Grave Magic (How To Be A Necromancer Book 4) Read online

  I followed the path, taking turns at random, expecting to loop around to the door relatively soon. But the hall of mirrors just kept going, and my breathing started to get tight, my chest squeezing painfully. The hall did grow brighter as I went but not enough to make me feel less anxious.

  Just enough to let me see the reflections.

  A thousand copies of me paced beside me, above and under me. When I dared to glance at them they stared back. I knew, intellectually, it was just my reflection, but anything longer than a brief glance unsettled me, the expressions blanker than mine, the features slightly alien. I tried not to look, keeping my head down, my hands cupped like blinders around my eyes, but the mirror under my feet was unavoidable. I was afraid of running into any of those mirrors, certain that if I touched them, something bad would happen. I didn't dare think about what it would be. Thinking made it real or at least would make me panic more. I was already nauseous with fear, making a thin, strangled, panicked sound in the back of my throat. I fought not to let it escalate to a scream. If I did, I would never stop. I walked faster, though I knew it would only make me panic more. Where was the damn door?

  "Please let me out," I said, hoping the fucking door knocker could hear my thin voice wheezing. "Please. I'm not going to learn anything in here. There's no point in this. There's no fucking lesson. Please, please just let me out?"

  I gritted my teeth, determined not to scream and give into panicked rage. It wouldn't do any good. The sadistic, goddamn door had decided I needed to go through actual hell for some reason and it wasn't going to let me go until I'd suffered enough to satisfy it.

  "Okay," I hissed, forcing myself to take deep breaths, trying to remember the coping methods supposed to help with this. I'd gone to therapy for a little while when I was younger, but not being able to tell them about my powers had limited how effective it could be, and I'd given up eventually. Maybe I should have stuck with it, because trying to imagine my happy place and breathe through my nose here was really not doing much. "Okay. Okay. Gotta solve the fucking puzzle. All right. What's the lesson? What are you after, you ugly ass-fucking waste of brass? What do you want from me?"

  The door didn't answer, as usual. I wanted to close my eyes, to not have to look at the reflections, but I couldn't shake the paranoid fear that as soon as I did, they would step out of the mirrors and tear me apart.

  "Mirrors, mirrors," I muttered, trying to think it out, to focus on the puzzle rather than my panic. "Why did it have to be fucking mirrors? Because I'm scared of them? You think I'm scared of myself? Is it that basic, you bitch? Gonna make me fight my fucking shadow-self? Did you just run out of fucking ideas? When I get out of here, I'm going to pry you off that door with a crowbar and return you to Home Goods. Bet you're not even actually brass. Huh? Is it even brass plating, you son of a bitch? I bet it's goddamn paint!"

  The door answered by turning out the lights.

  I lost it, screaming, swearing, and crying. I lashed out wildly at anything around me. Full-on complete fight-or-flight panic. Every time my fist connected with a mirror, my fear spiked further. I didn't stop until I'd exhausted myself completely and finally curled up, crouching with my eyes shut and my hands over my ears, on my tiptoes to be in contact with as little of this horrible place as possible.

  The lights returned.

  "Fuck you," I whispered, my voice a cracked ruin from all the screaming.

  I rose onto my feet, shivering as I looked at the mirrors around me. They were tarnished and broken, cracked and rusted until the reflection in them couldn't be seen. Had I done that? I couldn't make myself care.

  It's hard to describe fear exhaustion. It's probably a good thing that most people haven't had to experience it. But when you're at your maximum level of terrified long enough, you run out of the energy to panic. You end up in shock or disassociation or just shut down. But you don't stop being afraid. The fear is still there, still just as intense. You're just shuffling along like a zombie, unable to muster an appropriate fear response. You feel like a raw nerve, every stimulus too much, every muscle aching, but there's nothing you can do. You can't end the fear. You can't rest. So you just keep going, praying it ends eventually.

  I continued walking through the mirror maze, eventually realizing the point of all this bullshit. The fucking door wanted to exhaust me because it wanted me to stop hiding my eyes and look at the reflections.

