Smells Like Finn Spirit Read online

  Sammy said, “Fine. I’ll gather whatever wards and weapons I can find,” and pushed her way past Mort into the house. “And don’t even think about calling it stealing, Mort.”

  “Good luck,” Mort called after her. “Finn’s already used up or lost most of them anyway.”

  “The ones you didn’t sell off,” Sammy retorted as she disappeared through the basement door.

  Mort glared after her a second, unable to respond, then turned back to us and said, “Mattie, aren’t you going to help her?”

  “If I come inside, you won’t let me leave again,” Mattie said.

  “You always were the smart one,” Mort said with a tired smile, confirming Mattie’s suspicion. “Finn, you know it isn’t safe for her with you, please tell her.”

  I wrestled with my response for a minute, then sighed. “He’s right, Mattie. I’m sorry. You are safest with your father. You can’t come with us.”

  Mattie frowned, then threw up her hands. “Whatever.” She strode into the house.

  Mort waited until she had disappeared down the hall, then said, “How kind of you to permit her own father to care for her.”

  I ignored the barb, and looked down at the boxes holding all my worldly goods. “I don’t suppose you got the Kin Finder back from whoever you lent it to.”

  “No, and even if I had you couldn’t take it with you. It’s family property, not yours.”

  “Which is why I still can’t believe you let someone outside the family use it.”

  “What I do to keep the family business from collapsing is none of your business. You signed—”

  “—control over to you, yeah yeah, I know. But the only reason I can imagine you lending it out was just to keep me from using it for my dating service.”

  “Not everything in the world revolves around you, Finn. It hasn’t in many, many years.”

  I shook my head. “You really need to get over the whole Talker thing, Mort. I didn’t ask—”

  “Didn’t I just say not everything revolves around you? As much as you try to make it.”

  “Fine,” I said. “But Grandfather is back and he’s dangerous. He’s kidnapped Mattie before to use against me, he might try again. If I were you, I’d take her and go hide someplace he can’t find you.”

  “If you were me, Grandfather wouldn’t be trying to kill us at all,” Mort replied.

  I felt suddenly exhausted, crushed beneath the weight of everything that had happened these past six months since my return, wrung out emotionally from all that had happened just today.

  “Mort, look, I—you have good reasons to be mad at me.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I could have spent more time getting to know you again, more time helping you with the business—”

  “Not what I asked for,” Mort replied, and looked behind him impatiently, clearly wishing not to have this conversation, but also unwilling to leave the door unguarded and unable to send me away.

  “No,” I admitted. “But … I am sorry.”

  Mort shook his head, then said in a slightly less angry voice, his eyes not meeting mine, “You know, for like a second there after you came back, I actually was glad. I’d been taking care of Father, of Pete, of Mattie, of the business—for a second I thought maybe it would be nice to not have to do all of that alone.”

  I took a step toward him. “You’re not alone, Mort. We’re family. Brothers. We used to have fun together, before my exile, remember?” Well, before Mother died at least, before Mort grew more and more distant and angry.

  Mort blinked, and looked at me. “What the fuck does that have to do with anything? Look around! We aren’t kids anymore! And if your idea of fun is to go running after danger every—”

  “I didn’t ask to be used by Grandfather,” I said in a tight voice, determined to remain calm and friendly despite my growing irritation. “And I haven’t been ‘running after danger’! I—”

  “Just stop with all the damn excuses!” Mort snapped back. “You always have a perfect explanation for everything you do, but that doesn’t change the fact you’ve hurt everyone in this family doing it.”

  Tears welled up in my eyes. “I know,” I said.

  “What?” he asked, clearly expecting some different response.

  “I know,” I repeated. “But you don’t even realize how much I never asked for any of this. I swear I’ve only done what I thought I had to in the moment, what I thought was right, to try and protect this family, to—”

  “The way you protected Mattie today?” Mort said sharply.

  “She is exactly why we shouldn’t be fighting right now,” I replied. “She’s hurting, Mort. She needs her whole family around her right now, together.”

