The Gatekeeper's Curse- The Complete Trilogy Page 5

  As the dawn bathed the house in warmth, I walked into the living room to find Hazel waiting for me, wearing her official Gatekeeper’s coat, green with embossed gold edges like a Court faerie’s attire and glowing in the dawn light from the window. A strange pang went through me—someday soon, she’d be Gatekeeper. Five years had passed in a heartbeat, and would pass infinitely more quickly in the faerie realm. The gleaming silver mark on her forehead indicated the magic ready to spring to her fingertips at a second’s notice.

  River re-entered at the same time. He’d apparently found time to change outfits between patrolling, and now wore a knee-length coat similar to Hazel’s. Faerie-made, by the look of things. I hadn’t seen him bring a suitcase in, but faerie magic could explain away anything.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To the village,” I said vaguely. “You don’t have to come.”

  “I do if your sister goes with you.”

  “Oh, all right.” Hazel threw up her hands. “Ilsa can go alone. I’ll stay here. I’m the one you have to follow, right?”

  It wasn’t like her to sit out on the action. What was she scheming?

  River’s gaze slid to me. “It’s dangerous.”

  “Compared to evil spirits?” I asked. “The most dangerous thing in town is Everett’s baking. Trust me.”

  “The wraith is no common enemy,” River said. “It knew how to breach the boundaries of the liminal space.”

  “I’m aware of that. I live here.”

  He still didn’t move. Faeries could be bloody obstinate when they wanted to be. “If you’re attacked again, I won’t be able to help you.”

  What makes you think I asked for your help? “I appreciate your concern,” I told him, “but where I’m going is a protected place.”

  For a moment, I thought I’d have to shove him aside to get out of the house. Considering he looked more muscular than a typical half-faerie and knew how to use the sword, I’d probably come off worse, magical protection or none.

  Finally, River gave me a nod. “Come back within the hour, and inform one of us if you run into trouble. Hazel, you stay in the house.” I heard him giving her further instructions as I made my way to the door, but he didn’t follow to stop me.

  Overbearing, much? We’d met less than a day ago and already he thought he knew the house better than Hazel or I did. Only the Sidhe had authority over the Gatekeeper’s heir, and I had no doubt Hazel would set him straight on that one, whatever her plan was. As for me, the sooner I got out of this environment, the better. I might have grown up in this world, but I’d never really belong in it. I would never be Gatekeeper. And that suited me just fine. I just wished the rest of the world would accept it.

  5

  The Lynn family mausoleum lay on the other side of a hill, the closest geographical location to where the Summer estate would actually exist if it had a physical address. We’d attended school in the local village as we’d been growing up. Foxwood had a mostly supernatural population, and had been hidden from mortal sight before the faeries came. Now it wasn’t hidden, but nobody wandered this far into the Highlands unless they wanted to end up torn to pieces by wild fae.

  If Mum had been gone for a month, Hazel would have had her hands full dealing with the local supernatural community’s problems. Usually the Mage Lords dealt with such tasks, but the village was small enough that it had only one small group of mages living there. Down the road from the mausoleum was the home of the necromancers, a building with blacked-out windows. They never seemed to turn the lights on, but Hazel and I had once had a running joke that they slept during the day, hanging from the ceiling like bats.

  I unlocked the gate to the graveyard, a chill running across the back of my neck. I’d never had reason to feel afraid here before. The living caused me more trouble than the dead, and iron barriers surrounded the place to keep the faeries out. The oldest grave of all was an empty one, commemorating Thomas Lynn, our great-infinity-great grandfather, who’d started this whole mess by getting himself kidnapped and taken into Faerie in the first place.

  I shot a glare at the fancy embellished marble grave, then jumped violently when a hand rested on my shoulder.

  “Surprise,” said Hazel, appearing out of thin air.

  “You.” I stepped back, willing my racing heart to slow down. “Have you lost your mind? How’d you shake off your bodyguard?”

  “I conjured up a glamour. He thinks I’m napping.” She grinned. “Forgot I had a spare shadow-spell, too. I’ve been following you for ten minutes.”

  “Are you sure the glamour will last longer than an hour? You know what happened last time.”

