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

by Meghan Ciana Doidge

  All right, yeah. I knew way too much about someone I didn’t even like.

  The back door was never locked when someone was home — and hadn’t been since Jade kicked it in three months earlier. Regular door locks couldn’t bar the magically inclined from entering, and especially not anyone of Jade’s power level. Plus, replacing a door was a hassle, even with Kandy having arranged for a maintenance crew to fix it straight away. Pearl Godfrey was the Talbots’ landlord, after all.

  I had to cross through the laundry room, bypass the stairs into the kitchen, wave at a camera set in the open-stud wall, and execute a secret knock on the door to gain entry. The knock was a bit of a joke between the rest of us, and something Tony had insisted upon implementing after Jade had trashed the place. The dowser had blown through like she usually did, rescuing all of us after Gabby’s magic went wonky and amplified all our powers past the point of control.

  Afterward, the tech sorcerer had declared that he wouldn’t have been quite so hasty in throwing magic around if he’d known who was coming through the door. The fact that the dowser had been standing in the room for at least a minute before Tony stupidly attacked her — and got easily trounced for the effort — didn’t seem to dissuade him from his argument. Neither did installing the camera that had arrived a few days later, along with numerous boxes containing a new TV and just about every product that Apple manufactured. Burgundy told me that it had been Kandy — not Jade, who really wasn’t Tony’s biggest fan — who had replaced far more than what had been destroyed in the so-called amplifier incident.

  So yeah, Tony’s version of events ran a little differently than what I’d experienced.

  I executed the secret knock a second time, then stepped back to wave to the camera. Because the main problem with Tony’s security measures? He usually wore headphones while working, and his parents wouldn’t actually let him install a lock on the door because it was supposed to be recreational space for the entire family.

  “Come!” Tony shouted from within the room.

  I entered into the harsh light of his monitors, immediately flicking the switch to my right to turn on the overhead lights.

  “Hey!” Tony howled, covering his eyes.

  I ignored him. I had no problem sucking up to Tony with the secret knock, but I wasn’t going to try to have a conversation with a sorcerer in the dark. Though honestly, that had less to do with his magic — he was different from any other sorcerer I’d ever met — and everything to do with the fact that he was a nineteen-year-old male who never left the basement if he could help it.

  Tony squinted at me. He was dark-haired and tall, with light-brown skin like his brother, but the resemblance ended there. Tony would need at least twenty pounds of muscle, a haircut, and a daily shower if he ever wanted to be as uniformly clean-cut as Liam.

  Except for the shower, the same could be said for me. And even then, I’d never measure up in the looks department to someone like Jasmine, who was epically gorgeous, or even to Jade, who surpassed being simply pretty with the force of her personality. So why bother?

  In that indifferent attitude, Tony and I were the same. Other than that, we were completely dissimilar. And not in an opposites-attract sort of way.

  “Mory,” Tony grunted, turning back to his main computer screen — a twenty-four inch monitor. He had two desks set up in the far corner of the room, with multiple monitors placed right against the walls. Every inch of both desktops was covered in electronics.

  The first thing Tony had done upon receiving Kandy’s gifts was to crack open the box of each and every laptop, iPad, phone, watch, and other tech device to fiddle with them. He had some process for making them his own, tying them to his specific brand of sorcerer magic. Even the huge TV, wall mounted so that it was centered in the room, now responded to his verbal commands. Though not always reliably.

  The center of the large rec room was occupied by a huge sectional couch and a large square coffee table, which was currently strewn with controllers for at least three different gaming systems. Friday nights at the Talbots’ house were reserved for board or card games. Anyone who wanted to play just had to show up by 9:00 p.m.

  I’d been wanting to invite Benjamin for a while, but I hadn’t yet. He’d met Burgundy and the twins, Peggy and Gabby, at the bakery. But I was worried about how Bitsy and Tony would react. Apparently, werewolves and vampires didn’t mix. Like, on an instinctual level. And no matter how contained and calm Benjamin’s bone bracelet made him, Bitsy was still in denial of her own second nature. She was reluctantly training with Kandy, but she still had trouble changing into her wolf form.

  And Tony?

  All right, fine. I was slightly concerned that Tony might be interested in me. Too many casual comments had been dropped by third parties — the twins and Kandy — about us hooking up to ignore. And, for some reason, I didn’t think the sorcerer would take to Benjamin very well.

  “You just going to stand there?” Tony asked. His fingers hadn’t paused their frantic movements across his keyboard. Text scrolled up his screen, but I couldn’t see what it was from my vantage point. “There’s cola in the fridge.” He made a halfhearted gesture toward the small black fridge to the far left of the desk.

  “No, thanks.” I wandered across the room, trying to figure out how to phrase my request without ending up owing Tony a favor. That was underhanded, sure. But I didn’t want the payment to be some sort of an attempt at a date. “Just bumped into Liam.”

  Tony grunted but didn’t otherwise respond. I could hear tinny music emanating out of his headphones, which he’d removed to leave slung around his neck.

  “Have you ever met an oracle or seen a … prediction?” I asked, super casually pulling the folded sketch that Rochelle had given me out of my satchel.

