Feeding Frenzy: Curse of the Necromancer (Loon Lake Magic Book 1)

by Maaja Wentz

  She felt less like laughing now. Her friend wanted to set up her installation in the cemetery, which was bad enough, but as they passed the chapel and continued south past the round hill, Priya noticed the most sacred site of all.

  “What about that tree?” She pointed to a tall ash tree, just inside the old section of the cemetery. “Do you think we could climb it?”

  “I climbed it, when I was too young to know better. We should leave it alone.”

  “Why? Look how big it is.” Priya craned her neck up to look at the top. “The leaves have turned gold and started to fall off. It’s the perfect creepy focal point for my installation.”

  “No, it’s the Three-Century Ash.”

  “Wait, did you say you climbed it?”

  “Yeah.” Tonya shrugged.

  “I don’t believe you. The trunk must go up two stories before there’s a branch to grab hold of. I can’t even get my arms around it.”

  “You have to find a better place.” Tonya wasn’t allowed to explain to outsiders what the tree meant to the Old Families, and their ancestors buried nearby.

  Priya walked around the trunk. “Hey, what’s this?”

  “Never mind. Let’s go.”

  “What are these for?” She pointed to slats of wood, nailed into the bark.

  “They look unstable,” Tonya lied.

  Priya tested them with her hand, then stepped onto the bottom rung. “Somebody built a ladder right into the tree.”

  “A stupid kid. Aunt Helen punished me for doing it.” Mostly with long lectures on how the Ash protected them from lingering magic released by their buried ancestors.

  “Why didn’t you take the boards off?”

  “By the time Aunt Helen discovered the rungs, the tree had stopped leaking sap and started to heal. She told me to leave them for fear of causing more damage.” Her Aunt had also warned that if the tree died, the town would be in danger.

  “You’re making a lot of fuss over a tree.”

  “You hurt the tree, you hurt the town.”

  Priya’s eyebrows shot up.

  “According to my Mom. As punishment, I had to work for free in my aunt’s store all summer.”

  “Too bad.”

  “It was fine. On my first day, my aunt showed me the secret merchandise, locked under the counter.”

  Priya quirked an eyebrow. “Your aunt’s a drug dealer?”

  “No. She keeps little drawstring bags, reserved for the regulars.”

  “What was she selling?”

  “Nothing. Herbs and dried roots.” In fact, they were charms, but her explanation seemed to satisfy Priya, who wandered farther into the cemetery, seemingly forgetting about the tree. Tonya couldn’t get that summer out of her mind. Her aunt had made her sew sachet after sachet using an antique treadle-powered sewing machine.

  “Why can’t we use a modern sewing machine?” Tonya had wondered.

  “Electricity interferes with the magic.”

  At first, sewing little bags and hanging herbs to dry was annoying because her aunt made her do and redo things until they were perfect. It wasn’t until she had been working there for a couple of weeks that Tonya realized she was having fun. Something about her aunt was completely comforting in a way her parents weren’t. Before long, she found herself finishing Aunt Helen’s sentences, which would have irritated her mother, but just made Aunt Helen laugh.

  “What are we, twins?” Tonya asked one day when it happened again.

  “We’re family . . .” Aunt Helen’s words seemed to catch in her throat and rather than continue she pulled Tonya in for a hug. “These days, working with you, have been some of the happiest in my life.”

  Despite the log cabin exterior, the renovated shop was bright and airy with large modern windows. Her aunt hummed as she polished every pane of glass, as well as the long counter over the display cases lining the wall. This insistence on a clean and bright environment belied her reputation as a woman with a dark past.

  Tonya could never forget the high school taunts she had endured because she defended her aunt’s choices. The Herbal Healing Shop was her aunt’s livelihood and her independence. So what if she was born into a Pure family who disapproved? Helen hurt no one. She kept the secret of magic from the Mundanes and mostly sold to Old Families. Tonya’s mother, and a gaggle of Pure family gossips, had no right to judge her for embracing magic.

