by Nova Nelson
And the most awful thing was that Jasmine’s treatment of me seemed directly related to the fact that I was dating her son. She’d been polite enough to me when I’d been with Tanner. But now… I’d lost her respect by proxy. No one deserved that sort of disdain from a parent. No one.
I unclenched my fists and looked up from where I’d been glaring at a cracked stone in the road. Movement caught my eye across the way, just there in the shadows between a high-end furniture store and a cheese shop. I recognized the figure immediately. It was the same one I’d seen right outside the Ram’s Head Inn. Who was it and why was he watching me?
The fear that had flooded me the first time around only served as fuel for my growing indignation.
I was already marching toward him before I realized my feet were moving. “Hey,” I shouted, very much in the mood for a good old-fashioned fistfight. He turned and headed deeper into the shadows. “Hey!” I called again, and took off after him.
As he turned the corner, he passed through a small sliver of light—enough to tell me he had black hair, but not enough for me to see his face.
His gait was awkward, a little stiff, but undeniably male. I must have recognized it the first time without realizing it, because I’d since filed away the figure as a man. “I just want to talk to you!” I lied, even then fantasizing about a right hook to his stupid chin. That’s what he deserved after watching me from the shadows not once, but twice.
It did occur to me that what I was doing was extremely dangerous. But to be honest, that was part of the appeal when I was so irked.
One more corner then I had him trapped against a fence. Only twenty yards ahead of me stood just the danger I was looking for… and then some. Chasing a mysterious person is much less dangerous than trapping a mysterious person. People do dumb things when they’re trapped.
So, yes, I hadn’t thought this through.
I kept the distance between us. “I just want to know why you’re following me.”
The response wasn’t exactly what I’d expected.
The man gurgled.
Yikes.
And then, even worse, he charged.
“Twenty tines!” I jumped to the side just in time, and his momentum as he lunged sent him flying past me…
…and straight into a patch of light streaming from one of the shop’s back windows.
What. The. Hellhound.
Giovanni Stringfellow, may he rest in peace, glared up at me from the ground, his pupils so large they made his eyes look like black pits. For a moment, we just looked at each other. His expression showed about as much emotion as a baggy T-shirt.
“Giovanni? How…” Then it hit me, and I glared into his empty eyes. “Who are you? Who’s on the other end there?”
But the dead man simply clambered to his feet and took off with that shocking speed again, and I was left standing there with my mouth hanging open and all the hair on my arms pushing out against the sleeves of my overcoat like it was trying to escape.
Our horrible suspicion was correct: there was another Fifth Wind in town.
But I had no idea who he or she was and why they’d come. I had no idea about anything, other than that it was a good idea to hurry my hide back to Ruby’s and not look back.
Chapter Sixteen
“I guess we know where the body went, then,” Ruby said on a sigh. She pulled out a set of small boxes from a trunk near the fireplace and placed them on the parlor table.
“We ought to let Stu know,” I said.
“Oh, we’ll get to that, but first things first. There’s a Fifth Wind out there who seems to have your number.” She paused in her shuffling and frowned at me. “And you’re sure it was a hellhound?”
Only after the shock of the encounter with Giovanni began to wear off (thanks in part to one of Ruby’s strong brews) did I remember the mountain of a thing I’d seen in the alley next to the Ram’s Head on my walk back from Medium Rare two days before. Without the additional context, it’d been easy enough to dismiss, but now it seemed much more likely that I hadn’t just imagined it.
“Hellhound or grim, yes.”
She nodded. “I suppose it’s impossible to tell the difference at a distance. Or really up close.” She tossed a look over her shoulder at Grim where he snored on the rug by the fire. “And I don’t suppose you got a glimpse of its, um…”
She let the question hang until I realized what she was leaving unsaid. “Huh? Oh, no. I wasn’t close enough to see if it was a male or female.”
“Shame. That could have been an important clue as to the sex of the Fifth Wind we’re dealing with.”