  Tony spun in his chair — and realized belatedly that he looked overeager. He leaned back to mask it but went too deep, almost toppling backward. Recovering his balance, he took a swig of pop. The can was empty. Flustered, he set it down on the desk and folded his arms across his chest.

  “You know an oracle?”

  “Yep. Rochelle.” I untangled a strand of yarn that was trapped in a fold of the sketch, but I didn’t open it. “She draws. And she was the one who figured out how to make the map part of the witches’ grid work.”

  Tony sneered affectedly — as sorcerers always seemed to do whenever witches were mentioned. But he was clearly struggling to hold himself back from snatching the sketch out of my hands.

  I unfolded the sketch, pretending to study it. “I was in the graveyard today —”

  “Mountain View?”

  “Yes. And Rochelle stopped by and asked me to find someone for her.”

  “Someone dead?”

  I gave him a look. “What else would anyone ask a necromancer?”

  “Right, right. And?”

  “When I asked her why she was asking me, she gave me this.” I handed him the sketch.

  He took it gingerly. Handling it only by the very edges, he shoved two keyboards and a disassembled phone out of the way to clear a spot on the desk, gently placing the sketch down. Though there was more than enough light in the room, he stood up and flicked on a desk lamp, repositioning it over the image.

  He stared down at the vision of me rendered in charcoal.

  Intently.

  Then he found, cleaned, and put on a pair of thick glasses I’d never seen him wear before. He stared some more.

  I pulled out my knitting, leaning back against the desk.

  “What’s the connection?” Tony finally asked, not looking up from the charcoal rendering of me perched on my favorite headstone. “From this vision to the request she made?”

  I shrugged, knowing that the less I told him up front, the more interested he’d be in helping me out.

  “Maybe it’s the grave you’re sitting over,” he murmured. “Can you make out the name?”

  I could, but only because I knew it.

  “Mayb
e there’s a mystery you need to solve. Like a murder? Or switched bodies? And you need to find the real victim?”

  “She gave me a date of death and a name,” I finally said, keeping my attention on my knitting as if I were just casually filling him in, not asking for information. “But the ashes would have been interred as a Jane Doe.”

  That got Tony’s attention off the sketch. “At Mountain View?”

  I shrugged. “Rumor has it.”

  A wide, cocky grin spread across the tech sorcerer’s face. “Hit me with it.”

  “DOD January 27, 1995. Jane Hawthorne. Died at St. Paul’s Hospital after a car accident as a Jane Doe.”

  Tony turned back to his computer, pulling his main keyboard slightly forward, then stretching his hands and wrists. “Child’s play.”

  I reached for the sketch.

  “I’d like to keep it.” Tony said, rapidly opening browser windows. “In case there are any more clues.”

  “It’s … mine,” I said. I felt suddenly and oddly awkward about having shown it to him at all. “It’s … I should keep it.”

  Tony nodded, picked up his phone, and snapped a picture of the sketch. It was all done perfectly casually. Then he glued his eyes to his monitor screen.

  I folded the sketch and tucked it in my satchel. “I have some research to do myself. Necromancy stuff. Text me when you have anything?”

  He nodded absentmindedly.

  I slipped away. But when I turned back at the door, I saw that he had sent the picture he’d taken of the sketch — the picture of me — to his computer. And that it now occupied one half of his screen.

  That was … oddly disconcerting. But I had presented it as a clue. I brushed away my reaction as I called back, “Thanks, Tony.”

  He waved his hand over his shoulder, acknowledging me. Though he could have just as easily been waving me away, as he might a fly.

  And I had a much, much easier time with that assessment. I exited the Talbots’ basement and headed home.

  Mom and I lived in an older Georgian manor in Shaughnessy, which had way too many rooms for just the two of us. On occasion, the guest rooms got filled by visiting necromancers who wanted to study or consult with my mother. The door to Rusty’s room hadn’t been opened since he’d been murdered by Sienna, even though he had moved out a couple of years before his death into an apartment downtown.

  The front door was unlocked, but the house was empty when I got home. I hadn’t seen my mother for a couple of days, but that wasn’t unusual. The Convocation kept her pretty busy. And she really didn’t like being at home. Not since Rusty died.

  I locked the door behind me, not bothering with lights as I wandered back across the huge main floor to the kitchen. I poured myself a bowl of cereal from a random box I grabbed off the shelf without looking, then took it with me into the library.

  The house had been part of my father’s inheritance, not from my mother’s side of the family. His ancestors had come with the Godfreys to the Pacific Northwest to establish a coven. Of witches.

  Necromancy was rare. Probably more so than any other magical lineage, because its traits usually fully manifested only in the female line. Apparently, it was a thing for female necromancers to marry the male offspring of other necromancy families, given the option. But my mother, whose entire family had been dead by the time she was two, had been raised by witches. Accordingly, she fell in love with and married a witch. My father.

  My dad had died before I was born. But no matter how many times Rusty or I had asked, we never got the full story about what had happened. I knew it was something bad. Something magical. But my mother, who dealt in death magic daily, couldn’t bring herself to talk about it. Not ever.

