Incarnate (A Spellmason Chronicle)

by Anton Strout

“Remember when you didn’t know anything about your own past?” she asked me.

  “Of course,” I said. I turned to Emily. “Alexander had split who I was into arcane pieces of memory and hid them away, both for his safety and mine.”

  “Which I restored for him,” Alexandra said as she pulled her notebook out of the pocket of her coat. “Those gemstones hidden in your chest. I think I can access them and use them as a spell focus to draw out Emily’s own memories. It’s a sort of sympathy magic.”

  “Will that hurt Stanis?” Emily asked.

  “You need not concern yourself with that,” I told her. “I have withstood a greater pain watching you not know your past. The greater question is do you still wish to know?”

  “I don’t know if this will hurt,” Alexandra said. “I wish I had a better answer, but I just don’t know. I’ve never attempted anything like this. I’m mixing some of my notes, Alexander’s knowledge, and some alchemy I’m borrowing from Caleb and Marshall. I just do not know.”

  We stood in silence, all of us waiting for Emily to decide. The majesty of so holy a space had a calming effect, which I took solace in until Emily spoke again a moment later.

  “Very well,” she said. “I was not sure if I truly wished to have these memories, but they are part of my past, a part of me. I think I will be better for the knowing. And if it can help you deal with this abomination of a grotesque, so be it.”

  Alexandra placed her hand on Emily’s shoulder and eased her onto the table, helping her lie down. Caleb went through the contents of his jacket, checking vials as he prepared them for the ritual that lay ahead. The Spellmason pulled her great-great-grandfather’s spell book from the bag she took off her back and laid it out on the table, willing it from stone into a real tome. From the pocket of her coat she took her own notebook, and flipped through several pages she studied for a long moment before looking up at me as she let out a long, slow sigh, focusing herself.

  Alexandra placed her hand on the center of my chest, the skin cool against me.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  “You think you will be able to get what you need?” I asked her back.

  Alexandra smiled.

  “Hey, I was able to fish out several hundred years of your entire past,” she said. “I think I can manage stirring up some memories from 1963.”

  I went to smile back, but it died on my lips as the arcane snap of power to Alexandra hit me. Caught off guard, I staggered back before digging my claws into the stone of the floor, steadying myself.

  It had been some time since I had felt true pain thanks to my stone form, but my chest felt as if it were on fire as it tore open. The smooth stone of it erupted into a series of snakelike patterns that twisted and turned at Alexandra’s touch. One by one the four gemstones came to the surface as their stone settings worked their way out. My mind filled with a clarity I did not normally possess, swimming with the touch points of my past all at once.

  “You still with me?” Alexandra asked, flipping through her spell notes with her free hand.

  I tried to answer, but found myself unable to form words and merely nodded.

  “Marshall!” she called out. “Hold this open for me. I don’t want to screw this up, and I need both hands free.”

  “On it!” Marshall said and ran around the table and my inert form to take control of the book.

  Alexandra then nodded to Caleb, who poured a vial into her mouth. She choked down whatever had been in it, coughing out a glowing purple mist before slamming her free hand down onto the prone form of Emily.

  Her dragonlike wings twitched wide, but thanks to where Alexandra had positioned me, none of my friends was knocked away from the blow, my body absorbing it. Alexandra continued on with her spell, whispering her words of power, and as the last one left her lips, my mind flooded with foreign images.

  Although the images were not mine, I recognized the time period they came from. The vehicles, the clothes of the people on the streets of Manhattan, the looks of the very buildings themselves—all of it screamed 1960s. Everything I saw was through Emily’s eyes, but my perception was still partly my own. The images came and went with ferocity, none lasting more than a few seconds as Alexandra searched through Emily’s memories. It reminded me of watching the fleeting images that appeared on the large screens in Times Square.

  My world went black. In one moment, I was within the confines of a modest apartment, and the next there was nothingness.

  “This has to be the part of Emily’s mind that she doesn’t have access to,” Alexandra said. “Stanis, we need to break through.”

  Over the centuries I had assessed the boundaries of what I could and could not do, always testing the limits and lengths of my power. One thing rarely failed me when I needed to overcome an obstacle. I did what I did best.

  I attacked the darkness, imagining it a tangible foe when in reality I could see no actual nemesis to contend with. I imagined my wings flaring wide, thrashing back and forth with each strike of my claws against a black wall.

  “It’s working,” Alexandra said through the strain of her efforts, which sounded heavy judging by the pained hiss of her words.

  The darkness crumbled in piece after slow piece, falling away as my mind filled with glimpses of an image that was slow to reveal itself.

  A darkened apartment came to light, its furnishings sparse but feminine, and of a time long past. A woman lay tied on the couch of the living space, but it was not the face of Emily that I had seen in the photographs. This was the face of the other human who had died at her side.

  This was Emily’s view upon entering her apartment, finding the light switch unresponsive, but even as she closed the door behind her, she had not processed the whole of what she was seeing. The bound woman screamed out through the gag in her mouth, and as Emily ran to her, a strange figure darted out from the corner of her eye. The burn of rope caught on her wrists as total confusion set in and she fell to the floor.

