Body of Ash

by Eli Constant

  “Is it really that bad?” Kyle is standing by the broken living room window, the one that I couldn’t get open the night of the fire because it had been nailed shut from the outside. It’s covered in transparent plastic that makes the world outside blurry. I will miss looking out of it, when the seasons change and snow falls and the lake is a glassy mirror in the distance.

  “Imagine you’re eating in a restaurant. You’re sitting in a small table right in the middle of everything. All around you are large parties—screaming children, loud conversations, and music is blaring from overhead. Imagine someone tells you that you have to sleep there, work there, function twenty-four seven there.” I pause, letting my words sink in. His face is blank as he listens. “Then imagine that most of those people around you are in pain. Radiating abject sadness because each one of them is deaf and no one can hear and they just keep talking and screaming and calling out to the universe to be heard. You’re the only person in that place that has working ears. The only person they can actually talk to.”

  “You’re the person who can hear,” he says slowly.

  “In Hellhole Bay, I’m the only person who can hear. And that restaurant is... God, it’s full. Lost ghosts. Still-trapped spirits on their way to ghosthood. Wraiths caught by a spell my grandmother planted years ago. But I can hear them.”

  Kyle pulls me back into a hug, so tight I lose myself. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just live with me, Tori?” His body is shaking, and I don’t know if it is his bear reacting to my words or his human empathy. This time, I let him hold me longer than I’d like, because I think he needs it more than I do. And that’s a relationship isn’t it? Giving of yourself even when you want to run away and hide.

  “It would be easier, Kyle.” I pull away, yet again, and I smile. “But inside the house is fine. It’s spelled to keep out the noise. Or at least it was.” With grandmother dead, would the magic still be alive?

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER, Kyle is helping me load salvageable clothes, a few sentimental things, and the books and journals from the safe in the storage room. The basement is in fair shape, most everything will be fine with some light restoration. I wish it were the other way around—my apartment saved, and the business part lost.

  For some reason, I also take the painting that was hiding the safe. The graveyard and the crying woman. The angel tomb and the shining moon. I hate it, but I want it. Is that mixed signals again?

  I walk towards Kyle’s vehicle. The day after the fire, I also found out that my car was a victim of the dick arsonist. My tires were slashed, the windows were busted, and the interior was soaked with gasoline. It was close enough to the house that maybe he had expected it to burn by proximity I guess.

  “I really need to get a new car now,” I sigh out, looking back at my house and the sedan.

  “About that,” Kyle takes what I’m carrying and shoves it into the back of his ride. My belongings seem so few now. “It was going to be a surprise when it was finished, but I figure you might need some good news.”

  Curious, I turn to look at him. “There has been a shortage of good news lately.”

  “I found a guy a few weeks ago that can rebuild the Bronco. You’ll need to pick out body color, new interior fixings if you want. It’s an option, at least. I know you were really broken up about—”

  I fling myself into his arms and this time human contact doesn’t feel suffocating. “Kyle. Oh my God. This means so much to me.” I kiss his neck over and over and I realize I’m crying, but they’re happy tears and I don’t try to stop them, because it’s not just the Bronco that fills me with joy. It’s Kyle. It’s the ring, though I don’t want to wear it yet. It’s the future, though I’m still seeing only past the end of my nose. And it’s Liam, who I’ll forgive... eventually.

  As we leave the Victorian, I don’t look back. Behind me is just a shell. The memories made there are mine forever.

  Chapter Thirty

  “HOME, SWEET, FREAKING, home.” I mumble, pulling a white sheet off of one of the sofas in the small front room of the tiny cottage. A cloud of dust puffs up. “She really didn’t change a thing. She just left me the house, died, and had someone preserve it like a damn museum.”

  I sit on the newly-exposed floral couch with velvet trim and stare around the room.

  The wooden frog with the ribbed spine, accompanied by its little rod for music-making was still sat on the mantel. It was a gift from her shaman, and looked just like any of the million trinkets someone could buy in an exotic store and claim to have traveled to Africa. Yet, when the rod was stroked across the spine, it didn’t just make music—it warded off unwanted spirits. It was an invisible spell, almost disappointing when you’re used to movies with glowing prancing animals that ward off baddies.

  A portrait of my grandfather is hung near the entrance to the kitchen. I’d asked her once why she didn’t hang him over the fireplace, where people typically put distinctive photos of their loved ones. She’d responded that he’d always loved her cooking, and every time she went into the kitchen he made her smile—and gave her a reason to eat and survive.

