by Debra Dunbar
The ground was soft on the other side. I tucked and rolled, springing to my feet in what looked to be a park. Glancing around quickly to orient myself, I saw the shadows of tall trees and geometrically shaped bushes, all vague lumps of gray sheltered by the wall from the streetlights. Behind me my pursuer grunted and scrabbled as he tried to get over the brick fence. With any luck he’d give up.
Nope. I ran and heard the thud of the man’s body against the ground the same moment my foot stubbed against something hard and solid, pitching me onto my face. Luckily the ground was soft and velvety grass cushioned the impact of my body against the sod. Stupid sandals. I was never wearing heels again. Only hiking shoes and joggers, just in case a vampire ditched me north of town and I needed to run from some dude who’d been assaulting a prostitute. I wasted a precious second to cradle my bruised toes and saw what I’d tripped over. It wasn’t a rock, it was a grave stone.
The moon came out from behind a cloud, illuminating the “park” around me in a rolling ocean of white. Neatly placed rows of green were bisected by rectangles of marble. Ahead the markers rose several feet tall, headstones gleaming in the silvery moonlight.
The call of the moon wasn’t the only thing I felt. Magic bit sharply through the air, tingling along my skin like an electric pulse. There were a lot of spells that required a full moon and a graveyard, but none smelled like rotted flesh and mothballs, none felt like a thousand maggots moving along the ground. Shit. The ground really was moving, and it was maggots. Grass vanished, dirt shifted like sand parting around me. I rolled, desperately trying to find some portion of the ground that wasn’t turning into a silt-like form of quicksand.
Solid ground. I panted, my hair spilling around my face as I struggled to my feet, no longer worried about the man who’d been chasing me. Flesh and blood I could deal with, this I couldn’t—at least not without some serious preparation.
Brushing the hair from my eyes I saw them. White smoke rolled up from five graves, swirling in columns. Limbs extended, features formed, and before me were five specters.
I heard a gasp from behind me. “Holy shit. What…who are you?”
Correction, five specters and one bulky man. He was smeared with dirt, his clothing torn from rolling in an alley and falling over a brick fence, but he still was intimidating. Well, he would have been intimidating if I hadn’t been pretty sure he was pissing his pants right now.
“Magic fire. Ghosts.” The man took a few steps back, his eyes huge as they darted between me and the shadowy ghosts. “You’re a fucking witch. A fucking witch.” He barely got the last word out before running and nearly throwing himself back over the fence. I should have been glad. That was one last threat I needed to face. Instead I was feeling a spike of fear at being left alone with five newly risen spirits.
Templar instruction on ghostly spirits was only geared to clearing a path for pilgrims and Knights to pass safely, and my extracurricular magical studies didn’t lean toward the necromantic. I didn’t know anyone who delved into that sort of thing. Evidently someone did, and that someone was nearby.
I touched my heart, and went down on one knee. The specters were fully coalesced and beginning to gather their power. My skin prickled with the chill of their presence. My heartbeat jumped, but I didn’t have time for a panic attack or an adrenaline freak-out. I was trained for this. I may have spent my life in privilege, my only experience academic, but these rites had been drilled into me from the moment my Knight training began.
My heart rate normalized. I made the sign of the cross. “Jesu, luys im chanaparhy.”
A tunnel of light appeared, reaching from my feet to the end of the cemetery. The specters shrieked, floating backward to give the glowing path a wide breadth. I rose and walked carefully forward, aware that the light closed behind me as I passed. The spirits didn’t give up, following me at a safe distance, howling. I still felt the chill of their presence, the malevolence of their intent. Who had brought them from the grave? And for what purpose?
A thousand years ago a necromancer would summon hundreds of spirits to march before an army, to strike fear into the hearts of the opposing forces. Many fled. If the necromancer was highly skilled, the specters could even kill. But that was history. In modern times, spirits were only called for the purpose of communing with loved ones—séances and that sort of thing.
Someone’s surviving relative had a lot of money, and some pretty pissed off dead family judging from the specters following me.
