To the Grave

by Monica Corwin

  “Assuming we aren’t talking about me since I’ve been here for a while, what else could it be?”

  Melanie, the one with a crush on Sam, answered this time. “We don’t know, and if we did, we wouldn’t tell you.”

  I blinked, unsurprised, but usually, they were more reserved around me, especially after being freshly resurrected. As if they were afraid my curse could contaminate their perfect poreless skin.

  “Ok. Good talk.”

  I spun back to the living room, and Sam chuckled to himself. Instead of throwing the coffee cup at him, I set it on the table and curled back up in my love seat. The pillows hugged me close, and I was tempted to doze off, but then a stomp dragged me from the edge of sleep. I let out a groan. “I just came back from the dead. Can’t I get one night off from this crap?”

  No response. Thank goodness.

  “Why don’t you go see Sylvester?” Sam offered.

  “An hour to get ready, then another hour to his part of Chicago, and it will take probably three more to find opium. I’m not in the mood to play with the Oracle today.”

  “Do you want to find out if your murder and the new one are connected?” Sam said. I hated when he became the logical one.

  “If I’m going, then you’re coming with me.”

  He shrugged like it didn't matter to him, but his lips had a little upturn in them. Mini road trip with the wolf. Better than Angel. At least Sam could talk and drive.

  I sighed and went back to my room to get dressed. It took about ten minutes to find the right outfit since Angel rearranged my clothes when he grabbed my funeral attire.

  The little bastard.

  I slipped into the sleeveless red velvet number with beaded fringe. It was very much the rage in the 20’s, and old Sly loved his prohibition era parties. If you showed up dressed wrong, you wouldn’t get into his house. And if you were banned from Sly’s, there was no telling when he will let you back in.

  I curled my hair, put on the fake lashes, and the shoes. Sam stood in the entryway with a fedora, his suit jacket, and my laptop. “All this work. Sly better be in a good mood today.”

  Sam opened the door for me. We exited and walked down the street to where he parked. An old beat up Volkswagen Beatle, black interior and exterior. I had no idea how he folded his 6-foot frame inside, but he managed it with some grace.

  The drive passed uneventfully, and I spent most of it avoiding Sam’s eye. Turned out he knew a guy when we arrived, so the two-hour hunt for Opium changed to a thirty minute pick up outside of town. It was already dark when we pulled up outside Sly’s hopping townhouse.

  Jazz blasted out the door, which stood wide open, and people spilled out onto the sidewalk and front steps.

  Sam easily cleared a path. Any super hanging about would catch his close-to-full-moon scent and slink out of the way.

  Sly sat at his usual chair in the living room just off the entry, a king on his throne watching all the minions dance.

  “Aw, my dearest Dani,” he said, rising to kiss both sides of my face. His brown weathered cheeks brushed mine, and I returned the greeting fondly. It was a bitch to get here, but I adored him all the same.

  “May I sit, Sly?” I gestured at the empty stool beside him. Only to be used for a question.

  His black eyes turned hard. “Are you here on business?”

  I held up the paper bag holding the opium. “Unfortunately, I am.”

  He nodded his head just once, and I sat. The magic of his stool, the table, his home whizzed through me, testing me, trying me on, and then it passed right out again dealing me inconsequential. And in the grand scheme of things, I am. My magic is nothing compared to Sly’s.

  “Are you ready to pay?” he asked.

  I reached out for Sam to hand me my laptop and opened it up. It took a minute to connect to the Wi-Fi. “What will it be, Sly?”

  He tapped his chin and nodded his head. Then he glanced at one of his guards and waved him over. After they shared a few words, he nodded and clapped the guy in the shoulder. Once he faced me again, I brought up the coding screen on my laptop and waited.

  “We would like a Facebook page. One that will help those of our kind find us. But deter those who have no need of my services. Public, but private to our community.”

  I stretched my fingers on the edge of my laptop. The silver on those areas already rubbed away. Sylvester wanted a magical cloak on a Facebook page to bring in the right kind of business.

