Feral Night, page 8
She raised her hands, and silvery light played about her form.
What is she doing? Lukie asked her patron.
Ghosts are trapped by their obsessions and passions, the Detective explained. If she lets go of them, she’ll move on.
“Wait, no!” Lukie rushed to where Anneth stood. The ghost couldn’t leave yet. Not until they’d rescued Dad.
The woman stopped, surprised, and the aura of silvery light faded.
“We need to understand who you were before,” Lukie said. “What was the important thing you had to do?”
“Yes,” Anneth touched the blood dripping from her face. “I must—” She shook her head, frowning. “Why cannot I remember?”
“We’ll figure it out,” Lukie promised. She headed in the columbarium’s direction. Energy spilled from Tenebra, in rising waves of ancient melancholy from the sighing ocean of the dead. Whispering voices howled, building to a terrible crescendo.
A spectral storm is rolling in, the Detective said. The ghost realm of Stonerise Castle is bridging onto the living lands.
“How do I get there?” Lukie asked.
Anneth can take you, once you resolve her amnesia, or bargain with that muzzled gravebeast.
For a few seconds Lukie pondered setting a trap for the urn’s stalker, but that was too risky. “Let’s work with Anneth. How will she remember?”
Find something familiar. Use your amazing skills of observation and deduction, the Detective suggested. Notice how the columbarium is on the easternmost edge of the graveyard?
“No.”
Pay attention, junior detective—
“Can we have a conversation where you’re not completely condescending?” Lukie growled.
Traditionally, that’s where the worst sorts of people were buried, the Detective continued, unperturbed. Or the poorest. Now, check that symbol on the building.
Lukie squinted at the writing above the lintel of the columbarium. Carved into the worn stone were tiny marks, half-filled with moss. Some figures she recognized from church, while others she wasn’t sure about. In the center was a vaguely familiar pattern—the upward pointing triangle of the Light joined to its mirror image that signified the Dark, all surrounded by the elemental shapes and bounded by a circle.
“This mashes together every religious icon ever. Mother Paverna at my church would have a fit.”
It’s a grand warding, something cooked up by paranoid magicians.
Lukie read the inscription aloud: “‘The fallen within are interred with the Precursor’s Grace and the Sanctity of the Light, with the blessing of all the Spirits of the Firmament and Fundament. Travel well, and do not return to these mortal shores.’ What does that mean?”
It’s something you’d stick on the grave of someone bad, like a serial killer. It’s telling their soul to shove off, and not even bother reincarnating. I’ve seen it on individual graves, but not an entire run-down urn motel. The person who did this—perhaps an occultist—was so terrified of these people that they used a symbol that borders on blasphemy.
“I do not know,” Anneth whispered, unaware of Lukie’s internal conversation. “It sounds final.”
The howling noise from Tenebra increased.
Be careful, the Detective yelled. Getting harder to focus on you… the storm.
“What do I do?” Lukie pleaded.
Their link firmed again. Trust your client. Believe in her. You’ve taken her cash, and you have to deliver. You’ve gotta be on her side all the way. Remember to rely on observation and logic above any powers and…
The wailing, screaming wind drowned the Detective’s voice.
“And what?” Lukie bellowed.
And don’t forget to brush your teeth before bedtime.
The howling increased in tempo, and the sense of her patron diminished.
Lukie was on her own.
She returned to the shelf where Anneth’s urn had rested. No immediate clues leaped at her. Time to try her power to see into the past at locations. I need to think of a better name for this than psychometry. Later.
Lukie closed her eyes, remembering how Cage had instructed her. Use this place as a touchstone. Call upon Tenebra. She hooked her fingers in her pocket, reaching for her cassette. The cache object warmed her, and she cast her senses forth, feeling the Underworld massing beyond the Veil—a dark, velvet ocean of the dead.
