Chapter One

Graveyard Shift

You should know better than to ask a testy young wizard's name, but I'll tell you anyway: Therese Leigh Valentina Cromwell. Don't ask. Conjure at your own risk. The name was a gift from a very-nearly-warlock mother, and a none-too-sane father. I go by Tess. Only very close friends and very distant enemies have the permission, or balls, to call me Therese.

I was an emancipated minor, and now I'm a fledgeling wizard, old enough to vote, too young to drink. I have my high school diploma, courtesy of an online academy and a certain belly button piercing, and a continuing street education from all the sundry forgotten places in my home city.

I'm a born-and-raised Southern girl, but that doesn't make me like the summer heat when it rolls over Atlanta. Between the Gulf of Mexico and the Appalachian mountains, a lot of humidity gets trapped down here, and there are enough forests left to strangle any breezes we get.

Which is why, naturally, I'm a night owl come April. Spring came early this year, and that meant summer was on its merry way. Still, after the sun goes down, I'm safe to wear my beloved layers, and my leather jacket and wool felt fedora feel less like torture and more like fashionable protection once again. I'm a chick that likes to go a-ghost hunting in style.

My steel-toed secondhand boots sink into the damp turf, and I can almost feel the ground protesting. After I had stepped over the curb, I felt the beginnings of a barrier being passed. The feeling quickened as I advanced into the cemetery, and outright snapped once I stepped onto the first grave. It was an old one, with an obelisk gravestone and some bedraggled memorial flags stuck into the dirt over it.

Enter into the Twilight Zone, I intone in my head, mentally humming the theme song. Externally, I listen, feeling for the colors in the air. My magic always worked with an odd intuition- I was born clairvoyant. I can see psychic imprints, and read one's future possibilities and one's past. Ghosts are easier than people. They don't have a future.

But their footprints aren't as obvious. I stretch out my senses, feeling for the chilly threads of the dearly departed that was said to be haunting this area lately. For me, it's almost as if my Sight is stuck permanently cracked open, like a kid with their eyes half-closed, peering under their lashes and pretending to be asleep. Magic shows up as music and colors, half visible to my physical senses. Other details echo in my mind.

Reaching under my unzipped leather jacket, I tug open a snap on my bandolier, and pull out a tiny handbell from its pouch, keeping my fingers wrapped firmly around the clapper. The bell is one of a set I collected over time, and it's inscribed with symbols on the inside and out, an odd collection of my own personal cipher, twining designs resembling the illuminations of medieval manuscripts, and musical notation. This is one of the middling-sized bells, and the tone activates a spell that acts almost like a bat's echolocation, letting me see in greater detail the things that want to stay hidden.

I raise the bell, carefully releasing the clapper, and take a deep breath. I swing the bell down, and the whole thing vibrates in my hands as the metal rings sharply. At the same time, I sing a single note, pure and clean, feeling the two sounds resonate together. I feel the force of the magic leaving my chest, sweeping out in an ever-expanding arc across the graveyard. The aftereffect buzzes my teeth.

For a brief instant, I see the form of a young woman crouched by a shrub, huddled over a spot where a dog ripped up the grass and dug a hole. I can hear weeping for about half a second. Then it vanishes.

I take one step towards the line of bushes, squinting in the dark at the hole.

Then she's there, right in front of me, glowing and brilliant.

"Who are you?" she says. Yikes, she's cognizant.

That's the trouble with my little locator spell. It tipps the spooks off that I'm there.

Cue the trumpet crescendo in the Twilight Zone.

She doesn't give me a chance to answer. My bell flips out of my gloved hand on its own accord, and I feel icy cold fingers rake over, and then through, my throat. The feeling makes me shiver.

I fumble under my collar for my necklace, a little silver crucifix an old friend gave me. Whispering a few words, half spell, half prayer, the cross begins to softly glow in a silvery light resembling the moonlight. The scratching in my throat ceases. I tap my walking stick on the ground a few times, waiting. Sometimes my clairvoyance gives me head warning, sometimes it doesn't.

A thrill races down my arm, and I drop my necklace to raise my glove over my head and choke out a spell.

"Attendus!" I cry, and the air swirls around me, coalescing in a pearly blue shield, insubstantial and rippling like water. An instant later, I hear a wicked scream from all directions. There is a sensation like something smacking hard into my palm, like a baseball thrown awry. My shield flares, and I see a ghostly white figure rebound away, passing through a gravestone off to the side and landing on its back on the ground. Then it dissolves.

Dropping the shield, I dive down and retrieve my bell, putting it away in my bandolier as I get a move on, backpedaling away from where I saw the ghost vanish. Strapped to my leg is another pouch, one holding a carved wooden vessel set with metal tracery and carefully blessed for the occasion. I pull it out- about the size of a bar tumbler, and unscrew the lid.