  I grabbed a pin I kept stuck in a sticky sleeve along the edge of the computer and pricked my index finger.

  Magic always exacted a price.

  This would be a fast job for me, but I still had to pay for it. I rubbed the blood on all my fingers and made sure it continued to flow by squeezing a little bit. Then I focused and let the magic which always threatened to rise up flow through me freely. When I opened my eyes, it was done, and I sent Sly the log in details.

  Sly clapped his hands. “All done. Are you sure it will work?”

  It was my turn to hand out the “are you kidding” looks.

  He held up his hands in surrender. “No, you’re right. I know better. If anyone can seamlessly sync magic and technology, it is you, Dani.”

  While I let Sam pour hand sanitizer on my palm, Sly took the bag of Opium and pulled out two round pearls of greenish gray herb and dropped it into a diffuser in the center of his table. A few minutes later, the steam came out, and he leaned in. His black eyes went white, and he seized. I wanted to reach out, but I kept myself immobile. Sam hovered in the corner watching closely. Music still played in the other room but, this one, and the inhabitants, sat silent and transfixed as Sly worked.

  After a minute, Sly spoke. “As your question, Dark One.”

  I glanced around and watched as some of the room noted my affiliation and shrunk back. “Oracle. Are the recent murders of two witches connected?”

  He blinked, and then studied me with that unnerving gaze. Like he could see through me. Most likely he could. “There are more than two. So far seven witches across the face of our mother have been slaughtered. Two dark, two light, two unaligned, and one...” Sly stopped and cocked his head, still peering at me. “One that is not dead.”

  It was hardly a secret to those who knew my family name. It was the curse which broke dark magic for centuries. So, if there were two dark, two light, two unaligned, and me…how many more did the murder need to kill? And what was the end game? I had to think quick as Sly only allowed two questions and only before the smoke stopped.

  “Oracle, the white witches in my home told me something is coming. What is it?”

  Sly jerked against the table again and dropped his head to his chest. I waited. Once upon a time when I didn’t know anything about Sly, I tried to rush him. That ended badly. Never rush an Oracle. Especially if you already have one curse over your head.

  “There is something coming. It’s dark. Untested but strong.” He closed his eyes, and it was easier to look at him without the white staring back.

  Another minute passed. “I see what it is you want to know witch, but I am bound by the laws of the Gods not to disclose it. This is beyond witch deaths and curses.”

  I let out a sigh, and Sly dropped to the table, his forehead hitting with a thunk. Sam brought some water, and I placed it next to the diffuser for when he woke up. It might be five minutes, or it might be five hours. I stood and left the house, half the eyes which weren’t already drunk were on me. Sam followed and opened the car door for me to climb inside.

  “How screwed do you think we are?” Sam asked.

  I jerked off my heels and put the faded black moccasins I brought with me on my feet. Mostly, I wanted to keep Sam from seeing the quake in my hands. When I could formulate an answer, I looked up at him. So young, and so young to his magical gifts. “Basically, the world is probably on the brink of a turn.”

  His forehead crinkled in that way I found adorable. “What does that mean?”

  He pulle
d off the curb into the slow side street traffic toward the highway back home. “Every thousand years or so, the Gods get restless. A turn is like a change in management upstairs. Sometimes, it’s so seamless you don’t know it even happened. Other times...fire and brimstone.”

  “How do we know what we are going to get?”

  I shrugged. “Hold on to something and hope if it floods, there’s an ark waiting somewhere out back.”

  Chapter 3

  We drove back home in mostly silence. It was heavy and oppressive and uncharacteristic of Sam. He was the happy one. The one I didn’t mind being around if I needed a quick laugh or a smile. I’d tried to keep him relatively untouched in my world. Unfortunately, that didn’t always work out well for me and those who chose to live around me.

  I trudged inside, already pulling the bobby pins from my hair to release the heft of it down my back. Angel jumped up from the couch under a mountain of text books. All of which crashed to the floor as he raced to the entry to question us.