Souls were a person’s identity, memories, and special essence mixed. And everything connected through Tenebra, a violent sea of grief and regret, where hungry, rapacious shades consumed each other for recollections of life. She placed a hand on the shelf and concentrated. The power flowed easier now than it had that first time when she’d tried to recall her own murder. Through the Veil, Tenebra pounded like angry waves on a beach. Energy from the Underworld spilled forth, into her and through her.
Images of people visiting the columbarium flashed past. An ogre woman in overalls, repairing the broken wire fencing. Teenagers, smoking illicit cigarettes, giggling. Priests praying before the rows of urns. The vision crumbled. She concentrated, pushing at the flows of spectral energy around her, straining until an elderly man in old-fashioned work clothes appeared. He cracked open a wooden box at his feet with a crowbar. Dozens of urns nested within. “Travel well,” he muttered as he pushed one into place on an empty shelf, with as much enthusiasm as when Lukie had stocked the detergent aisle at the Cubermarket. “Do not return to these mortal shores.” He said the same refrain over each container he unpacked.
The tides of power from Tenebra surged. Lukie flailed as she lost control, knocking an urn from the worn shelf. She barely caught it. Huh. That didn’t tell me a lot. Crap.
She replaced the urn, and faced Anneth: “Are you sure you don't remember anything?”
“No, child,” the ghost sighed.
Lukie paced. That matched with her vision. Anneth had died elsewhere and had been interred in a place to which she had no strong emotional connection. Perhaps we can go to the site of the massacre, but where is it? No one who’d know would be awake. She watched the ghost stare forlornly at the sky.
Anneth spoke in a posh manner, suggesting she was a member of the gentry. And she wore that expensive red gown. Only she was blended. Could she hold land and title? Was she a privileged exception? How had history treated people like them? Maybe I should go to a library, Lukie thought. Something for morning, when the sun rose in the sky. What could she do in the remaining hours of the night? She couldn’t waste this precious time.
Lukie studied her phone. Tamlyn had been keen on sleeping; she’d contact him later. And while he’d warned her about contacting Meven, she only had until midnight to save Dad, before the barriers between the Underworld and the living lands strengthened.
What did he say? Think about something before I do it? Well, I have.
She reached into her pocket to call Meven.
Anneth drifted pensively in front of her.
“Don’t worry.” Lukie gave her client a thumbs up. “I’ve got this all figured out.” Mostly.
Chapter 11
The Tower of Wings
Meven arrived on a motorbike forty minutes later. He removed his helmet, dark curled hair tumbling to his shoulders. His yellow eyes glowed under the stars before he slipped on his smoked glass goggles. Then he leaped over the wall in a single bound, his leather coat swirling behind him like a raven’s wings.
He’s a cool guy, Lukie admitted, watching his dramatic entrance from the crook of an overhanging tree.
She studied her internal reaction. At school, when she’d met someone she liked, she felt an excited rush. A racing heartbeat, sweaty palms, and an immediate urge to confide in a close friend about how hot that person was.
Instead, while she admired Meven’s fashion statement, she didn’t feel anything. She dropped from the tree to the ground with a solid thump.
Maybe that meant she only liked girls. Perhaps she was over the whole guy thing after Rillen. She’d spent her last few years in a rocky relationship with Karra. She recalled the taste of Karra’s lips (berry-flavored or chocolate, depending on her favorite lipstick), and the smell of her perfume (jasmine and moonflower) as they snuggled in bed on sleepover nights.
When alive, she’d feel an answering twinge, and an excited pulse…
And now that was gone. While she ached over their broken relationship and lit with the warmth of having driven Karra to the afterlife, nothing felt like living passion. I guess I’m all shadows inside. She pushed these uncomfortable thoughts to one side. She’d have all eternity to deal with her personal undead crap.
Meven strode toward her through the rows of tombstones, waving. He wore a Miserica t-shirt, a popular band associated with the Gloom music movement in the late 1970s, which had focused on heavy basslines and percussion, and lead singers dressed in jet and purple.
“Are you a Vesperling?” she asked, referring to the youth subculture spawned from the Gloom. She had tried the fashions, but the stifling summer heat of Breakwater Bay had made wearing black, extravagant dresses a nightmare and Lukie’s pale face make-up had sweated off. Karra had managed.