  Faerie glamour wasn’t the most reliable branch of magic. When we were thirteen, Hazel had made a fancy car materialise outside the house. She’d then driven it to town, where it had swiftly and embarrassingly vanished before she’d reached the end of the road. That’s how we’d found out most of her faerie magic faded away when she travelled too far from the Ley Line. Good times.

  “I’m sure,” Hazel said. “He’ll probably notice I’m missing at some point, but that’s his problem.”

  Apparently she wasn’t as resigned to having a bodyguard as she’d pretended to be. “Yes, it is. I won’t stick around long, anyway. I’ll just ask Grandma if she knows about that wraith, then go and question someone living.”

  “Good, because this place gives me the creeps.”

  Earthy scents filled the air, fresh from the rain the night before. I found this place peaceful, actually. My deceased family members didn’t make snide comments on my fashion sense or implicitly refer to me as the ‘spare’.

  Stone gargoyles topped the family mausoleum, carved with precision. Iron had been built into the walls in a similar way to how the necromancers built their underground shelters. An odd choice considering our family dealt with faeries, who stopped bothering us when we shuffled off this mortal coil, but the extra protection did make it trickier for anyone to break in. I unlocked the brick building with another key, and slipped into the darkness.

  The place might look old-fashioned, but someone had installed electric lights, which snapped on the instant I entered. Names of Lynns past covered the walls—both branches of the family. I never did find out why Grandma had decided to stick around while nobody else did, and Mum refused to elaborate on the subject. The two had had a volatile relationship at the best of times.

  “Grandma,” I whispered.

  Silence answered. Guess I shouldn’t have expected to get lucky.

  “Grandma?” I called again, my voice echoing back at me. I dug my cold hands into my pockets, pacing to the room’s centre, then back again. “Hey. I really need your help.”

  Silence answered. I paced again, scanning the names on the wall. Gatekeeper names. Non-Gatekeepers did get their own fancy graves but not the privilege of having their names recorded in here. The whole town had turned up for Grandma’s funeral, when I was five. She’d scared the crap out of everyone by dancing on her own coffin. Unlike Mum, being Gatekeeper hadn’t removed her sense of humour. But where in hell was she? She hadn’t moved on, surely—Hazel would have said so. But the two rarely spoke to one another. Kind of odd that I’d been her favourite, considering my non-important status, but you didn’t pick your calling if you were a Lynn.

  A scream came from outside. Hazel.

  I ran for the door, grabbing the salt shaker from my pocket. Green light flared as Hazel’s magic activated. She stood with her back to the door—and a head poked up from amongst the graves.

  Impossible. The place had been impenetrable for generations. Necromancers couldn’t tamper with it. Nobody could.

  Hazel whimpered. “I think… I think that’s Great-Aunt Enid.”

  “Oh god.” If there was one thing worse than zombies, it was knowing the zombies, or who they’d been in life. Not that you could tell at first glance. The flesh had rotted off her bones, leaving little more than a skeleton behind.

&n
bsp; I cringed as bony hands scrabbled at the ground. The graves were splattered with soil, wet from the rain.

  “Poor Great-Aunt Enid.” I scattered the salt in front of us in a line, while Hazel conjured magic to her hands, biting her lip. “She hated dirt. I remember her yelling at me for getting mud on the furniture.” I spoke more to reassure Hazel than myself. The necromancers’ place was just down the road, and it wasn’t unreasonable to assume a novice had accidentally summoned up a swarm of zombies. The idea of dissolving my relatives wasn’t appealing, but their spirits were long-gone. I lifted the salt shaker and took aim.

  Cold air slammed into me, and my back hit the door. Hazel shrieked, hands raised to defend herself. Green Summer magic exploded from her fingertips, knocking the undead back, but a second crawled from the ground to join the first. Another Great-Aunt, from the look of her tattered dress.

  My stomach turned over. They can’t use magic. They’re not alive. The cold terrible energy pulsing from the undead was too close to what I’d felt in my room. Not faerie magic, but something else entirely—a power that could bypass our magic-proof shields.

