Chapter 45

Chapter

Forty-Five

I'd been right about Pierce's corner office and finding him sitting comfortably in the daylight, but wrong about him not having a house deep in the forest. Still, two out of three wasn't too bad.

The house wasn't crumbling, though—it was a lovely two-story renovated California Gothic. The home and its woodsy acreage had been a foreclosure, snapped up for pennies on the dollar by a real estate investment company with a half-dozen properties currently under renovation. The paper trail linking Pierce to the company had been as twisty and hidden as the path I took through the woods from an adjoining property, but not hidden enough to escape the skilled researchers at the Vampire Court. Not many things were.

Pierce's wards around the property demonstrated his power and skill. My skin tingled when I got close to the perimeter he'd created a full hundred yards from the house. I smelled damp earth and decay—and fresh blood. He'd added new spellwork to his wards just hours ago, judging by the scent and the sharp metallic tang in the air. My blood magic let me know most of the blood he'd used was human. Some was from animals, but I didn't like that either. Necromancy wasn't limited to humans and human spirits .

Normally, I wouldn't be able to pass through the wards unnoticed; they were too well made, and Pierce's magic was too different from my own for me to unweave the spellwork or create spells of my own to trick it into letting me pass.

Good thing I knew someone willing to do bad things for good reasons, whose coven High Priestess let her do so under careful supervision. Someone who was no one's "dark angel" and thus highly motivated to help take Pierce out before he tried to make good on his threat to possess her.

The other day, Malcolm had told Matthias that he and I didn't mess with occult or black magic, even when the situation seemed to demand its use. Neither of us wanted to start making exceptions that might turn into new rules. Black magic was never not insidious. It would never just be used once and then go away. Like my addiction to the designer drug Black Fire, there was no permanent recovery from its lure.

And yet here I was, standing six feet from Gregory Pierce's wards, holding a cup of blood in my hand.

I was living proof that no matter how dangerous one might know black magic to be, once one has used it, there would always be situations that justified its use again. And again. And again. The abyss would never not beckon. The road to its edge was paved with desire for justice and its bricks held together by a mortar made of desperation.

If anyone understood the dangers involved, it was Carly. She'd reassured me about what I was doing and the kind of magic I'd asked Katy to provide. "You're self-aware about these choices," she'd told me as I watched Katy brew the potion I needed. "You understand the danger on a deep level. There's a big difference between taking a deliberate step after contemplation and jumping ahead hoping for the best."

What about taking a deliberate step after contemplation and hoping for the best? I'd thought, but hadn't said aloud. But she'd smiled and patted my arm, so I knew she knew what I was thinking. She was witchy that way.

Now more than ever I wished I had Malcolm with me, but I'd had to leave him safe at home because of the threat Pierce posed. Nothing was more dangerous to a ghost than a necromancer.

I took a deep breath, chanted the spell Katy had written for me, and dumped the cup of blood and herbs over my head.

Despite the hour or so that had passed since Katy made the potion, the thick liquid remained warm thanks to the magic it contained. That made the sensation of it running over my face so much worse, somehow.

I closed my eyes and forced myself not to flinch or wipe it away from my eyes, nose, or mouth as the foul-smelling mixture streamed down my body. The potion formed a coating of spellwork that rolled over me from the crown of my head to my feet. Katy had promised it would dry quickly. I hoped so.

Once the last of the spellwork tingled to indicate it was ready, I crouched and quickly buried the empty cup. I would have just incinerated it with my earth magic, but I didn't want to risk Pierce or his wards sensing my presence.

I dusted damp dirt off my hands and rose. Unbidden, an image of a one-eyed black cat slipping through the woods appeared in my mind's eye. The cat was Basil, Katy's feline familiar, the donor of the blood in the potion. Katy had assured me it wasn't nearly as much blood as it looked like and taking it from him hadn't caused him any pain, but the thought of what I'd just poured on myself made me nauseous. I'd just have to deal with that later. I had to get moving.

With a deep breath, I made sure all my magic was hidden under my shields, and then I walked through the wards.

They slid over me like a smooth, silky caress, without flaring or even buzzing on my skin. That was what stray animals felt if they crossed my perimeter wards at our home, which were designed to alert me to interlopers but let neighborhood cats and dogs and the occasional coyote stroll through the yard unbothered when Esme wasn't outside guarding her territory .

So as far as I could tell, Katy's spell had worked and tricked the wards into letting me pass as if I were a cat or some other small animal prowling in the woods.

Meow , I thought, and made my way toward Pierce's house.

Somewhere in these woods, Sean and the others were waiting and watching as I slipped through the trees. This was one of the parts of the plan nobody liked but me: sneaking up on Pierce in his oh-so-secret lair, outsmarting him and his wards along the way. At least Sean and the rest of our pack understood, even if they didn't like that I was going in alone. Wolves had a deep appreciation for stealth and hunting.

In black clothing, covered with dried blood and moving from tree to tree as I got closer to the house, I was doing my best to channel shifter-level stealth and cunning. Maybe it helped that I'd recently gotten to spend a week in wolf form, hunting and playing with Sean and practicing disappearing into my surroundings like a real wolf. The memory of that precious week made me smile, even as I got close enough to Pierce's place to sense his house wards.