“I’m part of the dark poetry collective,” Meven explained. “It started centuries ago, in this very Ward. It predates Gloom, Vesperlings, and Shadowtide. I think of those trends as our grandchildren.” He pulled at his t-shirt. “What’s your style?”
“Cold Wave.” Lukie’s movement had broken out in the late 1970s and 1980s, where singers like Vizzie Slanter of Outside Sky merged traditional operatic singing with rock music and synth-pop. Whereas punk tore things apart, Cold Wave collected the pieces and made cool new stuff with it. She’d wanted to dress like she had done in the past with the extensive green eyeshadow favored by Vizzie, but Tamlyn had said she wouldn’t fit in. But Meven didn’t care, or at least perhaps black t-shirts and dark eyeliner would never go out of style.
“Oh yeah. From the eighties.” Meven leaned back, reciting the chorus from Outside Sky’s View from the Summit.
“I would have been there for you
When the stars crashed
When your life became ash
I would have been there for you
When you went to delve
When the clock struck twelve
I would have been there for you
Had you not sent me away.”
His voice and pitch were excellent. Lukie clapped her hands. “That’s good.”
Meven bowed. His dark hair fell over his face. “What did you want help with? I imagine it wasn’t to talk about music, as much as I’d prefer to.”
“There’s a symbol on the columbarium where Anneth’s urn was.” She led him along the path to the forlorn brick building and indicated the Grand Warding incised on the lintel. “Do you know anything about it?”
“I’ve seen something similar at the Tower of Wings.” Meven scrutinized the inscription.
“Where’s that?”
“I’ll show you,” Meven said. “It’s where the victims of the Stonefell Massacre were interred. People were so scared at what had happened, the Royal Investigator ordered a special tomb built rather than letting the noble families bury their kin in their ancestral plots.”
“Then why was Anneth stuck in a crumbling brick shed in the middle of nowhere?” Lukie jerked a thumb toward the columbarium.
Meven grimaced like he’d eaten a lemon. “You know how classist this country is. Everyone is obsessed with the lost nobles who died at the Stonefell Massacre, yet they forget about the other people who died that night. The hundreds of servants that would have been slaving from dusk to dawn to put the party on. No one remembers their names.”
“That sucks.” Lukie folded her arms.
Anneth materialized in front of the columbarium. “Will I always be as forgotten as these others?”
I shouldn’t talk about depressing things near her. Lukie balled her hands into fists, wondering what sort of servant Anneth had been. Perhaps a high-ranking maid, given her well-groomed appearance. “You are special! Once we discover your name and history, you’ll understand that. Everyone who died that night was important.”
“Your words are kind,” Anneth murmured, but her face held only bitterness.
“Are you talking to your client?” Meven asked.
“Yeah. Wait, you can’t see her?”
“No. We can only talk to ghosts we’ve got a sympathetic link with. That special spark or connection. Let’s visit the tower.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to take Anneth straight to the site of the castle?” Lukie asked.
“Your call,” Meven said. “But there’s nothing on the top of Stonefell Hill, and there’s a few things that might jog her memory at the Tower. The names of the nobles, the people she worked for.”
That sounded promising. “We’ll go there. Anneth, let’s visit the Tower of Wings.”
“I will find you in the shadows,” the ghost whispered. An ethereal breeze blew her dark hair across her bleeding face.
Meven headed toward the road. Lukie trailed after him, stumbling on the rough, cobbled path. Meven leaped on top of the high cemetery wall in a single bound. Lukie heaved herself over with a frantic burst of her undead strength, sending rocks and pebbles everywhere.
Meven walked over to his motorcycle, retrieved a spare helmet, and handed it to her.
“I don’t need this.” Lukie studied her faint, starlit reflection in the visor.
“It’ll prevent us from being stopped by the Venison.” He pulled on his own helmet and straddled the bike. “Get on.”
