he missed my effort, forcing me to be disparaging out loud.

  “No,” I said. “Not that you’re the one to ask.”

  “Yeah … while things get sorted, I’ll be taking Kandy’s rounds for a bit, checking on you in the evenings and Burgundy in the mornings.”

  Burgundy, my friend who was training in witch magic with Pearl and Scarlett, was tasked with checking on the thirteen points of the witches’ magical grid every morning. It was a task that took her all around Vancouver, from the bridges that crossed to the North Shore to the boundaries of Burnaby and Richmond.

  “And why would that be?”

  “I’m just helpful like that,” he said, smiling.

  “What things need to be sorted?” I asked, fishing to see if he actually had any insight into what was up with Jade and Kandy. If anything was up at all. “And on whose authority?”

  He shrugged. His smile lingered, but there didn’t seem to be anything behind it. “I volunteered.”

  I stared at him.

  He glanced away.

  Right. If Liam was going to be a closemouthed asshole, I’d just go on with my personal plans. I tucked Ed into my bag, intending to brush by the sorcerer, planning to treat him as inconsequentially as he was treating me. Then I decided to take him down a notch at the same time.

  “You know I was with them last night,” I said, turning back to address him.

  “What?” Liam feigned confusion.

  “With the elves. At the dance club.”

  He frowned. I could actually see him reassessing the situation and all the assumptions he’d made about me — and specifically, about my relationship with Jade. Yeah, I was close enough to the dowser that I’d been invited to her bachelorette party. Close enough to whatever was going on that he really should have just fessed up whatever he was so obviously hiding.

  Mory 1, sorcerer 0.

  I started toward the stairs, glancing over to where Benjamin was standing in the shadows, watching our exchange. I could feel his magic even though I couldn’t see the vampire. Liam apparently couldn’t even do that.

  “See ya, Benjamin.”

  Liam, following a couple of steps behind me, stumbled.

  Mory 2, sorcerer 0.

  “I have my phone.” Benjamin’s disembodied voice filtered across the sand.

  I nodded, reached the base of the stairs, and started climbing.

  Liam paused, looking back toward the cliff again.

  I stifled my sneer, rather pleased to leave the stuck-up sorcerer in my wake.

  Unfortunately, he caught up to me just as I was crossing the seawall path into the grassy stretch between the beach and the houses on the edge of Kits Point. I was still intent on asking Tony to help find Jane Hawthorne’s interment site for me. Unfortunately, the Talbot at my heels wouldn’t have any problem following me into his family home while I made the request. And I wasn’t interested in getting interrogated about things that weren’t any of his business.

  “I didn’t mean to suggest that you didn’t know what was going on,” Liam said, matching my stride. That wasn’t a difficult task, since he was easily ten inches taller than me.

  I didn’t bother answering.

  Liam wasn’t daunted by my silence. “So that turtle of yours … it can walk through wards?”

  I glanced over at him. “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Just an idea I’m formulating.”

  “When you decide to let us peons in on your plans, then I’ll answer your questions.”

  “Hey, I’m not sure what I’ve done to piss you off, but …”

  I waited for him to finish his sentence. He didn’t. I assumed that meant I was supposed to offer up an explanation for myself. I laughed
snarkily.

  “Only you can figure out your own prejudice, sorcerer.”

  Liam stayed silent.

  I paused at the curb, giving him a moment to decide if he wanted to share while I glanced both ways for traffic along Ogden. But Liam didn’t pick up the conversation, so I crossed toward the Talbot residence without another word. The thought crossed my mind that I probably should have texted Tony to tell him I was dropping in, but he never left the basement voluntarily. And Liam had distracted me.

  “Maybe I’m still figuring out how everything works here,” Liam said quietly, walking behind me again.

  I glanced back at him. “Really? Defaulting to being nice until being antagonistic becomes necessary? You find that confusing?”

  He clenched his jaw. “There are a lot of different definitions of being nice. I protect —”

  “Please. We all look after each other. We don’t demand it as a right. Plus, you’re really only interested in protecting those you don’t deem beneath you.”

  “How do you get that?”

  I laughed snidely. “Um … how about calling Benjamin a bloodsucker? That’s shortsighted … especially for a sorcerer.”

  “And how does the magic I wield make any difference?”

  I shook my head with a sneer. Then I made my way to the sidewalk on the other side of the wide street and crossed the Talbots’ front lawn. The basement windows were still the only ones lit. Liam watched me go, stuffing his hands in his pockets again.

  I glanced back as I cut along the path between the side of the house and the fence. The sorcerer’s expression was grim. Thoughtful, but stressed.

  Necromancers weren’t the only Adepts who hated vampires. But in Vancouver, everyone was welcome. Including the Talbots. Jade and Kandy made it so.

  Tony Talbot had transformed the basement recreational room of his family’s home into a technological haven. When I’d first been invited to a games night by Peggy, who was a telepath, I’d assumed that all the Talbots lived under one roof. But I hadn’t also realized that four of them were sorcerers, including Tony and his parents. The twins, Peggy and Gabby, along with their elder sister, Bitsy, were adopted. Liam, who had moved to Vancouver a couple of months earlier than the rest of the family to start his probationary period with the Vancouver Police Department, had rented an apartment somewhere in the city and had kept it. Certainly, if I was a twenty-three-year-old sorcerer with an apartment all to myself, I wouldn’t have given it up for a room over the garage either.