Grave Mistake Read online

  "You don't know," Gilfaethwy said, voice muffled by the tense set of his jaw as he refused to look at Julius. "You can't understand. To be cut off not just your home but your reality— the isolation of it— how desperately you search for any tiny piece of who you were—"

  "No, I don't," Julius agreed. "But he can."

  He gestured to Gwydion, who was finishing his beer and looking deeply bored of the entire conversation.

  "You are not half as alone as you pretend to be."

  Gil didn't answer, but his crossed arms and bitter scowl made it clear he didn't accept Julius's wisdom. Quiet lingered for a long moment. Ethan had gone back to staring at the table top.

  "So, you've met my family?" I asked Julius to fill the silence.

  "Indeed," Julius confirmed. "Right back to the beginning. The bar looked pretty different back then, obviously, but I had a door in Constantinople. I'm not one of those who pretends the past was better than the present, but the clothing was infinitely superior to anything you can get in a department store, and the beer was incredible."

  I'd glossed over without really noticing the fact that Julius was clearly much, much older than he looked. But I realized the implication of his words now.

  "Have you met Aethon?" I asked.

  Julius gave me a long, measuring look, then stood up.

  "May I borrow her for a moment?" he asked Ethan and Cole. They exchanged a look, then Cole nodded and Ethan stood to let me slide out of the booth.

  "Now, how many curses have you 'encouraged' this way, exactly?" Gwydion asked Gilfaethwy as I followed Julius away from the table.

  "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," Gil replied, sounding even more bitter than before.

  Chapter 2

  Julius led me back past the bar through a heavy curtain. The front of the bar was just a normal pub and mostly served normal humans. The more magical clientele entered through a portal in a hidden alley to the back door. On this side of the curtain, long halls held countless rooms full of tables and booths where magical humans, fae, monsters of all varieties and a few things I was certain had to be aliens mingled over bar food and drinks.

  "See the sigils?" Julius pointed out the marks carved above each door. "They're in the universal magical language. You'll find you can more or less understand them if you look at them long enough. The rooms are roughly themed so that my guests can choose their company and thus avoid as many confrontations as possible. This is neutral ground. Sworn enemies dine here, predator and natural prey, and things with morals so distant from human that we could never attempt to rationalize them. As long as they understand the rules and follow them— primarily just not causing harm to any of my guests or the bar itself— all are welcome. This is one of the safest places on Earth, magically speaking. I've been building the wards for thousands of years. No hostile magic can touch this place, and even many forms of physical violence are impossible. If your Ethan was comfortable living here the rest of his natural life, the wards might even stall his curse. But I doubt he'd be happy with such an arrangement."

  "Don't wizards as old and powerful as you usually find a quest?" I said, remembering something Ethan had told me before. "Like, all the really powerful wizards stay busy deflecting meteors from Earth and stopping Yellowstone from erupting and stuff, right?"

  "Right," Julius said with a chuckle. "Well, if a threat becomes serious enough, I chip in. But this is my quest. Maintaining this place. There's nowhere else like it. There aren't many areas of neutral ground in the Earth or the Other Lands. And none with these protections, or with someone like me enforcing neutrality. Also, it's quite an assumption to call me a wizard."

  He looked back at me and winked.

  He finally stopped in front of a private room and gestured to the sigil. "Can you tell what it says?"

  I squinted at the strange, sharp edged rune, tilting my head. It just looked like a weird shape to me. Meaningless. Although, I supposed, if you looked at it right, that squiggle kind of looked like a skull. And that bit might have been a person? Was it changing as I looked at it? Suddenly, it seemed heavy with symbolic meaning, dense with nuance. Some of the associations I was drawing I was certain wouldn't have made sense to anyone but me.

  "I think it says…" I spoke haltingly, unsure. "For the protected, uh, for the children, no, the... the divine children? Divinely sworn children?"

  "Godchildren, perhaps?" Julius suggested.

