Welcome to Jessie's, page 7
Unfortunately, that kind of miracle only happened on TV. Either Morticent or his mysterious cohort had already thought ahead to make sure nothing was left behind. Considering the sheriff’s office came up empty on the trash from the bathroom and all they had to go on was a bracelet and witch’s intuition, which was not admissible in a court of law, Jessie felt like they were back at square one.
“Well, that was a bust,” she said dejectedly, rising up from the floor and dusting her hands off on the thighs of her jeans.
“Yeah. Sorry, Jess. But hey, now we know I can do something to help out,” Charlie shrugged.
“Hopefully we don’t need to use that particular power very often, but yeah, it’s certainly useful. Let’s go tell the others. I want to try to figure out why you felt something like wind too. That’s definitely odd,” she said over her shoulder as she led the way out of the bathroom.
“Do you want to figure out what kind of whammy is on the bathroom though? I mean, it’s kind of strange that I felt something on one side of the door but not on the other.”
Jessie paused, considering.
“No, leave it. Whoever cast it doesn’t know that I know it’s there yet, and I can take a look when we’re closed tomorrow to see if I can figure out the spell’s origins. It has to be something that was physically done to the room, and I don’t want to risk hurting any of the patrons or staff if I try to take it apart tonight and it’s booby trapped. If it was on Morticent, and he really needs to come up with a better name; that one’s ridiculous, then it would have ended when he left the room.”
She led the way down the small hallway lined with golden oak panels that radiated comfort and warmth like the rest of the building.
“Anything?” Caroline asked, looking up from washing bar tools and glassware as they walked up to the bar.
“Nope, but someone did something to the bathroom so anyone who’s sensitive can’t feel the energy from the murder in the hallway,” Jessie replied, perching on a bar stool.
“You think it was Morticent?” Cassie asked over something that looked and smelled purple but was definitely not a color or taste found in nature.
“I doubt it. If he was a witch who was strong enough to cast a cloaking spell, he would be able to render himself invisible without a talisman. Besides, he’s clearly under an obsession spell, so unless he’s a very weak witch, he’s not our guy.”
“So what now?” Mikael asked.
“I need to figure out some stuff. I want to try something though while you’re here. Can you cast a compulsion without a target?”
“I don’t know, I never tried,” Mikael looked surprised.
“I just don’t want to compel anyone, but I want to see if Charlie can feel it when it goes through him to get to someone else.”
“Would you care to enlighten us as to this particular request?” Mikael raised an eyebrow.
“He felt something like the wind. It’s probably supernatural. He’s been around me doing magic a million times, so I doubt it’s anything a witch here would have done. But the vampires who come here aren’t allowed to use compulsion. It’s a house rule,” she explained.
“But there weren’t any other vampires here,” Jared pointed out as he brought a towering stack of dirty glasses to the sink.
“I know, but it’s always important to rule out everything. If Charlie can feel a vampiric compulsion, then maybe that could help us narrow down the field to other cryptids that have similar powers.”
“Ah. Charlie, please stand—er, float—there,” Mikael gestured toward an empty space. Charlie obligingly got into position and waited. Mikael’s eyes glassed over and then turned pure silver. Even though she wasn’t in the line of fire, so to speak, Jessie felt the intensity and was glad for the millionth time that she had a built in resistance to mind control and compulsion.
Charlie made a seesaw motion with his transparent hand.
“I felt that, but I wouldn’t call it wind. More like a very gentle push. I knew you were doing something, but it was external, you know?”
“Yeah, thanks Charlie. I’ll talk to Greta and see if she can think of anything. Caroline, you got this if I go do some digging?”
“Sure thing,” Caroline waved Jessie off.
“I think I should leave and check on Nicodemus,” Mikael said, pushing back from the bar and coming to his feet.
“Good idea,” Jessie agreed. “I’ll let you know if we find anything. Meet back here tomorrow?”
“Of course,” he said with a simple bow.
“Great. Call me if you need me, Caroline” Jessie said over her shoulder, heading back to her office while the others stared at her retreating back.
Chapter 5
ALL WITCHES NEED A place of study, and as they grow older, learn more, and collect more books and artifacts, they more often than not find themselves in need of a place to store their wealth of knowledge.
