by Emma Hamm
“How is it that you exist?” She wobbled to the side as she tried to gain her balance on one foot.
“Like any other creation that exists. I simply do.”
She watched him as he walked towards the altar once more. He moved as though he were ancient. Each step was slow and calculated.
“But—”
“Do not say it is impossible.”
“But it is!”
“Why? Because they’re all dead?”
Lyra trailed along behind him, limping the entire way. “Well, yes! Magicians weren’t a species; they were an anomaly that accidently happened when the dimensions combined. They weren’t natural, and they weren’t meant to happen. That’s why they were wiped out.”
“That’s the tale everyone seems to tell,” he murmured as he reached the altar and braced his hands against it.
“Is it not the true one?”
“Magic has its ways.” He turned slowly back towards her. “If magic wants something alive, it is.”
“Wow. You’re really going with the ‘magic can do everything’ route?”
He patted his hand against the altar.
She raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“If you please.”
“I’m not your next sacrifice.”
“I’m not asking you to be a sacrifice. You are bleeding. I would heal you.”
“I didn’t ask for that.” Lyra sniffed. “I’m not getting up there.”
“It is a simple thing for me to do. Please, allow me to apologize for your fright and for the uncomfortable nature of our meeting.”
He had a point. She shouldn’t say no when he was offering something that was truly innocent. But was he a Magician? Really? They were extinct as far as she knew, although she never really knew why. Lyra hadn’t been alive, and the Siren wasn’t the type to remember such trivial information. If it hadn’t pertained to her, then she hadn’t kept the memories.
She braced her hands and pulled herself up onto the stone. She was now eye to eye with the man named both Graverobber and Wolfgang. It was difficult for her to reconcile the man she had met with this monster.
However, now that she was staring into those mismatched eyes, Lyra found she was starting to feel a different way. These were the eyes that had fascinated her for many nights. These were the eyes that made her feel like sparks were erupting from her fingertips.
“Do you mind if I bring Mungus back in?”
The question made tears spark in the corner of her eyes. She wasn’t an emotional person, but she felt as though the day had been sufficiently trying. He was asking if she was going to be okay. He cared about her feelings.
Why did he care about her feelings and yet hadn’t even looked at her body?
“No, I don’t mind,” she murmured.
Truly she didn’t. The skeleton wasn’t worse than the other things she had seen in her life. She had simply been shocked to see something dead standing behind her and had likely overreacted. She hoped.
There were stories that the reanimated were dangerous. That they thirsted for blood or brains. But she couldn’t imagine that the creature had wanted either when it had stayed so calm while she screamed.
She experimentally wiggled her feet as the door opened. Both man and skeleton walked slowly towards her. She suspected their slow gait was partly because Wolfgang could not move very fast and partly because Mungus was allowing her a few moments to get used to him.
“I’m sorry,” she said as they reached her. “I didn’t mean to insult you. I was just startled.”
Wolfgang raised an eyebrow that had been cut in half by a scar. “He can’t talk you know.”
“What?”
“Do you insist upon using that word so often?”
“Only when you confuse me.”
Wolfgang sighed. “Mungus cannot speak because he has no tongue.”
“Touché,” she said as she looked the dead man over. “Couldn’t you give him a voice?”
“Hmm?” Wolfgang made the confused sound from behind her. He had moved towards shelves while the skeleton remained perfectly still in front of her.
“Well, if you can reanimate him, I don’t see any reason why you can’t give him a voice. I always heard that there was no limit to what Magicians could do.”
The shuffling sound behind her fell silent. Curious, she looked over her shoulder to see him staring in her direction with a dumbfounded expression on his face.
“What?” she asked.
“The thought never crossed my mind.”
Lyra shrugged. “Well now it has.”
“I shall endeavor to spend some of my time researching such a spell, if it would please you.”
“You’re awfully concerned with things that will please me.”
He walked back towards her with a thick tome in his hands. The leather binding creaked as he opened it. Dust puffed into the air as he flipped through yellowed pages.
“Is it any wonder why?” he asked as he peered at the runes scrawled before him.
“Yes. I would say that’s another of my ‘what and why’ moments.”
He didn’t seem to be paying attention to her. Wolfgang began rattling off ingredients to something that sounded like an awful soup. Mungus began to amble around the room while holding one of its hands inside its rib cage.
Lyra watched with morbid fascination. The dead man used its ribs as a kind of basket. The ingredients would only have the potential to fall through the hole at the base of its ribs which was now clogged with its skeletal hand. Each time he found the thing he needed, Mungus would tilt his head backward and drop the object down what would have been his neck.
“This place is like a dream,” she murmured.
“I have oft heard it compared to a nightmare.”
“Or that.” She looked around the room. “It really does look like the inside of a grave.”
“Technically it is.” Wolfgang licked his thumb and flipped a page. “This was once the holding room for bodies that had yet to be embalmed. Mungus, hasten your speed please.”
