Graveyards, Visions, and Other Things That Byte (Dowser 8.5) Page 6

  Benjamin tapped again.

  Shaking my head, I put the book down beside my cereal bowl and wandered over to open the upper window. The lower ones were fixed.

  Benjamin rested his palms on the dark wood frame. Then he somehow lifted himself, slipped through the tight opening, and landed on the glossy hardwood floor beside me in a single smooth motion.

  Right.

  Vampire.

  It was stupid how easily I could forget what he was.

  Benjamin was already moving through the room, marveling at all the books as if he wasn’t sure which one to read first.

  I shut and locked the window, wandering back to settle at the table with my cereal. “Anything related to magic is shelved to my left and behind me.”

  Benjamin immediately corrected his course and began reading the spines — those that were titled, at least — without touching the books.

  I opened the second of the three volumes I’d selected, flipping from the first to the final pages in the hope that it had an index or a table of contents. No such luck. I’d have to scan the entire text, looking for keywords. I sighed, opening my phone to make notes — and realizing as I did that I hadn’t let Benjamin see Rochelle’s sketch.

  The vampire would likely be thrilled to see the oracle’s magic rendered on paper. Enthralled, even — in the same manner as he was currently enchanted by the books in my mother’s library. But I wasn’t certain I wanted to share it with him. Somehow, the sketch hadn’t meant as much to me when I’d leveraged it for Tony’s tech help. That had felt like … business. But watching Benjamin while he examined the sketch … while he saw me as the oracle had rendered me … felt like it would be intimate. Beyond intimate.

  But that feeling wouldn’t go both ways. Benjamin would be gazing at magic. Not at me.

  Ignoring the ridiculous bent of my thoughts, I started a new note, filling it with possible keywords: cremation, summoning, unidentified remains …

  “What are we looking for?” Benjamin asked, not taking his eyes from the shelves.

  I stifled a smile. “I thought you couldn’t see through witch magic.”

  That got his attention. “The books are spelled?”

  “The magical ones.”

  A wide grin spread across his face. I quickly looked away so that I didn’t get accidentally ensnared.

  “So?” he prompted. “You’re researching something.”

  I nodded. “Summoning spells that’ll work specifically with cremated, unidentified remains.”

  “You need to talk to the ghost of someone who was cremated?”

  “The most I can probably hope for is to access a shade. But yes, for Rochelle. The oracle. She asked me to find her mother.”

  Benjamin delicately pulled a book from the shelf. “Okay. Summoning spells for cremated remains.”

  I looked down at my bowl of cereal. “Yeah. I need something to help me narrow my focus. Pulling more than an impression from ashes is advanced necromancy. But I don’t think you can help with selecting an actual spell. It, um … has to speak to me when I read it. It has to feel right.”

  “But I can help you make a list, at least.” Benjamin smiled thoughtfully, settling down across from me while maintaining the same careful distance he always did. He opened the book he’d chosen and began to read. His hair fell across his brow and he unconsciously brushed it away. His fingers were long, almost delicate looking —

  I tore my gaze away, finished my cereal, and focused on the book in front of me.

  Hours of reading and five skimmed books later, I knew the exact moment my mother stepped into the house — because Benjamin was gone. I literally felt a breeze rather than saw him move. I was partway out of my chair, staring at the open window, when my mother barreled into the library. Her magic was tightly coiled around her — a dark, snakelike smudge ready to strike out.

  Specifically, ready to strike out at the vampire she’d felt in her home.

  I glowered in her direction.

  The ghost of Uncle Walter hovered in the doorway, half hiding behind his niece, half egging her on. He darted his wild eyes around the room, twisting his hands together. My great-uncle had been attached to my mother ever since he’d died, vowing to never leave her side. And his sense of the macabre was warped, even for someone with only a latent ability in necromancy. As a ghost, he continually chose to present himself in the brown tweed suit he’d died in, still marked on his right shoulder by splattered blood from a head wound.