Jessie and Greta had joined the legions of witches who, once they reached their first century or two, decided to solve the issue by tapping into another plane to create their own Library. Jessie’s and Greta’s was only accessible through a series of complex keys and wards they had created together. If something happened to one of them, the Library would only open for the other– a failsafe put in place to protect each other and their impressive vault of knowledge and dangerous artifacts.
Jessie walked to a piece of oak paneling behind her desk and whispered a spell as she pushed against the knothole in the wood. The tiny flower tattoo on her ankle glowed in response to the spell. She and Greta both had one, each drawn by the other, that signified their bond and connected their minds and emotions. What one felt, the other knew.
The panel slid aside showing a cozy room behind a shimmering veil. She stepped through, swallowing against the instant spin of vertigo and nausea that always hit witches when they crossed worlds and portals.
The room was lined on one side with tall windows that let in soft moonlight reflecting off snow capped mountains. A huge fire burned merrily at one end of the room in a cavernous stone fireplace flanked by mismatched and overstuffed armchairs and sturdy end tables.
An equally worn, comfortable, and patched sofa, draped with chenille and alpaca wool blankets and pillows all colors of the rainbow faced the fireplace along with an ancient coffee table covered in Jessie’s crochet patterns and Greta’s notebooks. They had an unspoken agreement that once they found furniture that worked, they would go to the ends of the earth and beyond to keep it standing.
Every available inch of wall space was lined with floor to ceiling shelves that groaned under the weight of books, scrolls, and boxes full of artifacts. Greta’s slightly dented cherry red tea kettle stood on a table in a corner next to her french press, a stack of coffee mugs (also mismatched), and tins of coffee and boxes of tea she picked up around the world.
A purple Persian rug Jessie had found in her travels covered the flagstone floor, and sconces set among the shelves joined their golden light to the lamps they had scavenged and scattered on various tables and in the corners. All in all it was charmingly eclectic and cozy and absolutely their own perfect space.
Of course it wouldn’t be complete without the cats, five in all. Aleister Meowley, the jet black cat who disdained all laps until the girls were trying to do something constructive, Lemur, the sweet and shy gray tabby, Spot, the tortoiseshell who felt that all laps belonged to her, Lucy, the tiny calico, who was the smallest of the five with the biggest personality and bossiness, and Sunny, a sixteen pound orange and white tom who spent every waking minute convinced that he was dying of starvation.
Jessie stood in the center of the room thoughtfully perusing the shelves trying to figure out where to start first. At some point it would probably be a good idea to get some kind of cataloging system in place, but then again, it was also fun opening random boxes trying to find one thing and discovering something else entirely she forgot they had.
She was the more organized out of the two of them though. One day she would win the seemingly endless war between Greta’s weird system that made sense one day and baffled them both the next and Jessie’s own more organized style. As she fought down a wave of annoyance, another panel of shelves slid away and Greta stepped through.
“I figured you would come here at some point for answers. How’s Nicky? Did you find anything out yet?”
Jessie regarded her best friend. Taller than Jessie by several inches, something that rankled Jessie to no end, Greta had one of those faces that somehow managed to be bookishly pretty and interesting even though her mouth was a little too wide, her nose a little too quirky, and one eye was shaped ever so slightly differently than the other. Her hazel eyes and oval face were framed by a silver pixie haircut.
“No. This whole thing is so weird, and some of it really doesn’t make sense.”
Greta scooped Lucy out of her favorite chair and deposited the grumbling cat in her lap while she curled her long legs under her. Lucy immediately went back to sleep. Jessie grabbed a blanket from the sofa and stretched out under it. Aleister claimed her feet.
“Like what?”
“Well, for starters, there’s the Puck.”
Greta frowned, recalling the information Jessie had already shared.
“Yeah, what’s up with that? I thought it was against the fae’s nature to be outspokenly rude and boorish, especially the ones from Oberon’s court.”
“Me too. He’s such an ass though! I want to smack him!”
“Did you ask the local court what they thought?” Greta asked, scratching Lucy under the chin.
“Not yet”, Jessie replied as Spot settled on her chest. “The full moon starts tomorrow night, and they usually swing by after they Ride. As Oberon’s representative, he should be with them. It will at least give me a chance to see what he’s like among his own kind.”
“What about the kid you think killed Warsaw?”
“Did you ever meet Warsaw?” Jessie asked, suddenly curious for more information on the shy but sweet gargoyle who had captured Nicky’s heart.
“Once. There was a benefit for cryptid-human relations in Paris, and they asked some of the witches and fae to attend just to balance it out.”