  The farther I went down the hall, the less they resembled me. It was subtle at first, something in the spacing of the eyes or the proportions. But the farther I went, the more distorted they became, like funhouse mirrors. I was going to smash the door into matchsticks.

  Fear, when too tired to be afraid, was like drowning, like being miles from the shore and fighting to keep your head above water, too exhausted to keep swimming. You can no longer force your body to keep moving to stay alive, and you begin to sink. It's choking on the water flooding your lungs while you're helpless to do anything about it, except it never ends. You never drown. The fear goes on.

  A reflection beside me shuffled along with my same exhausted stumble, but its teeth were too large for its mouth, its eyes black and sightless, a weird, flat parody of my face. Its lank black hair hung over its twisted, unnatural limbs. It looked like the corpse of something that was never really human.

  With a grimace, I reached over and covered the horrible things with my hand, half-wanting something terrible to happen, just to end this.

  Instead, tarnish spread around my hand, hiding the reflection. I still had the death touch from the garden. Thank God. I kept going, using my touch liberally, breaking mirror after mirror, obscuring every reflective inch. I'd take the seven year's bad luck to not have to look at those reflections anymore. They were still getting worse and more twisted. They were wrong in a visceral way that defied description, shifting in a constant state of unnatural wrongness. I took pleasure in covering them with tarnish. Was this what the door wanted? For me to use my powers this way? Was the lesson about appreciating my powers again?

  I rounded a corner, and the maze ended.

  It was not a loop to the blue door as I was used to. I stood before a dead end. A small round room, paneled in mirrors as usual, with a single tall standing mirror in the center. I approached it slowly, expecting the worst, ready to break it if I had to.

  I looked back at myself from the mirror. After interminable hours of twisted reflections, it was almost stranger to see one that looked right. Really right. Even looking in normal, mundane mirrors every day, my fear tended to make me feel like the reflection was wrong somehow. But this one was perfect. It was me, without question, standing there with exhaustion in her red-rimmed eyes, tear stains on her face, her makeup running, which stung my pride a little. Fuck, even trapped in hell in my own mind, my vanity still got to me.

  I reached up to fix my hair and flinched as I didn't recognize the hand coming toward me.

  "Oh," I said, looking down at myself. "Oh."

  I looked down at my bloated, corpse-like body, my twisted limbs. My too-large teeth hung in my mouth. Of course. Of course. It didn't even make my fear any worse. If anything, it felt appropriate. I sat down slowly in front of the central mirror, looking down at my hands.

  "So now I look like what I am," I said, my voice still my own despite everything. "Is that the lesson? I wish you would just tell me. I wish this would just end."

  "Learning is subjective," the voice of the door spoke from nowhere. "The lesson is whatever you need it to be."

  "What is that supposed to mean?" I growled. "You're just bullshitting all this? There's no lesson?"

  "I am not a teacher."

  "Then what's the point?!"

  There was no answer and I snarled in anger, kicking out with my monstrous, twisted feet, smashing a mirror near me.

  "What's the fucking point of it?" I roared, standing up, smashing another mirror with my claws. "Why? Why are you doing this? Why are you making me do this? Why am I in this stupid place
when people need me?! Why are you keeping me here when people are dying?!"

  I ripped a mirror off the walls with my claws and slammed it into another in a great, satisfying crash of broken glass, but no answer from the door. I turned to smash another and froze.

  The reflection was not me. It was the Wolf.

  No, I thought, looking closer at the eyes, not the Wolf. Ethan. His eyes looked back at me out of the skull of the Wolf, teeth, snarled fur, and killing claws. I saw movement and looked in the mirror next to Ethan as Cole appeared in the reflection. His face was half-obscured by a mass of black wings, glittering with eyes, which grew from his head like a tumor. The mass of wings was so large that Cole hung from it like fruit from a strange tree, his untied sneakers not touching the floor. His body hung pale and limp like a strung-up corpse, his hands bloody, clutching a beer bottle.

