Incarnate (A Spellmason Chronicle) (32 page)

I attacked the darkness, imagining it a tangible foe when in reality I could see no actual nemesis to contend with. I imagined my wings flaring wide, thrashing back and forth with each strike of my claws against a black wall.

“It’s working,” Alexandra said through the strain of her efforts, which sounded heavy judging by the pained hiss of her words.

The darkness crumbled in piece after slow piece, falling away as my mind filled with glimpses of an image that was slow to reveal itself.

A darkened apartment came to light, its furnishings sparse but feminine, and of a time long past. A woman lay tied on the couch of the living space, but it was not the face of Emily that I had seen in the photographs. This was the face of the other human who had died at her side.

This was Emily’s view upon entering her apartment, finding the light switch unresponsive, but even as she closed the door behind her, she had not processed the whole of what she was seeing. The bound woman screamed out through the gag in her mouth, and as Emily ran to her, a strange figure darted out from the corner of her eye. The burn of rope caught on her wrists as total confusion set in and she fell to the floor.

I had known violence in my life. From my own death through that which I had caused over the centuries in my protection of the Belarus family, but nothing had prepared me for the brutality of this knife attack. The photos of it were nothing compared to the raw pain of experiencing Emily’s death.

When it was done, the face of her attacker came into focus.

I had seen the face of human addiction before, humans wasting away, some through drink and others by the prick of needles. It reminded me of a dark alchemy of sorts, and this young man’s eyes held the desperation of a man crippled by his addiction. What fueled it, I did not know, but it did not matter. All that mattered was that Emily did not expect to find this man in her apartment; nor did she expect the knife in his hand and her roommate already tied up.

A burglary. She had simply been the victim of a desperate man’s attempt to rob her apartment, and for that she and her roommate lost their lives to stroke after vicious stroke of the blade, more than sixty in total. Pain, surprise, panic . . . all these emotions flowed through Emily, but even when the worst was over and her soul lingered in a room now vacant of all life, the crime scene bothered me, but for reasons beyond those I already thought it would.

Emily Hoffert was of course dead, but not in the way the crime scene photos had depicted. Her attacker left, but there was no ritualistic laying out of her body, no symbols written in her blood. None of what the photos had shown me was evident here, although the location was the same as in the pictures.

Emily’s soul remained in the room, that of her roommate nowhere to be found. Judging by the movement of light streaming in from outside the building, time was passing, but before long the door to the apartment opened. To my surprise, a white-marbled gargoyle with a feminine mix of angelic and demonic features ducked its way through the doorframe. She look displeased to see the bodies lying on the floor, but the gargoyle did not seem surprised as she moved to Emily and kneeled down next to her.

“You poor thing,” its voice said. It was unfamiliar to me, but not to the Spellmason.

“Laurien,”
Alexandra said, drawing a piece of my mind back to the anchor of reality.

“What about Laurien?” Caleb asked.

“She’s there,” Alexandra said. “Only she’s a lot more marble-textured and winged than she looked at the Convocation.”

“I’m sorry,” Marshall said. “Did you just say Laurien is a
gargoyle
?”

Alexandra nodded.

“How?” Aurora asked, unable to hold back the disbelief in her voice.

“What the hell is she doing there?” Caleb asked.

“Everyone be quiet and let me find out,” Alexandra said and fell silent as she adjusted her hand on Emily’s chest as if feeling around for the memories.

In my mind’s eyes, this Laurien pulled out a book of her own from a leather satchel she wore over her shoulder. She laid it next to the body, carefully beginning to move and arrange it in such a way that I began to see the patterns that would become the arcane ritual I knew from the photographs. Emily’s soul watched on with a morbid fascination at the gargoyle as she finished laying things out in the way we had both seen in the photograph.

“She is preparing a spell of some kind,” I said.

The gargoyle touched her hands to the outer ring of blood she had formed and incanted words that were foreign to me. Emily’s soul reacted. Her strange curiosity about the circumstances of her human form melted immediately away, replaced by one all-consuming word.

Find.

Before I could even wonder as to what it meant to seek, the answer came from Laurien’s lips.

“Cagliostro,” she whispered in the quiet apartment.

The results were like watching the crime scene where the Butcher had killed Fletcher to enact the same blood-magic ritual. At the word, Emily’s soul shot from the room through the walls of the building, and my perspective flew off with it across the city. I was used to flying fast over the city, but this pace was hard for me to follow although I thought we were headed across the island of Manhattan. I confirmed it seconds later as Emily’s soul flashed into Central Park, the trees and pathways blurring by.