  They were probably jealous of the handsome, middle-aged men who occasionally came to pick up Aunt Helen after work. It made Tonya proud when Aunt Helen trusted her to close up the shop, so she could go out.

  One day that summer, Tonya got up the courage to ask, “How did you get so popular?”

  Aunt Helen was threading ribbon through one of her herb bags. She put down her work and looked Tonya in the eye. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m seventeen but I still haven’t had a boyfriend.”

  “Oh honey, don’t rush it. Young love is a curse.”

  After each workday, Tonya found herself defending Aunt Helen to her parents. Her aunt was an infrequent visitor to their house and any impending visit caused her father to rush around putting away their valuables as if preparing for the arrival of some unpredictable animal. When Tonya was younger, this reaction simply added to her aunt’s mystique, but now that they were on friendly terms, her father’s behavior seemed bizarre.

  “Why are you putting everything away?”

  “I’m making things tidy.”

  As if. Her father worked long hours without tiring or complaining. He had lost jobs, buried a parent, married young. Nothing seemed to faze him, except Helen.

  “She’s just Mom’s sister. Why do you always fuss when she comes?”

  “Ask your mother.”

  Tonya tried to probe further but he went out to mow the lawn.

  How was it Aunt Helen’s presence made Tonya feel so relaxed when she made her cool-headed father jumpy as a fawn?

  In the years since, his attitude had mellowed but only slightly. Why would her parents move to Toronto to care for Aunt Helen?

  It gave Tonya a pang of sadness to think of Aunt Helen cooped up under fluorescent lights in a sterile hospital, all because of a so-called routine condition nobody would discuss. Did she ingest one of her own concoctions by mistake? Was she keeping a serious ailment secret? It seemed incredible that her parents refused to let Tonya visit or even know where she was being treated. Tonya took a moment to call her aunt again, but the inbox was full.

  Priya came back and led Tonya to the oldest section of the graveyard. “Do you have any idea who’s buried here? The names are worn off.”

  “The Old Families came here hundreds of years ago. I’d have to look up the records at City Hall. You can’t be thinking of using burial sites in your installation?”

  “Why do you think I’m here?”

  “You can’t put fake monsters on my ancestor’s graves.”

  “So, it’s back to the big tree then.”

  “Not if my aunt’s opinion counts.”

  Priya sighed. “Let’s walk over to the store. I’d love to meet her.”

  “She’s in hospital.” Probably, maybe. Tonya wished she knew.

  “Oh. Sorry to hear that.”

  “Let me know if you’re driving to Toronto some weekend? We can visit her together.” Once Tonya confirmed her whereabouts.

  GRUESOME PRESERVES

  Friday morning, Roberto wasn’t feeling well so he skipped class and drove to town on the opposite side of the lake. In the pharmacy, the clerk showed him diet pills with caffeine, and imported slimming pills but Roberto didn’t want to lose weight. He was in great shape from daily runs through the wooded cemetery near campus. Even doubling up on food since September, he had gained only ten pounds. No big deal. What bothered him was the constant hunger.

  This persistent desire had started a couple of weeks ago but lately it was getting so bad, it distracted him when he wanted to study, and he was losing sleep to a new compulsion fo
r midnight snacks. Last night, rather than going out and buying himself a bag of chips or a sandwich and returning to bed, he had gorged himself on ice cream. He didn’t even like sweets, but he had driven to the convenience store, grabbed a bag of corn chips on the way in, and finished them while foraging in the freezer.

  The next thing he knew, he was back in his car hunting for a spoon. He had a big tub of Kawartha Dairy maple walnut. He’d never seen such a flavor before, and didn’t expect to enjoy anything so sweet, yet he couldn’t wait to eat. There were no utensils in the glove box, so he spooned huge globs of ice cream into his mouth with his fingers. Once he got to the bottom, the last bits melted, and he tipped up the container to drink syrupy dregs.

  Roberto stood staring at a shelf of useless medications in the diet aisle of the biggest drugstore in Loon Lake, but nothing there could help. He didn’t need his poncho-wrapped abuela to tell him this eating compulsion wasn’t natural. He came from a family that recognized magic.

