Finn Fancy Necromancy (3 page)

I sighed and passed through the gate.

Mother's garden filled most of the backyard. After her death, it took on a mind of its own—or rather, its mind was a bit more vocal than other gardens due to the high concentration of magic on the property. Now, its once carefully tended beds had become a mysterious jungle surrounded by a tangled and thorny wall. If I didn't know better, I'd think a Cthulhu cult had moved in and were trying to breed tomatoes and roses together to create a plant of ultimate chaos, destruction, and evil red yumminess.

I skirted the edge of the garden, and approached the back door. As I neared the house, a red glow lit up the darkness to my left and caused me to jump. Then I registered the sickly sweet scent of a clove cigarette, and my eyes caught up with my nose. A woman stood in the shadows, smoking.

“Hello?” I said, prepared to run for my life at the first itch of a curse.

The woman stepped forward into the light from a nearby window, and smiled. She had short-cut black hair, thick black glasses, and a nose ring. She looked familiar, and yet not. There was something of Mother in her face, and something of—

“Sammy?” I asked, surprised.

“Hello, brother. Sneaking in the back way? You do realize Father can't ground you anymore, right?”

“Sammy!” I threw my arms around her. She stiffened for a second, then hugged me back. We stepped apart, and I said, “You still live here?”

“Hell no! I'm here for your welcome home party.”

“Party?” I glanced up at the house. “So the whole family's here?”

“Well, not the uncles and all, but our happy little nuclear disaster family, yeah. The enforcers were supposed to tell you, but I guess they forgot after giving you their lecture, huh?” She dropped her clove and ground it out.

“Anyone else here?” I glanced toward the street, where the pale man watched the house. “Anyone from the local council, maybe?”

Sammy snorted. “As if our family weren't bad enough.”

That might be truer than she knew. One of the many things I realized during my long exile was that someone in my family likely helped in framing me. Our home is pretty well warded against outside magical influence or unwanted guests, yet Felicity had been attacked all those years ago in our home, in my bedroom, and with necromancy. But now that I stood here, about to face my family, I found the idea hard to accept. We were hardly the Brady Bunch, but dark necromancers? Murderers?

“All right, let's get this over with,” Sammy said and turned toward the house. She paused, and turned back. “Look, a lot has changed since you … left, Finn.”

“No doy,” I replied.

“No
doy
? Oh man, I haven't heard that in years. Glad to see you're still a dork.” She looked away. “I actually missed you.” She sounded surprised.

“I missed you too, sis.”

“Yeah, well, you got to enjoy exile from this stupid world. Me, I had to deal with our family.”

“I see you're still a people person.”

“And you're still a smart ass.”

“Hey now,” I said. “My humor is a legitimate coping mechanism. My therapist said so.”

“Uh-huh. Worst money Father ever spent, sending you to an empath.”

“Worse than sending you?”

“Touché. Come on, dear brother, the sooner we get this reunion over with, the sooner I can leave.”

We climbed the creaky steps to the back porch, and Sammy led the way inside to the mud room. The tingle of the house's wards buzzed over me like a waterfall of love bees as we crossed the threshold. I glanced back out into the night before closing the door. Whoever or whatever was after me, I felt a little safer now.

A little.

I turned to find my mother's ghost smiling at me and Sammy. The cascade of straight black hair that had been her pride in life shifted behind her like a cape in a nonexistent breeze, and the glowing tan skin inherited from Grandma Ramirez shone now like brown garnet in a jeweler's case.

“How was school, kids?” Mother asked. Her voice had a distant quality, as though channeled via drive-thru speaker.

“Holy crap,” I whispered. Mother's ghost? This shouldn't be possible.

“
Mira,
interesting fact,” Mother said, a phrase that I'd heard constantly growing up. “The Catholics have an entire vault full of petrified poopies they think might have belonged to Jesus, and they don't know what to do with it all. There's been a fierce war going on for centuries as to whether the holy crap is actually holy, or entirely unholy. On the one hand, it came from the body of their messiah. On the other hand, it is the waste rejected by his body. You would be surprised how many major conflicts in history were really the result of those two factions secretly fighting for power and—”

Sammy sneezed, the kind of sneeze that registers on weather maps, knocking me back a step with her elbow.