Neither the pathway leading to the clearing known as Strawberry Fields nor the memorial itself existed yet, but I recognized the area of the park nonetheless as Emily shot deep into the woods there. Seconds later her soul met some sort of invisible resistance, slowing as it forced itself through it to suddenly find itself within a vast cemetery. Rolling hills of gravestones flew by, the journey ending only when Emily entered a massive tomb with the name
O’SHEA
on it, coming to rest on one of the raised sarcophagi within.

Anne Elizabeth O’Shea
, its marker read.

“The gargoyle Laurien found the location of the medallion in the mausoleum,” Alexandra said. “I think she took it from the grave of one of the O’Sheas. Decades before the Butcher tried to seek it out.”

Alexandra released the spell and my mind’s eyes closed as if the image of the graveyard was receding down a tunnel. As I came back to reality the world around me returned. I collapsed to my knees, releasing a tension I had not realized had accumulated during Alexandra’s manipulation of me. My chest burned as the gemstones slid back beneath the surface on their knot work of tracks, smoothing over to its unmarred state once more.

Alexandra dropped down beside me, her one hand remaining on Emily’s prone figure. “You okay?” she asked, grabbing my hand with her other as if she could lift me.

I took a moment, composed myself, and nodded, using the stone table to steady me as I lifted myself back up. Emily stirred on the table but with eyes closed made no move to rise.

“Is she . . . ?”

Alexandra checked the spell book Marshall was still holding open, and muttered a foreign phrase, adjusting her hand on Emily. “She’s fine,” she said, “but I think she’s going to need a moment to recover.”

“You mentioned Laurien,” Caleb said. “What did our grand high witchy-poo have to do with Emily’s death? You know, I’ve never trusted her.”

“Hey!” Marshall said, taking offense. “She’s a good customer.”

Caleb shook his head at him. “Oh, sure,” he said. “When she’s not killing our friends . . .”

“Laurien did not kill Emily,” I said, which stopped the two men’s bickering.

“It’s true,” Emily said, attempting to sit up on the table. I took her hand and helped her. She swung her legs over the side of the table and stretched her wings out from under her. “Laurien was there, but I was . . .” She hesitated to say the words as I watched her process the images. “I was already dead.”

“Laurien only used her for a ritual,” Alexandra said. “The same one the Butcher used on our friend Fletcher.”

“Cagliostro,”
Emily said. “Laurien spoke the word.”

“She was seeking out this medallion you told us of,” I said to Alexandra.

“But why?” Caleb asked.

“Because that gargoyle version of her wanted to be flesh and blood,” I said, “and because people in power always seek out more power. My father did so, and so goes it with the head of the Convocation.”

“When Warren finds out that it was Laurien who took his family’s medallion, he’s going to go ballistic,” Caleb said. “And he’s going to have trouble on his hands if he tries to take it back from her.”

“No, he’s not,” Alexandra said.

Caleb laughed at that. “He’s
not
?”

Alexandra shook her head. “Because we’re going to help him,” she added.

“Awesome,” Caleb said, but it did not sound as if he meant the word. “And how will we do that exactly?”

“We’re going to call for a Convocation,” she said.

“That’s not going to happen,” Caleb said.

Alexandra gave him a look more full of stone than any I could have.

“I’m not being a dick,” he said. “You saw what an explosion-filled meeting that was, and that was one that was planned out for months. You’re on trial before them at this juncture, so you don’t get to call the shots. I can’t make that happen. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

“Fine,” she said, and her face filled with defeat, but not for long. “Then call Warren. Tell him I want a meeting with him
and
just Laurien.”

“I’m not sure I can make that fly, either,” he said.

Alexandra walked up to him and took his face in her hands. “I have faith in you,” she said. “I’m not asking for the entire witching and wizarding community here. I just need to meet with the two of them. I’ll even make it easy. I’ll host it at my home on Saint Mark’s. They don’t even have to plan a thing other than to hear me out.”

There was an intimacy to their conversation that filled me with discomfort, and I instead focused on helping Emily down from the table, making sure she was not too rattled from what she had seen.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Caleb said after a minute. “I can’t promise anything.”

When I looked back over, Alexandra had picked up the bag of bones and was already making her way back to the front door of Sanctuary, Aurora and Marshall hurrying to follow.

“I need better than a promise,” she said as she headed up the stairs leading to the door out to Trinity Place.

“What about us?” Emily called out after her.

Alexandra turned at the top of the stairs. “You know how you died now,” she said. “Now it’s time to figure out how you want to live. How you
all
want to live.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“There will soon come a time when the
grotesques
of Manhattan must make a stand,” Alexandra said. “It is up to you for them to be ready.”