  Uncle Walter also claimed to have been killed by a vampire while defending my mother in a cemetery. What he was doing in a cemetery with a two-year-old after dark, and why his murderer hadn’t actually bitten and drained him, probably had more to do with the broken blood vessels that reddened his nose and his cheeks even in his ‘idealized’ ghost state. Yes, my mother’s uncle was an alcoholic even as a ghost. And I had never seriously believed that a vampire had wandered into a graveyard on the estate of known necromancers, murdered Walter, and then left a baby necromancer behind.

  My mother’s step faltered as she cast her gaze around the library, settling on the pulled-out chair sitting opposite mine at the table.

  I crossed over and closed the window.

  “Ben,” she spat. Her Croatian roots echoed in the name even though she’d never lived in Europe, somehow turning it into an insult.

  “Yes.” I settled back at the table, suddenly incredibly tired. “You didn’t have to run him off.”

  “It’s ridiculous that the witches have partnered you with him.”

  “You and Teresa are friends.”

  “Friends!” My mother’s dark hair fell about her face with the renewal of her anger. Fine streaks of gray where her hair was parted caught in the light. Her eyes were shadowed. Hollow, like she hadn’t slept for days. “Teresa is a necromancer. Vampires don’t have friends.”

  I closed the book I’d been scanning, sliding it to the side and pulling a final unread tome toward me. I didn’t bother fighting any further with my mother. My silence would piss her off more than my words would anyway. Sullen silence — paired with the relationships I was continuing to cement in Vancouver — reminded her that she was of the older generation. And if the elders of the coven didn’t adapt, they were going to find themselves left behind.

  My mother dropped her overnight bag in the wood-cased doorway, striding into the room to her bone collection. Once there, with her fingers slowly caressing mandibles and cranial ridges, her magic settled. Thankfully, Freddie had left over an hour ago. Benjamin had been completely unaware of the leech’s presence. I didn’t like pointing out magical things to the vampire that he couldn’t sense on his own.

  But my mother wielded more power by accident than I did with intention. She was also twenty-seven years older than me.

  “What are you working on?” she asked without looking at me. “Something for Pearl?”

  “No. Rochelle. The oracle.”

  My mother half turned to me then. Suddenly I was all interesting. “Based on a prediction?”

  “She doesn’t make predictions. She sketches visions of the future.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  I flipped the page of the book I was hunched over, really just pretending to read. My eyes ached.

  My mother circled the table, casting her gaze over the books spread across it. “The oracle wishes to speak to the dead?”

  “Her mother.”

  “Ah, I see.” And with that piece of information weighed and rejected as nothing more than routine — and therefore boring — I was uninteresting once again.

  My mother picked up my empty cereal bowl, managing to not launch into a lecture about eating in the library. She really must have been tired. Then she crossed back toward the doorway. Uncle Walter had disappeared, though that didn’t necessarily mean he’d wandered off.

  I half expected my mother to shut off the lights as she left.

  She didn’t.

  But as she picked up her bag, I force
d myself to swallow my pride and ask for her help. The summoning spells I’d found specifically for working with ashes appeared complicated, and none of them had ‘spoken’ to me so far. And to judge by the number of books with the word ‘grave’ in their titles, I had at least thirty more volumes to dig through. I was eager for a shortcut.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “I was scanning cremated remains today —”

  “At Mountain View?”

  The interruption was annoying, but also somewhat relevant. Since Mountain View Cemetery was my claimed territory, my magic should have held a good deal of influence on the grounds. “Yes, but —”

  My mother waved her hand. The one not holding the cereal bowl. “Ashes are advanced work.”

  She started to turn away.

  I stood, trying to temper my anger at being so quickly dismissed. “I had no problem pulling impressions from the interments. Most of them.” Mentioning the blank spot I’d found would only make me look even more inadequate than usual, so I kept that anomaly to myself. “But once I figure out the location of the cremated remains, I’d like to try a summoning spell.”

  “Mory … the older the ashes, the more difficult it will be to connect. How long ago did the oracle’s mother die?”

  I clenched my fists. “In 1995.”