“Are you feeling well, sweetie?” Mother asked.

“I'm fine, Mom,” Sammy said. “We have homework to do.”

“Oh. Yes. Of course, sorry dear. Go get yourself a snack, and then right to your homework.”

“Yes, Mother.” Sammy waited until Mother's ghost drifted off, then looked at me. “You okay?”

“Yeah. No. I don't know. How can Mother be here? We diffused her energy properly.”

“Apparently it has something to do with the garden,” Sammy said. “She put a lot of her energy into it. And she's just a ghost, obviously.”

Ghosts were not spirits, or “souls,” but just copies usually impressed on the world by a traumatic death.

“Still—”

“Hey, you're asking the absolute wrong person, remember?”

“Oh. Right. Sorry.” Sammy could channel magical energy, but she was highly allergic to it. That had made her a bit of an outsider growing up, and grumpy whenever the topic of magic came up. More grumpy, that is. “I didn't realize how much I missed Mom's crazy stories.”

“Yeah. It was nice, at first. But, you know, she's pretty much stuck where she was when this echo was created. I've heard the same stories repeated my entire life.”

Stuck where she was at, no memories of the decades since. I was little better off than a ghost.

“Sorry,” I said. “I can imagine it's been hard for you especially, seeing Mom all the time, but it not really being Mom?”

“Sometimes. But not as hard as when Father forgets who I am.”

“Father? What's wrong with—”

A young teen girl burst through the swinging door from the hallway into the mud room, and stopped short when she saw us. She looked amazingly like a fifteen-year-old Sammy. “Auntie Sam!”

“Hi, Mattie,” Sammy said.

“I'm so glad you came!” Mattie said. “Oh my gods, Uncle Finn? It's so cool to finally meet you!”

Mattie threw her arms around me and gave me a hug that would have put a pro wrestler to shame, then bounced back and said, “Dad's really excited to see you. He's in the dining room. I have to run, I'm helping downstairs. Love you!” Mattie ran through a door on the left that led down to the basement.

I blinked, then said, “Is she hopped up on Pixy Stix or something?”

“No. That's just Mattie.”

“Wait.
Uncle
Finn?”

“Oh, yeah, Mort spawned offspring. You're an uncle. Congrats!”

For some reason, this hit me harder than seeing myself and Sammy aged, or even finding a dead body on my return. All of that had felt a bit surreal yet almost normal after what I'd been through before. But seeing Mattie, a girl barely younger than Mort or I had been when I was exiled, and discovering she was Mort's daughter? My brain started to feel like, well, any one of the computers Captain Kirk caused to self-destruct by arguing with it—reality did not compute. I really wasn't the age my brain kept insisting I was. I couldn't just pick up my life where I'd left off, with everyone a little older. I'd missed a lot, lost a lot, in being gone for twenty-five years, things more important than movies and music. Adult things.

I might have been a parent by now.

I might have had a wife by now.

Or at least had sex.

I thought of Heather, the girl I fell in love with the year before exile, the kind of deep, true, certain love that made me feel like I could do anything. Anything except, of course, tell her how I felt.

“Hey,” I said. “You know whatever happened to Heather?”

“Heather Flowers?”

“Yeah.”

“Ask Mattie,” Sammy said. “Miss Brown's her teacher.”

“Who's Miss Brown?”

“Heather.”

“Wait. What? I—Oh! Oh.” Heather had married. Of course.

“Yeah.” Sammy shrugged. “She's divorced now though.”

“Oh?”

“And she had a kid when she was, like, nineteen. And stop saying ‘oh.'”

“O … kay,” I said.

“You can always stalk her online, see what's what.”

“On what line? You mean call her?”

Sammy stared at me as though I'd just asked what music was. “Oh my motherboard,” she said. “You really don't know, do you? And you didn't even know about Mattie. Weren't you supposed to get a bunch of memories from that Fey jerkling?”

I realized my mistake too late. As much as I wanted to trust Sammy, I couldn't know for sure who to trust, not yet. The last thing I wanted my enemies to know was how much I
didn't
know.