Lukie eyed the vehicle. “I haven’t ridden one of these before.”
“You’ll be fine,” Meven soothed. “Hang on to me, and lean when I do. It’s easy.”
Lukie put on the helmet, clipped on the strap, and clambered on the back, feeling the corpse chill from Meven’s body. She wondered briefly about intimacy between the undead and the living. Could you have an emotionally satisfying relationship without desire?
He kicked the stand up and the electric motorcycle glided forward, accelerating.
The wind rushed by as they traveled through the suburban streets of the Thunderhead Ward. Used to being surrounded by the glass and steel of cars, Lukie felt exposed as the vehicle weaved through traffic and powered along tree-lined roads.
Dad had been against motorcycles, having had an accident on one when he was a teenager. “Don’t get rides from anyone with a bike. It means they’re too lazy to save for a car.”
Not that it mattered, now that she was undead and all.
Meven swung left at a set of lights, gliding past a row of shops advertising fast food chicken, roast meats, and a flurry of strange cuisine from the other side of the continent: curries, pickled cabbage, and rice balls. Things she would have been familiar with if she’d ever gone to the Conservatorium of Music as she’d intended; Breakwater Bay’s most cosmopolitan dish had been grilled fish and fries. Once again, she raged at the Baron for stealing her future.
As they rode, the suburban areas changed to fields of browned grass and wooded groves. In the distance, a hill sloped upwards, surmounted with a lofty stone tower like a lighthouse. Pre-dawn light limned the horizon’s edge. Lukie shuddered at the uncomfortable approach of the sun.
After parking, they hiked up the narrow path, past golden and red flower beds that radiated away from the central spire in concentric circles.
“The yellow ones are helianths.” Meven pointed. “In local folklore, they protect against undead.”
Lukie remembered Mama, twining daisies in her hair, telling her about the special relationship between elves and blossoms. “Does it work?”
“No,” Meven chuckled. “I come here all the time.”
“Why?”
“I’ll show you.”
Meven led her toward the structure. In the pre-dawn light, the sun glinted on metal trash bins, a shuttered tourist kiosk, and a gift shop. Carved ravens, sparrows, and wide-winged cranes decorated the tower’s exterior.
“What does that mean?”
“They’re all psychopomps. In folklore, they guide lost souls to the afterlife safely through Tenebra.” Meven escorted her to a rusted grille door that sealed off the entrance to the tower. The modern security feature jarred with the historical stonework. Meven crouched in front of it, and after a few seconds of fiddling, creaked it open.
“I can escort souls to the Lanes of the Dead,” Lukie explained as they entered.
“Most patrons give you gifts to get the stuff they want. I wonder what yours gets out of rescuing lost souls,” Meven mused.
“My patron genuinely wants to help others,” Lukie said.
Meven snorted. “Saints don’t become ghost lords of Tenebra.”
Lukie bit her lip. Having a vestige meant taking on a bucket of supernatural debt. She owed her patron for her existence, and in return had to serve as the Detective’s agent. She’d agreed to solve mysteries and stop ghost lords from stealing souls. That wasn’t too bad, was it?
Lukie marveled at the hundreds of overlapping wings carved into the roof, and thought of how she needed to ask the Detective for better abilities. “What are your powers?”
“Things that befit a death knight,” he explained. “The Cloak of Shadows to foil my enemies. And to thwart them, my Rose Blade, and the Bone Mail of Withered Petals.”
So cool! She pondered names for her own gifts. What if I call my power about driving to the Lanes of the Dead ‘the Shadow Car?’ And how I can see past events ‘the Shadow Play?’ She poked at her vestige, to ask about some practical abilities. Yet when she reached out, a thousand voices filled the darkness of Tenebra.
Lukie shuddered. “Do you feel that storm?”
“Yeah.” Meven gestured at her to follow him down a set of narrow stairs. “Every time I think I understand the Underworld, more weirdness manifests.”
She followed him for several minutes, reaching a round, open space at the bottom.
