Necromancing the Stone Page 4

  “It wasn’t an order, James, I asked you to do it. Nicely. With a please.”

  “Either way, I feel like I’m running a home for wayward boys.”

  He wasn’t far off on that point. Frank had moved in when I did. I’m not sure if Frank’s parents had even noticed he was gone yet. Sean, who was probably on his way over, had been staying there as well. He didn’t watch me as closely at home. The house had some pretty good security, even apart from the killer statues: gladiators, attack hedges, and of course, the gnomes. I wasn’t 100 percent sure they’d protect me, but I was still probably safer here than anywhere else.

  And now Ramon would be joining us. Home for wayward boys, indeed.

  Brooke perked up even more, her blond ponytail swinging as she bounced excitedly in her seat. “Like in Annie! Can I be Miss Hannigan? I love orphans! And Carol Burnett! My mom and I used to watch that movie all the time.” Her face took on a wistful cast.

  “We’re more like Oliver!” Frank said. “Minus the orphan thing, accents, and soul-crushing poverty.”

  “Besides,” I said, leaning toward Brooke, “we all know James would be Miss Hannigan.”

  James flicked my ear, hard, then took a sip of his water like he hadn’t done a thing. “They are delivering the new fridge tomorrow and will have it installed before your friend arrives.” He made a face. “I guess I’ll need to go to the grocery store again.” He glared at Frank. “And if you aren’t too terribly busy, I could use a hand wiping down the new fridge as well as shopping.” He surveyed us all and sighed. James’s sighs always had a vaguely regal quality to them, like he was sighing at peasants. “I guess I’ll have to start shopping in bulk.” He made the word bulk sound dirty.

  “Why?”

  “Because all of you eat like half-starved wolves.”

  “That’s because some of us are half-starved wolves.” Sean entered the kitchen and went straight for the fridge. “Or is that starved half-wolves?” He pulled out a soda, grabbed an apple, and hopped up on the counter, ignoring James, who had pointedly pulled out a chair.

  I shook my head. “No, I meant why the new fridge? What’s wrong with the one we have?” Douglas’s fridge was a stainless-steel masterpiece. I’m not that into appliances or anything, but this one was nice and probably cost more than my last apartment. I had the strange desire to hug it every time I came into the kitchen.

  James pushed in the extra chair with a look of resignation and turned back toward me. “I’m not replacing the one we have. I’m getting a spare.” He pointed at Frank and me. “Besides you two growing boys, you have a were hybrid—”

  “Fey wolf, were-hound … you know, I’m not sure we’ve settled on a proper appellation,” Sean corrected him through a mouthful of apple. He ran a hand down his chest. “Whatever we are, though, we’re damn sexy.” He stretched and flexed his biceps for us while making some very dubious “sexy” faces.

  “Whatever, and now a were-bear. Do you have any idea how much he’ll need to eat?” James asked.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Of course not,” James said, sounding put-upon. “That’s why I have to think of these things. Hence the new fridge, a possible Costco card, and will you please tell him to get off the counter!” James was pissed off. Usually, he had a pretty good poker face, but we’d finally, apparently, pushed him over the edge. Little specks of spit had flown out of his mouth, and his face was an angry red.

  I put down my soda gently. “Why don’t you just ask him to get down?”

  “Because,” James said through gritted teeth, “this isn’t my house, it’s yours.”

  Ah. Sometimes I was a little slow. “James, I’m sorry.” His head snapped around toward me. “We’ve invaded your space and made you feel, well … look, and this applies to all of you.” I waited to make sure I had everyone’s attention. “Technically, I own this house. I’m still trying to adjust to that. That being said, James, this is your home. You’ve been here the longest.…” I trailed off. “How long have you been here?”

  James gave a one-shoulder shrug. “I’m not sure. Those sorts of things blur after a while. I remember it was right before the video for Thriller came out, because we watched it on the new television we’d bought upon our arrival. Douglas thought it was highly amusing.”

  Frank scrunched up his nose in thought. “That was before I was born. How old are you?”

  Again, an indifferent shrug. “Old enough to know better.”