  “How very Mr. Brady of you,” Mort said. “But I have some news for you, Finn. Her whole family is either dead, mad, cursed, or dangerous, in no small part thanks to you. So you’ll excuse me if I choose to keep you the fuck away from her for a little bit.”

  I felt as though he had just gutted me. I hadn’t realized how much Mattie had become part of my life in the past six months. And everything he said about our family hit me like lemon-scented Aliens drool on an open wound, burning right through to my heart.

  And there, it burst into an intense fire of determination.

  I was going to put an end to all of this once and for all, put an end to Grandfather and his allies, and to their plots that were constantly putting me and my family in danger.

  “I really am sorry, Mort. And … okay. Okay. I’ll stay away, until this is done. But when—if—I can stop Grandfather and fix all of this, we’re going to have this conversation again.”

  Mort snorted. “That right there’s your problem. You keep trying to fix things, keep trying to play hero, to make everything right. And instead, you end up making things worse, destroying … destroying lives.” He choked to a stop.

  I winced. “Mort, look, I know you blame me for what happened with Brianne—”

  “Don’t,” Mort said, his voice going flat. “I’m way past done with the heartfelt talk. I just want you out. And don’t go trying to make me look like the bad guy to Mattie and the others, the way you do.”

  “Screw you,” I said, irritation springing back up in me like Sonic the Hedgehog landing on spiky childhood arguments. Who was he to keep judging me? This was the guy who’d conceived Mattie and made sure she was a Talker just to secure his position as head of the family, then neglected Mattie for his succubus spirit wife. “I’m not you, I don’t use Mattie to get what I want.”

  Mort was through the screen door and shoving me, hard, so fast that I had little time to react, and I stumbled backward down the stairs, falling back onto my butt.

  “Fuck you!” Mort said. “When you move on, I’m still going to be here, I’m still going to be Mattie’s father, and I’m done letting you make my life and my job any more difficult!”

  Mort turned without waiting for a response and strode back inside the house, behind the protection of the wards, then marched off down the hall and out of sight.

  I stared after him, shocked at the real anger I’d seen on his face, at the fact that he’d actually attacked me, at the fresh tears that welled up in my eyes at his words.

  * * *

  *Your brother is an ass,* Alynon said.

  Yeah, I thought back. Then, I wasn’t exactly perfect, either.

  *And yet, well do I know the difficulties a jealous brother may create.*

  “It’s more than jealousy,” I responded out loud. I felt the need to talk with someone, even if it was a voice in my head. “Hell, Mort and me, we’ve been fighting practically since I was old enough to argue over who got to eat the last bowl of Cap’n Crunch. But we’ve always made peace, and even had fun together in between the fights. We’re brothers.”

  *You say that as though the word itself holds some greater meaning,* Alynon said. *In my experience, it is but a word, a space formed of sound, empty but for what you both choose to pl
ace within it.*

  “Well, I don’t know what life is like growing up Fey, but Mort and me, we share a lot more than just blood. A whole history of good times and bad that nobody else shares. I just wish he remembered that.”

  I wiped at my eyes, and climbed to my feet.

  There wasn’t much I could do about this now. I would have to try and mend things with Mort after I dealt with the little problem of my undead grandfather trying to destroy an entire world and name himself King of Everything.

  I grabbed a couple of boxes, stacking one on top of the other, as Sammy emerged with a reusable shopping bag weighted down with objects.

  “The sword?” I asked.

  “Mort wouldn’t let me take it,” she said. “And if he’s going to protect Mattie, I figured he should have it.”

  “Yeah, guess so.” We headed to Dawn’s.

  Dawn stood in her kitchen making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. For someone who worked in a café, she had a very limited list of foods she knew how to prepare, or at least that she was willing to prepare. Desserts, that was a different topic entirely. But when it came to meals, the microwave was Dawn’s best friend. That, and cereal.

  “Thought you might be hungry,” she said, and licked the peanut butter off the knife. “I know I am.”

