Finn Fancy Necromancy (2 page)

“That can't be good,” I muttered. A bit of drool fell into the frothy brine between my hands.

Oh wow. I was back in my body. A real body. I was alive! And I was home! Wherever home was. The body transfer worked, but I hadn't received the changeling's memories. I had no clue where I was, other than a beach.

Had the other exile made it out? I looked in the direction he'd stood in the Other Realm, but rocky bluffs rose from the spot. If he had escaped, he was probably miles from here given the funky way distance worked between our world and the Other Realm. And I couldn't sense the changeling. He'd most likely returned through the portal only to be destroyed, which just left me and—

The attacker!

I rose, and wavered a bit as I readjusted to having a physical body. I looked around, but I stood alone on the beach. The attacker must have fled.

Crap. It was nice to not have a foot flying at my face and all, but somewhere out there I had an enemy with the juice to launch an attack into the Other Realm. That was most definitely not awesome.

Why would anyone that powerful want to attack me at all? Then again, who had cared enough to frame me for dark necromancy in the first place, twenty-five years ago? Safest not to stick around enjoying the biting cold sensation of wind and water on my skin, just in case.

Skin. I had skin! And it ached in the cold! How awesome was that?

Okay. Focus.

I took a few tentative steps, finding my balance and control as I pushed the floating mane of black hair out of my face. A clear path cut up between two driftwood stumps and through a bank of beach grass to my right, still visible in the surreal glow of twilight. I willed myself to be at the top of the hill. When nothing happened, I remembered that the stuff of reality no longer responded to (just) my will. So I stumbled up the path the old-fashioned human way, one step at a time.

I was grateful in that moment for the restrictions that had been placed upon the changeling by the Pax Arcana. Not so much the ones against using Fey magic, or interacting with my real life friends and family, or even the one against sex, although by the gods if anyone was going to have sex for the first time in my body it was going to be me! No, in that moment I was grateful for the magical boundaries protecting my mind and memories from the changeling's, and the rules requiring that the changeling keep my body in excellent physical health. From the ache that spread through my head and muscles, I doubted I would be walking and thinking at all otherwise, not after that botched transfer. I might not even be alive.

Too bad that hadn't protected the changeling.

I crested the hills, and ahead a mobile home squatted in a wide gravel lot surrounded by evergreen trees. I both hoped and dreaded that this was my home—hoped, because if not then I had no clue where to go next; and dreaded because, well, it looked like a pretty crappy place to live, oceanfront or not. As I moved closer I spotted a two-seater sports car parked behind it.

I knocked on the trailer and tried the door. It opened, and warm air washed over me, smelling of cotton candy and the faint vanilla tang of magic. No glamoured assassins or teenage mutant fairy attack squad burst out of the trailer and jumped me, so that was good at least.

“Hello?” I called, and entered.

The dead woman lying facedown on the floor really clashed with the Liberace decorating aesthetic.

Perhaps I should have been more shocked by the body, but I wasn't. Maybe because I still felt numb from the events of the transfer. Maybe because I'd been raised around death, helping prepare and destroy the bodies of the dead in my family's necrotorium.

Or maybe I really was just stunned by the gaudy awfulness of the changeling's tastes. It was like Rainbow Brite had been given a BeDazzler, a flock of shedding peacocks, and a credit card and told to go crazy.

“Well, this sucks,” I said to the dead woman, meaning her death, not the decor.

The body didn't respond, which was a relief actually. Talking to the dead was one of my arcane gifts, but something I hoped never to do again, not least because it drained my own life away to do so.

I rolled the body over and felt the unpleasant tingle of residual dark magic, like spiders made of ice crawling across my hand. Her head flopped over, and she stared with an expression of frozen horror at the ceiling. A blood-soaked strip of linen covered in silver runes spilled from her mouth, revealing the space where her tongue should have been. Necromancy. Dark necromancy.

“No. Damn it, no!”