"Animatus colliganen," I murmur, and then close my eyes, plopping down to sit cross-legged on the ground. The rest of the spell isn't verbal. I push more juice into my crucifix, and it glows brighter, the light soaking into my eyelids and turning the velvety darkness more of a warm gray.

I start humming, softly at first, gathering my will and layering it into the notes. They gather into the design behind my eyelids, each one adding another line to the framework, fleshing out the traces in my mind into something more solid. They form a vortex, spreading out ahead of me and converging on the container in my hand. The last few ends snap onto the container itself, and then I can see it clearly. Holding it in my head, I rise, placing the container on the ground.

"So mote it be," I whisper, and the threads unlatch from my clairvoyant sight, becoming their own entity. I can feel the pull immediately.

Then at once my mind is assaulted by rage and woe.

Stop! The woman's voice cries. My baby! Oh, my baby…

But quick as it came, the ghost is trapped by the vortex, and I see bits of it as they swirl into the container. When the spell is done, I feel it weaving into place over the top, trapping the spook inside. It still looks empty to the naked eye, but I can feel the little ball of suffering curled up inside.

Poor thing. I have to remind myself that ghosts are just a spiritual imprint- not people at all.

I pick up the vessel, screwing the lid on and saying a few more spells to keep it sealed for now. Something strikes me as off. The jobs Mr. Wilson sends me on are usually pretty easy and harmless, but this one just felt… too good to be true.

Idly putting the container back in my pouch, I walk over to the bushes, taking a closer look at the hole some mutt dug at the roots.

I lower my hand inside, and immediately feel the wrongness. Snapping a nearby twig, I scrape at the dirt, deepening the hole until I poke something that isn't soil. The twig levers up a little shard of something, white with browned insides, stained by the clay and the surrounding muck.

Bones. Tiny ones.

I drop the twig and back away. How long have these been here, I wonder? They're too clean to have been buried here as long ago as I suspect. Wilson said the lady I was after was born and had died in the Victorian days. So would her child, logically. Those bones shouldn't even still be around.

Then I examine the turf more closely. The soil is too loose around the hole, not the clean, hard packed clay, but something turned up, with some debris caught deeper down than they should be. I find a root from one of the shrubs, bitten neatly through by something that wasn't a dog's paws. Sure, a dog must have dug this little grave back up- there are claw ridges in the dirt- but someone… huh.

I shake my head, mulling it over. Ghosts tend to be anchored to something in particular, and a young mother who lost her child would be pretty attached to the grave of her little darling. If someone moved the bones, the ghost may very well follow. But who would move this here? And it was such a… well, a harmless vanilla thing. At least to practitioners like myself, and I'm no heavyweight. More raw talent than most my age, and certainly more than I care to handle all at once, but nowhere near the league of a real wizard, yet.

Then my clairvoyance makes my back tense, and I whirl around, looking up.

Two seconds later, a light shoots up over the tree line, exploding in the sky with a sharp crack. It resembles a red firework, but for the bolts of lightning that shoot back down from it. I get a queasy feeling in my stomach, the kind that says something wicked is afoot. Moments later, I taste the copper tang of magic laced with ill-will. A lot of it.

I quickly weigh my options. Realistically, I have exactly no talent for combat. I'm good at veils, illusions, and the occasional flash-bang, but in a real fight, I'm better at running away. My rational part says I need to head home, now, and forget what I saw. Maybe send up a red flag on the ParaNet. Somebody needs to know I smelled black magic.

But one eyewitness of a red firework isn't likely to be noticed by people that matter. And I don't like the idea of warlocks in town. I had enough brushes with them when I was younger, and it cost me a family. Mainly because a couple of said warlocks were in the family. Now I live Lost Boys style with a crew of teens and young adults, with some very young children sprinkled in. All of us have talent, and all of us look out for one another.

Being in the dark about this seems scarier than the risks of checking it out. There's that whole saying about the devil you know and all that, or the spider you can see is better than the one that gets away.

Tipping my fedora, I softly sing the spell that weaves a veil around myself. It's the kind I'm best at, a veil that muffles my silhouette and the sounds I make, making me harder to notice. It comes with the added feature of directly deflecting any attention that comes over me, which was really freaking useful when I was seventeen and in a homeless shelter. Tucking my now-cold crucifix back under my collar, I grip my walking stick close and head for the trees. I can only hope whoever sent that little firework up is too occupied to go probing for magic like mine.

I make it about as far as the tree line itself before I feel it like a punch to the gut. A smothered scream, a flash of pain, and the raw sucking of opened veins. It's coming from less than a stone's throw away. I tumble to my knees, trembling and fighting the urge to vomit.

Death.

Someone just broke the first law of magic.

Someone just died.