  In the next mirror, a beast like an elk stood, and I knew it was Gwydion, though no part of him was recognizable behind the bone, horn, and frost. Its stomach was wasted to nothing and hunger gleamed in its eyes.

  The men I loved stood in front of me, twisted into unrecognizable horrors. Had I done this to them? Was this my fault? I searched for an explanation, and then stopped, realizing I was doing the same thing I'd figured out in the first hall, trying to blame myself so that I could retroactively be in control. I hadn't cursed Ethan. I hadn't made Cole deal with demons. I had no hand in what happened to Gwydion.

  No, I hadn't done this to them. Nothing had. This wasn't actually them. They'd never actually looked this way. Not even Ethan. The Wolf wasn't him, it was just—

  It was just how he saw himself. I looked down at my own monstrous body, putting it together. This was how they saw themselves. All of us believed we were monsters. All of us were wrong. We'd all been trying to convince one another without ever accepting it ourselves.

  I remembered Cole's argument with Ethan and felt stupid for taking this long to get it.

  "That's the lesson," I said. "There never was a monster. It's not about controlling my powers. It's not about resigning myself to living with something evil inside me. It's about recognizing that they were never evil to begin with. That I'm not a monster."

  "And what are you, then?" the door asked. "A person? A necromancer?"

  I looked down at my clawed hands, and then at the mirror in the center of the room where my perfect reflection stood.

  "I don't know," I admitted.

  "A lesson for another time, perhaps."

  "I think I'm about done with lessons," I replied, and reached out to touch the mirror, which shattered at the barest graze of my fingers and fell away, revealing the blue door.

  "I'm still going to sell you on eBay," I informed it, opened the door, and stepped through.

  Chapter 13

  On the other side of the door, I found myself among the wisps again. I still didn't know why the door kept bringing me there. Was it supposed to be some kind of reward? Or was it not intentional? Was it like Julius said and I was just crawling through the space behind the walls, accidentally crossing into someone else's apartment?

  Either way, at least I was out of the door. The physical exhaustion lifted away, but the mental exhaustion remained. I was mentally burnt. I wanted a nap.

  I sat down and waited for the wisps to adjust to my presence and start flowing near me again. Both of the previous times, the memory had been kind of pleasant, dead foxes aside. Maybe I'd get one about a beach vacation or something. Or even just a peaceful weekend morning, lying in bed. I just wanted to be somewhere nice, somewhere that wasn't here.

  Of course, things could never be that easy.

  I grabbed a wisp and found myself in a hospital.

  My foot tapped in sync with the flickering fluorescent lights above us.

  The blond man from the parade sat beside me, a few years older now. I held his hand tightly in mine.

  " . . . have to get something for the service on Monday," he was saying. "And then Wednesday is the protest."

  "Do we have time for those anymore?" the person whose memory I was experiencing said, the thoughts a tangle of grief, flickering through anger and despair too quickly to track. "I mean, is that really a priority now?"

  "It's more of a priority than ever," the blond man said, firmly. "We can't let the government keep ignoring this. We can't let it all have been for nothing!"

  "You've done your part," said the person whose eyes I was looking through, who looked at the man like he was the whole world, and they were watching it crumble. "You went to the rally, the marches, you did everything you were supposed to. Do you have to die doing it, too?"

  "Yes," the man replied, without hesitation, though I saw the fear and grief in his eyes, the familiar lines they made on his face. "If that's what it takes. On the front steps of the White House if I can, so no one else ever has to."

  "But why does it have to be you?" the person asked. "It isn't right. It isn't fair."

  "We knew this was a possibility," the blond man said quietly. "It was practically inevitable. We'll handle it. It . . .It could have been anything, you know? It could have been cancer or a car accident or a house fire. It happens to everyone, eventually."

  "Not like this," the other person replied, looking down, gazing at the flickering reflection of patent leather shoes in the linoleum. The blond man squeezed the other person’s hand tighter.