  “Okay, let’s not get distracted,” I said. “What I was saying is that, James, well, you know how everything works around here. If there is a rule you’d like us to follow, let us know. We’re all trying to live here together. Peacefully.” I waved a hand at Sean. “If Sean is annoying you by sitting on the countertops, ask him to get off. If you need any of us to help you do something, let us know. You get paid to run this place; it’s your job. If we’re standing in the way of that, tell us to move.”

  “We’re a team,” Brooke chimed in, “so let’s freaking act like it.”

  James schooled his face back into a polite mask. I didn’t like that mask. It reminded me of his former master. Former friend? I wasn’t sure how to qualify the relationship he’d had with Douglas. I rested my chin in my hand and stared at him. “But don’t get pissed off at our ignorance if you’re not sharing what you know. Got it?”

  He thought about it, then nodded. “Got it.”

  “Now, how about you share some of your knowledge?”

  James stared at his water for a moment. “Perhaps you should follow me to the basement.”

  5

  LET’S GET TOGETHER AND FEEL ALL RIGHT

  I hadn’t been in the basement since I’d escaped from it. As far as I was concerned, the house had no basement. And now I was following James down into it. Joy.

  The steps had a little creak to them. That was still the same. As I reached the bottom and looked around, I could tell James had been down here to clean. It wasn’t dusty, and there weren’t blood splatters everywhere. Also, Michael’s corpse was gone. And Douglas’s. I shivered.

  The bookshelves were still lined with musty, ancient books, notebooks, bits of chalk. The manacles were still on the walls. The table where I’d almost died rested in the same spot. My eyes went to the cage. That, too, remained.

  “We’re going to need to do a massive redecoration down here. Some color swatches, window treatments, maybe some Pottery Barn catalogs or something, the whole shebang.”

  James examined the room. “Before you go throwing all of this in the trash heap, you might want to consider its value.”

  I kicked the cage with my shoe. “What value? I won’t sell this.” The cage was really only good for one thing—restraining Brid and Sean’s particular type of hybrid. There weren’t any of those that I wanted to cage up. “What would I use it for?”

  Sean sidled up to the cage. He examined it. “You could ask Dad,” he said. “He might want it destroyed.” He ran a hand over the runes at the top. “But it might come in handy.”

  I blinked at him. “You’re the last person I’d expect to argue for keeping this cage.”

  Sean tapped it thoughtfully with one finger. “I don’t like it, Sam. I’m not saying we should all throw our sleeping bags in there and have a slumber party. But it might be useful if one of us goes rogue someday.”

  I considered the idea. He was right. Still. “James, this is necromancer powered, right?”

  “Yes, Master.”

  “Stop it,” I said absently. So unless I revved the cage up or it fell into the hands of another necromancer, which was unlikely, we were fine. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll keep it for now.” I looked around the room. “But some of the rest of this stuff is going. I will not now, or ever, need a table with leather cuffs.”

  “More’s the pity,” Sean said. He looked around. “What?” he said. “Am I the only one thinking the table might be fun? With a little cleaning, a nice-looking girl, six-pack of beer…”


  James didn’t react, but Frank and I gave Sean looks of disgust. “You guys have no imagination,” he said with a shake of his head.

  I rubbed a hand over my face. Long-ass day. “You know what? We’ll discuss this later. Now, James, what do you have to show the class?” James gave me his best game-show-host grin and swiveled toward the bookcase.

  *

  What James had to show us were dozens of old college-ruled-paper notebooks. Most were filled with Douglas’s precise writing. Michael had probably scrawled the few that weren’t. The handwriting was far too messy to be James’s. Each notebook painstakingly explained every one of Douglas’s experiments, and each one made me want to raise the fucker from the dead just so I could kill him a few more times.

  They were spread out on the dining room table. We each had a notebook in front of us, grabbed at random from the pile. Frank’s face was decidedly pale. Brooke’s held a stern look of disapproval. Sean wasn’t pale, but he didn’t look happy. After the first few pages, he’d grabbed some beer he’d hidden from out of the fridge. James wouldn’t buy any beer for the house, but Sean sure would. It was nice having roommates.

