Finn Fancy Necromancy (41 page)

“I think you were right, actually,” I said. “Everyone I care about has been hurt one way or another since I've been back. And I don't seem to have much of a life to return to anyway. Maybe the best thing, the easiest thing, is for me to just live out my life in exile, reliving memories of when I was happy, at least.”

Dawn skidded the car to a stop on the side of the road. Thankfully, the police were out of sight.

“What—?” I said.

She leaned across and kissed me. Hard. And deep.

When she pulled away, I found myself following after her, not wanting the kiss to end. She pushed me back.

“Did that wake you up, Sleeping Beauty?” she asked.

“I—it didn't bring back any memories, if that's what you mean,” I said. “But it felt … right. I liked it.”

“Oh, I know that's true. There's no way you didn't like it. But maybe now you'll stop talking about how you don't have anything to return to?”

“Uh, yes,” I said and thought of Zeke's warning. “Sorry.”

“Mm-hmm. You'd better be.” She shifted back into her seat and resumed driving. “Besides, there's no guarantee they'll let the girls go if you do what they want, right? So I'd come up with a better plan than surrender if you can.”

“Well, if you have any ideas I'm all ears,” I said. “But like Zeke said, we don't know who the Legion is, or where they are.”

“There's Grayson,” Zeke mumbled, eyes still closed. “You seemed to think that fool's one of them.”

“Maybe.” I turned the idea over for a minute. “No. That doesn't help us. If he's Legion, he'll just want you dead and me exiled, and if he knows we suspect him he might do something to the girls. If he's not Legion, I doubt he could help us in time, and he'd probably have us arrested while he figures it all out, which means the girls would die. Lose lose.”

“Lose lose, my ass,” Dawn said. “There's got to be something you can do, someone who can help. Don't tell me you've come this far just to give up?”

“You think I want to give up?” I said. “I'd love to fight. But in case you didn't notice, we've about run out of family and friends to help us. Zeke, you're one punch away from comatose, Petey's seriously injured, Mort's shot, and Sammy, Vee, Mattie, and Heather are all being held hostage. That leaves just me and you in fighting shape to mount a rescue, and we're not exactly fighters, or I'm not, anyway. And that's assuming we even knew where the girls were, which we don't.”

“Can't we use that Kin Finder contraption to find them?” Zeke asked. “You could use my hair or whatever to find Vee.”

“You'd have to be dead,” I said. “Otherwise, if I tried to find the closest living body that your spirit energy resonates with, it would point right back to you.”

“Fool machine. Well, what about that note they left you? Maybe there's some clue there you missed.”

“It's not like the thing was a riddle. But you're welcome to check it out if you want.” I dug in my pocket for the note, and felt the ring my father made for me still in the coin pocket.

Ring around the rosies. The heart always knowsies—

Why would Father say that? I'd thought his words gibberish before, but what he'd said about his plant, about branches and brains, had made a kind of sense once I understood it. It couldn't be a coincidence that he'd given me this ring, and then the rhyme.

I pulled out the ring, and held it up, examining it in the light of passing cars and streetlamps. It looked familiar, but I couldn't place it.

“What's that?” Zeke asked.

“Hang on.”

What was it Father said when he gave it to me?

Not for the blood, but for the heart … Scribble scroble, nib to noble.

Blood. Scribble. Nib.

The Kin Finder 2000!

I felt like an idiot for not seeing it sooner. But what would this ring do differently?

Not for the blood, but for the heart … Scribble scroble, nib to noble.

“Dawn! Do you have a mobile phone with you?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I need to call Mort. I think we might be able to find the girls.”

Zeke pushed himself up on his elbows. “If you find them, we should call in the enforcers.”

“Some of them might be in the Legion.”

“Well, I'd trust Reggie with my life, and he may know others he trusts. We have to tell someone. Vee's life's at risk, and like you said, we're pretty well outta friends and family.”

“Yes, but—” And just like that, inspiration struck.

