Finn Fancy Necromancy (15 page)

I felt a tingling where Vee's hands touched my head, and my physical senses took on a distant quality, as though I observed them happening to someone else. But at least I was aware of them.

A roar echoed in the distance, and Zeke said in a tone that vibrated with tension, “Stay with it, Vee, I'll be right back.”

And then memory swallowed me.

10

Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)

I woke with a start to R2-D2 chirping and whistling on my
Star Wars
alarm clock, the sunlight already streaming in through my bedroom window.

Ah crap! How long had it been going off? I glanced at the clock. Five minutes to eight. I might still make it.

My fifteen-year-old body was rather unhappy about being up before eleven, especially after a late night of coding “Zorrko,” my latest text adventure about an arcana in Old California. But my entire
TV Guide
strategy for Saturday mornings relied on getting to the television by eight, and went something like this:

I would claim the right to watch
Voyagers!, Ewoks,
and
Droids
. At which point Petey would throw a fit about wanting to watch the
Muppet Babies
and
New Zoo Review
. And Sammy would back him up, knowing I would give in to Pete, and he would be easier for her to then goad into watching
The Smurfs
(as she was obsessed with Smurfette).

At which point I would say fine, but afterward I get to watch
Dungeons & Dragons, Land of the Lost,
and
Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends,
absolutely no buts, takebacks, or requests to play ColecoVision. Once negotiations were complete, I could go back to bed for two hours.

I sprang from bed, made a dash for the door—and tripped over a body on the floor.

A pile of dirty clothes cushioned my fall. I flipped over, scrambling back from the body in surprise. The zippers from a pair of parachute pants dug painfully into my palms.

“What the—”

The body was our au pair, wearing her white sleeping robe, with her hands crossed over her stomach and her blond curls fanned out around her head, free from their normal braid. And there was a red stain on her stomach, over the locus point where magical energy lived. For a second, I thought her dead. But then her chest rose, and fell.

“Felicity?”

She didn't respond. I rushed to her side, shook her shoulder gently. “Felicity! Wake up! What happened?”

She didn't stir.

“Father!” I shouted. “Father, help!”

I'd learned CPR after Johnny's death. But Felicity wasn't dead, didn't need her heart or breathing restarted. She needed a healer.

“Father!” I took her hand. Her fingernails were always dirty from working in the garden. “It'll be okay,” I said, tears welling in my eyes. “Hang on.”

Felicity, who had been with us for two years, since Mother's death, was a feyblood witch from Austria earning her residency status through the ARC. She was twenty years old. She often smelled like Irish Spring. Mort believed he was going to sleep with her. Petey loved her dinosaur-shaped pancakes. Sammy resented her at first for taking Mother's place in any way, to the point where she'd even made a voodoo doll of Felicity, but even Sammy had finally begun to warm up to her.

I found it embarrassing when she washed my underwear.

My door opened. Father looked down at me and Felicity and blinked. “Finn, what did you do?” he asked. He sounded confused. Maybe he was in shock. First Mother's death, now Felicity, dying.

“I don't know what happened! Can you help her?”

“You didn't try to Talk to her, did you?”

“No,” I said. “She's not dead.”

“Good. You get dressed,” he said, and walked away. “I'll call the ARC.”

“What about Felicity?” I asked, but Father didn't answer. I hoped it was just that he was out of hearing, and not because he thought I'd really hurt Felicity.

I looked down at Felicity and said the only thing that came to mind. “I'll find whoever did this to you, and make them pay. I promise.”

*   *   *

“There,” Vee's voice settled over my awareness like misty rain. “A connection.”

*   *   *

“I promise,” I whispered to my mother, who lay in her casket with eyes closed. “I'll make you proud.”

I did my best to ignore the people entering the room in ones and twos behind me, taking seats in the rows of benches. Family friends, neighbors, local arcana, and my uncles, aunts, and cousins, I could feel all of their eyes on the back of my head.