  Sam walked toward his room, a confused look on his face, and slammed the door. Angel raised an eyebrow, and I could hear him asking, “What did you do to him?”

  I answered the question he didn’t actually ask. “Probably gave him nightmares for the rest of his life. Now go away before I do it to you too.”

  Angel had grown used to my sarcasm, even if he didn’t appreciate it. He crossed his arms over his chest and stared down at me hard, those green eyes boring into me as if they could reach my devil-spawned soul.

  “Okay, we saw the oracle, and he basically told us to buckle up.”

  Angel’s hands started going, and I didn’t have the energy or patience to finish watching him. “Angel, if I knew what we were facing, I would have told you that. For now, I’m going back to bed. I haven’t fully recovered...yet.” I almost said the words, and that would have brought it all back in my mind again. Instead, I focused on walking one step after the other to my room. Opening the door handle. Turning on the light. All these things were normal everyday things. I did them over and over all day. The repetition comforted me.

  I curled up on top of my bed, still in the vintage dress. To be honest, after the last time I lived through a turn, I didn’t know if I had the strength to do it again. It had only been a few hundred years since the last one. A little while before I got robbed of my mortality by meddling white witches.

  When an apocalypse breathes down their neck, people turned ugly. Not just humans, supers, demigods. All of them tapped into their most primal form, and nothing mattered but survival. I did some terrible things to stay alive then. Memories I kept buried for the sake of my already fragile sanity.

  My bedroom door creaked open, and I almost turned to tell Angel to get the hell out, but it was Sam. He wore a black pair of sweat pants and no shirt. When I caught the look on his face, I didn't have the heart to boot him from the room. He lifted me up and over on the bed as easily as picking up a milk carton. Then he curled himself up behind me and fell asleep in minutes.

  I wished Sam would find his own pack. There were other werewolves he hunted and ran with at the full moon, but he hadn’t found a pack to live with yet. Touch was necessary for his kind, and I did not make a good substitute for a shifter. As we learned in the bedroom department.

  For tonight though, I let him curl up and used his warmth to comfort myself. Tomorrow, I had to look at my files. Read how someone murdered me.

  In the morning, the alarm on my bedside table blared, and I rolled over to find Angel sitting in the chair next to my bed. “That’s not a creepy way to wake up at all.”

  I sat up, and he glanced anywhere but at me. He always did that like he feared catching a glimpse of my boyish frame might entice his snowy white heart into sin. “If you didn’t bring me coffee for this talk, then you should probably rethink your strategy.

  I got the morgue contact to get copies of your files and the other murder files, he signed.

  “Too much talking, not enough coffee,” I said, laying my cheek on my knee. He dumped the folders on my bed with a grumble and walked out.

  “That adorable ass better be bringing me coffee. Or he shouldn’t come back,” I called after him. More so to rile him up than anything. I had no more interest in Angel than he had in me.

  Clomping upstairs broke the silence as I straightened the folders. The click of heels on the stairway made me lean out to peak out the door. Tiffani-with-an-i inched down the stairs and out the door. The only one of her sisters with a job. But they paid the bills, so what did I care?

  I sucked in a deep breath and opened the report on the other girl’s murder. Glossy high res images greeted me first.

  “Jesus,” I whispered, turning them over fast, trying to get through them before I threw up. The report came next. The words I could handle better. There was an intimacy in words, but also a distance. I put those between me and the emotions and read the scrawled preliminary reports.

  The little white witch had her organs removed, and they had yet to be recovered. I rubbed my belly and thought about how much I appreciated my intestines inside my body. How terrible. The report did say the removal of the organs came post mortem. Thank goodness. This sounded like something out of a nightmare. There wasn’t any mention of a ritual or any ritualistic markers either. The police assumed a psycho serial killer or something for now.

  I put that folder aside and stared down at my own. I opened the file and expected to find images, but there were only pages of text. Angel had moved the images to the back of the file underneath the stack of reports. Like me, he figured I couldn’t handle the sight of it yet.

