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  “Er. I think he went over the veil by himself.” So much for a confession. “He’s definitely not in the house, and he can’t have got out of the circle.”

  “You know the ghost was a ‘he’?”

  Oh, great, quiz time with a murderer. “Yes, since we’re able to see the form they used when they were still alive,” I said. “Generally, they haunt someone they know, or a place they lived in. Maybe someone they argued with before dying…” I trailed off, letting him chew on that for a while. The old mage remained silent as I retrieved the candles and packed them into my coat’s fathomless pockets.

  “Your profile said you know the mages,” Lord Bentley said to me.

  He’d looked me up. Figures. “Have you ever met Lady Harper?”

  “Her? Awful woman. Terrible manners, dreadful attitude.”

  I couldn’t say I disagreed. “Yeah. She was kind of my…” Ack. I couldn’t say ‘mentor’ without having to admit I’d lived with the mages. “Er, guardian. We’re very distantly related.”

  “Yes, I can see that. We don’t usually mingle with necromancers.”

  And there was the hierarchical bullshit I’d been happy to leave behind. If Lady Harper had one redeeming quality, it was that she didn’t value one type of magic over the others. As a mage serving the Hemlock Coven and who’d had been part of the original Council of Twelve across all supernaturals, she had to be unbiased. But many of the other mages had got it into their heads that they’d come across their mage powers though superiority over other supernaturals. They particularly looked down on shifters, though witches and necromancers got the short end of the stick, too.

  I had no patience for his attitude whatsoever. “Yes, my family is a mixture of mages, witches and necromancers,” I said. “We’re pretty involved in the council, actually, and we cooperate with other supernaturals. Thank you for your time.”

  As soon as his house vanished from sight, I pulled out my phone and composed a message telling the boss to check if any mages had met a sudden end lately and advising them to run a thorough search of the wine cabinet and basement in Lord Bentley’s house.

  “What was that about?” said Lloyd.

  “I just praised Lady Harper,” I said. “Give me some water. I need to wash the bad taste out of my mouth.”

  “I want to meet her,” said Lloyd. “She sounds like a riot.”

  “That’s like saying necromancers throw amazing parties.”

  He snorted. “Did that ghost seriously just vanish without us having to lift a finger?”

  “Apparently. A voluntary banishment. Can’t say I blame him, considering his so-called friend poisoned him.”

  “He said that?” Lloyd stared at me.

  “You were fighting off foam at the time, but yeah, it sounds like another mage rivalry ended badly. I hope they arrest him before he figures out who my family is. There aren’t many witch-mage-necromancer families around, let alone people who’ve had a positive experience with Lady Harper.” I kept my tone light, a product of years of being a part of the necromancer guild. Having a sense of humour was the only way to handle spending twenty-four hours a day around death.

  Lloyd didn’t laugh. “Do you think the boss might know why the ghost vanished?”

  “Maybe.” I pulled up my hood against the bitter December air. “It’s not like she can blame us for it. We did our jobs.”

  He pulled his own hood back up and dug his hands in his pockets. “What was that spell you used to make him freak out?”

  “Illusion,” I said. “My own variation. It’s lucky it worked.”

  Lloyd rolled his eyes. “And you made him see his own floating dead body?”

  “It was that or turn the floor into snakes, and I thought you’d be more scared than him.”

  “You’re not wrong.”

  We walked down the cobbled street past the route to the house belonging to the vampires’ king. He was currently under guild investigation for letting his fellow vampires get away with flaunting the rules, and as far as I’d heard, the vampires were none too thrilled at that development. Serve him right for looking the other way while his fellow vampires kidnapped a psychic and forced her to obey the orders of my depraved distant relative.

  Did I mention my family life was a little complicated? The Hemlocks needed an heir, and I was the only surviving member of the coven who still had their magic. Without it, the world would be devoured by giant gods, so you know, it wasn’t something I could turn my back on, however much I’d been trying to do exactly that over the last few weeks.

  Lloyd’s gaze darted the same way as mine. “No fanged friends spying on us? Or do they hibernate in winter?”