  My mother smiled, not unkindly but a little too smugly. “You’re young, Mory. Other than the vampire, Pearl has you focused on the right tasks. By the time you are in your midthirties, you’ll be able to name every corpse in a graveyard just by stepping through the boundary.”

  “And that’s the point at which you’ll actually pay attention to me, then? Actually teach me something?”

  My mother stared at me, but I couldn’t read her at all — other than her overriding and constant frustration. She turned away, speaking over her shoulder. “Yes. Then I’ll teach you.”

  When I was ready. When I was worth the time investment. When I was worthy.

  A kinder person would have pointed out that all the loss my mother had endured was the root cause of our relationship issues. She’d grown up without parents, guided through her own necromancy by Uncle Walter. She’d fallen in love with a witch, who had died before meeting their second child. Then she’d lost her eldest, who had already been something of a disappointment.

  Though based on the preservation of Rusty’s room upstairs, I might have been making assumptions on that last part. But my only other narrative option was that my mother had loved her son more than she loved me.

  A kinder person would have been able to look past her mother’s faults, embracing the relationship we had managed to forge, no matter how flawed. But whether or not it was an irredeemable fault, I just wasn’t all that emotionally evolved. The distance she maintained — the void between us, reminding me of the empty interment niche I’d stumbled upon that afternoon — hurt.

  I shut the book that I wasn’t actually reading. Then I returned all the books to the shelves and headed upstairs to my bedroom.

  Setting my alarm for 9:00 a.m. gave me four hours to sleep, and an hour to get to the bakery before it opened. I put Ed in his tank and climbed into bed.

  I hauled myself out of bed with my alarm. Then I just stood in the middle of the room, trying to remember why I was up so early.

  Bakery. Checking on Jade. Before opening. Right.

  I tapped the screen of my phone, accidentally snoozing the alarm instead of turning it off. Seriously, why did the app keep switching up which button did what?

  Grumbling, I quickly checked that I hadn’t received an update text that would alleviate the responsibility of the task I’d set for myself, giving me permission to climb back into bed.

  No such luck.

  I cobbled together a passable outfit, then topped it with layers of hand knits, including my red chunky-knit poncho with the beaded fringe. I was awake enough to remember that the clacking while I walked totally irked Jade. Though amusingly, the dowser had begun to visibly force herself to not nitpick every little thing I did that bothered her.

  I tucked Ed into my satchel, double-checking that I didn’t get him tangled in that day’s knitting. I had a stock of reclaimed, Kool-Aid-dyed cashmere yarn that I was in the process of turning into arm warmers.

  Heading downstairs, I grabbed two new books from the library that appeared to contain summoning spells, stuffing both in my bag in case I didn’t have time to come home before heading back to the cemetery. I was working with the assumption that Tony would have a location for Jane Hawthorne’s interment soon. I ate another bowl of cereal — shredded wheat, this time — while finding and reserving a car share a couple of blocks away. Then I was out of the house, and without having run into my mother.

  I dropped the car in a permit parking spot on Yew Street, and another member of the service was already climbing into it by the time I’d wandered the half block to the alley that ran behind West Fourth Avenue. Cake in a Cup, Jade’s bakery, would still be closed, but I wasn’t planning to go in via the front door.

  Approaching the steel exterior alley door situated between industrial-sized garbage and recycling bins, I suddenly felt a bit out of place. I’d never before been a person who felt the need to check up on Jade. It was actually kind of the dowser’s job to check up on all of us. But I had told Rochelle that I would do so if neither of us had heard from Jade or Kandy by morning.

  I knocked on the door, feeling a slight resistance from the wards that coated the building as I did so. Then I stepped back. I didn’t usually feel magic other than necromancy that way, but Jade was uniquely powerful. The knocking was more polite than necessary. The dowser would have known I was outside the moment I brushed the wards. Hell, she might have even sensed me walking up the alley.

  Gabby Talbot opened the door, already frowning. “Mory?” The tall, slim amplifier had her long straight blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. A streak of cocoa powder was on her cheek.

  “Hey, Gabby. You’re baking today? Alone?” Tuesdays through Saturdays were usually Jade’s baking shifts, but she was getting married that week. It would make sense that she’d asked Gabby to cover for her.