  My reports filled a similar vein of the other girl’s murder, but I’d been stabbed ten times in the torso and left for dead. No mention of organ removal. Reading the words and living through it are two very different things. But part of my curse meant I didn’t get much from my deaths except minor flashes. It must have been the magic’s way of ensuring my brain actually lived through immortality intact. A centuries old, dark witch in a psychotic break probably wouldn’t be good for the local population.

  I closed the second folder and hugged my knees to my chest. Angel came back in with a questioning eyebrow. “I’m not answering anything you say until I’m caffeinated.”

  He handed me a mug of liquid heaven, and I sat back into the pillows to try and erase the mental images of eviscerated bodies from my head.

  “The witches told me there is a big bad coming. The oracle told me the same thing. Now there are witches turning up dead in the area. It has to be connected somehow, but I don’t see it. Unfortunately, I think someone else is going to need to die before I can catch a connection.”

  He shuffled in the door way, and I watched his hands fly. When he finished, I sighed and answered, “I’d love to be able to go back to living a normal life. Magicoding is what I love. Maybe there will be some application to this, maybe there won’t be, but I do know I need to find my killer. Or I’ll fear they are lurking in corners waiting for me.”

  He started to sign again. “Yes, I know; I won’t actually die. But I don’t plan to live my life in some screwed up version of Groundhog’s Day either.”

  A man of few words, he just nodded, turned back out the door, and headed downstairs.

  Six and a half dead witches. I needed to figure out what the magical number was going to be. Eight? Ten? I couldn’t think of any rituals that required any certain number of dead witches nor organs. There was the usual blood sacrifice, but that never required more than a cut or a slice across a hand.

  These rituals were serious, and they were dark. But were they dark like my brand of dark magic, or did it go deeper? The creatures which kept to the shadows and didn’t touch the light of day, those beasts went deeper and darker than my magic. Like a shallow pond to the vastness of the ocean.

  These sorts of beings hadn’t been spotted since humans began spreading like an infestation. Maybe the turn had woken something up. And now it needed fresh meat t
o regain its power. None of these choices seemed very good. I wished I could take Angel’s advice and just go back to work, do my job, and ignore what was happening in my world. My mom always told me I had too much light in me. I cared too damn much. And she was probably right. Although, I’d rather have my hands removed than admit that to her out loud.

  I shifted down in the pillows and hugged my coffee tight between sips. The warmth warded off the chill in my room. The fall mornings were making things a little too cold. I’d had no problems overnight snuggling with Sam, but now my toes were starting to go numb.

  If Tiffani didn't use all the hot water, it would be a good time to contemplate my place in the world. I climbed out of bed and plopped my now empty mug on the side table. A bag on the floor caught my eye. It had a label on it with my old alias and some official looking stamps and script. They usually didn’t return personal affects for a while, but here mine sat. I fished out my wallet from the bottom of the bag. My cell phone needed replaced, so I left it there.

  Inside the wallet sat my old ID, which needed burned, and credit cards. I petted the platinum AmEx I worked so hard on my credit score to get. Now it would need to be cut up if the accounts weren’t already closed.

  A white card fell out and floated to the floor at my feet. I crouched down and read the numbers on the back in my handwriting. It said 72053, and on the other side was a name and a phone number. I didn’t remember getting this card, which meant it linked to my death somehow, and my brain suppressed it.

  How was a girl supposed to solve her own murder when her brain blocked out all the evidence?

  I turned the card over a few times and then sat it with my wallet on the table beside the empty mug. As I gathered my clothes and things to hop in for a quick shower, I thought about the card and the number. Something about it felt familiar and not in a suppressed sort of way, more of an I-just-needed-to-remember-what sort of way.

  The house was quiet as I stepped under the hot spray. Full moon tonight meant Sam would be gone. Angel avoided the house because of the witches’ full moon Sabbath rituals.