Felicity. Our family's au pair before my exile. She might appear human, but she was a feyblood creature, a witch to be exact, though Mother had insisted she was a good witch. She looked older than I remembered, wrinkled as though she'd spent too much time in the sun, but it was her.

What the hell was she doing here?

The last time I'd seen Felicity, she pointed at me from an ARC witness stand and declared that I'd attacked her with dark necromancy. The day before that, I had found her unconscious and bloodied body on my bedroom floor. And the night before that, we were laughing over a game of Trivial Pursuit with my sister and brothers, making up ridiculous answers to the questions.

I'd been made to relive those memories a thousand times in the Other Realm, all the confusion and hurt, the sense of betrayal and anger. But I'd had little choice except to deal with those feelings or go mad. So I turned my anger instead to the Fey who fed off of me, and convinced myself that Felicity had actually done me a favor, granted me a reprieve from the life of sacrifice and necromancy mapped out for me since the day my Talker gift manifested.

I might not have forgiven Felicity, but I wasn't obsessively plotting revenge schemes either. And even if I had been, she was supposed to be hidden away somewhere in the ARC equivalent of witness protection. At most, I'd hoped she would confess the truth someday, and clear my name.

Instead, someone had now killed her, in “my” home, with dark necromancy. Most likely the same someone who attacked my transfer. Had he brought her here by force, or drawn her here with some promise of revenge or reconciliation with me? Either way, she was the perfect choice for a frame job given our history. But why? Why try to kill me
and
frame me? It made no sense.

The bloody rune cloth meant her spirit was warded, so a Talker like me couldn't get Felicity to speak again. And real enforcers might arrive at any minute, tipped off by my attacker or the release of magic. I didn't have time to hang around playing Inspector Gadget.

I considered hiding the body, but there was nothing I could think to do that would keep the enforcers from finding Felicity with magic. And with my luck I'd be caught carrying her into the woods.

I looked from Felicity to the stove. Just one option I could think of; but first things first.

I riffled through the place and found “my” wallet and keys. Nothing in the trailer was really my stuff, not the stuff I left at my family home when I went into exile, and I didn't find anything that seemed like a Scooby clue to explain who was really behind Felicity's death. I went outside and made sure the car started, and was an automatic. I'd never learned stick.

Then I returned inside and grabbed a frying pan, lighter, paper towels, and cooking oil, and moved back to Felicity's body.

Don't worry. Despite what you may have heard, real necromancers don't consume the flesh of the dead. In fact, most of us are vegetarians. That just sort of happens when you can sense life energy lingering in the flesh of anything that once had an active nervous system.

I hesitated, looking down at Felicity. I'd helped to destroy bodies before, but always with respect, following the proper rituals.

“Sorry, Felicity,” I whispered. “May your spirit find peace, may your energy bring light to the darkness.” The words were rote, but I felt a flurry of emotions as I said them: regret, sadness, and yeah, maybe a bit of satisfaction that this feyblood witch had paid in the end for what she did to me. That last bit made me uncomfortable, kind of like bad gas. But the self-examination could come later. Now was time for the running.

I dropped the frying pan on the floor, dumped cooking oil over Felicity and the paper towels, and lit the roll on fire after several fumbling attempts. Then I turned on the gas stove without igniting it, and ran outside.

A sorry excuse for a cremation, and cooking oil wouldn't burn up a body, but when the propane blew it would be good-bye crime scene, hello unfortunate cooking accident. With luck, the body would take time to put back together and identify, and with the mundy fire department and police involved it would complicate the enforcers' own investigation.

I dropped myself into the car, a Miata so the label read, and sped off along the gravel road.

Time to get someplace safe, and figure out who the hell still had it in for me. And that meant my family—possibly in both cases.

2

Our House

I have to say, I was a bit disappointed the car didn't fly like in
Back to the Future
. It didn't even run on fusion or anything cool as far as I could tell. After twenty-five years, you'd think there'd be more changes than making the cars really small.

At least I found driving easy. My body still felt a bit awkward to control and balance, but for some reason controlling the car, something external to me, came more naturally.