Meven pointed above at the ceiling. “See the grand warding at the center?”
What is she doing? Lukie asked her patron.
Ghosts are trapped by their obsessions and passions, the Detective explained. If she lets go of them, she’ll move on.
“Wait, no!” Lukie rushed to where Anneth stood. The ghost couldn’t leave yet. Not until they’d rescued Dad.
The woman stopped, surprised, and the aura of silvery light faded.
“We need to understand who you were before,” Lukie said. “What was the important thing you had to do?”
“Yes,” Anneth touched the blood dripping from her face. “I must—” She shook her head, frowning. “Why cannot I remember?”
“We’ll figure it out,” Lukie promised. She headed in the columbarium’s direction. Energy spilled from Tenebra, in rising waves of ancient melancholy from the sighing ocean of the dead. Whispering voices howled, building to a terrible crescendo.
A spectral storm is rolling in, the Detective said. The ghost realm of Stonerise Castle is bridging onto the living lands.
“How do I get there?” Lukie asked.
Anneth can take you, once you resolve her amnesia, or bargain with that muzzled gravebeast.
For a few seconds Lukie pondered setting a trap for the urn’s stalker, but that was too risky. “Let’s work with Anneth. How will she remember?”
Find something familiar. Use your amazing skills of observation and deduction, the Detective suggested. Notice how the columbarium is on the easternmost edge of the graveyard?
“No.”
Pay attention, junior detective—
“Can we have a conversation where you’re not completely condescending?” Lukie growled.
Traditionally, that’s where the worst sorts of people were buried, the Detective continued, unperturbed. Or the poorest. Now, check that symbol on the building.
Lukie squinted at the writing above the lintel of the columbarium. Carved into the worn stone were tiny marks, half-filled with moss. Some figures she recognized from church, while others she wasn’t sure about. In the center was a vaguely familiar pattern—the upward pointing triangle of the Light joined to its mirror image that signified the Dark, all surrounded by the elemental shapes and bounded by a circle.
“This mashes together every religious icon ever. Mother Paverna at my church would have a fit.”
It’s a grand warding, something cooked up by paranoid magicians.
Lukie read the inscription aloud: “‘The fallen within are interred with the Precursor’s Grace and the Sanctity of the Light, with the blessing of all the Spirits of the Firmament and Fundament. Travel well, and do not return to these mortal shores.’ What does that mean?”
It’s something you’d stick on the grave of someone bad, like a serial killer. It’s telling their soul to shove off, and not even bother reincarnating. I’ve seen it on individual graves, but not an entire run-down urn motel. The person who did this—perhaps an occultist—was so terrified of these people that they used a symbol that borders on blasphemy.
“I do not know,” Anneth whispered, unaware of Lukie’s internal conversation. “It sounds final.”
The howling noise from Tenebra increased.
Be careful, the Detective yelled. Getting harder to focus on you… the storm.
“What do I do?” Lukie pleaded.
Their link firmed again. Trust your client. Believe in her. You’ve taken her cash, and you have to deliver. You’ve gotta be on her side all the way. Remember to rely on observation and logic above any powers and…
The wailing, screaming wind drowned the Detective’s voice.
“And what?” Lukie bellowed.
And don’t forget to brush your teeth before bedtime.
The howling increased in tempo, and the sense of her patron diminished.
Lukie was on her own.
She returned to the shelf where Anneth’s urn had rested. No immediate clues leaped at her. Time to try her power to see into the past at locations. I need to think of a better name for this than psychometry. Later.
Lukie closed her eyes, remembering how Cage had instructed her. Use this place as a touchstone. Call upon Tenebra. She hooked her fingers in her pocket, reaching for her cassette. The cache object warmed her, and she cast her senses forth, feeling the Underworld massing beyond the Veil—a dark, velvet ocean of the dead.
Souls were a person’s identity, memories, and special essence mixed. And everything connected through Tenebra, a violent sea of grief and regret, where hungry, rapacious shades consumed each other for recollections of life. She placed a hand on the shelf and concentrated. The power flowed easier now than it had that first time when she’d tried to recall her own murder. Through the Veil, Tenebra pounded like angry waves on a beach. Energy from the Underworld spilled forth, into her and through her.