  Sean had plunked one of the sweating brown bottles in front of me, but I’d barely touched it. Nothing really seemed appetizing when you were reading about the systematic torture of … I looked at the front page of the book. A fifteen-year-old homeless boy. Apparently, Douglas had been curious to see what would happen if he injected several different blood samples from various kinds of shape-shifters into a single human being. He started with teens and moved up. Children, he decided, weren’t worth the risk, since most shape-shifters don’t shift until puberty.

  Bloody freaking hell.

  I shut the book and took a swig.

  Sean was partial to ales, and he had good taste, but the flavor fell flat in my mouth. Gee, I wonder why. As I drank, I noticed that everyone else was having about as much fun as I was. Frank seemed close to crying, Brooke was muttering to herself, and I thought Sean might rip his book in half at any moment.

  James didn’t have one in front of him. He wouldn’t even glance at the stack.

  Sean closed his slowly. He looked at the pile. “Every single one of these is a person.”

  James, still not looking, said, “Sometimes more than one.”

  Sean tossed his book back in with the rest. “How could you do this? Why? For fucking knowledge? Kicks? What?” I thought Sean might leap across the table and strangle James on the spot. He managed to keep himself in his chair, but he gripped the table until his knuckles turned white and I heard the wood creak.

  James faced him, his mouth set in a firm line, and his eyes flashed silver in the dining room light. He appeared to consider several responses as he looked at Sean. Finally, he shook his head. “I serve, Sean, that is all. What the master does with my service is up to him.”

  Sean growled. “So you really are a tool.”

  Before I could even consider blinking, James was across the table. He had Sean by the throat and pinned to the wall. Hot damn, he was fast. If it wouldn’t have gotten my face torn off, I might have clapped.

  Seriously, it was impressive.

  Sean’s eyes were a touch wide as James got in his face. “You listen here, you spoiled, arrogant brat,” James spat. “Not all of us have Daddy to run to. We don’t all have silver spoons jammed into our gullets.” He leaned in closer, until his nose was almost touching Sean’s. “Some of us live slightly more complicated lives.” With that, he dropped Sean to the floor. He turned to me. “If there isn’t anything else, Master, I’d like to retire for the night.”

  I held up my hands in surrender. “Go for it.” Before I finished speaking, James had stalked out of the room, leaving it very, very quiet.

  Sean sat down and took a sip of his beer. “Wow.”

  No one responded. Wow, indeed. I got up slowly, gathered all the notebooks, and set them back into the box we’d used to bring them upstairs. We hadn’t even managed to bring up half of them. Now I was glad we hadn’t. I snatched one out of Frank’s hand.

  “Hey!”

  I glared at him.

  Frank stood his ground. “We need to read those. They’re important.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but do we have to do it all tonight?” Frank opened his mouth, shut it, then opened it again. While he impersonated a guppy, I rummaged in a hutch in the corner. I pulled out Trivial Pursuit and dropped it onto the table where the notebooks had been. “Right. Let’s talk about something else.”

  Nobody argued.

  *

  It was hard to sleep after the day I’d had. I mean, I’d had worse. And someone, somewhere, was having an even worse time of it than me. I tried to keep that in mind. No matter how crappy your life, someone will probably beat you in the my-life-is-crap category. Not that I don’t let myself whine a little now and then, but sometimes it’s good to keep your misery in perspective.

  I threw back the covers and snuck into the hallway. A few doors down was my own private little heaven. When I’d first moved in, I’d been surprised to find out that Douglas and I actually had something in common. You know, besides our ability to wrangle the dead. In addition to being a raving psychopath, Douglas had been a music nut.

  The music library had plush carpet and wall-to-wall bookcases built to hold hundreds of records. Only a few CDs were present, and then only albums that couldn’t be purchased in vinyl. The rest of the room was sparsely furnished. An overstuffed leather couch and chair, a coffee table, and a tiny accent table with, of all things, an even tinier china duck. Above Señor Quackenstein, as I had named him, was one of the few shelves that wasn’t tightly packed with music. Instead Douglas had a framed first edition of Bowie’s Hunky Dory on display there.