“But it’s not always accurate,” I said. Usually a witch and his or her familiar weren’t the same sex, but that wasn’t always the case, as evidenced by both Donovan and Eva.
“Not always, but very often. And it’s less about anatomy than it is energy, the yin and the yang.”
I’d never considered that. But then I remembered Grim’s frequent complaints about Gustav, Donovan’s familiar, and the cat’s prissiness. And Eva’s mountain lion familiar, Zola, had charged a pack of hellhounds without a second thought. But then again, so did Landon’s lynx familiar, Hera. But even still, that made sense. Landon himself wasn’t what one would consider traditionally “masculine”—fist-first thinking and so on—but if Hera got even a lick of raw meat, she could cause some serious damage.
Ruby went on, “I’d take any morsel of a clue I could get at this point. I’m sure Manchester and Bloom will feel the same once we get them up to speed.”
“And when do we plan on doing that?”
“Soon. But first, you and I have some new curriculum to cover. I’d hoped we wouldn’t even touch this sort of thing for at least another few years, but… well, I’d be a fool to let you snoop around all defenseless.”
“And what exactly are we doing?” I leaned over the table from my chair and peered into one of the boxes as she removed the lid. “Sweet baby jackalope! Why do you have all those dead crickets?”
For some reason my mind immediately went to the possibility that I would be asked to eat them. But what she had in mind, it turned out, was even weirder.
“Why do you think? We’re going to resurrect them.”
I groaned.
“Why does this seem like the start of every nightmare I’ve ever had?” said Grim from the floor.
Ruby tsk-ed. “Oh, it’s not that bad, dear. Yes, it’s a little strange at first, and there will be—or at least there should be—a strong bit inside you that shouts at you for doing something so unnatural and potentially disastrous. But I have no doubt you’ll be able to smother that voice without too much trouble. At least that’s what everything in your history tells me. Now.” She set three stiff crickets on the table. “It may actually help you to use your wand for this.”
“What, do I just jab at them?”
“No. Well, sort of.”
I fished it out of my coat by the door and returned, holding it in front of me like a fencer’s rapier.
“Easy where you point that thing,” she said, gently pushing my hand down so the wand didn’t aim directly across the room at Clifford. “Watch me first.”
She grabbed her wand from the drawer where she usually kept it and then returned to stand right in front of the crickets. She took aim at one of the bugs and shut her eyes. “The theory is simple. You must imagine it’s alive and that you are it.”
“I have to imagine I’m a cricket?”
She cracked one eyelid. “That too much of a stretch? You can imagine yourself as a business owner, as a spirit who’s traveled through multiple lifetimes, as a witch, and you can’t imagine yourself as a simple cricket?”
“Sorry, sorry,” I said, cringing.
She rolled her shoulders to relax them and inhaled deeply. “Now, once you can shift your attention from your own perspective to the cricket’s, you need to imagine your body awakening, except it’s not yours anymore, is it?”
She c
ontinued to talk me through each of her steps until finally I saw one of the cricket’s antenna twitch just the slightest. I stared, transfixed, knowing that I was about to watch a fully dead cricket come back to life and hop off the table.
Except it didn’t happen quite like that. Instead, all of the legs popped right off the thing, and the limbless body rolled onto its side.
“Whoops!” said Ruby, opening her eyes. “Well, there you have it. The thing was too long dead. All dried out. No give in the joints at all. But that is an important lesson. The best corpse to take over is a freshly dead one. Clearly our mystery Fifth Wind knew that. But I suspect old Giovanni won’t last much longer. He’s probably fighting a frightful rigor mortis at this very moment. Necromancy can keep the tissues and joints from locking through use, but death will eventually tighten its grip on the physical form and do what happened with the cricket.”
“So, once someone is dead for a while, bringing them back will rip their limbs apart?” Not the loveliest thought I’d had that day.