  The one thing I did know was the fact that the Godfrey coven didn’t contain a single other male witch, even to this day. That was a little more than odd. But I hadn’t yet gotten up the courage to ask Pearl about my father. I had meetings with her where we did nothing but knit, so I’d had plenty of opportunity. But I knew there was a chance I wouldn’t want the answer.

  One of the bonuses of hanging out with the head of the witches Convocation at Jade’s bakery — besides the free cupcakes — meant that a lot of conversations and other meetings took place around me while I appeared to be totally distracted by my knitting.

  Liam Talbot would have been shaken to his elitist, prejudiced core if he knew even a third of the things I did about the business of the Godfrey coven. But then, I’d lived through a chunk of the Adept drama that had shaped the coven myself. If it could even be called a coven anymore.

  I flicked on the lights in the library. Thousands of books lined the dark-stained oak shelves built into the walls, ranging from literary fiction to necromancy tomes. Supposedly, there was some sort of befuddlement spell on the magical texts, so that our house cleaner — who came twice a month — couldn’t see them. But I couldn’t feel it. It was witch magic, renewed yearly by whatever coven member was available.

  My father’s familial line — the branch that wielded witch magic — had died with him. I’d inherited my mother’s necromancy, which was carried by both sexes but usually only manifested in females. Rusty had been a witch, though not much of one. He’d had a minor affinity for plants and could cast spells as part of a group of witches, but magic hadn’t really been his thing.

  Magic was like that. Two really powerful Adepts could, on occasion, have less than magically stellar children. I knew that Pearl thought magic was dying, like how the earth was dying. Which would make sense for witches, who pulled their power from the earth. But I wasn’t sure the same would hold true for other Adepts.

  I took my bowl of cereal to the far table, setting it down along with my satchel. Then I wandered over to the book-lined shelf nearest the window that looked out at the overgrown backyard. Necromancy texts were grouped together, most of them handed down through my mother’s family, with the occasional new addition. Unfortunately, the mostly leather-bound books weren’t organized, at least not by any means I could figure out. Plus, I didn’t really know what I was looking for … shade-summoning magic specific to interred remains, maybe?

  The shelves to my far right were lined with the skeletons of various animals — my mother’s bone collection. It was mostly skulls, but occasionally, she found perfectly preserved smaller animals like mice or birds.

  I wasn’t interested in collecting bones. I had Ed. From the time he’d been the size of a loonie, he’d lived in an aquarium in my bedroom. And when he’d passed away two years before, I had removed the water but kept the tank. When Ed wasn’t in my bag, he hung out there, digging in the sand and rearranging small pieces of driftwood.

  Finding nothing specific to cremation in the titles etched on the spines of the books on the highest shelf — at least the highest one I could reach without a stool — I selected the first three leather-bound volumes with the word grave or graveyard in the title. I had to start somewhere.

  Turning back to the table, I grabbed a bite of my cereal. And I had just opened the first book when the skull of a rat seemingly levitated off the middle shelf to my far right. The skull slowly rotated, as if scanning the library, then settled on staring at me. A soft red glow emanated from its eye sockets.

  “Hi, Freddie,” I said, flipping a page of the book.

  The rat skull swiftly but noiselessly dropped onto the shelf and went still. The shadow leech’s energy — I could feel more than see it — ghosted past three mice skulls and a muskrat before settling into one of my mother’s prize possessions. A beaver skull that still had its buck teeth, though one was badly chipped.

  The shadow leech infused the beaver skull with its energy, once again floating it from the shelf. Then Freddie held that position, waiting for me to notice him … or her … or it. I wasn’t certain the shadow leech — being composed of a mishmash of soul magic as far as I was aware — had a defining gender.

  Either way, Freddie had first followed me home from the graveyard three
months previously, and apparently loved playing with my mother’s bone collection. Though I didn’t think the leech had ever entered the house while she was home.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked.

  The beaver skull didn’t dip or nod in response to my question. The shadow leech and I had never actually communicated, and I had no idea whether Freddie could speak. But I didn’t have the guts to ask Jade, who had warned me off trying to tame the leech. So if Freddie did speak, it was on a level I couldn’t hear.

  “Teresa borrowed some of the bird bones on the top shelf this weekend. Maybe there’s some residual on them?” I flipped another page. I didn’t know whether Freddie was shy, or simply concerned that I was capable of hurting it. But either way, if I was too attentive, the leech would leave.

  It was important that the shadow leech fed on magic that it was actually allowed to consume. I had a strong notion that it would only take one slip, one indiscretion, for Jade to decide that Freddie was too much of a liability. And since the demon part of what animated the soul mishmash couldn’t be vanquished, that would mean death.

  The beaver skull set itself down again. Then the shadow leech’s energy slipped upward, eagerly flowing across the bird skeletons that decorated the top shelf.

  Someone rapped on the window.

  I jumped. Then I felt the pulse of magic behind me.

  Benjamin.

  I turned back to see the dark-haired vampire peering in through the glass. He offered me a smile, then made a motion indicating that he wanted me to let him in.

  “The front door would be easier,” I said, casting my voice loudly enough to hopefully be heard outside the house.