25 A Little Bit of Necromancy
A Little Bit of Necromancy
“What magic do you have?” I ask Luca.
“Besides being a charismatic, devastatingly handsome genius,” Luca says, “whose potential is being squandered in an underground prison in the middle of Nevada?”
“What magic did you get after the lycanthropy virus infected you?” I press.
“Get me a glass of water,” Luca says. I’m already used to the little favors he asks for in exchange for cooperation. The favors are traded as easily as all the little facts we trade about our lives.
I open the hatch and hold out the glass of water, expecting him to step close to take it.
He doesn’t, staring at the cup hard instead.
The water rises. At first, it becomes a wriggling amoeba, an amorphous mass.
Then it writhes and rearranges into a bird shape, feathers and all, gliding in place.
The bird melts away; a flower grows in its place—a snapdragon, I think.
I reach toward it, and suddenly it’s shaped like a hand and clasps my own in a ghostly cool caress before splattering to the ground.
I draw my hand back, inspecting it, only to find it completely dry.
“I’m a Pisces,” Luca quips.
“What can you use it for?”
“I’m still figuring that out. Water has a lot of force when it’s moving.
Depending on how much energy I can funnel into it, how much water I can access, I can use it like a flood, move stuff around.
Or the opposite. Like a dampener, to stop something in motion.
It’s dry as hell here, not the best working conditions. ”
“Can I see you transform?”
I can’t help but jump when Luca transforms without answering.
A giant wolf stands in Luca’s place. But wolf isn’t exactly an accurate description.
His form is still more humanoid than canine.
He’s huge; he’s got to be at least twice his normal size.
The room isn’t large for a human. It’s tiny for a beast this massive.
Most startling of all is the revelation I would have recognized him without knowing it was him inside the monster.
His eyes are still that specific shade of amber that sees right through my mask.
Luca’s werewolf form has fur the same color as his dark, glossy hair.
An almost-purple undertone ripples across his coat as it catches the light.
I give an involuntary flinch as he puts a paw against the wall, nails screeching slightly. But then I catch the annoyed glint in Luca’s eyes. I can almost hear his voice in my head.
Scared of puppies or something, Reggie? It’s just me.
“You’re kind of beautiful.” The sentence slips out almost reverently, much to my embarrassment. I get the feeling Luca knows I’m blushing. He looks smug.
Of their own accord, my fingers reach for the still-open hatch.
Luca watches, unmoving, as I reach through and rest a hand gently on the paw that is his hand.
There’s a door high in the base that leads out to a recess in the cliffside.
A pocket of air overlooking the open desert, it’s large enough you aren’t in real danger of falling as long as you’re cautious, yet small enough that your body can’t forget the precipice that lies too close for comfort.
Adele doesn’t allow anyone else up there, and anyway, my sisters are terrified of the place, but I’ve followed her before.
I know it’s where she summons her lightning, where her storms originate.
The itch to investigate overcomes my apprehension at being caught spying and the vertigo that comes with the thought of standing near that cliff edge.
Lightning illuminates my path up countless stairs, and I lose track of the times I nearly trip and tumble down, jumping with every round of thunder that reverberates around me.
By the time I’ve made it to the top, the storm has abated.
The door is open, swinging in the wind, and I lurk in the shadows, observing.
Adele is on all fours, trembling from exertion, the ground around her smoldering in patches.
She pushes herself up, rocks back on her knees, and stares up at the night sky.
I’m about to edge backward, creep away before she notices me, when she opens her mouth and screams. Guttural and raw, she empties her lungs, sucks in a breath, and does it again.
The sound stops me in my tracks. Not in fear, but in recognition.
Pity, empathy, and resentment war inside my head.
Lonely, lonely.
“I’m tired,” Adele says, her face still skyward. “What do you want, Regina?”
She sounds resigned. This mood is new.
“What are you doing?” I say, cautiously stepping forward. Fragments of sharp black stone crunch under my feet.
“Something pointless.” She laughs bitterly. “Shouting into the void for an answer I’ll never hear.”
The wind whips at my clothes, my hair, tugging me toward the drop-off.
Answer, hear. My inner voice tugs at me, too, ethereal as the wind.