Images of people visiting the columbarium flashed past. An ogre woman in overalls, repairing the broken wire fencing. Teenagers, smoking illicit cigarettes, giggling. Priests praying before the rows of urns. The vision crumbled. She concentrated, pushing at the flows of spectral energy around her, straining until an elderly man in old-fashioned work clothes appeared. He cracked open a wooden box at his feet with a crowbar. Dozens of urns nested within. “Travel well,” he muttered as he pushed one into place on an empty shelf, with as much enthusiasm as when Lukie had stocked the detergent aisle at the Cubermarket. “Do not return to these mortal shores.” He said the same refrain over each container he unpacked.
The tides of power from Tenebra surged. Lukie flailed as she lost control, knocking an urn from the worn shelf. She barely caught it. Huh. That didn’t tell me a lot. Crap.
She replaced the urn, and faced Anneth: “Are you sure you don't remember anything?”
“No, child,” the ghost sighed.
Lukie paced. That matched with her vision. Anneth had died elsewhere and had been interred in a place to which she had no strong emotional connection. Perhaps we can go to the site of the massacre, but where is it? No one who’d know would be awake. She watched the ghost stare forlornly at the sky.
Anneth spoke in a posh manner, suggesting she was a member of the gentry. And she wore that expensive red gown. Only she was blended. Could she hold land and title? Was she a privileged exception? How had history treated people like them? Maybe I should go to a library, Lukie thought. Something for morning, when the sun rose in the sky. What could she do in the remaining hours of the night? She couldn’t waste this precious time.
Lukie studied her phone. Tamlyn had been keen on sleeping; she’d contact him later. And while he’d warned her about contacting Meven, she only had until midnight to save Dad, before the barriers between the Underworld and the living lands strengthened.
What did he say? Think about something before I do it? Well, I have.
She reached into her pocket to call Meven.
Anneth drifted pensively in front of her.
“Don’t worry.” Lukie gave her client a thumbs up. “I’ve got this all figured out.” Mostly.
Chapter 11
The Tower of Wings
Meven arrived on a motorbike forty minutes later. He removed his helmet, dark curled hair tumbling to his shoulders. His yellow eyes glowed under the stars before he slipped on his smoked glass goggles. Then he leaped over the wall in a single bound, his leather coat swirling behind him like a raven’s wings.
He’s a cool guy, Lukie admitted, watching his dramatic entrance from the crook of an overhanging tree.
She studied her internal reaction. At school, when she’d met someone she liked, she felt an excited rush. A racing heartbeat, sweaty palms, and an immediate urge to confide in a close friend about how hot that person was.
Instead, while she admired Meven’s fashion statement, she didn’t feel anything. She dropped from the tree to the ground with a solid thump.
Maybe that meant she only liked girls. Perhaps she was over the whole guy thing after Rillen. She’d spent her last few years in a rocky relationship with Karra. She recalled the taste of Karra’s lips (berry-flavored or chocolate, depending on her favorite lipstick), and the smell of her perfume (jasmine and moonflower) as they snuggled in bed on sleepover nights.
When alive, she’d feel an answering twinge, and an excited pulse…
And now that was gone. While she ached over their broken relationship and lit with the warmth of having driven Karra to the afterlife, nothing felt like living passion. I guess I’m all shadows inside. She pushed these uncomfortable thoughts to one side. She’d have all eternity to deal with her personal undead crap.
Meven strode toward her through the rows of tombstones, waving. He wore a Miserica t-shirt, a popular band associated with the Gloom music movement in the late 1970s, which had focused on heavy basslines and percussion, and lead singers dressed in jet and purple.
“Are you a Vesperling?” she asked, referring to the youth subculture spawned from the Gloom. She had tried the fashions, but the stifling summer heat of Breakwater Bay had made wearing black, extravagant dresses a nightmare and Lukie’s pale face make-up had sweated off. Karra had managed.