“Your language is getting weirder.”
“More weird. ”
Lyra’s jaw fell open. “Did you just correct my grammar?”
“Grammar is a fundamental skill of life.”
“And speaking like a human is also important. Why are you speaking differently?”
Wolfgang hummed low in his throat. “I have already answered that question.”
She wracked her brain to try and remember what he had already told her. Being in this room was like being in the middle of a labyrinth. Every time she turned a corner, she thought she was going in the correct direction. Somehow that was never true. Instead, Wolfgang managed to spin her around and around.
“The spells?” she finally asked.
“Sanitatem incantatores.”
“Bless you.”
He blinked and slowly looked up from the tome in his hands. Mungus had returned to his side with a rib cage full of ingredients. “What did you say?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Did you not sneeze?”
“I did not.”
“Wow.” Lyra leaned back on her hands and began swinging her feet again. “You don’t understand jokes either, huh?”
“I frequently misunderstand humor.”
She chose to remain silent. Wolfgang set the book next to her hip, and she took the opportunity to curiously stare at the words. She recognized the shape of some runes before everything began to swim in front of her eyes. She couldn’t have read what was on the pages if she had wanted to.
The strange movement of the inked words was making her sick. But she could see that there was a drawing there. If she slightly crossed her eyes it became a little bit more clear.
“Do not stare at that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it will burn out your eyes.”
She laughed. “No really, why not?”
Wolfgang reached over to close the book. “Because it will burn ou
t your eyes.”
Lyra couldn’t control herself. She reached up to rub her fists against the offending eyes in hopes that she hadn’t already done damage to herself. “Why would you keep something like that around?”
“I don’t frequently have visitors staring at things, which are not theirs.”
He leaned close to her to stare into her eyes. She was instantly overwhelmed as she stared into both darkness and light. Black and blue, like a bruise, reflected strange sights she did not wish to dwell upon. He held worlds inside his eyes.
Moments passed as they stared into the gaze of the other. Lyra felt when he suddenly shut down. A cold air crawled from inside his cloak and wrapped around her wrists. It traveled up her body until her teeth were nearly chattering. Worse was that the curious expression on his face smoothed into something akin to marble.
“My apologies,” he said coldly. “I so easily forget the horror of my form.”
He raised his thin hands to carefully draw the hood of his cloak over his head once more. He must have bespelled the cloth, she mused. As soon as the fabric settled, she couldn’t quite focus on what was inside it. Every time light should have hit the harsh angles of his face, the shadows moved to hold onto its secrets.
Lyra bit her lower lip as her heart seemed to clench in her chest. There was that feeling again. The odd one that had been dull with his doppelganger but now had moments when it seemed to flood her entire being.
She couldn’t describe it. There was a tightness to her soul she had never felt before. Or perhaps tight wasn’t the right word. Tenderness. Peace. Anxiety. Qualities she had never associated with a male before.
Her hands touched the edges of his tattered cloak. The fabric was coarse against her calloused palms and eaten through in many sections by moths. It fell back to his shoulders, and she was careful to smooth it in place so that the edges creased.
“I don’t mind the way you look,” she said with a soft smile. “There are much worse creatures than a man who is scarred.”
Wolfgang stared at her with the now familiar dumbfounded expression on his face before he returned her smile. One of his front teeth was chipped.
His hand pressed gently against her knees. She could feel the imprint of each of his fingers. Long and lean, they pressed hard into the leather that encased her legs.
He began to murmur in a language that sounded familiar yet wasn’t. There were words that sounded like she should know them. A stirring in memories that were not her own suggested that these were a language she had heard once in another life. Sirens remembered very few things that weren’t pretty, shiny, or sexy. But this she had heard before.
Light glowed from between his fingers where they touched her legs. Her eyes widened. His hands clenched harder onto her knees as his voice grew softer.
Yet something was wrong. His fingers didn’t look normal. Before her eyes they grew crooked. His joints seemed to bend at awkward angles that no normal human hand should ever see. Red blood started to leak out from underneath his fingernails. Runes glowed from within his nail beds. Then his voice began to sound strained as he continued to murmur his spell.
Red. His blood was red.
“Stop,” she whispered hoarsely. “Stop, this isn’t right.”
He did not listen to her. The light emanating from the palms of his hands grew all the more bright.
“Wolfgang, stop!”
Lyra heard the crunch of bone. She scrambled to get off of the altar and broke contact with him as she threw her body towards the ground. The stone floor was unyielding against her knees and instantly bruised her flesh.
The pain was preferable to the sounds, which still rang in her ears.
“Lyra, you must not pull away for the healing to be completed.”
“I can’t. I can’t.”
She was breathing hard. The magic he performed was not the beautiful thing she had seen Illusionists create. He was not a magical creature, and somehow she had managed to forget that.