The locked gates of the cemetery were in sight. Darn, I’d need to climb over them, too. I wasn’t dressed for this sort of thing, and my shoes sure as heck weren’t ideal either. I paused, gritting my teeth at the wave of cold that surrounded me from the spirits. I took off my cute sandals, looping the straps over my wrist. Then I began to climb.
The protective tunnel of light held until I was over the fence, then it vanished plunging me into a world of darkness. I jumped back a few steps from the gate, my heart pounding until I realized that the spirits weren’t rushing to attack. As my eyes adjusted I saw the specters safely inside the graveyard. Interesting. I paced the gates a few moments, watching them as they bounced against invisible barriers. Were they unable to leave the cemetery boundaries? Could they only go a certain distance from the resting place of their physical bodies? Or could they only wander so far from their summoner?
Either way, they were on one side of a set of iron gates and I was on the other. I smiled, waved, and headed southeast, leaving them behind.
Chapter 3
EVERY WALL SPACE of my tiny one bedroom apartment was covered with books. They were on my little café table, across the kitchen counters, on the floors, couch, bed. Normally they were three-deep in the cheap bookshelves and stacked in precarious columns on the floor. Now the bookshelves stood empty.
I was exhausted. I’d been up all night researching this symbol and I needed to be to work in an hour. Well, I hadn’t spent all of my time on the symbol. I’d been acutely aware of carrying a large sum of money on me as I made my way through the city, and my apartment wasn’t in the best neighborhood. I figured most robberies were committed by guys, so I hid the cash in a box of tampons. Then I spent about an hour on a yucky-face spell to deter anyone who might decide to check the feminine hygiene products for money. After work I’d give the cash to the landlord, but until then I wanted to take every precaution to make sure it stayed right here. Paranoid, but as Guardians of the Temple with all of its magical artifacts, we Templars tended to take the possibility of theft very seriously.
Money secure. Still no idea on the symbol. And I was going to be dead on my feet for my shift. Hopefully I wouldn’t screw up too many coffee orders. That wasn’t the only worry on my mind this morning, though. Those specters in the cemetery haunted me in a metaphorical sense. I hadn’t seen any signs of a pending zombie apocalypse outside my window this morning, so I was assuming whatever purpose the spirits were summoned for was benign. Still…
I grabbed the quickest shower in the history of mankind and ran down the stairs in my work attire with a mess of wet hair and no makeup. I needed to pick up my car anyway. If I hustled, I’d have time for a quick stop before my shift.
Splurging on a taxi with a twenty from the tampon box, I retrieved my car and was parked in front of the cemetery in record time. Funny how different things look during the daylight hours. The neighborhood which had seemed so dark and menacing last night now just appeared battered and sad. The garbage bags in the alleyway had spilled open where rodents had chewed through, their contents beginning to ferment in the morning heat. The dealer and hooker clientele at the little corner convenience store had given way to two elderly men sipping coffee and a handful of children counting their pocket change. Even the cemetery was transformed by sunlight. The grave stones and markers were still in neat rows, but the grass showed signs of a careless mowing and the gates I’d climbed the night before were rusted. And unlocked. I pushed one and it gave way with a squawk.
Had they even been locked last night? I’d not bothered to check, assuming they were. I was just glad I didn’t have to repeat my climbing again today, especially in my work clothes.
Five graves stood out among the rest, the sod tossed about in huge clumps, the dirt looking as if someone had taken a giant mixer to it. Two men stood beside one of the disturbed plots—one with a ring of iron-gray wooly hair around a bald pate, the other younger and shaved bald. The younger shook his head in disgust as he smoothed the dirt back over the grave.
“Family of yours?” the elder man asked, watching me approach. “I’m so sorry this happened. We’ll have it back to rights in just a few.”
I glanced at the headstones. Robertson. Five graves right next to each other, same last name, same date of death forty years ago. I did some quick calculations one the ages. Forty and thirty-eight on the adults. Children aged sixteen, ten, and eight.