“Lucky,” Jessie grinned. She hated having to perform for the aristocracy. Greta was infinitely better suited to playing diplomat, even if it put her teeth on edge. Greta rolled her eyes.
“Yeah. Rolling in good fortune over here. Anyway, he was really nice. Very down to earth, very intelligent. He was a good match for Nicky. It broke my heart to hear what happened.”
“What did you think about Madame Blanche?” Jessie asked, absently scratching Spot behind the ears and on her cheeks.
Greta pondered for a moment before answering slowly, “I don’t really have an opinion about her one way or the other. She was nice and very gracious, but she didn’t really get cozy with anyone. Apparently in life she was originally Charlotte de Valois, the illegitimate daughter of King Charles, who was married off to Jacques de Brézé, the Duke who inhabited the Chateau de Brissac in the fifteenth century. He killed her when he allegedly found her in bed with her lover. I was honestly surprised that she’s the cryptid emissary for the Alliance. My understanding was the White Ladies have always been held at arm’s length, even by the cryptid community. I mean, when you think about what they are, it’s not all that surprising.”
White Ladies were usually the ghosts of women who died violently, frequently as a result of the betrayal or jealousy of a husband or lover. They had long been viewed as harbingers of death, and Jessie had often wondered how one had been chosen to represent the French cryptid community. A Dame Blanche with royal lineage from the 1400’s would probably do it though.
“You said she was aloof? Interesting,” Jessie frowned.
“How so?”
“Well, the one I met is very friendly. In fact, she put Robin in his place a few times. She travels with a Matagot named Rupert too. I don’t suppose you met him, did you?”
Greta laughed, “Ah, Rupert. Sadly I didn’t get to actually meet him, but I remember him well. Not gonna lie, he was probably the best part of that whole event. Nothing throws off a bunch of nobility like a giant, black, possibly demon cat who refuses to stay off the furniture and eats all the fish.”
Jessie giggled at the mental image.
“I can see that,” she said before sobering.
“What else happened?” Greta asked shrewdly, knowing that all of that was information Jessie could have asked for without a face to face meeting.
“Charlie,” Jessie replied, reaching around to get Lemur under the chin as he perched on her shoulder.
“The succubus’ ghost?” Greta grinned.
“Yeah. Earlier tonight a bunch of the vampire groupies showed up, and one of them tried to get to Nicky. We actually think that he’s the one in the video Cassie recovered from the QT’s security footage.”
“Do you think he’s a witch?” Greta asked, craning to reach Sunny who wanted pets but refused to leave the warmth of the hearth.
“No, but we think that there is actually a witch behind this who gave him a talisman of invisibility,” Jessie said, squirming under the cats to pull up the camera footage on her phone before tossing it to Greta, who, being athletically challenged, barely managed to miss hitting herself in the nose trying to catch it. Jessie snorted. Greta shot her an injured look before playing the video.
“That looks like a talisman all right. What about Charlie?”
“Tonight the kid got kind of crazy with Nicky and actually provoked Nicky to the point where he started to turn. Charlie said he felt like a gust of wind blew through him right before it happened. He’s never felt anything like that when I do magic around him, so we got Mikael to try to compel him. He said he felt something like a mild push, but it wasn’t as strong.”
“That’s because it came from a necromancer,” Greta said grimly, scratching Lucy harder until the little cat growled in protest and jumped off Greta’s lap to stalk away and clean her tail in disapproval.
Jessie looked at her friend expectantly. After the two of them had run into trouble against a group of necromancers created by a cabal set on world domination, Greta had spent a significant amount of time in the seventeenth century studying some of the lesser known forms of magic, which largely included those relating to death, and Jessie suspected that Greta probably had some insight the rest of them didn’t.
Greta sighed.
“You already know that necromancers aren’t naturally born witches. They’re made from a creature of death, either a ghost or a cryptid or faery that’s a harbinger of death, and the ritual to make them into a necromancer is very dangerous and difficult. Most don’t survive the transformation. Any witch can perform the ritual, but because it’s considered a defilement of nature, the witch who performs the ritual loses their connection with their spirit element until the balance of karma has been restored. Ones performed by the völva or shamans are stronger than what you or I could accomplish.”
Jessie shuddered in horror at the thought of never being able to touch the undercurrent of fire that ran through her consciousness like a river.