  He had caught the right kind of vibe from Helen’s Herbal Healing Shop when he passed it on his training runs through the cemetery, in what locals called the Village. He decided to get back in the car and go for a drive.

  After the high-rise lifestyle of Lima, buildings here seemed ridiculously small. As he drove south out of downtown, the roads were lined with single family houses with backyards. He passed parks without fences, then turned west along Lakeshore, marveling how much public greenspace encircled the water.

  At Kenny Road, he turned south and crossed the bridge, passing close to the cemetery on his left. The open fields to his right soon revealed a two-story log cabin. He had reached the Herbal Healing Shop, according to the sign painted across the front but he wasn’t quite ready to go in.

  On a whim, he parked on the shoulder and crossed Kenny Road to have a look at the tree-filled cemetery. September’s changing colors intrigued him after the sparse vegetation on Peru’s coast, but by October the leaves were gone, leaving bare branches to scratch the sky. Shivering, he braced his foot on the fence’s lowest crossbar and leaned his forehead between the posts.

  The people beneath these old stones would never move again, and the land looked like it was dying too. Roberto had seen too many withered faces in town, old people like leaves, waiting for their turn to fall to earth. Only Lynette made him feel alive. Without her he’d have flown back to Peru, even against his parents’ wishes. Let them disinherit him. He wasn’t helpless, at least, if you didn’t count this helpless craving for food.

  Used to Lima’s ten million people and diverse districts, Loon Lake was simple and boring. When his parents had first tried to convince him, they claimed a town with 135,000 people would be comfortable and safe. He didn’t want comfortable and safe. He wanted thrills, and neighborhoods where life was passion. Campus was tame and generic, so he went hunting for real life, night life, the dangerous and exotic. In Loon Lake, sadly, the enticing English idiom “wrong side of the tracks,” meant nothing more exciting than a cheap subdivision north of town. Loon Lake’s main products seemed to be diplomas, cemetery plots, and trees. Why was magic attracted to such an ordinary place?

  A few steps inside the fence, his eye was drawn up the side of an enormous tree, the tallest he had seen outside the rainforest. The earth around it was mounded and uneven and, when he strained to look, Roberto noticed ancient gravestones flush with the ground. The lettering was so weathered it was difficult to read. He would have liked to check them out, but not until he got treatment for this hunger.

  The shop stood opposite the cemetery, banished from sanctified ground. He took a package of biscuits from his pocket and munched on them as he walked to the building.

  Two stories tall and constructed of weathered logs, with modern windows, and a painted sign over the door; the shop stood behind a gravel parking lot. This wasn’t some multinational drugstore. It was special, but not centuries-old special, like Pucllana Temple in Lima. It was old by Canadian standards and as he approached, he sensed an aura of power.

  With renewed optimism, and cookie crumbs on his hands, he tried the door. Locked. The lights were off. Odd. It was already 10:30, but the posted hours were 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. He knocked hard, and when that didn’t work, he shouted:

  “Anybody there?”

  There was a crash inside the shop. His first instinct was to back away. The locked door and crash meant a robbery was in progress—except the guys on the cross-country team had told him Loon Lake had no crime. Could somebody be hurt?

  He thought he heard a woman’s voice, muffled by the door. He didn’t want to run afoul of police or criminals, but it would be wrong to walk away. Roberto couldn’t force the door, so he pulled his fist into his sleeve and punched through the little window beside it. His heart accelerated, like the final push at the end of a race. He reached in through the broken window and unlocked the door, throwing it open.

  “Hello? Everybody okay?” He took a step into the dark foyer and let his eyes adjust. Entering the shop, the wall to his left was dominated by a long glass case. It was the kind used for pastries, but this was no bakery. Exotic objects and herbal ingredients crowded the glass. Mounted on the wall opposite the counter, shelves displayed jars of odd preserves. He stepped closer, still unsure where the crash had come from. There was nobody here. He went around the counter to investigate a doorway which opened into the back room. Inside, there was a work table, floor-to-ceiling canning jars and, at the far end, a window. Curtains waved inwards with a cold draft. Broken glass glittered on the floor. He had interrupted a break-in.