Oh my. A whole family lost in one day. Fire? Car accident? Plane crash? Whatever had happened, this certainly was incentive for someone to disturb spirits at rest. An aunt or a cousin, perhaps. Or even a child. By the dates on his grave, Lincoln Junior was certainly old enough to have fathered a son or daughter. I winced at the thought of being a parent at sixteen, but had seen enough of the world to know it wasn’t an unusual occurrence.
“Friend of the family,” I told the older man. I had no idea how well he’d known the Robertsons and didn’t want to find myself caught in a lie.
He scowled down at the bare dirt. “Some people have no respect for the dead. Luckily there wasn’t too much damage. Just even these up, put some sod and seed on them, and they’ll be looking back to normal in a few months. I’m pretty sure I can even sand that mark off the stone, too.”
Mark? I bent down and swept the dirt from the headstone, tracing the edging and words with a finger. There. It was tiny, barely noticeable. If the old man hadn’t been so thorough about searching for damage, he would have missed it. It was likely any visitors would have missed the faint scratching at the corner of the stone, too. I wetted a finger and cleaned the rest of the dirt off to see it better.
And for the second time in twenty-four hours my heart raced. The graffiti that had been scraped lightly on the stone wasn’t a tag or rude word, it was a symbol. It was the same symbol as was on the piece of paper I carried in my pocket, the symbol Leonora had paid me to research.
What in the world could the Robertson family, deceased forty years ago, have to do with the vampires? And what was this mark? Obviously it had something to do with the raising of the specters last night. Like the elder man had said, just a few swipes with some fine grit sandpaper would erase them. If they’d been done weeks ago, had nothing to do with the spirits I saw last night, then the symbols would have been dulled by rain by now. Just in case, I checked the other stones and saw the same mark.
“Do any of the other markers or headstones have this graffiti?”
The man shook his head. “I didn’t check them all, but none of the other ones in this section do. Terrible, that someone would target this one family for such disrespect.”
I didn’t necessarily see raising the dead as disrespect, being a non-judgmental Templar and all, but necromancy wasn’t something we got within a hundred miles of. Artifacts and grimoires dealing with the subject were mostly locked away at the Temple. Even our Librarians, who prided themselves on the pursuit of all knowledge, thought carefully before cracking one of those books open. It wasn’t forbidden, but necromancy had a sort of ick factor that made a Templar want to head for a hot shower.
Suddenly it made sense why I had come up with a big fat zero in my research so far. I didn’t have the right texts. Nor the right knowledge. Neither my Templar education nor my side hobby had delved into this specific branch of magic. I’d need to go elsewhere than my own library to find the answer to what the symbol meant. I had three sources I could explore, and unfortunately all three options sucked.
And I was going to be late to work if I didn’t hustle up. I stood, brushing the dirt from my formerly clean khaki pants. “Thank you… uh, for taking care of them.” I gestured toward the markers, not sure how to take my leave of the two men without seeming rude.
“It’s my job, Miss.” The elder man held out a hand. I took it and noted the warm grittiness of his skin, the solid feel of bones beneath muscle and skin, the firm grasp that went with the quick pump up and down.
Nice guy. Sucky job. Although right now I would have traded him in a heartbeat, and I didn’t mean my part-time job at the coffee shop either.
The coffee shop was busy for a Thursday. The usual lunch crowd gave way to a handful of people who made the little tables and couches into mini-offices, typing away on their laptops. Tourists wandered in, cooling down with frappe creams. I surveyed them all from behind the stainless steel of the espresso machine, feeling like a queen among her people.
They were my people. I’d only been living here six months—hardly a resident, let alone someone who could claim any sort of attachment to this city. Even still, I felt like I belonged here, as though I’d spent every moment of my life among the streets and waterways. I cared about this city in a way I’d never cared about a place before. And I was as enchanted by, as protective of, the residents and visitors as I would have been a schoolyard full of children.
Yeah, how sad was my life that watching random strangers like a benevolent goddess of caffeine in a coffee shop was the highlight of my day? I’d grown up so close to my tight-knit family that I’d never realized what a challenge it would be to made friends as a stranger in a new city. Templars had a bond of purpose that brought them together—the same bond that tended to exclude other humans. What was I supposed to say to these people? How could I turn random observances about weather and sports teams into a friendship? I could chop a gjenganger to pieces with a sweep of my sword, but I had the worst social skills in the world. No doubt that was the reason the closest thing I had to a friend was a sexy vampire that I hadn’t even spoken to until last night.