  “I have no idea what they’re doing,” I admitted. “Again… not our problem.”

  That included Keir, the vampire who’d helped us in the battle, and who I’d become… I hesitate to say intimate with, considering he’d had to feed on my soul to avoid death when a rogue vampire had attacked us. Rather than blood, vampires fed on human life essence and needed it to survive. Keir had invited me to join him and become a rogue and I’d turned him down, but I hadn’t expected him to ignore my messages after the thoroughly non-verbal goodbye we’d said the night of the battle. With the spirit realm so close, there was no reason Keir couldn’t get in touch with me if he wanted to, despite the fact that we didn’t typically travel in the same circles. After all, he knew that since I’d accidentally used blood magic while Evelyn had been in control of my body, I was one mistake away from becoming an outlaw myself.

  Would Keir know about the malfunction in the spirit realm? Maybe. Vampires were capable of projecting outside their bodies to control the dead and communicating over a distance no other necromancers could reach. Maybe one of them had yanked the spirit out of the circle before I could banish it.

  One thing was for certain: I sincerely hoped that this time, the trouble wasn’t related to my coven.

  2

  “Do you want to get possessed by an evil faerie ghost?” Morgan Lynn, the guild’s resident psychic, said to his apprentice.

  Mackie Chen, the guild’s newest recruit, stepped out of the way of the door to the weapons room as I pushed it open.

  “There’s no such thing as faerie ghosts,” she said to him. “They can’t possess people.”

  “They can, too, and they nearly killed me,” said Morgan. “Put the bloody iron on or the next thing you know, you’ll be taking a swim in the Firth of Forth.”

  “That sounds fun.” Mackie shrugged and picked up a spirit sensor from the nearest shelf. “What does this do?”

  “Spits ectoplasm everywhere,” said Morgan, grabbing the spirit sensor and holding it out of reach. “Can’t you pretend to take this seriously so the boss doesn’t put us on cleaning duty?”

  Mackie folded her arms. “That’s rich, coming from you.”

  She wasn’t wrong. Not only was Morgan barely qualified as a necromancer himself, he’d also been the guild’s least-consistent rule-follower before Mackie showed up.

  He scowled. “All right, leave the iron, then, and leave your mind wide open. Don’t blame me when another psychic tries to fuck with you.”

  “They never will,” she declared, her hands fisting at her sides. “Never.” Her ringing tone carried a hint of her most deadly power—the ability to scream loud enough to shake the entire spirit realm. None of us had the faintest idea where she’d come across that power. The most we’d managed to drag from her about her background was that her parents were from Hong Kong and had died when she was a baby. Given her age—maybe eighteen, twenty at most—we could only guess at how she’d ended up living on the streets. An awful lot of people had disappeared in the years following the faerie invasion, and she’d have been a target the instant her psychic power manifested. While her slight build didn’t look like she was capable of knocking out a full-grown man, she’d done exactly that when Morgan tried to teach her self-defence. She might be a little behind on basic necromancy, but she was
a lethal force of destruction and didn’t intend to give us an easy time of it.

  “Training’s going well, then?” I pulled two candles out of my pockets and returned them to the nearest shelf. Iron weapons and other necromancer props filled each wall in the room, a testament to the guild’s history as a stronghold in the time of the faerie invasion twenty-two years ago. “Did either of you feel a blip in the spirit realm about half an hour ago?”

  “A what?” said Mackie.

  “Lloyd and I were in the middle of banishing a poltergeist when it disappeared over the veil by itself,” I explained. “We didn’t even use the banishing words.”

  “Huh.” Morgan returned the spirit sensor to the highest shelf, which Mackie wouldn’t be able to reach. “You sure?”

  “Yep,” said Lloyd, coming into the room behind me. “Jas checked the spirit realm. We didn’t have time to banish it. The candles switched off, too.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t use the fake candles?” asked Morgan.

  “What fake candles?” I asked.