“I’m part of the dark poetry collective,” Meven explained. “It started centuries ago, in this very Ward. It predates Gloom, Vesperlings, and Shadowtide. I think of those trends as our grandchildren.” He pulled at his t-shirt. “What’s your style?”
“Cold Wave.” Lukie’s movement had broken out in the late 1970s and 1980s, where singers like Vizzie Slanter of Outside Sky merged traditional operatic singing with rock music and synth-pop. Whereas punk tore things apart, Cold Wave collected the pieces and made cool new stuff with it. She’d wanted to dress like she had done in the past with the extensive green eyeshadow favored by Vizzie, but Tamlyn had said she wouldn’t fit in. But Meven didn’t care, or at least perhaps black t-shirts and dark eyeliner would never go out of style.
“Oh yeah. From the eighties.” Meven leaned back, reciting the chorus from Outside Sky’s View from the Summit.
“I would have been there for you
When the stars crashed
When your life became ash
I would have been there for you
When you went to delve
When the clock struck twelve
I would have been there for you
Had you not sent me away.”
His voice and pitch were excellent. Lukie clapped her hands. “That’s good.”
Meven bowed. His dark hair fell over his face. “What did you want help with? I imagine it wasn’t to talk about music, as much as I’d prefer to.”
“There’s a symbol on the columbarium where Anneth’s urn was.” She led him along the path to the forlorn brick building and indicated the Grand Warding incised on the lintel. “Do you know anything about it?”
“I’ve seen something similar at the Tower of Wings.” Meven scrutinized the inscription.
“Where’s that?”
“I’ll show you,” Meven said. “It’s where the victims of the Stonefell Massacre were interred. People were so scared at what had happened, the Royal Investigator ordered a special tomb built rather than letting the noble families bury their kin in their ancestral plots.”
“Then why was Anneth stuck in a crumbling brick shed in the middle of nowhere?” Lukie jerked a thumb toward the columbarium.
Meven grimaced like he’d eaten a lemon. “You know how classist this country is. Everyone is obsessed with the lost nobles who died at the Stonefell Massacre, yet they forget about the other people who died that night. The hundreds of servants that would have been slaving from dusk to dawn to put the party on. No one remembers their names.”
“That sucks.” Lukie folded her arms.
Anneth materialized in front of the columbarium. “Will I always be as forgotten as these others?”
I shouldn’t talk about depressing things near her. Lukie balled her hands into fists, wondering what sort of servant Anneth had been. Perhaps a high-ranking maid, given her well-groomed appearance. “You are special! Once we discover your name and history, you’ll understand that. Everyone who died that night was important.”
“Your words are kind,” Anneth murmured, but her face held only bitterness.
“Are you talking to your client?” Meven asked.
“Yeah. Wait, you can’t see her?”
“No. We can only talk to ghosts we’ve got a sympathetic link with. That special spark or connection. Let’s visit the tower.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to take Anneth straight to the site of the castle?” Lukie asked.
“Your call,” Meven said. “But there’s nothing on the top of Stonefell Hill, and there’s a few things that might jog her memory at the Tower. The names of the nobles, the people she worked for.”
That sounded promising. “We’ll go there. Anneth, let’s visit the Tower of Wings.”
“I will find you in the shadows,” the ghost whispered. An ethereal breeze blew her dark hair across her bleeding face.
Meven headed toward the road. Lukie trailed after him, stumbling on the rough, cobbled path. Meven leaped on top of the high cemetery wall in a single bound. Lukie heaved herself over with a frantic burst of her undead strength, sending rocks and pebbles everywhere.
Meven walked over to his motorcycle, retrieved a spare helmet, and handed it to her.
“I don’t need this.” Lukie studied her faint, starlit reflection in the visor.
“It’ll prevent us from being stopped by the Venison.” He pulled on his own helmet and straddled the bike. “Get on.”
Lukie eyed the vehicle. “I haven’t ridden one of these before.”