“Yeah, of course! I was totally kidding.”

Sammy shook her head, her eyes narrowed. “Nice try, but I can tell something's up. Come on, out with it.”

“It's nothing. I just—something didn't go right in the transfer is all. I didn't get all the changeling's memories.”

“Shit. That sucks,” Sammy said. “Or maybe not. At least you get to experience stuff yourself, rather than second hand. Hell, I envy you. To hear Nirvana for the first time? Or Sleater-Kinney? But look.” She glanced up the hall, toward the dining room entrance, and stepped closer to me. “Don't let on to Mort or the others that anything went wrong with the transfer.”

“Why not?”

“Mort's been running things here, but you know everyone kind of expected that you'd take control, being the Talker and all. And Grandfather definitely wanted you in charge. Or at least, he put all that stuff in his will about wanting a Talker to take over. Mort definitely hasn't forgotten that.”

I shrugged. “Grandfather also wanted someone with children to take over, to continue the line. He didn't know I'd be exiled for twenty-five years.”

“Maybe. But you're still the only Talker left in the family, and that trumps kids according to Grandfather's whacked-out logic.”

“Yeah, well, I loved Grandfather but I never asked to be a Talker, or to run things.” I flinched a bit as I said so, half expecting Grandfather's spirit to appear, slap his thigh, and give me an angry lecture about duty and responsibility. I loved Grandfather and owed him a lot, not just because the knowledge he'd given me saved my sanity in the Other Realm and my life during the attack, but also because I'd felt his spirit watching over me during my exile. I hated the thought of disappointing him. But I also hoped he would understand why.

“Besides,” I added, “most of the biz is just spirit dissipation and collecting the magic anyway. Mort and Pete can do that just fine, especially with Father's help. And Mort's the oldest. That's good enough as far as I'm concerned.”

“Maybe,” Sammy said. “But Mort treats—gods, this is why I avoid these gatherings. I've been here ten minutes and I'm already talking shit behind Mort's back.”

“Look, Sammy, I know you're just trying to help. But to be honest, I have zero desire to pay the price of Talking, or to spend my life around the dead. I'm taking this chance to officially leave the family biz, make a fresh start.” Hopefully with Heather.

“Seriously? Doing what? Your necromancy gifts'll give you about as many career options as a degree in women's history. Believe me, I know.”

“I was thinking maybe I'd make video games, like the Commodore ones we used to play together. I wouldn't be around grief and death all the time, or people bickering over magic. Nobody would have reason to try to kill or exile me. And best of all, making games won't suck the life out of me. I could kick even your butt at writing BASIC before I left, and I had some cool ideas—”

“BASIC?” Sammy shook her head. “Oh, man. You— Wow. You've got a lot to catch up on. Just, please, be careful while you do. Mort'll be looking for any excuse to stay in control, and you shouldn't decide to let him until you get to know him again is all.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Shall we go see him, then?”

We walked down the hall, and through the kitchen. The lingering smells of garlic, vinegar, and baked cheesy goodness made my mouth water, reminding me that I hadn't eaten in, oh, about twenty-five years. An arched doorway led to the dining room. A table long enough for eight seats to a side filled the center of the room, covered in a red cloth and a row of mismatched dishes containing veggies, breads and cheeses, and various bumpy brown entrées, all lit by two electric chandeliers.

I noted with some disappointment a complete lack of pizza.

Two men stood beside the table, talking with their backs to us. I easily recognized my younger brother Peter even from behind. Petey had always been a big guy—not fat, or all muscles, just big, like Bigfoot is big, and when he turned in profile I saw that he still had a round baby face. That face fit him more than the size did, since he'd always had a kind of childlike simplicity to him.

I didn't recognize the second dude until he turned to the side. Mort had grown to look a lot like Father, who looked a lot like Leonard Nimoy. And he appeared to have changed in more ways than just growing older. When I left, he'd been into Michael Jackson and breakdancing, calling himself Turbo Morto. Now, he dressed like Dracula's attorney in a black suit with red shirt. And the Vandyke beard made him look like evil Spock, but with a receding hairline and a diamond in his left (non-pointy) ear.