“Were they all humans?” I asked. “Not supernaturals?”
“Yes, to my knowledge,” he said. “It was an easy way to upgrade their recruits so they could go up against supernaturals without being killed.”
“But they’d need supernaturals to put the mark on them, right?” I swallowed bile. “The witches.”
“The Bloodroot Coven,” Asher said. “Yes, they did. It looks like the art hasn’t died out after all. I suppose this man was sent to run errands under the guise of a regular witch.”
“He was sent to use witch spells on shifters,” I said quietly. “To force them to kill each other and attack the mages. I guess we’re not gonna be able to interrogate him. Unless someone knows his name, but I doubt the person who did this to him let his ghost stick around.”
“I thought you were a witch, not a necromancer,” he said.
“I can be both.” He’d seen my Hemlock magic. Yet he hadn’t brought it up yet. I was having difficulty caring who knew, considering the warped dead body lying in front of me.
“I can’t sense him in the spirit realm,” Keir said. Bringing back souls wasn’t a vampire’s strong point, but I had an inkling even the most powerful guild necromancer would have trouble with this one.
“Let me see.” I held my hands out over the dead man’s body, turned on my spirit sight, and searched for anything, the tiniest thread of a connection. Nothing was there, just Death. After all, he wasn’t possessed by a vampire, but reanimated by a spell. His soul was long gone.
I turned off my spirit sight. “I have to tell the guild. And the mages. If we don’t, there’s no way they’d ever guess the enemy’s creating zombies without using a necromancer.” And that wasn’t the worst of it. A witch had done this—reanimated him, used him to put those other illegal spells on the shifters. A blood magic witch.
“If you tell the guild, that’s your prerogative,” Asher said. “Not my business.”
“But you knew about the symbols,” I said. “How long have you known people like him were wandering around?”
“Not much longer than you have.” He took another swig from the bottle. “I’m hardly in a position to stop them.”
Neither am I. I was in too deep to claw my way back to the surface now. The guild needed to know—no question.
“He must have died recently,” Isabel said. “Otherwise he’d have started to decay.”
“Undead reanimated in that way are preserved as they were in life,” Asher said. “They don’t decay.”
“Oh, that’s bloody wonderful.” I turned to Keir. “I’m going to need help carrying this guy back with me. We’re taking him to the guild.”
“Jas, are you sure?” he said. “Your boss doesn’t know where you are.”
Right. I wasn’t even supposed to be on my feet. “I’ll call her, say the dude ambushed us. It’s pretty much true.” The important thing was figuring out who’d reanimated him. That path would lead me right to whoever wanted to destroy the Council of Twelve.
Asher was still eyeing me suspiciously, so I left the shop before calling the guild’s number.
“Lady Montgomery.” I pressed my phone to my ear. “I was on the way back to the guild when a zombie attacked me.”
“Of course,” she said dryly. “Have you dealt with the undead yourself?”
“Uh, I think you’re going to want to see the body. He’s not like a normal undead.”
“In what way?”
“He’s a witch, dead, and reanimated, but there are weird symbols on him. I don’t know what they are.”
“You’re with your vampire friend, aren’t you? Bring him here.”
Ah. I should have known she’d suspect I wasn’t alone.
“All right. We’ll be there soon.” I hung up and went back into the shop. “Keir, she’s asked you to help me get that guy back to the guild. Isabel… are you going to find the mages?”
“I guess, but…” She turned back to Asher. “This dead guy’s trace is all over your shop.”
“It’s warded,” he said. “They won’t find me.”
“And he can turn it into a convincing brick wall,” I added. “But you should know, the spell this dude put on the shifter broke through a heavyweight set of wards. Several times.”
“I’ll stay here,” Isabel said, glancing at Asher. “Er, if it’s okay with you.”
I expected him to say no. I mean, we’d barged in here and then caused a ruckus in public, forcing him to blow his cover.
Asher gave a nod and took another swig from the bottle. “If you’d like to know more about that type of reanimation, I’m not an expert. But I can talk about the Bloodroot Coven.”