  I had known violence in my life. From my own death through that which I had caused over the centuries in my protection of the Belarus family, but nothing had prepared me for the brutality of this knife attack. The photos of it were nothing compared to the raw pain of experiencing Emily’s death.

  When it was done, the face of her attacker came into focus.

  I had seen the face of human addiction before, humans wasting away, some through drink and others by the prick of needles. It reminded me of a dark alchemy of sorts, and this young man’s eyes held the desperation of a man crippled by his addiction. What fueled it, I did not know, but it did not matter. All that mattered was that Emily did not expect to find this man in her apartment; nor did she expect the knife in his hand and her roommate already tied up.

  A burglary. She had simply been the victim of a desperate man’s attempt to rob her apartment, and for that she and her roommate lost their lives to stroke after vicious stroke of the blade, more than sixty in total. Pain, surprise, panic . . . all these emotions flowed through Emily, but even when the worst was over and her soul lingered in a room now vacant of all life, the crime scene bothered me, but for reasons beyond those I already thought it would.

  Emily Hoffert was of course dead, but not in the way the crime scene photos had depicted. Her attacker left, but there was no ritualistic laying out of her body, no symbols written in her blood. None of what the photos had shown me was evident here, although the location was the same as in the pictures.

  Emily’s soul remained in the room, that of her roommate nowhere to be found. Judging by the movement of light streaming in from outside the building, time was passing, but before long the door to the apartment opened. To my surprise, a white-marbled gargoyle with a feminine mix of angelic and demonic features ducked its way through the doorframe. She look displeased to see the bodies lying on the floor, but the gargoyle did not seem surprised as sh
e moved to Emily and kneeled down next to her.

  “You poor thing,” its voice said. It was unfamiliar to me, but not to the Spellmason.

  “Laurien,” Alexandra said, drawing a piece of my mind back to the anchor of reality.

  “What about Laurien?” Caleb asked.

  “She’s there,” Alexandra said. “Only she’s a lot more marble-textured and winged than she looked at the Convocation.”

  “I’m sorry,” Marshall said. “Did you just say Laurien is a gargoyle?”

  Alexandra nodded.

  “How?” Aurora asked, unable to hold back the disbelief in her voice.

  “What the hell is she doing there?” Caleb asked.

  “Everyone be quiet and let me find out,” Alexandra said and fell silent as she adjusted her hand on Emily’s chest as if feeling around for the memories.

  In my mind’s eyes, this Laurien pulled out a book of her own from a leather satchel she wore over her shoulder. She laid it next to the body, carefully beginning to move and arrange it in such a way that I began to see the patterns that would become the arcane ritual I knew from the photographs. Emily’s soul watched on with a morbid fascination at the gargoyle as she finished laying things out in the way we had both seen in the photograph.

  “She is preparing a spell of some kind,” I said.

  The gargoyle touched her hands to the outer ring of blood she had formed and incanted words that were foreign to me. Emily’s soul reacted. Her strange curiosity about the circumstances of her human form melted immediately away, replaced by one all-consuming word.

  Find.

  Before I could even wonder as to what it meant to seek, the answer came from Laurien’s lips.

  “Cagliostro,” she whispered in the quiet apartment.

  The results were like watching the crime scene where the Butcher had killed Fletcher to enact the same blood-magic ritual. At the word, Emily’s soul shot from the room through the walls of the building, and my perspective flew off with it across the city. I was used to flying fast over the city, but this pace was hard for me to follow although I thought we were headed across the island of Manhattan. I confirmed it seconds later as Emily’s soul flashed into Central Park, the trees and pathways blurring by.

  Neither the pathway leading to the clearing known as Strawberry Fields nor the memorial itself existed yet, but I recognized the area of the park nonetheless as Emily shot deep into the woods there. Seconds later her soul met some sort of invisible resistance, slowing as it forced itself through it to suddenly find itself within a vast cemetery. Rolling hills of gravestones flew by, the journey ending only when Emily entered a massive tomb with the name O’SHEA on it, coming to rest on one of the raised sarcophagi within.

  Anne Elizabeth O’Shea, its marker read.

  “The gargoyle Laurien found the location of the medallion in the mausoleum,” Alexandra said. “I think she took it from the grave of one of the O’Sheas. Decades before the Butcher tried to seek it out.”

  Alexandra released the spell and my mind’s eyes closed as if the image of the graveyard was receding down a tunnel. As I came back to reality the world around me returned. I collapsed to my knees, releasing a tension I had not realized had accumulated during Alexandra’s manipulation of me. My chest burned as the gemstones slid back beneath the surface on their knot work of tracks, smoothing over to its unmarred state once more.

  Alexandra dropped down beside me, her one hand remaining on Emily’s prone figure. “You okay?” she asked, grabbing my hand with her other as if she could lift me.

  I took a moment, composed myself, and nodded, using the stone table to steady me as I lifted myself back up. Emily stirred on the table but with eyes closed made no move to rise.

  “Is she . . . ?”

  Alexandra checked the spell book Marshall was still holding open, and muttered a foreign phrase, adjusting her hand on Emily. “She’s fine,” she said, “but I think she’s going to need a moment to recover.”

