Witch's Soul: The Hemlock Chronicles Book 2 (Paperback)

Extracting poltergeists from public places required a delicate touch.

When that place happened to be a house belonging to a mage, however, the fate of the universe might well depend on us removing the wandering spirit before it broke Lord Bentley’s collection of hundred-year-old antique china. Why couldn’t poltergeists pick deserted fields to haunt instead of places worth more than my life’s savings a hundred times over?

Unfortunately, poltergeists’ one goal in life—well, death—was to wreak as much havoc as possible, which left it up to Lloyd and I to get the little bastard out of the mage’s expensive cabinet. The poltergeist hovered on the other side of the glass with a grin stretching its ghostly face.

“Please don’t,” I said. I didn’t usually stoop to begging, but there was more than my neck on the line this time. If we ticked off the mages, we’d be hauled in for questioning, and I had very good reasons to want to stay from the supernatural council for the foreseeable future. 

A plate wobbled. Lloyd made a whimpering noise in the background, while I moved imperceptibly forward.

“You don’t want to be here,” I said to the poltergeist. “There’s nothing much to do. You can’t walk anywhere or talk to anyone, you can’t read a book, you can’t eat…”

“I can’t do that in the afterlife either,” said the poltergeist. “This is much more fun.”

The plate wobbled a little more. Ack. I reached out both hands, wishing fervently that my necromantic powers extended to being able to rescue falling china. We couldn’t even set up a banishing circle around the cabinet without risking the banishment causing even more damage. Magic didn’t come with control settings, and neither did pissed-off spirits who’d abruptly departed the land of the living.

Lloyd crept in, folding his tall, lanky frame out of sight behind another cabinet. He was tall and dark-skinned with locs, and wore as many witch spells on his wrists as I did, rainbow-coloured bands hidden under the long sleeves of the black coat that we had to wear as our uniform. With the help of my friend and mentor Isabel, I’d amassed quite a collection, but spells generally didn’t work on the dead. Only necromancy did, and it didn’t stop them from destroying crockery beforehand.

“If you stay there too long,” I continued, “you’ll get stuck in there. Forever.”

The poltergeist snorted. “That’s bollocks. This isn’t a magical cabinet. Maybe I want to break Lord Bentley’s toys.”

Oh, yay. A poltergeist with a grudge against the person he was haunting. Generally, poltergeists were fuelled by rage and angst, and had the maturity level of a five-year-old regardless of their actual age when they died. The worse his rage got, the more damage he’d be able to do.

“Lovely sentiment,” I said. “Unfortunately, my job is kind of on the line, so if you don’t mind, there’s a table for one in the afterlife with your name on it.”

I held my hands out, delicately, and pushed. While the spirit wasn’t solid, his instinctive reaction to being touched caused him to move backwards. Unfortunately, so did the cabinet. I lunged to steady it, and Lloyd threw one of the band-shaped spells. The trapping spell’s red lines appeared over the cabinet, fixing it in place. The poltergeist yelped and flew up into the air, panicking automatically at the sight of the glowing spell even though it only worked on solid objects.

Next step: lure our wayward spirit into the candle trap. We’d opted to set up the candles in the doorway, hidden beneath an illusion. This ghost had no magic save for his poltergeist abilities, so we should, in theory, be able to avoid any more unpleasant surprises.

A cushion rose from the sofa. Maybe not.

“Don’t,” I warned, grabbing for the cushion. Another threw itself at the bookcase, making it rattle. We didn’t have enough trapping spells to cover every piece of furniture in the house. Even senior necromancers had trouble trapping poltergeists without trashing the place in the process, but Lord Bentley had given us an extensive list of instructions as to what not to break (anything) and what level of noise to make (as little as possible). Considering he’d decided to live in a house right in the middle of a spirit line, it was a miracle he’d lasted this long before the dead paid a visit.

The whole sofa lifted into the air. “Oh, come on.”

Poltergeists’ strength levels ranged from rattling spoons to knocking walls down, based on the circumstances of their deaths, how powerful a magic user they’d been while alive, and whether they were close to a spirit line or not. This guy was definitely some form of supernatural, but hadn’t decided to share his name yet, and neither had Lord Bentley. I’d figured they’d argued before the spirit bit the dust, which I wouldn’t normally care about, except he’d picked out the room most likely to annoy our host and refused to leave. 