“Oh, sure,” said Isabel, giving me a faint nod to indicate that she’d tell me everything he said later.
Honestly, I was less than sure taking the zombie to the guild was the best idea. But Lady Montgomery had lived through the invasion. Maybe she’d seen this form of illegal blood magic before.
Maybe the Hemlocks knew, too.
15
Keir and I carried the body—or it started out that way. After we’d dropped him twice, Keir took over, giving the dead guy a piggyback under cover of a shadow spell while I walked on foot.
I turned on my own shadow spell. “We usually destroy the bodies, not haul them around.”
Keir chuckled under his breath. “Life with you is never dull, Jas.”
“Neither is death.” I stumbled along the cobbled stones, the shadow spell making it even harder to see the edge of my cloak than usual. It was that or walk along talking to myself, so I put up with the indignity. The boss hadn’t seemed surprised at what I’d told her, but it was hard to judge over the phone. A corpse reanimated using witch magic blew all the rules of both witchcraft and necromancy out the window. I swear, if Evelyn knew, I’ll skewer her.
Evelyn, however, remained quiet, which was probably for the best. It took forever to get to the guild, which only gave me more time to brood on how and why someone had thought it necessary to use blood magic on a living person. Even the regular type of blood magic involved using symbols that were too powerful to be controlled with magic alone and demanded an extra sacrifice from the caster. So if the symbols were drawn onto a person, fuelled by their own blood… as much as I desperately wanted to deny what I’d seen, it made sense. That meant the witches must have drawn the symbol on the zombie before his body had rotted, eternally preserving him.
Keir and I turned down the street to the guild, manoeuvred the doors open, and managed to get the zombie inside the lobby. With a relieved sigh, I switched off my shadow spell. “All right, down the corridor on the…”
“Boo,” said Lloyd. Then he jumped when Keir appeared out of thin air with the zombie on his back. “What the bloody hell did you do?”
“I’ll explain later. The boss didn’t say what she wanted me to do with this guy?”
“She asked me to empty a training room. I guess that’s why.”
At least there weren’t many people around. Carrying a dead body through the lobby wasn’t that unusual here, but the fewer people who knew about this, the better.
“Sorry,” I said to Keir. “I’m afraid you might be the one to get the interrogation.”
“We have bigger problems.” He adjusted his grip on the zombie and followed Lloyd into the corridor, where a door lay open on the right.
Sure enough, Lady Montgomery was in the designated empty training room, accompanied by River. Ilsa stood beside the door and raised her eyebrows as Keir brought the body in.
“You weren’t kidding,” she said.
“Nope.” I moved to let Keir pass with his undead cargo. “Where should we put him?”
“On the floor,” Lady Montgomery said. “We’d better see what we’re dealing with before anyone uses necromancy.”
Ilsa and River both stared when Keir put the body down, exposing the symbol on his back.
“He’s definitely dead,” I told them. “But he was walking around
like one of the living, for days, perfectly preserved. No vampires involved,” I added, for Keir’s benefit. He straightened upright and took a few steps away from the body as though unsure if he was being dismissed. Lloyd stood behind him, gaping openly at the dead man. Even River, one of the most experienced necromancers at the guild, looked vaguely stunned.
Lady Montgomery moved closer to the body, peering at the symbol.
“Yes, I have encountered reanimates like this before,” she said. “But not for a long time. Where did you find him?”
“At the witch market,” I said. “He is—was—a witch. I saw his face in a vision through the tracking spell I used at the…” I glanced at Keir, unsure whether or not he wanted her to know Clancy had been attacked.
He gave a nod, granting me permission to continue.
“Keir’s shifter friend was attacked this morning,” I went on. “And when I used a tracking spell to replay the incident, I saw this man force Keir’s friend to put on a spell like the ones the mages confiscated from the shifter who attacked them. He said he’d been ordered to target the next mage he saw.”
“And then you went to the hotel to warn your friends?” Lady Montgomery guessed.