They sizzled on the edge of my senses, but like his perimeter wards they slid against me in that silky, caressing way. I didn't think I could cross them without being noticed, however. A cat wandering through the woods, sure. A cat wandering into the house? Probably not.

As it turned out, I didn't need to get into the house to find Pierce at work.

Like earth mages, necromancers liked dirt all around them: beneath their feet, in their hands, and even under their nails. But while mages like Malcolm and me drew power, energy, and even security from the natural magic of the earth's pulsing life, necromancers drew theirs from decay. That in itself wasn't inherently evil or malevolent; life and death were two sides of the same coin, after all, and the universe and all its workings demanded balance. But necromancers, as Carly had pointed out, had allied themselves with Death itself and chosen to embrace black magic, the occult, and death magic for power and control above all else. Life and growth sustained an earth mage; death and suffering nourished a necromancer.

I found Gregory Pierce in the backyard of the house, wearing a black hooded robe with red along its edges, conducting ritual magic in an open-air cathedral unmistakably dedicated to Death. A half-dozen torches provided light in the garden while also ensuring plenty of shadows and dark corners to add to the overall creepy feeling of the place.

His version of a blood garden and altar area were hidden from view from above by a peaked pergola roof choked with black, thorny vines with drooping purple blooms and the scent of rotting flesh. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't have made me touch one of those thorns. I recognized instant death when I saw it.

In fact, everywhere I looked, death lay in wait.

It wrapped around the structure in the form of those nightmarish vines. It flourished in raised beds full of mushrooms, all of which I figured would either kill on contact or if eaten and were probably growing on corpses and blood within the soil. It dripped in plant and flower form from the heads of the garden's dozen statues depicting death and suffering. It hung in the air as an odor that made me want to sneeze and back away when the breeze shifted, and it slithered along the ground as venomous snakes that had gathered around Pierce and his altar like acolytes.

I squeezed my fist around the amulet Carly had given me to wear around my neck and fought the urge to leave this place and never come back. Her parchment-scented magic banished the stench of the garden, at least for the moments it took for me to regain my resolve.

I recalled a line from Malcolm's new favorite movie, in which a character suggested dropping a nuclear device on their location from orbit, describing that drastic action as the only way to ensure the terrible threat it contained could be destroyed. But looking at this garden and its caretaker, I wasn't entirely sure the equivalent of that dropped nuke would be enough. This infestation's roots would go deep. Pierce had owned this property for more than a decade. The garden had the feel of an established and powerful place of practice and worship, much like my grandfather's blood garden back in Baltimore.

Son of a bitch—this was going to be a nightmare.

Well, of course it is , I thought, and almost rolled my eyes at myself. What had I expected when dealing with a necromancer? Whimsical topiaries?

Without Malcolm nearby, I had to provide my own comic relief. I missed my ghost.

I'd never seen a necromancer's blood garden before. I hoped my first time would also be my last. It wouldn't do to make a habit of straying into them.

Pierce had something in a cauldron on his altar. As I watched from behind some bushes, he stirred it with what looked like a human femur, then dropped the femur in. He repeated the process with another bone. This one appeared to be a humerus, or upper arm bone. Black oily smoke swirled out of the cauldron with a sound that reminded me of a thick, wet cough.

I recognized this ritual from a long-ago lesson on the darkest of dark magic: Etruscan in origin and steeped in ancient rites I doubted more than a few had seen, much less practiced, in millennia. That lesson had taken place fifteen years ago at my grandfather's compound in Baltimore, but my memory of what I'd learned might help me survive. Hopefully.

Where had Pierce learned his practice? The vamps were looking into that, along with the rest of Pierce's background. There couldn't be many practitioners of this type of magic around. The list of suspects had to be pretty damn short. At least I knew it wasn't the necromancer I'd encountered back East. Her practice had been entirely different.

Wait—did those bones belong to the Harpes? Was he destroying evidence while I watched? Or cooking up something worse ?

Either way, I was going to have to step into a place where not only would angels fear to tread, but they'd avoid at all costs.

Years ago, on the night we'd first met, I'd told Charles Vaughan that I became a mage private investigator because I was addicted to danger. I was being flippant at the time, but that didn't make it untrue.

I didn't want to go into Pierce's garden, but I did. I wanted to face my fears and come out the other side. I wanted to beat him on his own turf. I wanted him in awe of me—not because of my ego, but because the conceited asshole needed to get knocked down a few pegs.

There was a fine line between showmanship and a necromancer's everyday magical practice. Pierce was ringed by venomous snakes and wearing a black hooded robe while doing magic alone in his own backyard, away from prying eyes, for crying out loud. Who was he showing off for?

I could almost hear Pierce say If it's not showy, what's even the point in doing it?

I'd learned when dealing with bad guys like Pierce, whether they were Dark Fae, sorcerers, blood mages, or scam callers, the thing that made them tick was almost always their Achilles' heel.

The question for me now was: how would knowing Pierce was a psychopathic show-off help me take him out for good? And could I do it without wading knee-deep into freaking snakes?

And that was when the army of the dead arrived.