We were pretty well out of friends and family, true. But we had plenty of enemies.

*   *   *

We set up camp in the last place the ARC, the Króls, or the Legion would look for us, hopefully—the Króls' house. And bonus, it was already warded to hide its occupants from the ARC. The wards were inactive when we arrived, but it didn't take much to seal up the physical hole from the grenade and patch the arcane holes in the house's protections. With luck, they would protect us from any scrying or curses from the Króls as well.

Zeke slept while I wrote a note by candlelight, and tucked it beneath the gnome statue in the front yard. Then I sat cross-legged in the living room with Dawn while we waited for Mort.

“Tell me about us,” I said.

“This is weird,” Dawn said. “But okay. We grew up together, but we weren't really close until this company wanted to tear down our homes and build condominiums in their place, and our parents didn't have the money to stop it.”

“Really?”

How much memory had I lost?

“Oh yeah. But you had a plan to stop them. We followed this old treasure map to an abandoned restaurant where a family of criminals were hiding out. One of them was this freakish monster-looking dude named Sloth—”

“Oh, for cheese's sake—that's
The Goonies
!”

“Really? You sure?”

“Not funny. I really was worried for a second I'd lost, like, half my memory.”

“You're right,” Dawn said, all humor gone from her voice. “I don't think it's funny at all that you remember the freakin'
Goonies
but you don't remember me.”

“I'm sorry. Really.”

“We watched that movie like a hundred times together.”

“I'm sorry!” I frowned. “I only remember seeing it a couple times with Petey. Until Mort started making him do the Truffle Shuffle.”

“I don't give a rat's butt about Goonies! I want to know why you went and lost your memories of me? Why not your memories of, I don't know,
Gilligan's Island,
or even Heather?”

“It's not like I just gave them away,” I said. “I think they were taken. And if it makes you feel any better, the creature that took them probably wanted whatever in me was most special, most powerful, not just any old memories.”

Dawn frowned. “That shouldn't make a difference. But oddly enough, it does.”

“So, uh, what now?” I asked.

Dawn picked at the carpet for a minute, then said, “You know, when you showed up after all those years away and I realized I still had feelings for you, I figured, what the hell, you probably needed some work, maybe a little counseling, but if the boy I grew up with was still in there somewhere you might just be worth it. Then, bam, it's ghosts and curses and waerwolves, and you with your stupid obsession over Heather. And you know what? I think I dealt with all that shit pretty damn well. So no way I'm going to go through all that and then give up. Shoot, if you'd been in a car accident and hit your head, you might've forgotten a whole hell of a lot more than just me. If Adam and Drew can go on fifty first dates, we can go on two, I guess.”

“Adam and Drew?”

“That can be our next first date,” Dawn said.

I wasn't sure how to feel about that. Dawn was making a pretty big assumption. Just because she wanted to keep dating, that didn't mean that I did. I still didn't really know her. And there was Heather. I remembered Heather wanted space for some reason, but that didn't change how I felt about her.

I also remembered Zeke's warning. Don't break up with Dawn until we figured out the whole memory thing. Probably good advice.

Mort arrived with a bandaged leg, the Kin Finder 2000, and, to my surprise, Petey.

“Who's with Father?” I asked.

“Marcus,” Mort said. One of Father's old friends, and a good choice. I nodded and rushed them inside, carrying the bulky contraption. Pete looked horrible but not as horrible as I would have expected. His wounds were just pink puckered lines now, and the scars from the boiling curse were mostly faded. Pete himself walked a bit stiffly, using the sheathed, silver-coated sword from the library as a walking stick. He looked like he could collapse into sleep at any minute, but he was no longer on the doorstep of death. It was miraculous.

And terrible.

The healing potions may have saved his life and accelerated his normal healing, but this was something more. This was waer regeneration.

I hoped Pete couldn't read the worry on my face.

“Hey, Petey,” I said. “It's good to see you, dude.”

Pete looked at Zeke snoring on the couch, then at the floor, avoiding my eyes. “I'm sorry I didn't stop the waerwolves.”

