Not once during the three weeks since my return had I stepped foot out there. Truth be told, I didn’t want to be standing here right now. But I didn’t have a choice. Not while my palm throbbed with the reminder of an old promise.
All the what-might-have-beens gathered on the fringes of my memory, tightening my throat until a ragged cough sounding too close to a sob broke free. I blamed the dust and choked down the burning ache before it consumed me, fisted my hand and let the burnt flesh sharpen my focus.
The overstuffed couches and reclaimed wood tables had been pushed against the walls to make room for thirteen oak and iron steamer trunks teeming with necromantic paraphernalia. Stacked in rows three high and four wide, they dominated the hand-braided rag rug in the center of the room. Each must have weighed a hundred pounds or more. Only lucky thirteen, the runt of the litter, sat all alone.
Boaz had done this for me, packed up all Maud’s things and stashed them out here after…
After it all went so very wrong.
Once I could breathe again, I extended my burnt palm toward the stacks, and, like a dowser in search of precious water, followed the persistent tug of magic to its source, tensing when the faint energy ebbing above that final trunk nipped at my fingertips.
“Here goes nothing.”
After crossing to the nearest window, I rose on my tiptoes and smoothed my fingers along the top of the frame until they brushed against lukewarm metal. I palmed the magicked skeleton key, right where Amelie had promised it would be, fit its teeth into the mouth of the lock, and twisted until the latch sprang free. I had to throw my shoulder into forcing up the cumbersome lid, and it yawned open on a breath perfumed with rosewater and thyme. Scents that still haunted Woolworth House.
Maud.
The trunk held one item that could be seen with the naked eye, an old-fashioned doctor’s bag the color of midnight and filled with things even darker. Vials clinked within when I hauled it out onto the rug. That was the easy part. The trunk’s lid refused to shut until I sat on it, and the lock fought me for possession of the key until I pricked my fingertip and let it taste me. Satisfied with a few drops, it twisted itself then fell out onto my palm. The bloodthirsty scrap of brass had been forged to obey Maud, but it tolerated me, so there was no point in hiding what no one else could use. But I did anyway. This time in a better place than above the window.
I doubted anyone could breach the wards surrounding Woolworth House, but the carriage house and the garage weren’t as well fortified. Since I lacked the power for composing new sigils, the best I could do was direct the existing ones into a quicker tempo, more allegro than adagio.
The leather bag creaked when I gripped its carved-bone handle with bloodless fingers, its weight both a comfort and a painful reminder that Maud would never restock the depleted supplies within again. I exited the carriage house and gardens before the tears blurring my vision spilled over my cheeks. I hadn’t cried since the night the door clanged shut on my cell, and I wasn’t going to start now.
Retracing my steps up the stone path, I cut across the wide lawn in the opposite direction, powering down my phone so Amelie couldn’t have second thoughts. I also didn’t want the neighbors, her parents, to hear my ringtone and come investigate. The last thing I needed was to add more charges to an already robust arrest record.
Palm extended like a compass needle pointing true north, a pulse of magic guided me across the property line I shared with the Pritchard family. Elaborate flowerbeds created a maze behind their modest house, and I lost myself in its twists until my feet planted themselves at the edge of a bed teeming with drowsy-headed begonias. I knelt on the soft mulch, and dewdrops burst under my weight, soaking my jeans.
Spring had arrived a week ago, tossing clouds of yellow pollen like confetti at its own welcome back party, but the night air still held a bite even if the daytime temps caused me to break a sweat.
“I can do this,” I murmured, placing the bag next to me. “Just like riding a bike.”
Chunks of white gravel borrowed from the driveway formed a rectangular border the size of a shoebox on the mulch. I gathered each one and mounded them near my ankle. A fist-sized, black river rock crowned the design. Written in blue sidewalk chalk on the makeshift tombstone was the word Twitter. Cute name for a parakeet. Not terribly original, but not bad for the social-media-aware seven-year-old who had adopted Keet after my incarceration.
Back when the deceased had been mine, Maud had named him Keet Richards. I was five when she became my legal guardian, and I’m embarrassed to admit how long it took me to unravel the pun. I might still be clueless about Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones fame had I not stumbled across her vinyl collection while searching for monkey bones in the attic one summer.
Holding my breath, I plunged my hands into the rich soil. The soggy edges of a buried shoebox stood up to my fondling despite the dampness from this evening’s thunderstorms. It helped that the deceased hadn’t been buried long. A half hour at most. Longer than that and Mrs. Pritchard would have had a coronary by now considering how her youngest son had rezoned her bed full of prize-winning perennials as a pet cemetery.