  “Ilsa,” whispered Grandma’s voice from beside me.

  I jumped, spilling salt everywhere. “What in hell is going on?”

  “Someone has tampered with some dark and terrible magic,” Grandma’s ghost whispered.

  “No shit.” I aimed the salt shaker with trembling hands, whiteness sprinkling the earth, but the two undead kept moving, undeterred. Horrible growling noises came from their rotting throats. “You might have shown up before the zombies.”

  “It’s not working!” Hazel blasted the undead with magic once more, but it had no effect. Her Summer magic needed life to function, and there wasn’t a living soul here besides me. “It’s like they’re—possessed.”

  The undead raised its hands. Another wave of icy air smacked into me, sending me flying through the partly open door. This time I landed on my back with a crash, stars winking before my eyes. I scrambled across the bare stone floor, beckoning frantically behind the iron door. “Hazel, get in here!”

  A third blast of magic struck the doors, making them rattle. The lights flickered on and off, and when they came back on, Grandma’s ghost appeared, faintly hovering next to the wall displaying the names of former Gatekeepers. A wooden door had appeared that hadn’t been there before, its handle gleaming with silvery light.

  “Hazel!” I yelled. “Get in here.” Heaven knew if iron could protect anyone against necromantic magic, but I was out of options. Save for an invisible door guarded by a ghost.

  “Ilsa.” Grandma’s voice was faint. “I don’t have much time… it’s through the door.”

  I lunged the last two feet towards the door, grabbing its cold handle. I’d expected to find a secret passageway, but the space inside was cramped and too narrow to climb into. Nothing was inside except for a small book lying on a raised section of stone. Pocket-sized and yellowed with age, it had a swirling mark on the cover and no other title.

  “What’s this for?” I flipped open the volume, but the pages were blank. I hadn’t thought Grandma was losing her grip on sanity, but handing me an empty-paged book wouldn’t help put my undead relatives to rest. It wasn’t like we were necromancers—

  An invigorating rush of icy energy pierced my veins and flooded my body. Power hummed through the book in my hands, which lit up silver-white. The pages glowed, unreadable text skimming across the blankness. Greyness infiltrated my vision, and the door flew wide, freezing cold air rushing in. The glow spread from my book to my hands, lighting the gloom. I heard Hazel screaming, but all I saw of her was a glowing outline of a person. Beyond, the undead were visible as dark spots in the gloom, pulsing with malevolent energy.

  The light shot from my hands, past Hazel, right at the undead. White light ignited around their edges, and with a cracking sound, the undead fell.

  I waited a moment, but they didn’t rise. The greyness receded from my vision, showing only the graves, and Hazel clinging to the iron door. Slowly, I turned to face Grandma.

  “What did you do?” I gasped. My body swayed on the spot and I closed my eyes, my head spinning. Though the book had stopped glowing, the white light was imprinted on my eyelids.

  “Keep the book,” she responded. “Tell nobody about it outside of our family.” Her words rang with steel, the tone that had terrified people when she’d been alive.

  “Hey—you can’t leave without telling me anything.”

  Grandma was already fading when I opened my eyes. The outline of her face melted into the whiteness, then disappeared entirely.

  In her place, Hazel gaped at me through the open iron door. “What in hell was that?”

  “I… that’s a very good question.”

  One I already knew the answer to. I had magic. I’d banished a spirit. Several of them. Only necromancers were supposed to be able to do that.

  Her gaze fell on the book. “What the—?”

  “Grandma gave it me.” I waved vaguely at the wooden door with my free hand, and looked down at the book to be greeted by entirely blank pages again. I skimmed through, my heart sinking. “Every page is blank.” Even the cover depicted nothing more than an inexplicable swirling symbol. No words.

  Hazel’s eyes bugged out. “She gave you magic?”

  “I don’t know what she gave me. I can’t read this, and besides, you can’t give someone magic, let alone if you’re a ghost. It doesn’t work like that.”

  “Our family’s never been known for playing by the rules, though. Wow.” She looked over her shoulder at the fallen undead, then back at me. “The undead—whatever was powering them switched off. Like their spirits were gone.”