“You’ll be fine,” Meven soothed. “Hang on to me, and lean when I do. It’s easy.”
Lukie put on the helmet, clipped on the strap, and clambered on the back, feeling the corpse chill from Meven’s body. She wondered briefly about intimacy between the undead and the living. Could you have an emotionally satisfying relationship without desire?
He kicked the stand up and the electric motorcycle glided forward, accelerating.
The wind rushed by as they traveled through the suburban streets of the Thunderhead Ward. Used to being surrounded by the glass and steel of cars, Lukie felt exposed as the vehicle weaved through traffic and powered along tree-lined roads.
Dad had been against motorcycles, having had an accident on one when he was a teenager. “Don’t get rides from anyone with a bike. It means they’re too lazy to save for a car.”
Not that it mattered, now that she was undead and all.
Meven swung left at a set of lights, gliding past a row of shops advertising fast food chicken, roast meats, and a flurry of strange cuisine from the other side of the continent: curries, pickled cabbage, and rice balls. Things she would have been familiar with if she’d ever gone to the Conservatorium of Music as she’d intended; Breakwater Bay’s most cosmopolitan dish had been grilled fish and fries. Once again, she raged at the Baron for stealing her future.
As they rode, the suburban areas changed to fields of browned grass and wooded groves. In the distance, a hill sloped upwards, surmounted with a lofty stone tower like a lighthouse. Pre-dawn light limned the horizon’s edge. Lukie shuddered at the uncomfortable approach of the sun.
After parking, they hiked up the narrow path, past golden and red flower beds that radiated away from the central spire in concentric circles.
“The yellow ones are helianths.” Meven pointed. “In local folklore, they protect against undead.”
Lukie remembered Mama, twining daisies in her hair, telling her about the special relationship between elves and blossoms. “Does it work?”
“No,” Meven chuckled. “I come here all the time.”
“Why?”
“I’ll show you.”
Meven led her toward the structure. In the pre-dawn light, the sun glinted on metal trash bins, a shuttered tourist kiosk, and a gift shop. Carved ravens, sparrows, and wide-winged cranes decorated the tower’s exterior.
“What does that mean?”
“They’re all psychopomps. In folklore, they guide lost souls to the afterlife safely through Tenebra.” Meven escorted her to a rusted grille door that sealed off the entrance to the tower. The modern security feature jarred with the historical stonework. Meven crouched in front of it, and after a few seconds of fiddling, creaked it open.
“I can escort souls to the Lanes of the Dead,” Lukie explained as they entered.
“Most patrons give you gifts to get the stuff they want. I wonder what yours gets out of rescuing lost souls,” Meven mused.
“My patron genuinely wants to help others,” Lukie said.
Meven snorted. “Saints don’t become ghost lords of Tenebra.”
Lukie bit her lip. Having a vestige meant taking on a bucket of supernatural debt. She owed her patron for her existence, and in return had to serve as the Detective’s agent. She’d agreed to solve mysteries and stop ghost lords from stealing souls. That wasn’t too bad, was it?
Lukie marveled at the hundreds of overlapping wings carved into the roof, and thought of how she needed to ask the Detective for better abilities. “What are your powers?”
“Things that befit a death knight,” he explained. “The Cloak of Shadows to foil my enemies. And to thwart them, my Rose Blade, and the Bone Mail of Withered Petals.”
So cool! She pondered names for her own gifts. What if I call my power about driving to the Lanes of the Dead ‘the Shadow Car?’ And how I can see past events ‘the Shadow Play?’ She poked at her vestige, to ask about some practical abilities. Yet when she reached out, a thousand voices filled the darkness of Tenebra.
Lukie shuddered. “Do you feel that storm?”
“Yeah.” Meven gestured at her to follow him down a set of narrow stairs. “Every time I think I understand the Underworld, more weirdness manifests.”
She followed him for several minutes, reaching a round, open space at the bottom.
Meven pointed above at the ceiling. “See the grand warding at the center?”