I put a swirl in the crema of a cappuccino and smiled as I handed it to the hipster dude on the other side of the counter. I’d only been in Baltimore six months. Maybe friends in that short of time were too much to ask.
One of my coworkers sidled up to me, bumping my fist with an empty cup. “Hey, Aria. What are you doing tonight? Wanna hit the Powerplant?”
It took me a second to realize that Brandi was speaking to me. Yeah, the other employees spoke to me, as did the customers, but nobody had invited me anywhere. Loneliness vanished in a rush of excited hope. I’d never been much for going to dance clubs, but I would have attended a sewing circle if it meant I might possibly have a friend.
But there was a roll of money in my bathroom cabinet, and the potential for more. I hated to blow off the only friend offer I’d had in…well, in six months, but I had to get back to work researching. And maybe take a nap.
“Uhh, maybe next week?” What excuse could I give Brandi? I’m not really good at making things up on the fly, so I just blurted out the truth. “I’m researching a magical symbol, and I’ve only got a week to do it or the vampires might kill me.”
I expected her to run screaming. I didn’t expected a bouncy hand clap and a huge smile. “Seriously? Let me guess, you’re an elf.”
Huh? Whatever gave her the idea that I was an elf? “No, I’m a Templar. Not a Knight though. I left the Order before I took my oath.” Honesty seemed to be working so far so I figured I’d just keep on with it.
“A Paladin! I’m so psyched to find out that you are into RPGs. We’ve got an Anderon game on Wednesdays. I’ll totally see if I can invite you. Do you LARP, too?”
I was fluent in four languages, but she’d lost me. “I love to LARP.” I had no idea what that was, but if it got me out of the apartment and gave me the chance to make friends I was going to LARP.
“Oh. My. God. Next Saturday is the LARP in the Park. We could use a Paladin. Meet us there at noon and wear your a
rmor. Oh, and bring a dish for the potluck.”
Brandi skipped off, shouting, “Can you believe it? Aria is a Paladin.”
I didn’t have the heart to correct her. Paladins were Templar wannabes, do-gooder vigilantes who ran around fighting evil. Their average life expectancy upon taking their own version of the Oath was about six months. Not that it mattered. I was more worried about where I was going to find armor by next Saturday. And figure out what the heck a LARP was.
I’d scored a three hour power nap after my shift that had left me feeling more groggy than refreshed. I powered onward with quick hits off an energy drink chased by a pot of coffee, sorting through books and putting ninety percent of them back on the shelves.
Three people might be able to help me. Well, two people and one… other thing.
Dad was a Librarian class Knight, which meant his specialty was cataloging and researching the vast sources of information inside and outside of the Temple. He was one of the few Templars who were entrusted with sacred texts and written-word artifacts outside of the Temple. If he didn’t have what I needed in the vault at home, then he’d know where to find it. Of course, that meant I’d need to return home—supplications always must be made in person, and that rule went for us Templars as well as the humans we were supposed to help. I hadn’t been back home since I left six months ago. This wouldn’t be a quick in-and-out research trip. I’d be expected to stay for dinner, to catch up on family news, and to face the mess I’d made of things when I left. Eventually I’d do that, but I wasn’t quite ready yet.
I’d briefly been a member of the magical society Haul Du. Like eight months briefly. My departure hadn’t been my idea. Some jerk had discovered I was a Templar and leaked the information. Racist pigs. Although I understood their reluctance to have someone as a member who was sworn and duty bound to reclaim any item of magical significance and stash it away in what amounted to Fort Knox. Still, I felt a combination of resentment and hurt every time I thought of my dismissal from Haul Du. I’d made friends there—the first non-Templar friends I’d ever had. And I’d felt at home—more at home than I did even with my family. They understood the excitement of magic, the need to do more with it than lock it away in the Temple. They felt there were secrets in this world and the next, puzzles that could be unlocked through study and partnership with those above and below.