“That’s terrible,” she said, hugging her knees to her chest which caused multiple cries of protest from Spot and Aleister. She straightened her legs out, and they went back to sleep, slightly mollified. Lucy continued to pointedly ignore Greta.
“Yeah. The witch basically has to stockpile energy in artifacts for use after the spell wears off or siphon from people, which, as you know, is dangerous.”
Jessie nodded. Siphoning from people was tricky. Like vampires, a witch couldn’t drain a person completely without being drawn into their death.
“How long does it take to restore the balance?” she asked.
Greta shrugged, the corner of her mouth quirking upward in thought.
“It depends. The transformation isn’t permanent, but the balance can’t start to be restored until the creature reverts to their natural state. If the necromancer was just a natural creature of death like a cryptid or faery that acts as a harbinger and neither the creature nor witch has ill intent, then it’s only a few months, a year at the most depending on how many good deeds they perform in the interim. But if the witch wants to use the necromancer for evil or the necromancer is an agent of evil or chaos, then it can take decades if not centuries for the witch to regain her power after the creature reverts.”
“How easy is it to find the ritual?”
“It’s pretty damn scary how easy it is if you know what you’re looking for. I can guarantee we have it in at least three of the books here. The other scary part is the karmic balance is more of a fine print thing. If you’re a creature of death who finds an impressionable young witch to do the ritual or vice versa, you can get away with pulling it off before they ever find out what it cost them.”
“And you’re sure that’s what we’re dealing with?” Jessie asked intently, leaning forward despite Spot’s protests.
“Yep. A spell from a necromancer is the only thing that a ghost can feel that strongly. It’s actually the only thing that can directly affect the dead outside of the ritual to transform them.”
Jessie stared off deep in thought.
“Can you make someone a necromancer without their knowledge?” she asked. Greta shook her head.
“No. There are certain things they have to do and bring to the ritual in order for it to work. Even if you tricked them into providing the materials, they have to recite their part with full knowledge and consent or it doesn’t work. And the karmic repercussions on the witch who tries are so bad that the witch may never come back from it. It’s one thing to create an abomination of nature, but to do so without consent is a gross abuse of power that is unforgivable to the universe.”
“How much of that is intent? Like if I wanted to turn a creature of death and didn’t want to risk the karmic repercussions, could I talk another witch into doing it for me?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Whoever casts the spell deals with the penalty. Plus while the necromancer is active, the witch must turn all of their power over to it.”
“Well, that was a bust,” she said dejectedly, rising up from the floor and dusting her hands off on the thighs of her jeans.
“Yeah. Sorry, Jess. But hey, now we know I can do something to help out,” Charlie shrugged.
“Hopefully we don’t need to use that particular power very often, but yeah, it’s certainly useful. Let’s go tell the others. I want to try to figure out why you felt something like wind too. That’s definitely odd,” she said over her shoulder as she led the way out of the bathroom.
“Do you want to figure out what kind of whammy is on the bathroom though? I mean, it’s kind of strange that I felt something on one side of the door but not on the other.”
Jessie paused, considering.
“No, leave it. Whoever cast it doesn’t know that I know it’s there yet, and I can take a look when we’re closed tomorrow to see if I can figure out the spell’s origins. It has to be something that was physically done to the room, and I don’t want to risk hurting any of the patrons or staff if I try to take it apart tonight and it’s booby trapped. If it was on Morticent, and he really needs to come up with a better name; that one’s ridiculous, then it would have ended when he left the room.”
She led the way down the small hallway lined with golden oak panels that radiated comfort and warmth like the rest of the building.
“Anything?” Caroline asked, looking up from washing bar tools and glassware as they walked up to the bar.
“Nope, but someone did something to the bathroom so anyone who’s sensitive can’t feel the energy from the murder in the hallway,” Jessie replied, perching on a bar stool.
“You think it was Morticent?” Cassie asked over something that looked and smelled purple but was definitely not a color or taste found in nature.
“I doubt it. If he was a witch who was strong enough to cast a cloaking spell, he would be able to render himself invisible without a talisman. Besides, he’s clearly under an obsession spell, so unless he’s a very weak witch, he’s not our guy.”
“So what now?” Mikael asked.
“I need to figure out some stuff. I want to try something though while you’re here. Can you cast a compulsion without a target?”
“I don’t know, I never tried,” Mikael looked surprised.
“I just don’t want to compel anyone, but I want to see if Charlie can feel it when it goes through him to get to someone else.”