  I guess even pure evil likes David Bowie.

  I shuffled past to grab something quieter to listen to. The album I wanted was up a little high, and I had to get on my tiptoes to reach it. I finally grabbed it, but the effort set me off balance, and I stumbled right into the end table. Poor Señor Quackenstein tumbled to the floor and … broke? On carpet? Frowning, I picked him up. No, not broken. He’d popped open, which was super weird. I’d never even noticed a seam on him before. Inside, hiding in the back near the tail, was an egg-shaped stone about the size of a chestnut. It looked like jade. The sides were intricately carved, tiny cherry blossoms on a branch winding up from the bottom.

  I rolled it over in my hand. Odd that anyone would hide something so pretty. Odder still that the egg felt cold to the touch, almost magically so. Marble was sometimes like that. Was jade? I examined it carefully, because that’s how you should treat a new thing in Douglas’s house: carefully and like it could kill you at any moment. There was something different about the egg, but I was too tired to really think it through.

  My pajama pants didn’t have pockets, and I was reluctant to leave the egg lying around. I opened up my pouch—my mom had told me never to open it, but that was before I’d known what it really was—and tucked the egg inside. Mom had made the pouch to hide me from the things that go bump in the night. You know, the kinds of things that might want to talk to someone like me. It was also supposed to hide me from, well, someone like me. I figured it could hold on to the egg for a little while. Record in hand, I turned off the light and headed back to my room.

  *

  Haley woke me with a phone call, which was a little unusual. My sister is a texter, especially if she thinks I might be asleep. I mumbled something—it might have been “hello,” or it might have been “piss off.” It’s hard to be sure of these things sometimes.

  “Be nice,” she said. Which meant I’d probably told her to piss off.

  “Sorry,” I grumbled, but I only half meant it. “What’s up?”

  “Are you free tomorrow? I wanted to see if maybe you’d pick me up from the library.”

  “Of course. Yeah. Wait.” Something was wrong with the conversation, and I was having a difficult time brushing away the cobweb
s and figuring out what it was. Finally, my brain caught up with an almost audible ding. “Why aren’t you catching the bus?” Haley was an independent kind of girl and liked to function without the help of, say, me. So generally she only pestered me for rides if she couldn’t catch a bus or she needed some other favor.

  “Can’t a girl just want to see her big brother?”

  Alarm bells now. Flashing red lights. Danger, Danger, Will Robinson. “What happened, Haley? And skip the bullshit, please. I haven’t had any coffee yet.”

  “It’s nothing. Really. Sort of. It was probably just a prank. Mom’s overreacting, and now she doesn’t want me catching the bus home by myself.”

  A flicker of the last violently delivered message—namely Brooke’s head in a box—surfaced before I could suppress it. Now that I was paying attention, I could hear the tiny vibration of fear in Haley’s voice. I should have noticed it instantly. “What kind of prank?”

  “Don’t freak out, Sam. Mom’s bad enough.”

  “I will freak out less when you tell me.”

  “Someone left a knife in the door.” Her voice was nonchalant, trying to mask her fear, trying to make it sound as if someone had simply left flowers.

  “A … knife? No note? Nothing else?”

  “That’s it. Knife. Door. It’s not a big deal.” Before I could argue or lecture she said, “Please don’t worry. We’re fine.”

  I rubbed a hand over my face. Of course I was going to worry. But I could do that on my own time and not lay it all on Haley. “Okay. I’ll pick you up tomorrow. Just be careful. And, Haley—carry some Mace or something, will you?”

  She forced a laugh, and we went over the details before she hung up. Haley might be shrugging it off or downplaying it so I wouldn’t worry, but I knew better than to ignore threats. Just like I knew better than to think this didn’t involve me in some way. Who on earth would threaten my baby sister and a witch who makes shampoo? No one, unless they were actually aiming at me. A chill eased up my spine, and I shivered.

  I couldn’t go back to sleep after that.