My mind fixed on the small details of Mother's face, the professional observations. Father had done an amazing job with the restoration. I couldn't imagine how difficult that had been for him to work on Mother's face, but the results spoke of his love. ARC Laws said she could not be dissipated by her family, that her magic had to be collected by an impartial other party, but Father had fought for the right to at least prepare her body for the viewing. “Nobody knows her face like I do,” he said.

I was glad for it. She didn't look like the photo beside the casket, a frozen moment—she looked healthy, full of life, with that slight smile at one corner of her mouth that said she was about to share an amusing fact. I didn't want to see her as a lifeless shell. And I didn't want to remember her as she was at the end, struggling against cancer that infected a body made vulnerable by the drain of Talking, laying there an impossibly thin caricature of herself.

“I should have spent more time with you,” I whispered. “I'm sorry.” She was asleep so often near the end, and with the tubes, and the way she looked—tears flowed freely down my cheeks. “I'm sorry.” I was so stupid. It didn't matter how difficult it was for me. I would never get another chance to talk to her. To tell her how much I loved her. To hear her say she loved me.

I felt a familiar tugging at the locus of my being.

A hand clenched on my shoulder. “I know that look,” Father said, his voice rough with emotion. “You can't Talk to her, son.”

“Why not?” I whispered without looking at him. “It's my choice, isn't it? It's my life energy. How is saying good-bye to Mother going to harm anyone?”

He squeezed my shoulder again. “I know. I know it hurts, Finn. You think I want to let some stranger dissipate her? You think—” His voice broke. He continued after a second, “You think I don't want to talk to her again, just one more time, even if it's through you? But that is exactly why the law is not stupid. Don't forget about your great-grandmother—” His voice broke again, and he squeezed my shoulder so hard it hurt.

My great-grandmother had died of grief, or more specifically from Talking without stop to her dead husband until her life energy was used up, and she joined him.

“I only want to say good-bye,” I whispered.

A brief moment of disorientation—the haze of grief—and my father suddenly stood at my other shoulder. I turned to give him a hug.

“Thank you, son,” he said as the hug ended. “Why don't you go and sit until the ceremony begins. I want a few last minutes with your mother.”

I nodded and walked up the aisle, past the gathered relatives and family friends. I didn't meet their eyes but continued out to the entry area where I could be alone for a minute.

More pictures of Mother had been arranged on boards to either side of the double doors. I moved past them, away from them, to the hall where people had hung their coats, where I could wipe at the tears that burned my eyes without being watched by everyone.

“You like
Star Trek,
right?”

I turned, startled as much by the question as the voice. Dawn stood there. It was the first time I'd seen her in a dress, and with bows in her cornrows.

“What?” I asked.

“I saw this one movie where the pointy-eared dude—Spork?”

“Spock.”

“Right, Spock, he died. But they put him in this missile thing and shot him onto this planet that was, like, a paradise.”

“The Genesis planet,” I said automatically.

“Yeah. And someone told me in the new movie, the planet brings him back to life. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, it's messed up seeing your mom in a casket. I know, because I did too. But maybe just think of it like one of those missile things, and really she's just being shot off to paradise, where she'll be reborn.”

“Actually, the Genesis planet became a hell and fell apart. And Spock was reborn because he transferred his consciousness into Doctor McCoy.” I couldn't tell her, of course, that doing that might actually be possible if it wasn't entirely forbidden. Or that the reason my mother got cancer in the first place was because she'd weakened her body and spiritual barriers by Talking to spirits who, as far as I could tell, weren't in any paradise.

“Oh. Shit,” Dawn said. “I suck at this, I guess. Well, here.” She went to her jean jacket and reached into the pocket. She pulled out a Walkman. I'd been asking for a Walkman since the previous summer, but Father said we didn't have the money, and Mother—

I turned away.

“I picked strawberries all last summer to get the money for this,” Dawn said. “This year I'm going to get a ColecoVision. If you want, you can come with me. To pick strawberries I mean, not to get the Coleco. Though you could do that too. Here.” She handed me the headphones, tapping my arm with them to get my attention. “Put them on.”