  “Someone—” he jerked his head at his reluctant apprentice—“thought it would be funny to switch out some of the candles with scented ones from the market.”

  Lloyd snickered with laughter. “That is pretty funny. Nice one, Mackie.” He high-fived her.

  “I think the old mage would have noticed if his house smelled of begonias. The candles are real, look.” I held one of them up for inspection. “So was the ghost. Stage four poltergeists don’t politely hop over the veil without a fuss.” Not in my experience, anyway.

  Mackie took the candle from me, where it promptly lit up in her hands. “Maybe it’s trapped in the candle.”

  “That’s not how it works.” Morgan snatched the candle from her and put it back on the shelf. “I dunno, maybe there was a glitch. The spirit realm gets them sometimes.”

  “Only when someone’s screwing around with necromancy,” I said. “Lloyd and I were the only necromancers there. Has anyone at the guild seen anything weird?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mackie. “I’ve been stuck in here with him, learning to banish ghosts like an amateur.”

  “You kinda need to be able to banish ghosts to do the job,” Morgan said to her. “You’re a self-taught psychic, not a trained necromancer.”

  “I don’t need to learn,” said Mackie. “Because I never said I’d be staying here.”

  “Whoa,” said Lloyd. “Calm down—”

  Mackie spun around, and a gust of kinetic energy buffeted all of us. My back hit the shelf, causing several candles to topple to the floor. The door slammed behind her with another blast of air.

  “Ow.” I rubbed the back of my head. “I see her self-defence training is ahead of schedule.”

  “Everyone else needs protecting from her.” Morgan climbed to his feet. Apparently, his ego hadn’t quite recovered from her drop-kicking him out cold the other day.

  “Who needs poltergeists when you have a pissed-off psychic?” said Lloyd.

  “This is a stupid idea.” Morgan shot a disgruntled look in the direction of the door—and by extension, Lady Montgomery’s office. “She knows Mackie doesn’t give a crap about training. This is as much a waste of time for me as it is for her.”

  “You’d just spend that time hanging out at the pub,” said Ilsa Lynn, entering the room through the partly open door. “Mackie didn’t leave the building, by the way. She went upstairs.”

  “Good, because I’m not chasing her.” Morgan scowled at his sister. “What are you doing here?”

  Ilsa left the door half open behind her. “Just came to see how you were all getting along. Lady Montgomery’s orders.” She walked to pick up the knives that had fallen to the floor when Mackie’s kinetic blast had hit the room.

  Ilsa was the more sensible of the Lynn siblings, intelligent with a rather frightening side when pushed. Tangled dark hair swept past her shoulders, and she shared the same dark brown eyes as her brother. That was about where the similarities ended. Ilsa was tall and solid and very much alive, while Morgan had spent so much time in the land of the dead that he’d started to look like one of them, thin and pale. To be fair, he was a powerful psychic, and despite his abrasive and sarcastic attitude, he wouldn’t have made a terrible teacher. If not for Mackie’s refusal to take on any training, that is.

  “The boss can take over herself,” he said to Ilsa. “See how she likes dealing with bratty teenagers.”

  Ilsa rolled her eyes. “Now you know how the rest of us felt when we had to bring you up to speed on necromancy.”

  Morgan crossed his arms over his chest. “I never stormed out of the place when I signed up here.”

  “Yes, you did. Twice.”

  I cleared my throat and addressed Ilsa. “Did you feel anything weird in the spirit realm?”

  Ilsa turned to me. “What do you mean?”

  “A ghost vanished without prompting. Stage four poltergeist.”

  “Oh, the one you went to banish from that mage’s house?” asked Ilsa. “The guild’s not on the same spirit line as you were on, so nobody here will have felt it. If something big happened, like on the Ley Line, we would, but I didn’t sense anything weird.”

  “Oh, right. Of course.” The guild only rested on one spirit line, but it happened to be the same line that linked with the forest most of my coven lived in. When Leila Hemlock, a former Hemlock Coven witch, had forced Mackie to unleash her psychic scream, it’d rippled down the spirit line and knocked half the guild unconscious. That alone was reason enough to keep an eye on her. Since she was old enough to be jailed for life for that crime despite the fact that it’d been committed against her will, she had no choice but to accept Lady Montgomery’s offer to work for the guild.