  Roberto wondered if he should leave when a feeble moaning came from close by. He stepped around the work table and found a woman, kneeling on the hardwood. The Señora’s thinning white hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her hands trembled.

  She was stuffing handfuls of something into her mouth that dribbled down her chin. It was pinkish, pickled. It looked like a jar of fetal pigs! Her face twisted into an expression of disgust, and yet she kept shoveling it in without even pausing to look up. This was worse than his junk food compulsion, but would it be his fate? He looked at her chicken-bone frame. She might be eating uncontrollably now, but she was too thin to have been doing so for long.

  Between mouthfuls she spluttered, “Don’t just watch me. Help.”

  He reached out to her but although she looked at him with tears in her eyes, her body kept on eating.

  Roberto came from behind and slipped his arms through hers. “Vámonos.” He dragged her gently away from the fleshy preserves. She clutched the last bloody morsels to her chest, but when they were almost at the door, he pried them from her fingers and tossed them into the garbage can.

  “Don’t worry, Señora. I will take you to the medical center and they can tell us both what is making us sick.”

  She nodded her head and let him lead her away. She was still chewing furiously and choking as she tried to swallow everything packed into her mouth.

  “Take your time.” He led her toward his car.

  “He’s getting away.” She pointed to a stand of trees behind the shop. “Stop him!”

  Roberto could see a man in a leather jacket trotting away unevenly, as if one of his legs was longer than the other. His hair was a flash of white against brown as he receded into the trees.

  “Run! Len’s had a hip replacement. You can still catch up. Bring him to me and I’ll know what to do with him.” She shot Roberto a lopsided smile.

  “Are you sure?”

  She wobbled and grabbed the side of the car to steady herself.

  Why did she want to confront the intruder? It was dangerous, and he wanted to refuse, until she turned her deep blue eyes on him. He felt himself falling into their liquid depths, until they were linked and helping her felt as natural as breathing.

  “Go,” she said. A whispering voice in his mind told him her name was Helen and he knew he couldn’t let her down.

  Roberto jogged toward the trees at a rate that would eas
ily catch the limping man. Question was, what would he do when he caught him? The old guy wasn’t feeble, despite his bad leg, but it wasn’t a fair fight. How could a big strong guy like Roberto tackle him? He was an old man, and he wasn’t carrying off any loot. It was confusing, but he felt strangely compelled to bring him back for Helen.

  The man stopped running and turned to face Roberto. A smile crossed his face. Deliberately, he lifted his hands above his head.

  “It’s okay,” said Roberto. “I don’t want to hurt you . . .”

  A fireball came at Roberto. He dove to the ground but knew by the painful heat that his hair, and the clothes on his back were burning. Roberto rolled in the damp October leaves until he felt wet. He remained lying on his back, panting and thanking the Saints he wasn’t dead. What kind of burglar was this?

  “You’re next, Helen!” The old guy strutted back toward Helen’s property. Roberto could see him, but no weapon. Had he used magic? No time to wonder. The flames had set several fires in the grass. He had to get back to Helen and protect her.

  Flames streaked past Roberto as a bigger fireball struck the back of the shop. The back window was obliterated, replaced by a jagged hole in the charred cabin wall.

  Roberto ran but couldn’t reach the Señora in time. Her legs collapsed under her and she fainted onto the parking lot.

  Seconds later, he knelt and put a hand to her chest. Her heart was beating fast but feebly. She breathed in ragged little gasps. He dialed for an ambulance, but by the time he described his location to the dispatcher, the mysterious stranger was gone.

  LUNCH WITH A ZOMBIE

  Tonya, Priya, Zain, and Drake were eating lunch in the cafeteria of Mackenzie College.

  They had a table next to the floor-to-ceiling window which overlooked the tree-rimmed lake.

  “When do they turn off the fountain?” Priya asked, referring to a jet of water offshore in front of campus.