I did as she instructed. Her tone and manner made me feel that I didn't have a choice.

“I listened to this after my nana died,” she said, and pushed a button on the Walkman. A few seconds later, the music started. The sound quality was amazing, like my father's good stereo.

A man began singing in a deep voice filled with sadness and longing. Leonard Cohen, singing “Hallelujah.” The lyrics didn't speak to my feelings, not really, but the feel of the song, the emotion of it, hit me hard. I didn't believe in any particular god—knowing the truth behind the mundy myths made that a little difficult—and I didn't get the sense that the singer did either, but when he sang the word “Hallelujah,” I burst into fresh tears.

I turned away from Dawn, embarrassed to be crying in front of her. She put a hand on my arm.

The music, and Dawn's touch, felt like they possessed some kind of magic—not one of the five known branches of magic but a power that reached deep within me and tore down the dams holding back my grief. I wanted to talk then, to let my thoughts and feelings come pouring out, but I swallowed the words. Dawn was a mundy, and so much of what I felt and thought was tied in one way or another to our family's magic, and to the Talker gift I shared with my mother. I couldn't share the truth about magic with Dawn, no matter how much, in that moment, I wanted to.

I had some idea then of why Grandfather always said I would never be truly happy with a mundy partner, that when the time came, I should marry an arcana girl.

*   *   *

“Almost there,” Vee said. “I just need to fill in the edges—”

“How much more of this are you going to make me relive?”

“Just enough,” she said. “What?” Her tone suddenly held worry, fear.

“What what?” I asked, but then I realized Vee wasn't speaking to me.

*   *   *

“Grab a partner,” my biology teacher said.

Grab a partner. Words not quite as bad as “pick teams” for a thirteen-year-old geek like me but still less fun than, say, a physical exam.

Then Heather Flowers stood next to me. “Wanna be partners?” she asked.

“Uh,” I replied. Despite my worries about being the last person in the room without a partner, I wasn't sure how to respond. Time slowed down to a bionic crawl as I felt the eyes of my classmates on me.

I knew who Heather was, of course. Her family were arcana, alchemists, though Mother forbade any of us kids from going to their home, and the Flowers family rarely showed up to local arcana gatherings. They were among the black sheep of the local magical community.

But that wasn't why I hesitated. What really made me hesitate was the fact that being a lab partner with Heather Flowers was dangerous. Not in the social reputation sense, though that possibility squatted in the back of my mind like one of the dead clammy frogs waiting for our dissection. No, what made her a risky partner, the reason I felt pretty sure she was talking to me and not one of her fellow brains in the class, was that she tended to make things go boom—in her chemistry class, in photography class, even in home ec. Plenty of students had made cakes implode, but how did you make a cake
ex
plode?

Alchemy gone wrong, I felt pretty certain.

“Have you been, like, sniffing the formaldehyde?” Heather asked.

“What?”

“Well, you're just staring at me like you're totally stoned or something.”

“Oh, uh, sorry.” I glanced around. Everyone else had partnered up. Awesome. “Sure, we can be partners.”

“Bitchin',” she said.

The whole Valley Girl thing had been cool for, like, a week the previous year. Heather had never exactly been on the leading edge of cool. But like me, I guess she hoped to start fresh as a freshman, to put the nerd label from elementary and middle school behind her.

For me, that meant a spiked haircut with a rat tail, a new wardrobe from the thrift stores that looked like Adam Ant's castoffs, and plans to make the creepiness of my family's “mortuary” business work for me rather than against me. I was sure to make new friends any day, and not just the ones in my programming class.

Heather's attempt at reinvention had been even less successful. She did cut her hair short over the summer, Pat Benatar short, and started wearing this cool shirt that buttoned diagonally across the front in a flap like the new Starfleet uniforms. She also stopped wearing her glasses except when reading. But that just meant she walked around squinting all the time. The only groups she joined were still academic groups. And she wore that one same “cool” shirt every other day for weeks.