  “I—yes, thank you.” I still felt shaken by Mort’s outburst, and wasn’t sure what I even wanted to do next.

  We gathered in Dawn’s dining room around the table—after she moved a teetering stack of mail, a small amp, two empty Amazon boxes, and a collection of small bags from The Spice & Tea Exchange to clear enough space for us. Dawn and I ate our sandwiches as Sammy lifted a crystal out from beneath her shirt and pulled it off of the cord necklace, revealing a USB dongle on one end. She plugged the crystal into her laptop, and began typing furiously.

  The Arcana Ruling Council had sorcerers whose job it was to manage all information related to magic. As such, they’d created a kind of hidden layer within the Internet so that they could freely mess with information, hide things, post a bunch of fake information, all so the mundies wouldn’t figure out the truth about magic, or brightbloods.

  But Sammy was able to use their own “Infomancer layer” to tunnel into their systems and steal real information.

  As she typed, Sammy said, “Make sure your phones are off. Probably want to remove the chips as well, just to be safe. Until this is over, we can’t contact anyone via our normal means.”

  “We’ve got to—” I began, or at least I tried to. The peanut butter made it incredibly difficult to speak.

  Interesting fact, peanut paste was first created by Aztec alchemists to protect against a dangerous water brightblood, the ahuizotl, who would drag victims underwater and eat them. The Aztec would keep a leaf-wrapped ball of peanut paste in a pouch, and if attacked would stuff the ball into the creature’s mouth. The peanut paste, combined with the creature’s unique saliva, created a delicious glue that distracted the beast and made it impossible for it to bite anyone for hours. This trick was later adopted by other arcana as a cheap and easy way to stop many brightblood creatures whose voices were weapons, such as sirens, sphinxes, and leshies, not to mention evil wizards. In fact, soda crackers were invented solely to increase the stopping power of peanut butter—combine the two, and you could render a creature completely unable to speak as you escaped.

  I finally managed enough moisture to speak clearly. “We have to figure out how the Arcanites are planning to use that spell we saw in the video, and why they went after me, and Fatima, and Reggie, but not the rest of you. Until we figure that out, I don’t know what we can do. Any ideas?”

  Sammy continued typing as she said, “ARC files say Reggie was arrested for possession of a Medusa’s eye, and that it was used to stone an ARC Magus to death. Anyone want to bet on whether that Magus was an enemy of the Arcanites?”

  “Oh frak,” I said. Either of those crimes meant exile, but together they could lead to execution.

  Sammy typed some more, and her face didn’t so much pale as went a kind of ashy color as she looked up. “They claim Fatima had a blood star, and vials of blood from a number of arcana.”

  My skin prickled with goosebumps. “So that was the ‘evidence’ they were planting in the freezer.” Not good.

  Blood stars were artifacts from a dark period of arcana history. When blood was placed within the five-pointed star, it would separate out to the five points proportional to the gifts in that person’s bloodline—alchemy, wizardry, sorcery, thaumaturgy, and necromancy. Any blood left in the center of the star indicated the amount of mundy blood the person had in their recent ancestry. The stars were used by a sect of arcana supremacists to weed out those arcana with more mundy blood than magical, and either kill them or lobotomize their gifts away. Although that had happened hundreds of years ago, there were, of course, extremists who still adopted the sect’s beliefs due to ignorance, misplaced anger, and fear—or to control others using the same—just like mundies who became neo-Nazis, Klan members, or shock-talk radio hosts.

  It was something of a cruel joke or bold irony that the Arcanites of all people had used a blood star to frame someone.

  “This is crazy,” I said. “Why would the Arcanites go after Fatima? Is it to get at us somehow?”

  Sammy shook her head. “I don’t think so. Maybe because her father works in the ARC? I need to get more info, look for patterns. And we should probably find someplace else to lay low while I do. Unless you want enforcers busting down Dawn’s front door and mind-wiping her?”