  “Have you told the boss?” Ilsa asked.

  “I was on my way, after Lloyd and I return these props,” I answered. “I got distracted watching today’s entertainment.”

  I moved the remaining candles from my pocket to the shelf, while Lloyd picked up the ones that’d fallen to the floor when Mackie had knocked them over. “You should let her pick what she wants to learn,” he said to Morgan. “Forcing her to follow the guild’s novice curriculum is gonna piss her off even more.”

  “What do you know?” Morgan said, walking towards the door.

  “I have a younger sister,” Lloyd said. “Also, Mackie’s strong enough to blow your brains out, so if I were you, I’d face her on her own level rather than treating her like a kid.”

  “She is a kid,” said Morgan. “Besides, she can pick up everything I teach her in five minutes just by watching another necromancer, the same way I did. She doesn’t need a tutor.”

  “Then let her tag along on missions,” Lloyd suggested.

  “Uh, that might not be the best idea,” Ilsa said. “At least, not until you can get her to wear the iron.”

  “Rather you than me,” said Lloyd. “I’m glad I’m just a garden variety necromancer.”

  I’d have agreed, but that would have been a lie. I was as far from a typical necromancer as it was possible to be. And while the vanishing poltergeist had solved one problem, ghosts didn’t usually disappear with no prompting. No other necromancers had been in the house, otherwise I’d have sensed them. So who—or what—had sent the ghost packing?

  Keir’s face briefly flashed before my eyes. I’d read up everything the guild had on vampires and they certainly could banish ghosts over a distance the same way powerful necromancers could, but again, I’d have sensed if he was there. Whatever the reason, he was outright ignoring me at the moment.

  I shoved the vampire firmly out of mind and went down the corridor to report to the boss. Before I had the chance to knock, she called from behind the door, “Come in, Jas.”

  “I’m taking that as an invitation to stay here,” said Lloyd quietly, as I grabbed the door handle. “Are you gonna tell her about the murderous mage?”

  “She already knows. I texted the information to the guild
’s main number.” Hopefully, since I’d been involved in such a minimal way, the former Mage Lord would never know who’d ‘accidentally’ left his wine cabinet unlocked. It wasn’t like he could prove the ghost had given the game away.

  I entered Lady Montgomery’s office, finding her standing behind her desk expectantly. Tall and strong, with her dark grey hair tied into a bun, she looked more like a stern headmistress than a woman who’d taken on the Sidhe of Faerie face to face and had the scars to prove it.

  “Ah, Jas,” said Lady Montgomery. “How was the mission?”

  “Great. Except for the end.” I explained the ghost’s disappearance. “The candles seem to work fine. It seemed like a minor glitch. Ilsa said nobody felt it here, because we’re on a different spirit line.”

  “Yes, that is unusual,” she said. “Did you use necromancy on the spirit line after the incident?”

  “Er, no. I didn’t need to, considering the ghost was gone. I assumed nobody else was around. I guess the poltergeist just went over the veil.”

  “That may be the case,” she said. “But given the level of strength he possessed, it might be an idea to check if something else occurred on the same spirit line that caused the veil to shift and the poltergeist to vanish. Ilsa, come in.”

  The door opened, and Ilsa entered the room. I’d find it creepy that the boss always knew who was outside her office, if I didn’t know she constantly used her spirit sight to check whoever was around her at any given time. I could technically do the same thing, but I wasn’t proficient enough to slip in and out of this realm without it being glaringly obvious to anyone looking at me that I wasn’t mentally present.

  “Ilsa,” said Lady Montgomery. “Won’t you and Jas go and have a look to see if anything is happening on the spirit line where she completed her last mission?”

  “Sure,” said Ilsa. “I was actually going to ask if you had any more instructions for Mackie. She’s refusing to listen to my brother.”