“Unless the practitioner knows a few more tricks, which I will absolutely not be teaching you or anyone else. We’ve already crossed the line into death magic that is generally of no use to anyone.”
I paused, unsure if I should even bring it up or if it was just going to earn me a lecture.
Oh boy, was I really thirty-three and still worrying about lectures? Seemed so.
“Do you… remember Roland?”
Ruby’s left eyebrow hitched up a fraction of an inch. “That sexy Irish house guest? How could I forget?”
“I was sort of able to… imagine him back into corporeal form, even though he was just a ghost and his body isn’t even in this realm, as far as I know. And even if it were, it’s long disintegrated. What exactly was…” But Ruby was giggling. “What? What’s so funny?”
“You’re talking about erotic magic, dear. That’s a whole branch of Fifth Wind magic that we have yet to explore. And if this universe is a good one, I’ll be long dead before we get around to it. But, yes, I believe you could have brought him back completely and permanently that way. At least from the tales I’ve read.”
I squinted at her. “What kind of books are you reading in that chair all day?”
She shrugged innocently. “Whatever tickles my fancy. Can’t a lady indulge herself sometimes? Besides, it’s technically professional research.” She elevated her chin, daring me to question her reading habits again. But I wouldn’t (though I might borrow a book or two from her shelf later on).
“Anyway,” she continued, “I don’t think the magic you employed on your dreamy lover will work on a cricket. Or rather, I’d sincerely hope not.”
I rolled my eyes. “Okay. Back to the point. How’s any of this supposed to help me when it comes to the dead man out there?”
“Ah yes. There are three ways to defend yourself from a necromanced corpse. The first is through a series of defensive spells that one might learn in, say, Mancer Academy. And that’s assuming the person has the ability to do proper magic.”
“So… not me.”
“Precisely. The second way is by physically overpowering the dead, which might work for someone like Ansel or Darius Pine or, spell, even Jane, but—”
“Again, not me.”
“Bingo. The last way is one you can do, which is to take back the vessel, to steal control from whoever is commanding it. Then you simply tell the bag of bones to stop attacking you.”
“You want me to take over Giovanni Stringfellow’s body?”
“More importantly, I think you might want to do that. Unless you enjoy being attacked?”
“Of course I don’t… It’s just that. Well, I don’t know. I just don’t like the thought of it much.”
She reached over and patted me on the shoulder. “That’s a good sign. So long as you can stand the thought of it more than you can stand the thought of being torn apart, you’ll be fine. Because if there’s one thing to know about reanimated corpses, it’s that they lack body awareness. If you or I try to lift something too heavy for us, our body will tell us to stop because we risk injury. Without that signal of self-preservation, the dead can pull off some incredible feats of strength. Sometimes it costs them a broken bone or torn ligament, but what’s that to them? They can’t feel it.”
I stared at the legless cricket. “Okay, fine. Let’s give this thing a shot.”
Chapter Seventeen
Ruby’s tea helped tremendously, and over the next two hours, I successfully snapped all the legs off of four crickets. Who would’ve thought that was a sign of success in anything?
Once I’d mastered the crickets, Ruby had pulled out a large cockroach. But that was a hard pass from me. Imagining myself as a roach was one of those things that there was probably no coming back from. I claimed I was exhausted and she relented, though I was sure she could guess my real reason for refusing.
Once she went upstairs for the night, I cooked up a late dinner, throwing on a few extra sausages for the three familiars who stared at me with eyes that threatened mutiny if I didn’t.
I split a small loaf of bread and put it facedown on the cast iron to toast it. I could hardly stand the wait, and I didn’t even have a hound’s sense of smell. Once the sausage rested on the toasted bread, soaking it with delicious grease, I summoned up the restraint to wait just long enough to grate fresh cheese over the top. This particular block was the closest thing to smoked Gouda I could find in Eastwind, but of course they didn’t call it that. That was the problem with cheese shopping—in my home world almost all of it was named after the place where it was made, so everything was named something different here. But in my hunt for the perfect queso, I’d conducted countless cheese tastings and made notes of what flavors here corresponded with those from back home.