  "This doesn't need to change anything," he said. "I mean, we'll need to do a few things differently, but, this doesn't have to be . . ." He hung his head, swallowed hard, tried to find the words. "I don't want to go through this alone."

  The other person looked up from the linoleum to meet the blond man's eyes.

  "Edmond," the person said softly. "I will never, ever leave you alone. I swear."

  Edmond smiled, relieved despite everything. The person whose memory I viewed took a deep breath and put the grief away.

  "You said Daniel's service is on Monday? What about Rob?"

  "His parents are handling it. They're having the service back in Maine. They don't want anyone but family."

  "Have Vince and Frankie made plans yet?"

  "Vince has everything settled. He really appreciated your help with the costs. Frankie wants to wait a little longer . . ."

  Edmond's voice tuned slowly out to silence, as did the thoughts of the person I was watching through. I listened harder, confused.

  "Enjoying yourself?"

  Surprised, I turned toward the voice on reflex and found that I could move. I slipped out of the body of the person this memory belonged to and stood in the hospital hallway as myself. At the other end of the hall stood the mirror image of the man whose eyes I had just been looking through.

  "I thought I felt someone poking around in here," Aethon said, and though his tone was casual, there was an anger in his eyes that felt like it could kill me where I stood. Divine wrath was in those eyes. "Well? Have you seen enough? Are you satisfied?"

  "I'm sorry," I said, reflexively. "I didn't know—"

  "Didn't know they were memories?" Aethon asked, striding forward. "Or didn't know they were mine? Both are despicable, and both are lies. You knew. You just didn't care."

  I backed up, my heart racing. The hospital had frozen around us. I tried to leave the memory and couldn't. I'd never had to try before, just snapped out of it when it was done. But Aethon held me in this place somehow.

  "Nothing is sacred to you, is it?" Aethon hissed. "Not family, not the sanctity of a man's memories, not even the peace of a deathbed! My one solace is that whichever of you took that candle from his bedside is dead."

  I decided not to correct him about that, still trying to figure a way out of here. I stumbled into a gurney, frozen in place, blocking the hall.

  "No, wait." Aethon stopped his sinister advance, putting a hand to his forehead for a moment as he restrained his anger. "This is an opportunity. Perhaps from here at least I can make you understand what I'm trying to do. Do you even know what I'm trying to d
o with the candle, girl?"

  "You're trying to end death," I answered reflexively.

  Aethon actually applauded, brief and sarcastic. "Well done! You figured something out. I was beginning to think you weren't even trying and that you just wanted the candle for yourself."

  "But you can't end death," I said, finding the courage to fight him.

  "You underestimate me severely," he replied, dryly.

  "No, I mean, you shouldn't," I corrected myself. "The world needs death! The universe needs it! There's a balance—"

  "Wrong," Aethon snapped. "You only believe the world needs it because you cannot imagine a world without it."

  "Uh, I don't know, I've spent a while imagining it," I said. "I think I've got a pretty good idea!"

  Aethon shook his head. "No, you don't. You may have a concept of the chaos in the immediate aftermath, but that is just a transition. Balance and equilibrium are the most powerful force in the universe. There will be chaos, but eventually it will stabilize into a new balance. And that is when mankind will finally be able to move forward."

  I stared at him, lost. He frowned in frustration.

  "Your family told you a story, didn't they?" he said. "About Godfather Death?"

  I nodded warily.

  "And in the story, Death's godson saves someone, at the cost of someone else's life, and Death kills him because Death is fair, yes?"

  I nod again, still confused.

  "It's a lie," Aethon said, with a powerful bitterness. "Do you want to know what really happened to the godson of Death?"

  "It was you?" I assumed.

  "Of course it was me," Aethon scoffed. "Why do you think they still tell the story, even though they've stripped my name and the truth out of it to make it easier to tell?"

  The memory shifted, and I saw the meadow from the first memory, and a dark-haired child played in the grass. A tall figure, not so much a shadow as a void, a hole cut in the world, walked behind him, and whispered in his ear.