  The journals and books filled with magical knowledge, plus the tome made of skin, are hidden well beneath a floorboard that is spelled so that only someone of her descent can access it. Someone could destroy the entire house, but that tiny area would survive. There was nowhere safer.

  The power had been off for a long time. I’d had all the utilities hooked up in anticipation of moving in—the AC pushed out musty, barely-cool air and the fridge smelled like dead bodies. Guess that shouldn’t bother me, considering where I used to live, but the dead I handled were typically clean. Cleaner than most living people.

  “I can’t believe I’m living here,” I speak to the empty room. Kyle had helped me unload, and then I’d asked for a few hours to... adjust myself. He’d agreed, but then had paused on the small covered porch—staring at the wrinkled, ragged trees reaching out from the shallow, murky water of Hellhole Bay, he’d asked me if I was absolutely sure this is what I wanted to do, where I wanted to live. It was probably his Berserker, wanting to stay and protect me from whatever the bear side could sense out there in the murder-stained swampy lake.

  Of course I wasn’t sure. This might be the worst decision of my bad-choice-making life. It felt like what I had to do though. I wouldn’t move in with a man unless I was completely, completely sure of him. And the magical bond between Kyle and I still made sureness a complicated thing. And that wasn’t even factoring in everything else.

  Like my fairy.

  My fairy who was still gone with the wind.

  Standing, I move through the small room and into the guest room. It’s smaller than the master, but I’m not going to sleep in my grandmother’s room. That place, more than the rest of the house is a tomb. A shrine to the woman, both wonderful and fear-inducing powerful, that had nurtured me. Literally, I’d stood in her room for five minutes before getting chills and walking right back out again, closing the door on that particular memory. At least for now.

  The spare room is also unchanged. The shades of grey quilt was mine when I’d stayed her as a child. The side table even held books I used to read. I pulled off the bed things to wash and smiled when I saw the ink stain on the mattress. I’d fallen asleep sketching in pen. After the stain though, my gaze falls onto the window and my heart jumps into my throat.

  I can close my eyes and still see the dead, reanimated crow slamming its body against the glass. I can still feel the terror in my stomach as ghostly faces tried to push into this room.

  At least it’s quiet here so far. Which probably means the barrier spell to keep out the noise of Hellhole is still strong and kicking. Knowledge from her shaman—a way to anchor magic that wasn’t tied to grandmother’s mortal life.

  “I can do this,” I speak once again, walking through the cottage to the closet with the washer and dryer. “I’m powerful. A freaking queen. I basically have a full-on-body period when I’m mad now, wh
ich isn’t great, but I’ll figure that out. This isn’t going to be terrible.”

  Who am I trying to convince?

  I almost laugh, until the air at my back grows cold. I stop moving and drop the sheets and quilt to the ground. “It takes a pretty powerful spirit to push through this spell,” I reason with whoever’s appeared behind me, and begin to turn very slowly. “I’ll help you if I can, but this space is reserved for the living.” It was something I once heard my grandmother say to an intruding soul. “Stop fighting the barrier and I’ll come out to the porch. We can talk—”

  “An intruder am I?” A familiar voice. A familiar face. A nearly-corporeal form that does not seem to be struggling with the effects of the barricade spell at all.

  “Grandmother?”

  “Hello, my lovely little death. Welcome home.” She walks forward, her arms outstretched, and she hugs me.

  And I can feel her.

  My name’s Victoria Cage. Necromancer. Blud-ah Vas. New resident of 13 Spirit Lane at the edge of Hellhole Bay. And I’m literally hugging a dead person right now. Just when you think things can’t get any stranger...

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Eli Constant also writes as: Eli Grace & Eliza Grace.

  Author of speculative, mind-bending fiction. The Dead Trees Series, The Shadow Forest Series, and more. Co-author of The Z Children Series. Adores all things quirky, eats ice cream with a fork, and likes warm Dr. Pepper (on a cool day). Once thought she'd marry Martin Short... until she discovered Alan Rickman. #Always (Might also have Martin Freeman and Simon Pegg on her 'I get a pass' list. And, please, don’t get her started on Jeff Godblum... erhm, Goldblum. #lifefindsaway)

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  THE VICTORIA CAGE NECROMANCER SERIES