The smoky cheese melted right away, and I wondered if I had enough control to get some spicy mustard on it before the whole thing magicked its way right into my mouth.
Miracle of miracles, I did. But only just. I moaned as the flavors hit my tongue on that first bite. I would definitely need a couple more before bed. But first…
With my mouth packed full of food, I cut up the other sausages into bite-size bits and set three plates on the ground for the scroungers. I got one more giant bite of heaven before there was a knock on the front door.
“Oo-ot?” I said, trying to chew but knowing immediately I’d crammed way too much in, like a little toddler that has to be told to chewchewchew!
I glanced at the clock. It was late, nearly eleven. Swirls. Must be some sort of emergency. As I got up from my seat, I already missed my sausage roll.
When I pulled open the door, Donovan stared back at me. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I owy oo.”
He cocked his head to the side. “Was that… are you trying to say something?”
I held up a finger to let my saliva catch up with the bread in my mouth, and then I chewed it down and said, “I’m sorry, too. Want to come in?”
“Yeah.”
As soon as he stepped by me, he said, “Uh…” and pointed at something behind me.
Maybe the connection with my familiar was getting stronger, but I knew instantly what Donovan was gaping at.
“Ohhh, you better not, Grim!”
But he had. I saw him just as his front paws left the tabletop, but not before he’d completely downed the rest of my meal.
I sprinted at him, clapping my hands with each word. “Bad! Dog! Bad dog!”
“But being bad tastes so good!”
He’d swallowed it before I could even reach him, and Monster hissed and took a swipe at Grim’s face for his selfishness. He yelped and jumped away, his tail tucked. “Still worth it.”
I sighed as I turned back to Donovan. “Welcome to the pound. You hungry?”
“No, I just wanted to talk. About earlier today.”
I moved toward him and put my hands on his chest. “Don’t worry. I get it. I just spent a day with your
mother.”
He laughed. “I thought she’d be on her best behavior around you. Maybe convince you any hurt feelings were all my fault.”
I cringed. “Not to speak ill of your family, but I got the feeling that was her best behavior.”
He crinkled his nose and wrapped his arms around me. “Was she awful to you?”
“Hmm… not really, but I will say confronting a reanimated dead body in a back alleyway wasn’t the worst part of my afternoon.”
He shut his eyes as if to reset. “Wait, what did you just say?”
I pulled away and set to making myself another sausage while the griddle was still hot. As I explained the events, he flopped down onto a chair at the table and listened quietly. “My dead uncle is just walking around Eastwind? And he’s… spying on you?”
“Listen,” I said, grating cheese before bringing a Grim-drool-free plate over to the table. “I’m not a fan of this either. But there’s more.”
“Yeah, I would assume so.”
“I think there’s something going on with Serena.”
“You mean outside of her terrible choice for a fiancé?”
I nodded. “Without going too much into detail, there are… inconsistencies between their story for why they’re in Eastwind and her actions today.”
“Without going into detail?” he said, and I could hear him pulling away again.
“Don’t you start with that. If you want to know what your brother told me, go ask him yourself. And if you want to fight and storm off again, then be my guest, but it’ll ruin both of our nights.”
A muscle in his jaw ticked as he stared at me intensely through those ice-blue eyes. Then finally he said, “Okay. Fine. I won’t keep bugging you about it.”
I exhaled the breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “Good. So here are some of the questions I can’t get past. The timing of the Fifth Wind in town and your brother arriving just seems too coincidental. Sure, maybe the Fifth Wind could have been hanging around, waiting for the next person to kick the bucket so he or she had a puppet to play with, but it seems unlikely and it doesn’t shed any light on who killed Giovanni or why. It still leaves your brother as the prime suspect.”