“Would you care to enlighten us as to this particular request?” Mikael raised an eyebrow.
“He felt something like the wind. It’s probably supernatural. He’s been around me doing magic a million times, so I doubt it’s anything a witch here would have done. But the vampires who come here aren’t allowed to use compulsion. It’s a house rule,” she explained.
“But there weren’t any other vampires here,” Jared pointed out as he brought a towering stack of dirty glasses to the sink.
“I know, but it’s always important to rule out everything. If Charlie can feel a vampiric compulsion, then maybe that could help us narrow down the field to other cryptids that have similar powers.”
“Ah. Charlie, please stand—er, float—there,” Mikael gestured toward an empty space. Charlie obligingly got into position and waited. Mikael’s eyes glassed over and then turned pure silver. Even though she wasn’t in the line of fire, so to speak, Jessie felt the intensity and was glad for the millionth time that she had a built in resistance to mind control and compulsion.
Charlie made a seesaw motion with his transparent hand.
“I felt that, but I wouldn’t call it wind. More like a very gentle push. I knew you were doing something, but it was external, you know?”
“Yeah, thanks Charlie. I’ll talk to Greta and see if she can think of anything. Caroline, you got this if I go do some digging?”
“Sure thing,” Caroline waved Jessie off.
“I think I should leave and check on Nicodemus,” Mikael said, pushing back from the bar and coming to his feet.
“Good idea,” Jessie agreed. “I’ll let you know if we find anything. Meet back here tomorrow?”
“Of course,” he said with a simple bow.
“Great. Call me if you need me, Caroline” Jessie said over her shoulder, heading back to her office while the others stared at her retreating back.
Chapter 5
ALL WITCHES NEED A place of study, and as they grow older, learn more, and collect more books and artifacts, they more often than not find themselves in need of a place to store their wealth of knowledge.
Jessie and Greta had joined the legions of witches who, once they reached their first century or two, decided to solve the issue by tapping into another plane to create their own Library. Jessie’s and Greta’s was only accessible through a series of complex keys and wards they had created together. If something happened to one of them, the Library would only open for the other– a failsafe put in place to protect each other and their impressive vault of knowledge and dangerous artifacts.
Jessie walked to a piece of oak paneling behind her desk and whispered a spell as she pushed against the knothole in the wood. The tiny flower tattoo on her ankle glowed in response to the spell. She and Greta both had one, each drawn by the other, that signified their bond and connected their minds and emotions. What one felt, the other knew.
The panel slid aside showing a cozy room behind a shimmering veil. She stepped through, swallowing against the instant spin of vertigo and nausea that always hit witches when they crossed worlds and portals.
The room was lined on one side with tall windows that let in soft moonlight reflecting off snow capped mountains. A huge fire burned merrily at one end of the room in a cavernous stone fireplace flanked by mismatched and overstuffed armchairs and sturdy end tables.
An equally worn, comfortable, and patched sofa, draped with chenille and alpaca wool blankets and pillows all colors of the rainbow faced the fireplace along with an ancient coffee table covered in Jessie’s crochet patterns and Greta’s notebooks. They had an unspoken agreement that once they found furniture that worked, they would go to the ends of the earth and beyond to keep it standing.
Every available inch of wall space was lined with floor to ceiling shelves that groaned under the weight of books, scrolls, and boxes full of artifacts. Greta’s slightly dented cherry red tea kettle stood on a table in a corner next to her french press, a stack of coffee mugs (also mismatched), and tins of coffee and boxes of tea she picked up around the world.
A purple Persian rug Jessie had found in her travels covered the flagstone floor, and sconces set among the shelves joined their golden light to the lamps they had scavenged and scattered on various tables and in the corners. All in all it was charmingly eclectic and cozy and absolutely their own perfect space.
Of course it wouldn’t be complete without the cats, five in all. Aleister Meowley, the jet black cat who disdained all laps until the girls were trying to do something constructive, Lemur, the sweet and shy gray tabby, Spot, the tortoiseshell who felt that all laps belonged to her, Lucy, the tiny calico, who was the smallest of the five with the biggest personality and bossiness, and Sunny, a sixteen pound orange and white tom who spent every waking minute convinced that he was dying of starvation.
Jessie stood in the center of the room thoughtfully perusing the shelves trying to figure out where to start first. At some point it would probably be a good idea to get some kind of cataloging system in place, but then again, it was also fun opening random boxes trying to find one thing and discovering something else entirely she forgot they had.