“Oh man, Petey, you did awesome. I'm just glad you're okay.”

He choked back a sob. “Do you think they're going to hurt Sammy and Mattie? Or … Vee?”

“No, definitely not. We're going to save them, Petey, I promise.” I put as much confidence in my tone as I could and patted the Kin Finder 2000. “This is going to lead us to them. Come on, help me set it up.”

We set up the machine and fetched a pitcher of water, then I activated the machine with some hair from the control braid. The water boiled, the machine made its noises, and the pen on the mechanical arm drew a reference line on the paper below.

I rinsed out the pot, then carefully removed the ring at the tip of the mechanical arm and replaced it with the one Father made for me. It fit perfectly. I slid the pen into the new ring and inserted the tube from the machine into the end of the pen.

I placed a strand of my own hair into the pot and lit the candle beneath it, then laid my hand over the small crystal ball at the back of the machine and concentrated, thinking of Heather—of our many walks to her home, of our many talks on the pier, of our time together yesterday.

The water boiled, the steam passed through the machine with the normal series of
pings
and
clangs
and
sproings
. The noise woke Zeke.

“What time is it?” he asked, stretching.

“Maybe four hours until dawn,” Mort said. “Here.” He tossed Zeke two small bottles.

Zeke held them up, reading the labels. “Energy drinks?”

“Gut bombs. Mattie's friends love them. You'll crash like a bandicoot later, but it should give you what you need to get through the next few hours without your face hitting the floor.”

Liquid dripped down into the pen.

The pen didn't move.

I closed my eyes, focused on how I'd felt as I made the mix tape for Heather. I peeked at the pen. Nothing.

I thought again about our lovemaking and of our kiss in the restaurant. More nothing.

Thinking of kissing made me think of Dawn's kiss in the car, the warmth and passion of it.

The pen twitched, making a line that was barely more than a dot on the page. In the direction of Dawn.

“Uh,” I cleared my throat. “Okay. I think maybe Pete should try.”

“Why not me?” Zeke said. “I'm assuming you fixed this fool contraption so it can work with the living?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “It's still using a kind of spiritual resonance, I think, but it, well, I think it's supposed to locate your heart's true love.”

“Really,” Dawn said, her tone smug as she glanced at the small jot on the paper. “And you thought it would point to who? Heather?”

“Doesn't matter,” I said, using the excuse of carefully removing the pot from the machine to avoid looking at her. “I was just testing it out. Hopefully it will work for Petey.”

“Me?” Pete said, his tone pleasantly surprised.

“Him?” Zeke said, his tone unsurprisingly unpleasant.

“Yes, him!” I said to Zeke. “My brother, who has fought twice to protect your sister. My brother, who is the most honest, loving person I know. My brother, who may be our one chance of finding your sister and saving her. Do you have a problem with that?”

Zeke and Pete both looked at me with startled expressions, then looked at each other. Zeke's face flushed red, but he was either too exhausted or too embarrassed to explode. Breath hissed out of him like steam, and he deflated back into the couch.

“Whatever works,” he said.

“Good.” I rinsed out the pot. “Pete, can I have some of your hair, please?”

I set up the KF2K again, and this time had Pete put his hand on the crystal ball and think of Vee. The machine made its noises, the transformed water drip-drop-dripped into the pen.

The arm lowered. It drew a long straight line out from the center of the page, and rose back up.

Pete's grin lit up the room brighter than any candle.

“Good job, bro,” I said. “Now let's figure out where the line leads.”

Pete made quick work of it, flipping through the Thomas Guide and rapidly zeroing in on our target: the waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, not far off the shore of Fort Worden.

“Are they in a boat?” Zeke asked.

“I don't think so,” I replied. “I think they're in the Marine Science Center. Or beneath it.”

It made sense. The shifting nature of the ocean would help diffuse and confuse any scrying spells and mask any magic being performed beneath it. A perfect, Legiony place to hide.