  Her tone suggested my answer wasn’t entirely obvious. Irritated, I said, “Of course I don’t want that.” Patterns. Pete was great at patterns. And while a brightblood steading wasn’t entirely off the grid in arcana terms, it would be harder to find us lost among all that magical energy. “I say we head out to Elwha, lay low there.”

  “Sure,” Dawn said. “What could possibly go wrong? Last time you went out there, you got involved in a conspiracy to start World War Fey.”

  “At least this time I got involved in a conspiracy first, before going out there. So, you know, I’m getting more efficient at ruining everyone’s lives.”

  “Oh, stop with the pity party,” Sammy said, packing up her laptop. “But we really should get out of here fast, before someone comes looking for us. I can’t help Fatima if I’m dead or in a damn ARC hole.”

  “Hey!” Dawn said, and knocked on the table. “Don’t jinx us further.”

  Sammy rolled her eyes. “Mind if I borrow clothes? Just in case.”

  “No, come on.” Dawn rose and moved toward the hallway to her bedroom.

  Sammy looked at me. “See if you can find some insect repellent. And flea spray if Dawn has any. Never mind, we can pick that up on the way. The sooner we get out of here, the better.”

  “Actually,” I said, “hold on one second, both of you, I have something for us.” I ran into what used to be Dawn’s father’s den, where I had stored a few things in his old safe for just such an emergency. I spun the tumbler, and pulled out three wax figures inscribed with runes and filled with colorful liquid. The figures had been reshaped from wax candy bottles by an … unconventional thaumaturge in town, and then charged by me with residual spiritual energy from three of the bodies that had come through our necrotorium. They hummed in my hand with that spiritual energy now.

  I rushed back into the dining room, and handed the bottles out, yellow, green, and the red one for me. Red anything usually tasted best.

  “Just stick a hair on its back.” I plucked a hair from my head, and pressed it into the back of the figure for demonstration. “Then bottoms up.”

  Sammy set the wax figure down, and shook out her hand. “This thing is burning with magic. What is it?”

  “It will mask our spiritual resonance for a little while. Hopefully, that’ll hide us from the basic enforcer scrying and location spells.”

  Dawn held hers up to the light. “So it’ll transform me?”r />
  “No. Just create a sort of second aura around your own.” I looked at Sammy. “The vessel has magic to hold the energy within, but the energy itself shouldn’t bother you too much, I hope. It’s mostly spiritual, not magical.”

  Sammy frowned down at the bottle, then rolled her eyes. “I’ve drunk worse.” She plucked and pressed a hair onto its back, then in a swift move lifted it up, bit off the head, spat that out and downed the bottle’s contents.

  I held mine up like a toast to Dawn, then did the same. Dawn shrugged, and followed suit, pressing a hair into hers then downing it.

  The spiritual energy tickled going down, like swallowing liquid laughter. I could sense the spiritual energy, bound and given specific purpose by the combination of thaumaturgical and necromantic magic, spreading like an expanding cloud, pressing out through my flesh to surround me like a second, invisible skin.

  “Delicious,” Sammy said, crushing her bottle beneath the heel of her green Converse and rubbing her hand furiously against her red jeans. “Now, can we get out of here before the ARC comes looking anyway?”

  I realized there was something I needed to get before we left. I couldn’t risk it being left for the enforcers to find. “You guys go ahead with the clothes. I’ll be right back.” I gave Dawn a quick kiss.

  “Sure,” Dawn said as I headed for the door. “But if you’re thinking of sneaking off to keep me safe or something, just keep in mind how long you’ll live if you try.”

  “Uh, right. No, I just need to grab something from next door.”

  I hurried out and ran through the break in the hedge to our garden. When Mother had been alive, she’d shaped this garden into a magical landscape. In her long absence, it had become a tangled and thorny beast shaped by leaked magic and, at one time, the evil manipulations of my grandfather and his accomplice, Felicity.

  I grabbed a shovel from the back of the house, and made my way to the center of the garden, to the twisted, dried husk of its heart.