No Humans Involved (Otherworld 7)

Had Becky been more seasoned, she'd also have known there was no reason to rob Grady of his segment. He was savvy enough to know his performance would pale after mine and had she suggested it was getting late, he'd have offered to step aside.

Instead, Angelique was humiliated, Grady was insulted, Claudia was outraged on his behalf, and all three stormed off as Becky gushed over my "amazing" performance. I'd alienated both my costars, discovered the garden was haunted by a malicious spirit and falsely raised the hopes of a murdered ghost. All in my first day on the show I hoped would take my career to the ne

xt level. Off to a rousing start.

ONCE I was in my room, my resolve to sneak out and conduct a full summoning wavered. I told myself I couldn't face disappointing Tansy, should she be out there waiting. What if she did know she'd been murdered and wanted me to find her killer? My gut twisted at the thought.

Turning down ghosts who wanted messages delivered was hard enough. As much as I wanted to say, "Hey, do I look like a courier service?" I could be, to a ghost, a once-in-an-afterlife opportunity to get that message delivered, and even if it was something as mundane as, "Tell my wife I love her," it meant the world to them, and it hurt to refuse.

Sometimes, if it was easy enough, I'd do it. But finding or punishing a killer? Not possible. Saying no to message delivery was nothing compared to telling a murdered girl that even if she handed me a name and address, there was no way I could bring her killer to justice.

Still, I'd have to deal with Tansy sooner or later, and deep down, I knew that what was really keeping me out of that garden tonight was fear. Not of the spirit who'd slapped me, but the possibility that no spirit had slapped me. That I was finally losing it.

Madness is the legacy of this "gift"--one that gives me more nightmares with each passing year. Jeremy was helping me to deal with this. He has some experience with psychic phenomena himself, and there's no one better for laying out logical arguments. Not every necromancer goes mad, he pointed out. I'd never denied or overused my power, as was often the cause of the madness. I was otherwise healthy and I had a good support network.

But every time I'm convinced I'm overreacting, that I'm going to drive myself crazy by worrying about going crazy, I see my strong, stubborn grandmother who died strapped to a bed, being fed like an infant, ranting about ghosts even I couldn't see. Then after helping Jeremy in Toronto last fall, I had another image to add--that of a necromancer driven so insane she could barely pass for human.

As hard as I clung to Jeremy's reasonable words, I felt my confidence slipping...and imagined my sanity slipping with it. So, while part of me said, "You're not going crazy, so make contact with this ghost and prove it," another, quieter but more persuasive part said, "Isn't it better just to tell yourself you could make contact, if you tried hard enough?"

No. I wouldn't give in to the fear.

I took my necromancy bag from its hiding place and snuck downstairs.

SICK PUPPIES

I FOUND A GOOD PLACE in the garden--on the other side of a wooden bridge where I'd hear the footsteps of any night walkers coming my way. No one should be surprised to see a spiritualist conducting a ritual, even at 2 a.m., but people like their summonings neat and tidy, with flowery words, herbs and incense. A true necromancer crosses the boundary between this world and the next, and for that, I need the remnants of death.

There's no preset list of items every necromancer uses. It's like a recipe for stew--we take a few common ingredients, test out the variations our families pass along, then add and subtract through trial and error until we have what seems to work best for us.

First, I removed an old piece of grave cloth--a relic handed down from Nan, who claimed it came from a Roman emperor. Walk into a necromancy shop and everything comes from a Roman emperor or Egyptian queen or African prince. It doesn't matter. The power the individual held in life has no bearing on an object's power. It just makes a better story.

Next, vervain, an herb burned to help contact traumatized spirits. Then dogwood bark and dried mate to ward off unwanted spirits and prevent summoning demonic entities. Considering how this spirit was acting, I added an extra helping of the banishing mixture.

I took out a tied bunch of hair. Different hairs, from different people at different stages of life, from infant to elderly, some for each sex. These came from the living. The advantage to hair is that because it's dead cells, I don't need to harvest it from the deceased.

Finally came the true remnants of the grave. A finger joint. A toe. An ear. Bits of bone. Teeth. The bone and teeth were ancient relics, also from my grandmother, also purported to have some wild and glorious history. With the flesh artifacts, I wasn't so lucky. To be potent they had to be fresh. Fresh, thankfully, is a relative term when you're talking about decomposing corpses. But after a year, they had to be burned and the ashes added to a jar. Then they had to be replaced.

I laid them on the grave cloth as prescribed, then put the jar of ashes in the middle.

If Bradford Grady came strolling back here and found me arranging bits of flesh and bone in a symbolic pattern, he'd fall on his knees, thinking he'd finally found concrete evidence of the satanic. Dark magic does exist, but not in the form he imagines. Satanic cults and devil worship belong in the realm of the mentally ill, the attention-deprived and the foolishly desperate. The power of magic lies in the blood. Without that blood, they can't use the power, no matter how many cats they sacrifice.

Now it was time to start the summoning. First I'd test to make sure this wasn't another vampire. I took a container from my bag and removed two locks of hair. I kept them separate to guard against loss. Vampires are the rarest of the races and I only know two.

Like Jeremy and me, Cassandra and Aaron served as delegates on the interracial council, a body of volunteers from each supernatural race who work together on problems that affect us all. When I'd asked Cassandra for a lock of her hair, she'd looked at me as if I were asking her to lop off a body part. Aaron had handed his over willingly, and would always provide more, but I liked having samples from both genders, so I was taking good care of Cass's.

I arranged the hairs. Almost the moment I finished preparing, fingers glided along my arm, as if the spirit had been waiting patiently the whole time.

"Can you hear me?"

The whispering began, distant and off to my left. Something brushed my arm. A finger poked my cheek. At the same time, a third hand lifted a lock of my hair, and the hairs on my neck rose as I realized this meant there was more than one spirit.

I conducted the vampire test. Hands kept touching me, voices whispering, but nothing changed.

"Can you hear me?" I said. "Can you give me some sign that you understand?"

The touches stayed gentle, like the voices, as if whoever was on the other side knew I was working hard to make contact. I repeated the ritual using the regular hair and entreated the spirits to speak or otherwise make themselves known. They just continued the whispering and touching. I redid the ritual. Twice. No change.

I dumped my purse, laying out a pen and paper and scattering some other items. I even smoothed a patch of dirt for finger-writing. The vampire ghost, Natasha, had been able to move objects, and had conveyed "charades"-type messages. Maybe that would work.