I was three minutes down the winding wooded road when a flash and boom caused me to look in the rearview. An orange glow lined the treetops. At least the tree line stood a ways back from the trailer and everything looked well rained upon, so Smokey the Bear would have no reason to chastise me, I hoped.

I soon found my way to Highway 101 North around the Olympic National Rainforest, and finally to Port Townsend, my hometown. The clock in the car said 9:27
P
.
M
. as I passed the first outlying houses and shops.

Unfamiliar streetlights and strip malls had replaced what once was a wooded approach to the small seaside town. But I had no fear that I would find my family home replaced by a record store or 7-Eleven. Port Townsend protected its funky old houses, and our family would never sell that house anyway. Beneath it lay our necrotorium. The work my family performed there—properly disposing of dead arcana and feyblood creatures saturated with magic—had resulted in the land being contaminated with whatever magic managed to escape our capture.

I heard that someone once built a Dunkin' Donuts down near New Orleans, and the round donuts became mini portals to a shadowy corner of the Other Realm. The only way to close the portals and stop the invasion of gremlins had been for a group of enforcers to eat all of the donuts, followed by a pot of mushy lentils. Lentils, by the way, are a quick and dirty cure for ingested magics should you ever need one. In fact, there are few foods less magical than lentils.

Anyway, it turned out the land under the Dunkin' Donuts had been a necrotorium in the long ago, and the records were lost during one of the Fey-Arcana wars. Point being, graveyards and old Indian burial grounds have nothing on necrotorium sites for lingering mojo.

So it was with relief but little surprise that I found my family home standing much as I remembered it, its peaked towers and gabled roof visible over the madrona trees that screened the property from the road.

I spotted movement in a car parked across the street and a little ways past our house. A pale face framed by an equally pale bowl cut leaned forward, watching. No beard. So not the guy who attacked me at the transfer. But there was something familiar about him—

I turned off our street before passing him, and hoped he took no special notice of me.

Memory clicked, and I knew who he reminded me of. Felicity. Which made him one of the Króls, the Germanic clan of feyblood witches that Felicity came from—or escaped from, by her account—when she moved to America. I'd feared they might seek revenge on me for my supposed past crimes against their kin, but I'd expected to have enforcer protection from them when I returned. Unfortunately, until I figured out who'd just killed Felicity, enforcers were the last people I wanted to see. Going to the arcana authorities last time about Felicity's assault had resulted in my exile. I didn't trust her death would lead to better results.

Were the Króls behind the attack on my transfer? Possibly. And equally possible they'd killed Felicity for leaving their clan at the same time they sought revenge against me for hurting her. Witch clans had their own twisted sense of justice that more resembled something from a bad mafia movie than anything sane or logical.

I took the back streets through town and drove around for several minutes to make certain I wasn't followed. The residential streets were imaginatively named. There was “A” street, followed by “B” street, followed by “C” street. You'd think Big Bird had been the founding mayor.

The town had changed quite a bit since I'd left. Before my exile, a clash had begun between wealthy retirees versus the resident hippies, laborers, and artists, a clash that ran like an undercurrent through everything in the town. Clearly, that clash had continued during my absence, evident in the large golf course, cookie cutter mansions, and a lot of new franchise stores and restaurants versus the funky old houses and artsy Ma and Pop storefronts. I wondered how the culture clash had affected the more one-sided tensions of the arcana community living hidden among the mundies.

I glanced in the rearview. Nobody followed me, and I hadn't begun to burst into boils or flames or any other subtle symptoms of a deadly curse. I circled back and parked a couple blocks from our house in the lot of a local hardware store, then snuck through backyards, empty lots, and grassy alleyways to the garden gate behind our home.

I paused, one hand on the cold black iron. I'd hoped to deal with my family—their expectations, and my feelings of being abandoned in exile—on my own terms and on my own time. I looked in the direction of the street where the Król witch waited. For all that I was free from exile, I still didn't have much freedom of choice it seemed. I needed help.