Michael Scott - The Necromancer

“Josh Newman!”

Aunt Agnes’s voice on the other side of the door made him jump. He’d been concentrating so hard on creating the glove that he hadn’t heard her come up the stairs. His aura dissipated, the glove drifting away in curls of golden smoke.

Agnes pounded on the door. “Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

Josh sighed. “No,” he said truthfully.

“Well, I’ve made some tea. Come down now before it gets cold.” She paused and added, “I made some fresh muffins this morning also.”

“Great.” Josh felt his stomach rumble; Aunt Agnes made the best muffins. “I’m just getting changed. I’ll be right down.” He waited until he heard his aunt shuffle away, her flat-soled shoes rubbing the carpet. Then he looked at his hand again and smiled broadly at a sudden thought. If he was able to mold his aura without training, then that meant he had to be more powerful than his sister.

Settling his backpack over both shoulders, he inched open the door and listened with his enhanced senses. He could actually hear his aunt pouring tea from the pot into a cup, could smell the tannin of fresh black tea and the richer odor of warm pastry. His stomach rumbled again and he felt his mouth fill with saliva: he could almost taste the buttery cake. He wondered if he could stop for just one… but that would mean sitting down with Aunt Agnes, and she’d want to know all the details of the past few days. He’d be there for an hour-and he couldn’t afford to waste the time.

He padded silently down the stairs, cracked open the front door and slipped out into the cool San Francisco morning. “Sorry, Aunty,” he muttered, pulling the door silently closed behind him. She was going to be furious when she discovered he’d left. She’d probably call his parents, and he had no idea what explanation he was going to give them.

What he did know was that he was not returning to the house in Pacific Heights without his sister.

Agnes heard the hall door close and padded out of the kitchen. She blinked at the door and then tilted her head to one side, listening. “Josh?” she called.

The house was silent.

“Josh?” she called again, her voice cracking with the effort. “Where is that boy?” she muttered. “Josh Newman, you come down here right this minute!” she shouted.

There was no response.

Shaking her head, the old woman prepared to climb the stairs again when something crunched under her slippers. She bent painfully to lift it off the carpet. It was a chunk of dried and hardened mud. Agnes squinted at the stairs. They’d been spotless when she’d walked down them only a few moments earlier, but now, all the way up to the second floor, they were covered in fragments of mud. Someone had followed her down, wearing old muddy boots. Turning her head sharply, she spotted the telltale traces of mud on the floor leading straight to the door.

“Josh Newman,” she whispered, very softly, “what have you done?”

Moving as quickly as her arthritic hips would allow, she hurried upstairs and pushed open the door to Josh’s room without knocking. She immediately spotted the dirty clothes tossed in the basket and the filthy sneakers shoved under the bed. She opened the wardrobe and found the space where the walking boots had been.

Standing in the center of the room, she turned slowly, conscious that there was something odd in the atmosphere. Her senses were no longer as sharp as they had once been; age had robbed her sight and hearing of their acuity… but her sense of smell remained strong. The still, dry air of the room was touched with the sweet odor of oranges.

The old woman sighed and fished her cell phone out of her pocket. She wasn’t looking forward to telling Richard and Sara Newman that their children had vanished. Again.

Some guardian she’d turned out to be!

“I can smell Dee’s stink on everything,” Perenelle complained. She had showered and changed into fresh clothes: stonewashed blue jeans, a beautifully embroidered Egyptian cotton shirt and a pair of boots that had been handmade for her in New York in 1901. Her still-damp hair was pulled back off her face and tied into a thick ponytail. Lifting a heavy woolen sweater from a carved chest of drawers, she pressed it to her face and breathed deeply. “Ugh! Rotten eggs.”

Nicholas nodded. He too had showered and changed into one of his almost identical combinations of black jeans and T-shirts. This shirt had the iconic Dark Side of the Moon design on the front. “Everything organic is starting to rot,” he said. He held up a hideously tie-dyed T-shirt. It was dusted with mold spores, and much of the bottom half of the shirt had decayed to curling threads. Even as he held it up for inspection, one of the arms tore away. “I got that at Woodstock,” he complained.

“No, you didn’t,” Perenelle corrected him. “You bought it in a vintage store on Ventura Boulevard about ten years ago.”

“Oh.” Nicholas held the destroyed shirt up again. “Are you sure?”

“Positive. You didn’t go to Woodstock.”

“I didn’t?” Nicholas sounded surprised.

“You didn’t go when Jethro Tull decided not to attend and Joni Mitchell pulled out. You said it would be a waste of time.” Perenelle smiled. She was busy with the lock on a heavy steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. “In fact, you said that several times.”

“Something else I was wrong about, then.” He looked around the bedroom and then pressed his foot against the floorboards. “I don’t think we should hang around here. I’ve a feeling the floor could give way at any moment.”

“I just need a minute.” The fist-sized lock clicked open and the woman heaved the lid back. The faint odor of roses and exotic spices filled the air. Nicholas joined his wife and watched as she carefully brushed dried rose petals off the leather-wrapped bundle within. “Do you remember when we last packed up this box?” she asked softly, unconsciously slipping back into French.

“New Mexico, 1945,” he said immediately.

Perenelle nodded. Peeling back the leather covering, she revealed an ancient-looking carved wooden box. “You wanted to bury it at the Trinity Site so that the first atomic bomb would destroy it.”

“And you would not let me,” he said reminding her.

Perenelle looked up at her husband and a shadow moved behind her eyes. “I am the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. I know…” She paused, and a look of terrible sadness touched her face. “I know certain things.”

Nicholas rested his hand lightly on her shoulder and squeezed. “And you knew we would need these items?”

Perenelle looked back at the box without answering and then lifted the lid. Inside lay a thick coiled silver and black leather whip. She wrapped her long fingers around the dark handle and lifted it, the leather rasping and creaking softly together. “Now, here’s an old friend,” she murmured.

Nicholas shuddered. “It is detestable.”

“Ah, but it saved our lives on more than one occasion,” Pernelle said, winding it around her waist, threading it through the loops on her jeans like a belt. The handle hung down by her right leg.

“It is woven from snakes you pulled from the Medusa’s hair,” Nicholas reminded her. “Do you know how close we came to dying that day?”

“Well, technically, we would not have died,” Perenelle said. “She would have solidified our auras…”

“… turning us to stone,” Nicholas finished.

“Besides,” Perenelle added with a grin, patting the wooden box, “we got what we wanted, and it was worth it to see the expression on the Gorgon’s face when we escaped.” Reaching into the chest, she pulled out another box. “And this is yours,” she said.