“I did,” I said. “Then this guy attacked me when I left Keir’s place. The moment I checked the spirit realm and saw he didn’t have a soul, I knew we couldn’t leave him out there.”
Lady Montgomery knelt and examined the body. From her silence, she was likely checking the spirit realm.
River moved in behind her. “When you say you’ve encountered an undead like him before… where, exactly?”
“In the days following the invasion, there were a lot of attempts made to seize power,” said Lady Montgomery. “These beings were used by people without necromantic skills, who needed willing puppets.”
“Wait, it wasn’t a necromancer who did it?” Lloyd said.
“Apparently not.” I glanced at the boss. Having lived through the invasion, it made sense for her to have encountered wannabe-necromancers who stole witch symbols and used them to reanimate the dead. Maybe Asher’s knowledge wasn’t so unusual after all.
“No, only a witch is capable of using this type of magic,” she said. “So, Jas, this man was sent to ambush shifters on behalf of someone who wished to turn them against the mages? If that’s the case, I’ll have to call Lord Sutherland.”
Despite myself, I felt some measure of relief that he’d be shown undeniable proof that the shifters hadn’t entirely been in control of their decisions. Maybe he’d lift the ban on the ambassadors. From the look on the boss’s face, I wasn’t getting off the hook so easily, but I hardly cared.
“What does that symbol mean?” asked Ilsa.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t dare. Not only was it familiar, it belonged to the same language as the glyphs in the forest, and the symbols Lady Harper had taught me when she’d tried to unlock my magic as a teenager. But neither Isabel nor I had recognised the symbol’s actual meaning the way Asher had.
“The symbol belongs to the oldest known form of magic,” said Lady Montgomery. “It was forbidden by the mage council long before the guild as we know it existed. None of you tell a soul outside this room that you saw this unless I give you direct permission, and you’re absolutely not to draw or describe it. The word alone contains power.”
I tasted bile at the back of my throat. So similar to the Hemlocks’ power. Control…
“Of course,” River and Ilsa said, and Lloyd nodded frantically.
“The Mage Lords will be informed,” she added. “And the Council of Twelve.”
I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth. “Would he want to hear it from me, since I’m the witness?”
“I will ask, Jas,” she said. “However, for now, I’m ordering you to go to the medical room for an evaluation.”
“But—”
“The hotel collapsed on you, from what I heard.”
Actually, I got stabbed to death. “All right,” I said, resigned. She’d likely be talking to the Mage Lord for a while, and besides, I needed to update Lloyd on the latest.
Keir caught my arm as I left the room. “I’m fairly sure I was just dismissed. You’re going to the medical room?”
“Guess I have to. Thanks for helping me out back there.”
“Anytime you need me to carry a zombie, let me know.” Keir briefly embraced me, then left.
Lloyd came out of the room behind me. “That’s nothing. I can do the same and I have way more style than he does.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Come on, let’s see what the nurse has to say.”
Shockingly, the nurse dismissed me in two seconds flat as ‘absurdly healthy’. I decided not to tell her about the near-death-by-shifter-ghost situation. Maybe I should have told the boss, but she already knew about the first shifter ghost. If she didn’t know they’d been at the hotel, it was impossible to keep that type of thing quiet with necromancers around.
By the time I’d brought Lloyd up to speed on the day’s events, he was shaking his head at me. “Really, Jas? You had to fight the dude in public?”
“I didn’t know he was a zombie until I was about to kick his arse. It’s not like I had the faintest idea you could use blood magic to revive them.”
“Uh, yeah, neither did I.” He shuddered. “Never heard of this Orion League either, though the name kinda rings a bell. Maybe I read it somewhere.”
“Since when did you actually read the books in the archives?”
He hit me in the arm. “Funny, Jas. Speaking of the archives, she didn’t tell you to get back in there?”
“No, she just told me to report to the nurse,” I said. “You’re not patrolling?”
“Nope, I’m on cleaning duty in half an hour. Unless you have a witch spell for that?”