  "Right," I said, absorbed in my analysis. "Godchildren of... of, uh, empty-all? Inevitability? He-who-walks-behind..."

  I paused, that phrase ringing a bell, ringing like a strange tuning fork on a sensation I'd been oblivious too, or ignoring, since I touched the candle. No, long before the candle. It had always been there, and that was why it was so easy to ignore. It was the feeling of someone standing behind me.

  "Death," I finished. "The Godchildren of Death."

  "Precisely," Julius confirmed and swept aside the curtain.

  I stepped into the private room and found it empty, the booths and tables dusty. Three portraits hung on the walls, one of which I recognized immediately. I'd seen the same one in my Great Uncle's belongings after he'd died, right before I touched the candle. It was a full-length portrait of Aethon Tzarnavaras, patriarch of our family, possibly the inventor of necromancy itself. He stood before a gray landscape in the noble costume of Byzantine Rome. There was much resemblance between us, from our long black hair to the sharp angle of our noses. In his hand, he held the candle of the Covenant, source of all necromantic energy on Earth.

  "Is that—?" I asked.

  "The portrait your uncle brought back from abroad?" Julius asked. "Yes. He requested it be hung here before he died. He didn't approve of your family's attempt to wipe your ancestor from history. He believed Aethon's mistakes should be remembered and learned from. The other two are his grandson, Alexius Tzarnavaras, who had Aethon banished after he achieved immortality and is generally considered the progenitor of your family in Aethon's place, and Rosamunde Tzarnavaras, his granddaughter many generations distant, the last great necromancer of his direct line, and that last known person to successfully manage a True Resurrection."

  Aethon's grandson looked much like I'd expected, a dour man who had carried the sober lines of age in his face since the day he was born. Rosamunde I'd read about but never seen a picture of. She'd lived in the early eighteen hundreds, leading the Tzarnavaras clan to the Americas. In her portrait, she was thirty-five or forty, wearing a fine dress but barefoot, feet planted wide in the earth, one hand on her hip the other on a tall black staff with the mountains rising behind her. She seemed a mountain herself, her smile stony, her shoulders broad. I had her hair. The candle burned at the top of her staff. Alexius carried it in his portrait as well.

  "Aethon has sat at my table," Julius confirmed, resting a hand on the scarred old wood of the table beneath Aethon's portrait. "As have most of the other members of your family, until recently. Your Uncle Ptolemy was the first in several decades. Before that, this room was often full of your kin and those who supported them."

  I could almost imagine it, the tables full, the quiet air loud with talk and laughter. I could all but see Rosamunde herself sitting proudly here, surrounded by family, a drink her hand, secure in the mastery of her fate. The True Resurrection she'd achieved had been on her seventh son. All six of her previous sons had been born near death, or else encountered some near fatal injury or disease shortly after, and she had wrestled them all back to life, through necromancy, skillful care (she was a midwife and healer of shocking ability for the time), and sheer ferocious determination. The seventh had been born already cold. She wrote, in the translated journal I'd read when I was younger, snatched from my Great Aunt's collection, that Death was in love with her and longed to have a child by her. When she'd refused Death and fought off all Death's attempts to take one of her living children, Death attempted to steal one before it had taken its first breath. She refused Death again, as on
ly a handful of people ever had, and Death never troubled her again. She and all her children lived long, healthy lives and died fast and peacefully when the time came. And the time came only when Rosamunde was satisfied.

  I shook off the memories and the aching desire in my chest to have been here when this room was full of my family.

  "What was he like?" I asked Julius. "Aethon, I mean."

  "Complicated," Julius said, looking at the portrait with a strange, sad frown. "As most good men are." He turned to look at me with those heavy, mournful eyes. "Whatever else he has done, you must believe that Aethon was and is a good man."

  "I'm not sure I can believe that," I said, confused by the assertion. "He tried to kill me, a couple of times. Ethan too."