I had many a question, but Alexandra did not wait to hear any of them. Instead, she turned back around and got all the way to the door before spinning to face us once more, her eyes landing on Caleb, who had not moved.

She lifted the bag, shaking it to the point that it rattled the bones within.

“Don’t forget to get Laurien to my place,” she said, throwing open the door. “Tell her I have a bone—several, in fact—to pick with her. Plus I’d like to talk to her woman to woman about the kind of jewelry she likes to wear.”

Caleb, Marshall, and Aurora followed after her, leaving Emily and me alone in the middle of the church.

“I fear there are unpleasant times to come,” I said, then turned to her. “How do you feel after what you saw?”

“As horrific as it was?” she said. “Strangely at peace.”

“That must be of some comfort,” I said.

Emily nodded. “More than you can imagine,” she said. “There is a strange and welcome closure in my mind knowing how I died.”

“May that bring you peace,” I said, embracing her.

She returned the gesture, but fell silent for a long time.

“Only . . .” Emily pulled herself away from me and looked up at me. “I don’t think I can stay here.”

“What?” I asked, feeling as if she had struck me. “Emily, why?”

“I remember it
all
,” she said. “My life before that night. I had come to this city wide-eyed and hopeful. My time here was cut all too short, but . . . there was the family I left behind. It broke my heart to leave them in Edina, Minnesota, and my murder must have destroyed them. I can’t stay here . . . I need to go. I need to find them.”

“What about your life here?” I asked. “What about Sanctuary? What about . . . me?”

Emily managed a smile and took my hands in hers. “I think I have done my work here,” she said. “I have laid out a path for those who come to Sanctuary seeking answers. Jonathan is a quick study. It will be fine.” Emily let go of my hands. “As for you, I have seen the great care and affection you have for me.”

“Then how can you leave?” I asked, confusion filling my mind as I fought to process what she was saying.

“You are a good person, Stanis Ruthenia,” she said. “But do not confuse your desire to help me reclaim who I was with actual desire.”

“It is more than a desire to help you,” I countered, but Emily shook her head.

“No,” she said. “It’s not. I know you think it is, but my mind is clear now. I see the way you are with Alexandra. There is something there that you and I can never have. I would not wish to be in the way of that. My heart lies elsewhere.”

“And where is that?” I asked, unable to hide a bit of anger over her trying to assess whom I did and did not care for. There might be truth to it, but in the moment all I wanted was answers from her.

“Edina, Minnesota,” she said. “You spent centuries watching over the Belarus family. I wish to seek mine out and do the same. I need to reclaim that part of my humanity. I need it more than anything.”

I fell silent, lowering my head at her with eyes shut. There was no arguing with her, not about her desire to watch over her family or where she thought my secret heart lay. I kept my questions to myself, but there was only one that I needed to answer.

Was my heart truly bound to another?

Alexandra

I
t wasn’t every day I had unfamiliar company at my place on Saint Mark’s, and frankly having a witch and a warlock at my door was about as welcome as someone preaching the word of Insert the God of Your Choice Here. Nonetheless, I smiled and held my front door open to the two of them.

“Thanks for coming,” I said, gesturing Warren and Laurien inside. The warlock had a natural curiosity in his eyes as he entered and looked around, but Laurien hesitated, looking less than thrilled to be here. In fact, she looked downright put out by it, but after a moment entered.

“You wished to speak with me?” she asked as I shut the door behind her, clearly not wanting to be here a moment longer than she had to.

“This will be worth it,” I said, moving to the steps leading down to the library. “Promise.”

“Let us hope so,” she said. “Warren had to call in a few favors to get me here. I hope this is not a waste of his time as well as mine.”

I hit the bottom of the stairs, waiting for them to join me among the heavy wooden shelves and lush seating before continuing farther back into my building.

“Impressive library,” Warren said as they followed me.

“It’s about to get more impressive,” I said, stepping to one of the bookcases. I reached behind a copy of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
on the top shelf, activating the pressure plate against the back wall. The mechanism clicked and the bookcase swiveled free, revealing the stone door behind it. I whispered my words of power to the massive door, willing it open. I stepped through the opening behind it, finding the familiar comfort of my great-great-grandfather’s guildhall.

Caleb, Rory, and Marshall stood assembled at the large stone table I had formed at the room’s center, one end of it draped over with cloth and the other holding the bag of bones I had taken from the Butcher’s secret court.

Warren came through the door into the guildhall, marveling at the height of the large circular space and its stonework. Laurien entered last, pausing for a moment when she saw all my friends there. Once it was clear none of us had any intention of hostility toward her, her eyes left my group and looked around the hall as she and Warren moved to where we were in the center.