I dug my toes into the lush grass and shivered as a garden spider bustled across my heel. I gave three good tugs, and the cardboard coffin pulled free. After dusting off the top, I traced the decorations scribbled in crayon down the sides then lifted the lid. Paper towels folded to resemble sheets on a bed rested high on the dead bird’s chest where he had been tucked between them for one final snooze.
Keet’s silver-white cheeks looked as plump and adorable as I remembered. His feathers as bright yellow as a fresh banana peel. His bill and legs held a reddish tint, and his eyes, when they opened again, would be deep crimson.
That was thanks to his Lutino coloring, not magic, but the effect was eerie all the same.
“Hey, little guy.” I lifted him with care and set about tidying the area so no one would suspect precocious little Macon of playing mortician. “Long time, no see, huh?”
Having been dead for some time, the parakeet didn’t answer.
That would have been creepy.
Fisting the bone handle on Maud’s bag, I hauled it closer. The latches flipped with ease, and I cracked the top halves open, rooting around in the bag’s cavernous belly until my fingers located my favorite round paintbrush in its case. I removed the brush and a jar of crimson ink that smelled of spiced pennies then set them at my knee.
Other necromancers-in-training in my age group had been raised with their familiars, but I had never stayed in one place long enough for a pet until I went to live with Maud. Things might have gone differently had she not sent a softhearted kid to pick up her order of feeder mice. After learning the writhing pinkies were snake chow, I bawled until the store owner, terrified of losing a lucrative contract, shoved a parakeet into my hands to shut me up as he nudged me out the door.
Keet was not the familiar Maud had in mind for her pupil, but she allowed the match to placate me. Sadly, the store owner had a reason for selecting that particular bird, and Keet kicked the bucket two days later. Cheered by the opportunity to use him as a teaching exercise, Maud coached me through inking my first sigils. But I must have smudged one, because bada-bing, bada-boom, I found myself the proud owner of a psychopomp.
I’ll never forget how the blood drained from her face as his wisp of a soul reentered his rigid body, or how she made the goddess sign across her heart thrice with trembling fingers when his tiny lungs caught a second wind.
She enrolled me in public school the next day, where my peers consisted of plain-vanilla humans and the children of Low Society members. She claimed that in order to survive in our world, one had to understand theirs. But how I was meant to grasp the workings of the High Society while masquerading as a mortal, I had no idea. And after I met Amelie and her older brother, Boaz, I stopped caring how I was ever meant to fit into that world of castes, rules and blood magic.
Maud continued teaching me rudimentary herblore and basic warding magic on the weekends, always behind locked doors, and I excelled at both. But that one failure with Keet, who she refused to share air with, had cemented my fate.
Assistant.
The designation still smarted.
A quick dip of my brush, and I painted a modified sigil on my forehead that gave me the ability to perceive souls. Yep. Just as expected, the shimmery whorl of Keet’s spirit drifted in a glittery cloud around him, bound to his corpse and the sigil burnt into my skin by a fine thread so that each of his deaths, and there had been many, summoned me. Using the end of my brush, I disturbed the halo of motes, scattering them into the night. Slowly, oh so slowly, they gravitated back to Keet and reformed as if I had never agitated them.
Here was proof positive that my magic had been wonky from the get-go.
Assistant indeed.
Sitting back on my heels, I rotated his small body in my palm until his belly faced the stars. I dipped my brush and swiped a few symbols on the smooth feathers covering his abdomen. The effect left him slashed with red, as gruesome as a disemboweled murder victim, but the sigils would wash off with soap and water later.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Boaz.” The brush rolled from my fingers, and my heart clanged against my ribs. The urge to glance back at him twitched in my neck, but fear he might vanish like mist if I looked at him head-on kept me staring straight ahead. “Amelie said you got deployed.”
“Yeah, well, I got undeployed.” He nudged the tips of my toes with the blunt edge of his massive boot. “You’d know that if you hadn’t been hiding from me.”
“I haven’t been hiding,” I lied on reflex, shielding my own wounded pride.
“You don’t call. You don’t email. You don’t snail mail.” A growl laced his voice. “Sounds like hiding to me.”
“At least I didn’t run.” I balled my empty fist in my lap. “How is what you did any better?”
“I enlisted.”
“Maud was barely in the ground when you shipped out.”
“You were already gone,” he seethed. “What did you expect me to do? Stay in Savannah? Wake up every morning and see your house sitting empty? Torment myself with the knowledge you weren’t there? That I would never see you again?”