This was Blood Magic. Dark and older than time itself, Blood Magic always took from its user far more than it gave back. No wonder he was capable of so many terrible things.
No wonder he had so many scars.
She stumbled to her feet and rushed towards the door. Her aching ankle was all but forgotten in her haste.
“Lyra!”
His shout made her pause. She looked over her shoulder in acknowledgment.
“You will return.”
“I have no reason to.”
There was a hesitation to her response even she heard. Lyra wanted to be able to say confidently that she would never return to this graveyard. But she had a horribly sick feeling that what had happened here tonight would be impossible to forget.
He was a drug that she had injected directly into her veins. She knew nothing of this strange man, nor of his world. But she could feel the electricity running through her veins and the imprints of his hands that remained on her flesh.
A quick nod was her only response before she disappeared out the door.
Wolfgang’s eyes lingered upon the opening for many moments after she had left. His chest rose and fell in steady motions. He knew he was breathing steadily because he was counting each breath in hopes that she might return.
By the time he reached one hundred breaths, he was forced to admit to himself that she was not returning. Not this time. He was confident she would return at some point. There was no question in his mind that she had felt the same thing he had.
Mungus clacked his feet against the ground to get his attention.
“Yes, Mungus?”
Wolfgang turned to stare at eyes that woefully stared back.
“Yes, I do believe we are in trouble. Come bring those to the altar.”
Lyra had interrupted a rather important moment. Much spying was required to obtain all the information Wolfgang needed to understand what this Malachi wanted. He did not believe in the slightest that the creature was bad simply because he was bad.
The only way to obtain the truth was to look into the past for oneself. Luckily, Wolfgang had only the limit of his own lifeforce. There was plenty of that left to take a peek through time.
As Mungus laid all of the ingredients from his rib cage on the altar, Wolfgang ran a hand down his jaw.
“Do you remember the archaic book from Salem I found many years ago?”
Mungus replied as only a dead man could. He gave no hint that he understood Wolfgang was speaking to him.
“Well, I remember. A Magician or a Witch always begin to lose their soul when they choose to practice Blood Magic. I can attest that this knowledge is truth. I have been the shell of a man filled with power for a very long time.” He leaned forward and plucked a blade from the altar.
“I spent only a moment with her, and I swear I felt my soul again.”
His hands were delicate as he drew the sharp edge against his palm. His body would be wounded, but healing was a simple thing to do. Blood speckled the altar in dark red droplets.
Wolfgang paused only a moment to look once more over his shoulder in case she was not really gone.
Chapter 7
“Are you paying attention at all, Lyra?”
She blinked a few times and looked towards Burke who was seated at the corner of the kitchen island with a piece of pineapple attached to the fork he was brandishing at her.
For some reason, he had thought it was a good idea to have a team breakfast. She would admit that Wren’s cooking was delicious. But she wouldn’t admit that this was a good idea. Breakfast was meant to be a relaxing time. Not a paying attention time.
“No,” she replied with a cheeky grin.
“This was a bad idea,” Burke grumbled.
“I told you that from the beginning. You just didn’t listen to me.”
He sighed and put his fork down with a clatter. Which meant the pineapple was free game, as far as Lyra was concerned. Her hand swooped and popped it in her mouth.
“Excus
e me, that was mine,” he growled at her.
“You put it down. I put it in my mouth. I believe that means it’s mine.”
Laughter from Wren’s side of the table was followed by a snort. “Shouldn’t I be the one eating after Jiminy?”
“Oh, you suck face enough to have his germs all in you. I need to get my immune system boosted. Therefore, fruit is mine.”
“Lyra, you are tempting fate.” Jasper always was the person trying to stop her from doing something foolish. She turned to slowly cross her eyes in his direction.
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
“Am not!”
Burke slammed his hand down on the table. “You two are adults. That game is not acceptable to play right now.”
“You’re absolutely no fun. How are you ever going to be a dad if you can’t play games?” Lyra crossed her arms firmly over her chest with a smug smile.
Burke’s mouth gaped open and closed before he managed a stuttered, “Th-that’s not what we’re talking about right now.”
“Fine, but I want babies soon.”
“We’re not even engaged!”
“Good enough. Anyways, what were you rambling about?”
“Our next mission.” He leaned down and rested his head against the table. Burke mumbled something against the wood.
“I can’t hear him. What did he say?” Lyra asked.
Wren patted his back. “He needs an adult.”
“Too bad, he’s the adult.”
She leaned back to rest her feet on the table and grinned. This was the first day she had felt like herself in a very long time. Perhaps because she had spent two full days covering everything reflective in her apartment with sheets. There was nothing that Bones could talk to her through, and she finally had a little bit of peace.
Which meant she had finally managed to piece together her thoughts on the Graverobber. None of the people around this table were aware she had snuck out to meet with him. In fact, they were still trying to plan on how they were going to get information out of him.