“What is this?” I say, kneeling to pick up a shard of the black stone.
“Meteorite. I’m testing it as a conduit. I can’t make it work. Can’t seem to find my way deep enough. My magic is broken. I can’t bring myself to jump; something holds me back.” A shiver runs down my neck. This mother I don’t know, the one who answers my questions and admits her weakness.
“A conduit for what?”
“Perhaps the void will never give back what it took from me. Maybe I should give up. Maybe this life is all that’s left to me.”
Warily I step forward, alongside Adele, the cliff edge so close I feel that paradoxical desire to leap just to fly for a moment before I hit the ground. A shooting star whips across the sky, startling an exhalation from me.
Look, listen.
Adele tears her gaze from the sky. “Do you think we’re truly alone here?”
Her question startles a laugh from me. “Alone? In the universe? Like, aliens?”
“Have you never wondered?”
Truthfully, it’s never been something I’ve worried about.
My wonderings are much more earthbound. I wonder if Zara and Meredith are turning out all right.
I wonder if I can save Luca. I wonder about my own life.
The edges of the meteorite fragment press into my fingertips as I turn it over and over in my hand, thinking about my answer.
“I guess,” I say. “But it doesn’t matter to me. If they’re out there or not. I don’t care; it doesn’t affect me.” I shrug.
Adele puts her face in her hands, and for one shocking moment, I think she’s sobbing.
But she’s laughing. In one fluid movement, she’s on her feet, gripping the front of my shirt, pushing me backward.
I take two steps in shock before remembering the cliff edge, stopping just short of stepping into open air.
The meteorite fragment bites into my fingers, drawing blood; then it slips from my grasp and clatters as it falls, down, down, down.
My stomach swoops and I flail before my hands find Adele, and I instinctively cling to her so hard my knuckles turn white.
“Stop, stop!” I plead.
“I could do it; I could push you in, you know. I don’t know if it would count as a sacrifice,” she says. Any trace of weakness is erased from her face.
“I’d pull you in with me,” I say. I couldn’t let go if I tried. “Please, don’t let me go. Please hold on. Mother, please!”
With a snarl she pulls me back, throws me to the ground.
“Go,” she says. My blood has soaked into her shirt.
I don’t know if it would count as a sacrifice, she’d said.
I run.
The shipment is dead bodies. I stare into a bloodless face, the body bag unzipped enough for me to be sure of its contents.
The delivery is a refrigerator truck full of them, at least a dozen.
I attempt some quick mental math as I glance at the cargo.
It could fit what, fifty of them? What the fuck.
What grand scheme does Adele have? I’m not sure if it’s the cold or the unsettling knowledge that I’m surrounded by death that raises goose bumps on my skin, and I rezip the bag and slink away.
When Zara emerges from her sulk, I ban her from my project entirely.
No dungeon, no lab, no looking at my notes.
She seems more shocked than hurt when I refuse to budge.
The look on her face when she discovers I’ve gone above her head and spoken with her tutor about keeping her away from the werewolf project is one I’m familiar with.
It’s the look she wears around Adele. Wariness.
She’s unsure of her footing with me, and it kills me. But it’s for her own good.
I spend as much of the next month as I can in the dungeon, procrastinating, barely remembering I have sisters. Adele lets me get away with it for weeks. Maybe she feels guilty for the cliff incident. But finally, I’m required to show progress.
Adele corners me during one of the rare moments I’m not down in the dungeon.
It’s late; my sisters are probably sleeping already.
The sun slipped away when I was too far down in the earth to notice.
The guilty thought that Luca must be missing the sun by now is flitting across my mind when Adele materializes out of the darkness of the hall before I quite reach my room.
“Where have you been?” she asks, her eyes unreadable, arms crossed like I’m a teenager sneaking back into the house after a forbidden outing. Thankfully, I haven’t yet removed my mask, so she can’t read my face.
“Working on the werewolf project,” I say quickly.
“Not much to show for it, considering how often you’ve been . . . working on it.”
“Brilliance takes time,” I say loftily. Adele is like a piranha. If she smells blood, you’re as good as done, so I clutch my arrogance around me like a raincoat in a tropical downpour.