She was the more organized out of the two of them though. One day she would win the seemingly endless war between Greta’s weird system that made sense one day and baffled them both the next and Jessie’s own more organized style. As she fought down a wave of annoyance, another panel of shelves slid away and Greta stepped through.
“I figured you would come here at some point for answers. How’s Nicky? Did you find anything out yet?”
Jessie regarded her best friend. Taller than Jessie by several inches, something that rankled Jessie to no end, Greta had one of those faces that somehow managed to be bookishly pretty and interesting even though her mouth was a little too wide, her nose a little too quirky, and one eye was shaped ever so slightly differently than the other. Her hazel eyes and oval face were framed by a silver pixie haircut.
“No. This whole thing is so weird, and some of it really doesn’t make sense.”
Greta scooped Lucy out of her favorite chair and deposited the grumbling cat in her lap while she curled her long legs under her. Lucy immediately went back to sleep. Jessie grabbed a blanket from the sofa and stretched out under it. Aleister claimed her feet.
“Like what?”
“Well, for starters, there’s the Puck.”
Greta frowned, recalling the information Jessie had already shared.
“Yeah, what’s up with that? I thought it was against the fae’s nature to be outspokenly rude and boorish, especially the ones from Oberon’s court.”
“Me too. He’s such an ass though! I want to smack him!”
“Did you ask the local court what they thought?” Greta asked, scratching Lucy under the chin.
“Not yet”, Jessie replied as Spot settled on her chest. “The full moon starts tomorrow night, and they usually swing by after they Ride. As Oberon’s representative, he should be with them. It will at least give me a chance to see what he’s like among his own kind.”
“What about the kid you think killed Warsaw?”
“Did you ever meet Warsaw?” Jessie asked, suddenly curious for more information on the shy but sweet gargoyle who had captured Nicky’s heart.
“Once. There was a benefit for cryptid-human relations in Paris, and they asked some of the witches and fae to attend just to balance it out.”
“Lucky,” Jessie grinned. She hated having to perform for the aristocracy. Greta was infinitely better suited to playing diplomat, even if it put her teeth on edge. Greta rolled her eyes.
“Yeah. Rolling in good fortune over here. Anyway, he was really nice. Very down to earth, very intelligent. He was a good match for Nicky. It broke my heart to hear what happened.”
“What did you think about Madame Blanche?” Jessie asked, absently scratching Spot behind the ears and on her cheeks.
Greta pondered for a moment before answering slowly, “I don’t really have an opinion about her one way or the other. She was nice and very gracious, but she didn’t really get cozy with anyone. Apparently in life she was originally Charlotte de Valois, the illegitimate daughter of King Charles, who was married off to Jacques de Brézé, the Duke who inhabited the Chateau de Brissac in the fifteenth century. He killed her when he allegedly found her in bed with her lover. I was honestly surprised that she’s the cryptid emissary for the Alliance. My understanding was the White Ladies have always been held at arm’s length, even by the cryptid community. I mean, when you think about what they are, it’s not all that surprising.”
White Ladies were usually the ghosts of women who died violently, frequently as a result of the betrayal or jealousy of a husband or lover. They had long been viewed as harbingers of death, and Jessie had often wondered how one had been chosen to represent the French cryptid community. A Dame Blanche with royal lineage from the 1400’s would probably do it though.
“You said she was aloof? Interesting,” Jessie frowned.
“How so?”
“Well, the one I met is very friendly. In fact, she put Robin in his place a few times. She travels with a Matagot named Rupert too. I don’t suppose you met him, did you?”
Greta laughed, “Ah, Rupert. Sadly I didn’t get to actually meet him, but I remember him well. Not gonna lie, he was probably the best part of that whole event. Nothing throws off a bunch of nobility like a giant, black, possibly demon cat who refuses to stay off the furniture and eats all the fish.”
Jessie giggled at the mental image.
“I can see that,” she said before sobering.
“What else happened?” Greta asked shrewdly, knowing that all of that was information Jessie could have asked for without a face to face meeting.
“Charlie,” Jessie replied, reaching around to get Lemur under the chin as he perched on her shoulder.
“The succubus’ ghost?” Greta grinned.
“Yeah. Earlier tonight a bunch of the vampire groupies showed up, and one of them tried to get to Nicky. We actually think that he’s the one in the video Cassie recovered from the QT’s security footage.”