“I can make one.” I grinned. “Give me ten minutes in my room. I want to grab some food, too.”
“And then? We’re long overdue a zombie marathon.”
“Not to deprive you, but the boss is telling the Mage Lord about those zombies. I need to stick around in case he wants to hear the story from me.”
I stopped at the cafeteria to grab a sandwich to go, and Lloyd did likewise. We ate them on the way to my room, where I’d left some spell circles already set up. He raised his eyebrow at the latest set of sketches on the wall, featuring a group of hellhounds swarming the cemetery.
“Too soon, Jas,” he said.
“I told you, I like to draw out my nightmares so they don’t haunt me when I’m asleep.”
“Keir, too?” He indicated the sketchbook I’d left out on the bed, open to a portrait of Keir.
I pointedly closed it and made for the ingredient stash. “If you’re jealous, I’ll draw you your own portrait.”
“He got you these,” he observed, picking up the box of paints Keir had given me. “Maybe I was wrong about the vampire.”
I grabbed a piece of chalk and sketched a fresh spell circle. “He’s not going to clear off again, Lloyd, trust me.”
“Because he’ll die if he doesn’t feed on your soul.”
I tossed a handful of leaves into the circle. “That’s not why. It’s just a complication.”
“Just a complication?” He snorted. “Have you made any progress on that front? Or has he accepted he’ll be sucking on your soul forever?”
“Have I had a moment’s peace lately?” I grabbed a jar of powder and sprinkled some into the circle. “Nope. Besides, what I’ve learned today has invalidated half the textbooks I’ve ever read. Shifters can be controlled after death. Bodies can be reanimated without necromancy. At this rate the Ancients will show up tap-dancing on the roof.”
“Sometimes I’m glad I’m not in your shoes, Jas.” He made a big show of ducking out of the way when the circle lit up with transparent flames. “Cool magic, though. Pity you don’t have time to try the fun stuff. I heard there’s a new batch of love potions doing the rounds on the university campus.”
“What, you want one for the person you secretly admire?” I picked up the newly formed cleansing spell and tossed it to him, and Lloyd caught it in one hand. “Gonna enlighten me on who it is? I’ve not exactly been paying attention lately, so you could be dating the half-troll cleaner and I wouldn’t be any the wiser.”
“Not him, no.” He slid the cleansing spell onto his wrist. “And now I think about it, I don’t want your Hemlock magic anywhere near any love potions.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t trust Evelyn with that one.” I hid a smile at the horrifying idea of an amplified Evelyn-style love spell.
Then I thought back to his unexpected appearance at the mages’ place. “Hang on,” I said. “Does the person you like have the surname ‘Lynn’?”
A pause. “Maybe.”
“Morgan?” I said. “You like Morgan Lynn? Wait… what were you two doing in that cupboard?”
“Nothing,” he said, his face reddening under its dark hue. “He… doesn’t actually know I like him.”
“Well, then.” I reached for a fresh handful of ingredients. “You’re the one who usually plays matchmaker. Besides, life’s short, and being a ghost isn’t all fun and games. I’d say go for it.”
“Yeah, no. You’re the risk-taker.”
“Risking rejection or risking your life? Pfft.” I turned on my magic and once again, flames sprang into life in the spell circle. “How about this? Tell him you like him, or come with me to the Hemlocks’ forest.”
“What the hell d’you want to go there for?”
“To ask them about those blood magic symbols reanimating the dead,” I said. “And if they had past experience with the Orion League, too.”
They probably did, but then again, they’d been in the forest for a long time. Besides, Evelyn wouldn’t need to use blood magic to resurrect the dead. She had me to do that for her.
Lloyd watched as I picked up the newly formed healing spell. “Jas, it’s your choice, but you nearly died today. You have a sign on your head telling every enemy in the city to come and take a shot at you.”
“He’s not wrong,” Evelyn said from beside me.
Witch's Spirit (The Hemlock Chronicles Book 3) Page 15