  “You mentioned Laurien,” Caleb said. “What did our grand high witchy-poo have to do with Emily’s death? You know, I’ve never trusted her.”

  “Hey!” Marshall said, taking offense. “She’s a good customer.”

  Caleb shook his head at him. “Oh, sure,” he said. “When she’s not killing our friends . . .”

  “Laurien did not kill Emily,” I said, which stopped the two men’s bickering.

  “It’s true,” Emily said, attempting to sit up on the table. I took her hand and helped her. She swung her legs over the side of the table and stretched her wings out from under her. “Laurien was there, but I was . . .” She hesitated to say the words as I watched her process the images. “I was already dead.”

  “Laurien only used her for a ritual,” Alexandra said. “The same one the Butcher used on our friend Fletcher.”

  “Cagliostro,” Emily said. “Laurien spoke the word.”

  “She was seeking out this medallion you told us of,” I said to Alexandra.

  “But why?” Caleb asked.

  “Because that gargoyle version of her wanted to be flesh and blood,” I said, “and because people in power always seek out more power. My father did so, and so goes it with the head of the Convocation.”

  “When Warren finds out that it was Laurien who took his family’s medallion, he’s going to go ballistic,” Caleb said. “And he’s going to have trouble on his hands if he tries to take it back from her.”

  “No, he’s not,” Alexandra said.

  Caleb laughed at that. “He’s not?”

  Alexandra shook her head. “Because we’re going to help him,” she added.

  “Awesome,” Caleb said, but it did not sound as if he meant the word. “And how will we do that exactly?”

  “We’re going to call for a Convocation,” she said.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Caleb said.

  Alexandra gave him a look more full of stone than any I could have.

  “I’m not being a dick,” he said. “You saw what an explosion-filled meeting that was, and that was one that was planned out for months. You’re on trial before them at this juncture, so you don’t get to call the shots. I can’t make that happen. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  “Fine,” she said, and her face filled with defeat, but not for long. “Then call Warren. Tell him I want a meeting with him and just Laurien.”

  “I’m not sure I can make that fly, either,” he said.

  Alexandra walked up to him and took his face in her hands. “I have faith in you,” she said. “I’m not asking for the entire witching and wizarding community here. I just need to meet with the two of them. I’ll even make it easy. I’ll host it at my home on Saint Mark’s. They don’t even have to plan a thing other than to hear me out.”

  There was an intimacy to their conversation that filled me with discomfort, and I instead focused on helping Emily down from the table, making sure she was not too rattled from what she had seen.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Caleb said after a minute. “I can’t promise anything.”

  When I looked back over, Alexandra had picked up the bag of bones and was already making her way back to the front door of Sanctuary, Aurora and Marshall hurrying to follow.

  “I need better than a promise,” she said as she headed up the stairs leading to the door out to Trinity Place.

  “What about us?” Emily called out after her.

  Alexandra turned at the top of the stairs. “You know how you died now,” she said. “Now it’s time to figure out how you want to live. How you all want to live.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked.

  “There will soon come a time when the grotesques of Manhattan must make a stand,” Alexandra said. “It is up to you for them to be ready.”

  I had many a question, but Alexandra did not wait to
hear any of them. Instead, she turned back around and got all the way to the door before spinning to face us once more, her eyes landing on Caleb, who had not moved.

  She lifted the bag, shaking it to the point that it rattled the bones within.

  “Don’t forget to get Laurien to my place,” she said, throwing open the door. “Tell her I have a bone—several, in fact—to pick with her. Plus I’d like to talk to her woman to woman about the kind of jewelry she likes to wear.”

  Caleb, Marshall, and Aurora followed after her, leaving Emily and me alone in the middle of the church.

  “I fear there are unpleasant times to come,” I said, then turned to her. “How do you feel after what you saw?”

  “As horrific as it was?” she said. “Strangely at peace.”

  “That must be of some comfort,” I said.

  Emily nodded. “More than you can imagine,” she said. “There is a strange and welcome closure in my mind knowing how I died.”

  “May that bring you peace,” I said, embracing her.

  She returned the gesture, but fell silent for a long time.

  “Only . . .” Emily pulled herself away from me and looked up at me. “I don’t think I can stay here.”

  “What?” I asked, feeling as if she had struck me. “Emily, why?”

  “I remember it all,” she said. “My life before that night. I had come to this city wide-eyed and hopeful. My time here was cut all too short, but . . . there was the family I left behind. It broke my heart to leave them in Edina, Minnesota, and my murder must have destroyed them. I can’t stay here . . . I need to go. I need to find them.”

  “What about your life here?” I asked. “What about Sanctuary? What about . . . me?”

  Emily managed a smile and took my hands in hers. “I think I have done my work here,” she said. “I have laid out a path for those who come to Sanctuary seeking answers. Jonathan is a quick study. It will be fine.” Emily let go of my hands. “As for you, I have seen the great care and affection you have for me.”

  “Then how can you leave?” I asked, confusion filling my mind as I fought to process what she was saying.