“You recognize this place, don’t you?” I asked her.

Warren raised an eyebrow and gave her a sidelong look, his ring-covered hands folded together in front of him.

Laurien didn’t notice him, but continued looking around the room, her eyes coming to rest on the large glass cabinets full of alchemical mixes along one wall.

“I don’t believe so, no,” she said, then looked back to me, her eyes filled with a strange mix of nerves and anger. “Should I?”

“Oh, most definitely, I think,” I said, not looking away from her, keeping my gaze fixed on her.

Laurien looked over at Warren, and her eyes narrowed to the point that he actually stepped back from her. “You were a fool to bring me here,” she said with a heavy sigh.

Agitated, she turned to leave, but I reached out my will to the door, slamming it shut. The stone door disappeared, its seams fading into the texture of the wall.

Laurien spun around to me. “How dare you! You are dealing with the head of the Convocation here.”

I unzipped the bag and, with little reverence for its contents, upended it. The bones within poured out onto the stone table, clicking and clacking together like bits of dry wood.

“I thought you might like to see this,” I said, grabbing the large box of salt off the table, liberally pouring it over the pile of bones.

“Is that who I think it is?” Warren asked.

“Depends on who you think it is,” I said, waving Marshall over.

He walked to me as I crumpled a bushel of sage over the remains. When I was done, he slid two different vials into my hand.

“The Butcher,” Laurien said. “The remains of Robert Patrick Dorman.”

“You see?” I said with a smile. “It
is
who you think it is.”

Warren moved closer to the table, looking down at them. “How did you finally come by them?” he asked.

“We got the drop on him,” Caleb said, then lowered his voice to a whisper, “even if it was a bit of an accident.”

I shot him a look, then turned back to Warren and Laurien. “I forced him to leave his secret court a bit more hastily than he expected,” I said. “And now there’s one less thing for you to worry about, Warren.”

I unstopped the two vials and poured them together over the bones. The pile erupted into a cold eldritch flame, burning the salt black and consuming the bones until all that was left was a charred pile of ash and the warm smell of sage in the air.

“That doesn’t kill him,” Laurien said, as if angrily correcting a child she thought was being foolish.

“I know,” I said, “but it
is
one step closer to finishing him off.”

Warren could not take his eyes from the pile, looking less relieved than I thought he would. “But no medallion,” he said.

“No, not yet,” I said. “But that’s why I asked you two here.”

I moved to the back end of the table, which was still draped with cloth, and pulled it away. The sight of a second set of bones—the petrified body I had found in our walls—caused the anger to fall out of Laurien, her eyes widening at the corpse.

“Alexander Belarus hid the details of his apprentice well among his books and books of notes, but he
did
still write about an apprentice,” I said. “He even went as far as to hide the name of that apprentice in his notes. This is you, isn’t it?”

The head witch stared at the body for a long moment before slowly nodding. “I’ve certainly looked better,” she said with no humor in the words.

“I think you’d better explain yourself, Laurien . . . before I sage this body and salt it as well.”

“I suppose you leave me little choice in the matter,” she said with little fight in her, but then she met my eyes, a dark power radiating from them. Her demeanor shifted to pure bravado and threat. “Or I could invoke my power and reduce the lot of you to cinders.”

Marshall looked flustered at her response, dropping two of his vials, watching them roll across the stone floor of the chamber. Rory’s posture changed, going from casual with her hands in her back pockets to hands on her hips, more aggressive. Caleb simply remained stone-faced, waiting to see how I was going to handle it. Personally, I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle it. All I knew was that Laurien had touched a raw nerve with me and I was livid.

“Do you think I’m honestly afraid of you anymore?” I asked her as I walked up to her, each step slow and full of purpose. “In the past year, I’ve been threatened by cultists, stone monstrosities, the police, people within your Convocation. All I wanted was to practice art. Not arcane art, mind you. Sculpture, painting . . . these were my passions. You know what I end up doing? Trying to keep the cops from shooting me and my friends. Hopefully figuring out the good
grotesques
from the bad ones, usually finding out by seeing if they swing their claws at me once I’m up close. Peeling entanglement vines from warlocks intent on capturing me. So you get to herd the cats that are the witching and warlocking community. Big hairy deal. You want to fight me—fight
us
—instead of giving me an answer? Fine. You could take that chance, but then you’d be trapped in here. Sure, you
might
be able to power your way out of my great-great-grandfather’s guildhall, but then again, you might not be up to that task. This stone is strong.”

“I
know
how strong it is,” she said.

“Do you?”

The vibe coming off the woman was still intimidating, no doubt amplified by the power lurking just behind her eyes, but I did not move.