“Do you think he’s a witch?” Greta asked, craning to reach Sunny who wanted pets but refused to leave the warmth of the hearth.
“No, but we think that there is actually a witch behind this who gave him a talisman of invisibility,” Jessie said, squirming under the cats to pull up the camera footage on her phone before tossing it to Greta, who, being athletically challenged, barely managed to miss hitting herself in the nose trying to catch it. Jessie snorted. Greta shot her an injured look before playing the video.
“That looks like a talisman all right. What about Charlie?”
“Tonight the kid got kind of crazy with Nicky and actually provoked Nicky to the point where he started to turn. Charlie said he felt like a gust of wind blew through him right before it happened. He’s never felt anything like that when I do magic around him, so we got Mikael to try to compel him. He said he felt something like a mild push, but it wasn’t as strong.”
“That’s because it came from a necromancer,” Greta said grimly, scratching Lucy harder until the little cat growled in protest and jumped off Greta’s lap to stalk away and clean her tail in disapproval.
Jessie looked at her friend expectantly. After the two of them had run into trouble against a group of necromancers created by a cabal set on world domination, Greta had spent a significant amount of time in the seventeenth century studying some of the lesser known forms of magic, which largely included those relating to death, and Jessie suspected that Greta probably had some insight the rest of them didn’t.
Greta sighed.
“You already know that necromancers aren’t naturally born witches. They’re made from a creature of death, either a ghost or a cryptid or faery that’s a harbinger of death, and the ritual to make them into a necromancer is very dangerous and difficult. Most don’t survive the transformation. Any witch can perform the ritual, but because it’s considered a defilement of nature, the witch who performs the ritual loses their connection with their spirit element until the balance of karma has been restored. Ones performed by the völva or shamans are stronger than what you or I could accomplish.”
Jessie shuddered in horror at the thought of never being able to touch the undercurrent of fire that ran through her consciousness like a river.
“That’s terrible,” she said, hugging her knees to her chest which caused multiple cries of protest from Spot and Aleister. She straightened her legs out, and they went back to sleep, slightly mollified. Lucy continued to pointedly ignore Greta.
“Yeah. The witch basically has to stockpile energy in artifacts for use after the spell wears off or siphon from people, which, as you know, is dangerous.”
Jessie nodded. Siphoning from people was tricky. Like vampires, a witch couldn’t drain a person completely without being drawn into their death.
“How long does it take to restore the balance?” she asked.
Greta shrugged, the corner of her mouth quirking upward in thought.
“It depends. The transformation isn’t permanent, but the balance can’t start to be restored until the creature reverts to their natural state. If the necromancer was just a natural creature of death like a cryptid or faery that acts as a harbinger and neither the creature nor witch has ill intent, then it’s only a few months, a year at the most depending on how many good deeds they perform in the interim. But if the witch wants to use the necromancer for evil or the necromancer is an agent of evil or chaos, then it can take decades if not centuries for the witch to regain her power after the creature reverts.”
“How easy is it to find the ritual?”
“It’s pretty damn scary how easy it is if you know what you’re looking for. I can guarantee we have it in at least three of the books here. The other scary part is the karmic balance is more of a fine print thing. If you’re a creature of death who finds an impressionable young witch to do the ritual or vice versa, you can get away with pulling it off before they ever find out what it cost them.”
“And you’re sure that’s what we’re dealing with?” Jessie asked intently, leaning forward despite Spot’s protests.
“Yep. A spell from a necromancer is the only thing that a ghost can feel that strongly. It’s actually the only thing that can directly affect the dead outside of the ritual to transform them.”
Jessie stared off deep in thought.
“Can you make someone a necromancer without their knowledge?” she asked. Greta shook her head.
“No. There are certain things they have to do and bring to the ritual in order for it to work. Even if you tricked them into providing the materials, they have to recite their part with full knowledge and consent or it doesn’t work. And the karmic repercussions on the witch who tries are so bad that the witch may never come back from it. It’s one thing to create an abomination of nature, but to do so without consent is a gross abuse of power that is unforgivable to the universe.”
“How much of that is intent? Like if I wanted to turn a creature of death and didn’t want to risk the karmic repercussions, could I talk another witch into doing it for me?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Whoever casts the spell deals with the penalty. Plus while the necromancer is active, the witch must turn all of their power over to it.”