  “Gone,” I murmured, lowering the book and turning to face the empty room again. “Er—Grandma?”

  “Is there a problem?” asked a male voice from outside the mausoleum. River. I swiftly shoved the book into my pocket. Someone had made it a convenient enough size to carry around—but why couldn’t I read it?

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, walking after Hazel out into the cemetery. River stood beside the gates, eyebrows raised at the undead lying in crumpled heaps. If we left them in that state and Mum found out, we’d be joining them in the dirt.

  “What else? My vow compelled me to follow Hazel.” His gaze slid to the graves. “Are several of your family members supposed to be lying in pieces?”

  “Clearly not,” I told him. “Guess the person raising zombies got here first.”

  “In that case, allow me to help you return them to their resting place,” said River. “I also sensed necromantic magic, but when I arrived here, it’d entirely disappeared. Is there a necromancer here?”

  “No,” said Hazel. “This is a private graveyard for family only.”

  “So who banished the dead? That flash of light I just saw—”

  “Family magic,” I said. “Defence mechanism on the graves. Handy.”

  He frowned disbelievingly. “Why did you come here anyway? After being attacked by a wraith and an undead, it strikes me as a risky move.” There was definite suspicion in his eyes, and I remembered the accusing look he’d given me when the wraith appeared in my room. Admitting I had some unknown form of necromancy might not be the wisest idea, especially as he was still an unknown element.

  “Maybe it’s none of your business?” said Hazel. “If you’re volunteering to help move the bodies, though, be my guest.”

  “There’s a simpler way.” He raised his hands. Swiftly, the undead rose like puppets on strings, directed towards the rows of graves. “Which grave did she come from?”

  It took me a second to understand he meant Great-Aunt Enid. I pointed to the grave, more stunned by the demonstration of actual, genuine necromancy than anything else. River wasn’t just a faerie. I’d never heard of a faerie-necromancer before. I mean, anything was theoretically possible, but faeries were terrified of death, and necromancers dealt in corpses. Not exactly a m
atch made in heaven. Hell, possibly.

  Would he understand my magic? I opened my mouth, but a sudden tugging sensation gripped my chest. Ow.

  Hazel got there first. “You’re a necromancer? You?”

  “Half,” he said, directing the last of the undead back to their graves. “I didn’t reanimate them, don’t worry. I merely gave them some encouragement to return to where they came from.”

  “Wow.” I shook my head. “You’re wasted on bodyguard duty.” That explained how he knew there’d been undead at the house.

  “It’s lucky those wraiths were too weak to need a circle to be banished,” he said. “May I see this defence mechanism of yours?”

  It might have been my imagination, but I swore his gaze briefly dropped to my pocket where I’d stashed the book.

  Hazel stepped in. “It only works when we’re being attacked. Kind of like our defensive magic, but without the shield. Anyway, we should go. We share this graveyard with Winter’s Lynn branch, and I don’t want to explain to Holly why her Great-Aunt Thistle’s grave is in such a mess.”

  “There are more Lynns?” he asked, a note of surprise in his voice.

  Thanks, Hazel. She’d successfully distracted him. All the way home, Hazel explained about the two branches of the Lynn family, and even how old Thomas Lynn had started the whole thing by getting ensnared in Faerie. That left me plenty of time to brood over the spellbook. I’d thought the only magic that ran in our bloodline was the Gatekeeper’s power. The idea of having my own magic wasn’t an unappealing one, but how I was I supposed to figure out the book if every one of its pages was empty?

  River followed us into the house again, so I slipped upstairs and left the book in my suitcase before showering and changing out of my dirt-covered clothes. Usually I’d stop to appreciate the house’s shower—which came with a dozen settings ranging from ‘late to work’ to ‘fell in a mountain of troll dung’, but the whole time I was in the shower, I was conscious of the book not being in the room with me. Like an ache in the back of my head, a constant tapping on my skull. The feeling went away when I shoved on a fresh outfit and stuck the book deep into the inside pocket of my hoody. I knew a magical item when I saw one, and the book apparently really wanted me to carry it everywhere. But if it was an important family heirloom, I sure as hell hadn’t heard of it before.