“What
do
you know about this place?” I asked her. “What do you know about the Spellmasons?”

“I knew Alexander Belarus,” she said, dropping her anger and hanging her head. “Centuries ago. I was young, ambitious, and seeking power. I thought Alexander a fool. He had such power at his disposal, but what did he choose to do with it? Hide quietly in his secret hall with his singular stone construct.”

“How did you come to know him?” I asked.

“He had heard of our community here in New York after coming here, and approached our Convocation,” she said. “We had heard rumors of his gargoyle, some even claiming to have seen it, but none had met him until he approached
us
. To tell the truth, I think it was to alleviate his loneliness more than anything.”

“He had just escaped to this country fearing the tyranny and reprisal of Kejetan Ruthenia,” I said. “He had only his wife and had lost his first son, replacing him with an eternal one in Stanis. Of course he would want to seek out others with whom he shared the same passion for the arcane.”

“I was an initiate within the Convocation back then,” she said, “but I craved the knowledge and Alexander was all too willing to share . . . at first, anyway.”

“You were his apprentice,” I said. “There is mention of you in his notes, although there is very little said. I mean, he built this guildhall with the clear intention of sharing knowledge. Why would he stop after taking an apprentice?”

“I was the
first
of his students,” she said. “And I would turn out to be his last. Remember, I was young, vain, and wanting for power. Your great-great-grandfather, however, was a man of caution.”

“Of course he was,” I said. “He had already watched the last person he taught back in the old country die. That’s how Stanis was born.”

“He was so cautious that he would not even let me see the creature Stanis,” she said, a bit of bitterness returning to her voice. “I studied alone, and the longer I studied, the more I desired to see the creature, to see the results of his work. But no.”

“You wanted the secrets of his power,” I said. “You wanted to create a golem of your own.”

“And I did,” Laurien said. “Against Alexander’s wishes. ‘Too fast,’ he said, his words only burning away against the fire of my ambition.”

“You needed a soul to complete the work on it, though,” I said. “To animate its form.”

“And what better one than my own?” she asked, sadness in the question. “I would be more powerful than any other. I performed the Spellmasonry myself here in this very chamber. Alexander found me here once I had become a
grotesque
, my new form unconscious from my arcane efforts. He was furious that I had betrayed his wishes, but even more furious with himself for failing me.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Marshall interjected. “How exactly did
he
fail
you
?”

“I understand it,” Caleb said to him. “It’s like when I started showing you how alchemy worked. You were
my
student. If you did well, it reflects on me. If you fail, it also reflects on me.” He turned to Laurien. “Is that about right?”

“Exactly so,” she said. “I fled from this place and never saw the man again. I had achieved immortality, but in doing so I lost more than a master. I lost everything. The Convocation frowned upon my transformation, ostracizing me, leaving me alone in this world.”

“Hold on, now,” Rory said. “You’re looking fit and spry and entirely not made of stone right now. Don’t tell me you just made a full recovery.”

“Of course not,” I said, meeting Laurien’s eyes. “You care to show them what we’re talking about? Why you needed Emily . . .”

Laurien went to the collar of her shirt, drawing it open. A golden necklace lay against her skin, a heavy charm carved with runes of red hanging at the center of it.

“The Cagliostro Medallion,” I said, but even before the words were out of my mouth, the woman before me had begun to transform.

She doubled over with a muffled cry, her skin going a veiny marble white. The back of her shirt tore open. Large batlike wings grew out of her, unfolding. Her frame bulked up in size while somehow managing to keep its femininity, and while she stood taller than me now, it was now in a mix of demonic and angelic forms that had the carving style of my great-great-grandfather’s work.

She rose to her full height and let her wings work back and forth behind her.

“It has been a while,” she said. “I spent years in this form in solitude, all the while regretting what I had done to myself in my selfish quest for greater power. It had removed me from the people I cared about. It had removed me from my kind—from the Convocation. It was many years later that I discovered there was hope.”

“My family?” Warren asked, raising an eyebrow. “We had tried to keep arcane knowledge out of the mainstream, but the O’Sheas have always had a propensity for being a bit larger than life, grandiose.”

“You don’t say,” Rory said with a smile.

Warren ignored her, but Laurien nodded.

“When I heard of the Cagliostro Medallion, I knew I must seek it out,” she said. “The only arcane knowledge I knew for divining its true location was through a dark ritual.”

“Blood magic,” I said. “I watched you do it. You used Emily for it. The same way the Butcher used it to try to seek out the medallion now by using the blood power of our friend Fletcher. I saw his vision, too. Dorman’s spell to find the medallion showed him the Convocation, but it could not actually pinpoint a source for the piece.”