Suzanne Johnson - Elysian Fields

“Who ordered you to attack me?” Here was the real question.

The Axeman frowned. “I know not his name.”

Okay, it was a man. That didn’t help much. Both Etienne and the new age shop owner were male. “What does he look like?”

I hadn’t met the new age necromancer yet but if Axeman said dark hair, it let Etienne off the hook.

“I have not seen him. He remains hidden from my sight when he summons me.”

I paced outside the circle, thinking. “Is your summoner a vampire?”

The Axeman blinked. “I do not know.”

I huffed in frustration.

“When you gonna attack again?” Rene asked.

The Axeman didn’t answer. Instead, he looked up as if hearing a voice, then looked back at me with animation in his eyes for the first time. “I’m being called.”

He disappeared. Just like that. One second he was there, the next he was gone.

“What happened?” Rene walked around the outside of the circle as if the Axeman might be hiding. “I thought he couldn’t leave on his own.”

That made two of us. “I’m guessing the necromancer summoned him again, and it pulled him out of my circle.” I released his name anyway before breaking the plane. No point in leaving an open door for him to return.

Rene propped his hands on his hips. “Does that mean the necromancer’s magic trumps yours?”

It sure looked that way.

Rene insisted on sleeping in my guest room since Alex wasn’t due back until noon the next day, so we stayed up half the night playing poker. By the time it was over, he owed me five pounds of oysters and a ride in his shrimp trawler. Gerry had taught me some things well, and how to play a mean seven-card stud was one of them.

Rene also insisted on going with me to visit Jonas Adamson, the only registered necromancer in Southeast Louisiana besides the vampire Regent. He ran a shop in the lower French Quarter and publicly claimed to be a witch. Witches were minor mages who got little respect in the wizarding world, so for a wizard to proclaim himself a witch—even for commercial reasons—was incomprehensible.

I found a parking place about four blocks from Peaceful Easy Feelings. It was starting to feel like winter, which in New Orleans meant wind and bone- chilling damp. Around us, people snuggled inside sweaters and jackets as they hurried along the streets. Rene the aquatic shapeshifter and DJ the soon-to-be- loup-garou wore short sleeves and thought the wind felt refreshing. Damn it.

A bell chimed over the door when we entered the shop, and a middle-aged man dressed in an embroidered hippie-gypsy purple tunic looked up from behind the counter. “Be with you in a minute—just look around.” He resumed a conversation with a young woman asking about the different ingredients and cost of an herbal concoction to banish negative spirits from a house she was buying.

Rene and I wandered the narrow, crowded aisles, studying the assortment of candles and pouches of herbs that promised everything from cash windfalls to true love to fertility. I saw nothing that warded against ax-wielding dead guys, pending wolf hood, or creepy prete neighbors.

I hadn’t told the necromancer I was coming. Not so long ago I would have considered it a breach of etiquette to drop in unannounced. Call me jaded, but now I figured the less warning people had, the less time for them to devise lies and subterfuges. They might slip up and be honest.

“Any of this stuff real?” Rene held up a sexual potency tonic.

“No way. It’s illegal to sell real magical potions and spells and, besides, I lived inside your head for a couple of days, remember? You don’t need any help in that area.” Sex and money and food—welcome to the life of a merman.

He took a step closer to whisper. “Never done it with a wizard, though, babe.”

I elbowed him in the ribs and laughed. “Don’t even think about it.”

Since Mr. New Age wasn’t paying any attention to us, I picked up a few of the herbal pouches and held them to my nose, deciphering the scents. Some of them—love potions, pouches to attract wealth, and Rene’s sexual potency tonic—were obvious fakes unless our necromancer had stumbled upon some secret not yet known to wizardkind.

I sniffed at a pouch that promised protection. I could isolate the bergamot, eucalyptus, heather. Common herbs. No aura of magic came from the pouches.

“Can I help you find something?”

New Age Guy came from behind the counter and approached us with a friendly lift of the eyebrows. The goodwill faltered as he got closer. “Have we met?”

I glanced around to make sure no one else was in the store. “Are you Jonas?”

“Yessss . . . And you are?”

I held out a hand, which he looked at a second before shaking his head. “Sorry, I don’t do handshakes. Nothing personal. Too many germs.”

Too bad. I’d found handshakes a harmless way to do empathic mental pat downs of new acquaintances. “No problem. I’m DJ Jaco, the sentinel for the region. I need to ask you a few questions.”

His wizard’s energy and nervousness spilled out unchecked. “I’ve had this shop open for almost six years. Your prede cessor cleared it with the Green Congress. I don’t sell anything illegal here.”

I held up my hands. “Wait, wait, wait.” I didn’t give a crap what he sold in his shop to gullible tourists unless the potions were real. Then we’d have to talk. Later. “I want to ask you some questions about necromancy.”

Jonas’s eyes widened, and he turned to Rene. “And you are?”

The mer crossed his arms over his chest, which highlighted all the smooth muscle packed into those wiry limbs. “I’m her bodyguard.”

I rolled my eyes. Rene was having way too much fun.

Jonas seemed to accept my having a bodyguard as perfectly normal. “Let’s go in the back.”

He flipped the open sign on the door to closed, thumbed the deadbolt forward, and led us behind the checkout counter and through a curtain of shiny, clinking black and gold beads. Sort of half goth, half New Orleans Saints.

We walked through a storage room filled with stacked boxes stamped with rare earth supply inc., but in the back of the room, nestled behind a partition, I spotted a small worktable filled with jars and bottles. It looked not unlike my own workspace, where I mixed real potions and charms. Jonas’s aura had relaxed since learning I wasn’t there to talk about his shop inventory, but I’d bet most of Jean Lafitte’s gold he was selling real potions to human clients and using the new age shop as a front.

We entered a small office about the size of a walk- in closet, with barely enough room for the institutional metal desk covered in peeling green paint and two straight-backed chairs. My bodyguard propped himself against the doorjamb with his hands in his pockets and his surliest expression while Jonas and I took the chairs.

“What can I tell you?” Jonas sat in one chair and pointed me to the other. “First, I have to say I was so excited to hear our new sentinel was Green Congress. It’s about time!” His hazel eyes blazed out of a pale face that had spent too many days inside, his hair a cloud of thinning orange- red that jarred with the purple tunic.

Buttering me up wouldn’t help him when I came back to investigate his potions sales and ingredient purchase rec ords, but for now I agreed with him wholeheartedly. It was about time the Elders recognize that not only Red Congress wizards could be sentinels, the old gits. There were a handful of Greens and Blues working as sentinels around the world, but I was the first non-Red in the U.S. Physical magic was faster and the Elders equated that with power.

“Thanks, but I’m here to talk about necromancy— namely to ask if you know of other practitioners in the area, maybe someone new who hasn’t registered yet.”