  Gabby glanced around the alley behind me, then gestured for me to enter without answering.

  I stepped into the kitchen with my stomach already grumbling at the sweet scents of baking. The sight of a multitude of colorful cupcakes occupying almost every flat surface only increased my appetite. There were full muffin tins by the large ovens waiting to be baked, and tins on the counters that were baked but not iced. A tall steel rack near the swing doors that led to the storefront was more than half filled with trays of cupcakes ready to be placed in the display cases and sold.

  Gabby closed the door behind us, promptly crossing back to the stainless steel counter that took up the center of the kitchen. She was frosting a batch of chocolate cake bases with what appeared to be a chocolate buttercream. “Todd should be here any minute.”

  My stomach rumbled again. I ignored it. Jade would have offered me a stool and a cupcake. Gabby did neither. The amplifier wasn’t terribly friendly, though she and I got along well enough. But no one was as friendly as Jade.

  “So you’re baking?” I repeated my question. “On a Tuesday?”

  “Liam texted,” Gabby said. “Told me I needed to open and bake … until further notice.”

  Until further notice? And since when was Liam running or scheduling or overseeing anything? “And Jade?”

  “Not here.”

  “Kandy?”

  Gabby shook her head, switching frosting bags and carefully piping what looked like plain buttercream icing onto the remaining chocolate bases.

  “So … no one has heard from them since Sunday night?”

  Gabby shrugged, then she glanced my way. “Liam knows something, but he’s not saying.”

  “Jade’s gone away before. For months sometimes.”

  “Without warning? And with Kandy?”

  I wasn’t exac
tly sure how dialed in Gabby, or even the Talbots in general, were with who Jade truly was — and with everything that had happened since Sienna had gone dark. But our current conversation didn’t feel like a great time for a history lesson that it wasn’t my place to teach. “And Scarlett and Pearl haven’t been in?”

  “The bakery was closed Sunday and Monday.”

  Right. “Okay …” I watched Gabby frost another cupcake, not really knowing what else to ask her. Then I wandered back toward the door while inwardly mourning that I was leaving without eating. I could have waited for the bakery to open, then bought a cupcake. But still.

  “That’s it? You were just checking on Jade?”

  I paused with my hand on the doorknob. “Yeah. But I’ll just text her. And Kandy.”

  “Oh. I thought you might want my help with something …”

  I didn’t get whatever the amplifier was hinting at.

  “Tony said he’s looking into something for you?”

  Okay, Tony had a big mouth.

  I must have looked peeved, because Gabby raised her gloved hands. “No details or anything. My brother is as cagey as the rest of you. It’s just, I thought … it might have something to do with Jade being gone. Like an assignment. And if Peggy and I can help, we’d like to.”

  Suddenly I felt like an idiot for being secretive. “It’s nothing like that. Just an unrelated request from Rochelle.”

  “The oracle?” Gabby asked, far too casually.

  Honestly, I was surprised that Rochelle didn’t keep herself locked away at all times. Every Adept thought they wanted their future read. But as far as I could judge by my own experience, it was better to not know what was coming. I just nodded in response.

  And then I remembered what my mother had said about not being powerful enough to work with ashes yet.

  Gabby was an amplifier.

  “Hey, um … you might actually be able to help. What do you think about coming to the graveyard with me later today and giving my magic a tiny boost?”

  Gabby laughed quietly — perhaps because she was remembering the last time she’d boosted my magic. That amplification hadn’t been tiny at all. It had embedded so deeply within me, spilling my magic so far and so fast, that even I had started worrying about what dead things I might awaken. Thankfully, by the time Jade had finally intervened, I’d managed to pull only dead animals forth from the Talbots’ yard — mostly rats, mice, a couple of bats, and a few dead pets. But what were the chances that no humans had ever been secretly buried in a neighborhood that was hundreds of years old? For all I knew, there might even have been an undiscovered First Nations burial site in the area. And I certainly didn’t want to be involved in covering something up of that magnitude.