  "Do you know why he wants the candle back after all this time?" Julius asked. "He's been content to let it remain with his descendants all these years. And no, he has not been dormant or simply sleeping since his banishment. He has been alive and active for all the five hundred years or more since he became immortal. He spent a good portion of it in the Other Lands, but he has been on Earth too. He has been here. I've seen him, steady through the years."

  "You let him in here?" I asked, shocked. "After what he did? I mean, I don't know the details, but I know a lot of people died! A whole city!"

  "You're right," Julius said with a sigh, looking back at the portrait. "You don't know the details."

  "Do you?" I asked. "Do you know what he did, why he wants the candle again?"

  "I know what he did," Julius replied. "And no, I won't tell you. That really is something better forgotten. But I couldn't have allowed him back here if I didn't know. And I wouldn't have chanced it if I wasn't certain. I don't make exceptions, Vexa. If all this with Gil doesn't convince you of that, nothing will. There aren't a lot of immortals on Earth, and fewer who I consider friends."

  He looked back towards the portrait of Aethon, expression distant.

  "I don't know why he wants the Candle. But I can assure you, he has a good reason. He would never endanger one of his own descendants without a very, very good reason. He made a mistake once, threw himself at a goal without consideration of the consequences. It cost him dearly. He won't make that mistake again. Whatever task he's set himself to, he is absolutely certain that it is the right choice."

  I hesitated, suddenly unsure. Julius certainly knew the man better than I did. And he was older than dirt and clearly powerful. Odds were that he was right about Aethon. But that wasn't the question, was it?

  "He's certain it's the right choice," I said, frowning. "But that doesn't mean it really is."

  Julius smiled at me.

  "Vexa is observant," he said and chuckled, shaking his head. "But that is what you're up against, Vexatious Tzarnavaras. Absolute certainty. More than his age, more than his power and immortality, that is the danger of what you're attempting. You are trying to stop a man with total, unshakable faith. Rosamunde did not get her stubborn resilience from nowhere. He will not be moved. If you learn what he's attempting and you don't agree, you won't be able to change his mind. You will, in all likelihood, have to kill him. Are you prepared for that?"

  I thought about it for a moment, and a brief flash of anger made me want to answer yes. But I hesitated, then shook my head.

  "No," I told him. "Not remotely. I can't even kill spiders."

  "Good," he said with a nod. "I would have had no hope for you at all if you'd said yes. You might actually survive this though. For what it's worth, I hope you do."

  I scoffed and looked around at the empty room again.

  "Do you know the Curators?" I asked. "At the library?"

  "Which library?" Julius asked. "The front doors of this bar open onto a hundred different cities and towns. You'll need to be more specific."

  "Uh, Connecticut?"

  "Oh, yes. They all visited once. Just once."

  "Uther?" I guessed.

  Julius's mouth thinned to an impatient line. He nodded.

  "An interesting man," Julius said charitably.

  "I went to see them with Ethan," I said. "They... weren't exactly receptive. They threw me out."

  "That seems in line with what I know of them," Julius said with a rueful grimace. "And I'm afraid that attitude is not exclusive to Uther's little group."

  "I figured," I said, a bitter taste in my mouth. "Is it... I read that it was because of what Aethon did. If I... If I stopped him, if I did something really important, do you think they'd maybe...?"

  "Accept you?" Julius asked. "Or all necromancers? That's two very different things. And your premise is wrong from the start. They didn't turn on necromancy because of Aethon. His actions were merely a convenient match to light the pyre they'd already built. Necromancers could have been the most well behaved civically minded saints since the beginning and it wouldn't have mattered. Human prejudice is a force that operates independent of reason. To attempt to blame it on its victims is at best a diversion from useful conversation, at worst an invitation to further violence. Yes, if you bowed and scraped and apologized long enough, as many of your ancestors tried, they might condescend to acknowledge you as useful, or an exception among your kind. But they would never accept what you are."

  "What am I, then?" I asked, my heart sinking a little. I looked towards the curtain, beyond which I could hear the easy chatter of conversation. There were people out there, talking about magic, being openly what they were together. "I didn't choose this."

  I was surprised by a heavy hand landing on my shoulder. I looked up into Julius's wise, ancient eyes.

  "There is no evil magic," he said. "And no good magic either. You might as well try and divide gravity into moral alignments. It's a force of nature. Its uses, and the morality of those uses, are as diverse as the people that use it. What you are is not inherently evil, as Uther's little circle would claim. Neither is it inherently good. It just you. You just are. You are a Necromancer, Vexa. How you decide to live that truth is your decision."

  "I get that," I said, hating the fact that tears were stinging my eyes. "But I don't want to be alone."

  I wished I could find the words to explain my hope and frustration. How desperately I wanted to be a part of something. I'd been isolated in what I was for so long. My parents had no powers. My great aunt had barely any and couldn't teach me much except how to not accidentally raise every dead thing I encountered. To have finally found more people like me only to discover they hated me without even knowing me...

  Julius patted my shoulder.

  "I wish there was an easy answer," he said. "Or even a place to start. These things are too complicated even for my magic to fix. Believe me, I've tried. But you aren't alone. Not everyone is like Uther, and if you're half as strong as I think you are, the right people will find you in time. And you will always have a place here, I promise you that. I do not take promises lightly."

  He took his hand off my shoulder and offered it to me to shake. I took a deep breath to try and compose myself before I shook his hand. He patted me on the back and nudged me back towards the door.

  "Let's get back to the others," he said. "Before Gil stops trying to teleport and thinks of just running for the door."

  Chapter 3

  Gwydion and Gil were still arguing when we got back. They might not have been brothers in the human sense, but they sure acted like it.

  "I have collected a veritable gold mine of embarrassing personal secrets and old grudges on both of them," Cole confided as we returned. "I'm pretty sure at least half of it is even true."

  "I wasn't gone for fifteen minutes," I said, surprised, but as I turned my attention to the fae's bickering, I realized the real surprise was that Cole hadn't learned more. Gil appeared to be digging up every petty argument since the birth of Christ in an attempt to guilt or harangue Gwydion into letting him go. Gwydion was responding in kind with all of Gilfaethwy's apparently endless fuck-ups and Gwydion's equally endless patience in cleaning up the associated messes. Cole
just snickered and took short hand notes on his phone.

  Eventually, we managed to break up their argument enough to leave.

  "We'll bring Gilfaethwy back to my home," Gwydion announced. "It's obvious he can't be trusted to be on his own. I can hopefully convince him to help me study the mutt's curse. If not, at the very least with him present I'll have a much easier time of tracking down anyone else he's cursed this way."

  "What's in it for you?" Cole asked, curious, as we headed out to the back and Julius opened us a portal. Gwydion's lip curled, his expression scathing, but Cole just shrugged. "You're fae, and I'm not an idiot. There's no such thing as a charitable fairy."

  Gwydion, with a long-suffering sigh, pushed his brother through the portal ahead of him, presumably because he did not want Gil to hear his answer.

  "You're correct. The Fae don't deal in charity. We deal in favors. And giving the people who my brother has doomed a glimmer of hope is a better way to collect favors than most. Also, and perhaps more significantly, I live on this plane of existence. And probably will for the rest of my conditionally endless life. This world is much more pleasant to live in when people aren't randomly turning into bloodthirsty manifestations of their own inner demons and revealing the existence of magic to the mundane populace. Is that sufficient motivation for you, you puerile mosquito? Or would you like to rudely interrogate the amoral immortal nonhuman a little longer?"

  Cole said nothing, a hand on his hip and a tilt to his head that plainly said he wasn't impressed. Gwydion rolled his eyes and stepped through the portal after his brother.

  "He's got a point, kid," Julius said, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning back against the bricks. "Whatever spirits and demons you've dealt with before may respond well to that kind of frankness, but the Fae require a little more tact. You might want to read up on your fairy tales. Actually—"