I grabbed the edge of the sofa, tugging it towards the floor. “Put it down. Easy.”

The sofa dropped, onto my toes. I muffled my yelp of pain with the back of my hand, eyes watering. Lloyd swore and stepped towards me, and the wine cupboard flew open. Oh, bugger.

I’d spent my teenage years with the upper-class magical elite thanks to being adopted by a former Mage Lord, and yet it never ceased to amaze me what they wasted their immense wealth on. Since I’d moved away, my living standards had gone down a bit. I lived in jeans and a T-shirt underneath the necromancers’ standard plain black cloak, and while I had a special badge to mark me as Lady Montgomery’s assistant, my dyed black hair and lip piercing worked against me. If I got hauled in for questioning, nobody would take my side over the distinguished Mage Lord’s.

A wine bottle flew from the cabinet, right at Lloyd’s head. 

My hand snapped up, kinetic power knocking the wine bottle off course, where it hit the trapping spell on the cabinet. Lloyd lunged and caught it before it broke open—and the poltergeist vanished.

“Give me a simple zombie banishment any day of the week.” I massaged my toes. “Hey. Spirit. Get back here. Unless you’ve gone over the veil and done us all a favour?”

“No.” The poltergeist appeared, hovering above the bookcase. It wobbled, the books rattling within it. “I think not.”

A book threw itself at my head. I caught it on reflex, wishing I’d risked setting the candles up within this room after all. The poltergeist cackled, several books rising into the air and juggling themselves. I glimpsed gold-plated spines and velvet coverings. Oh, come on. “Really mature,” I said. “What was this guy to you when you were alive?”

He paused his juggling and said in a mock whisper, “He poisoned me.”

A book smashed into the side of my face. Ow. I should have ducked, but the word poison brought up some unpleasant memories. Also, the guy we’re helping is a murderer? The ghost might be lying… or he might have given me an opening to get through to him.

“That so?” I said. “Someone tried to poison me once, too. It wasn’t nice. But you know, neither is being in jail. Which is where I’ll be going if you wreck the place and my friend and I get blamed for it.”

“That’s a nice argument.” The poltergeist rose into the air before us, still juggling the remaining books. “Pity I don’t care.”

I danced backwards to catch another book, causing the ghost to erupt into howls of laughter. I heard Lloyd sniggering, too, and gave him the finger. 

“Yeah, hilarious,” I said to the spirit. “Is this really what you want the last memory you leave on earth to be? You have a family, right? Would you want them to find out you came back to have petty revenge on an old man?”

Another book threw itself at me in answer, and I caught it by my fingertips. Lloyd yelped a warning as the cabinet began to rattle again. The ghost’s hands glowed with kinetic power. We’d reached stage three—the ‘oh hey, I can levitate things on the other side of the house!’ stage of poltergeist fun.

“What is going on?” bellowed the old mage from the room below.

“We’ve got it under control!” I said, in a failed attempt at a breezy tone. An alarming crash came from downstairs, and the old man swore loudly. Having the ability to shoot lightning from one’s hands yet being unable to do anything about an invading poltergeist must be fairly demoralising. Where was a telekinetic when you needed one?

“Whee!” The poltergeist zipped through the room, rattling the furniture.

Dammit, Lord Bentley. Why didn’t you ward your house properly? I guessed being able to make lightning strike intruders had seemed like it would be sufficient enough on its own. Mages tended to overestimate their own prowess.

I pulled a spare candle out of my pocket, waving farewell to caution. It’d boost the poltergeist’s power as well as mine, but I was out of options.

The candle light grew brighter, and the ghost appeared in front of me. “Pretty light.” He reached out a hand, and a cold breeze kicked up.

I tapped on my spirit sight. Grey light filtered in, showing me the ghost pulsing brightly in front of me. This time, his features became more distinctive, more human. Hoping I wasn’t as rusty as I thought, I reached out my hands towards him. “Go beyond the gates of Death.”

The banishing words rose to my tongue, well-practised, but pulling this off without a candle circle was almost certain to go wrong. With no other props, though, it was a last resort.

Lloyd’s voice rose to join mine, and the poltergeist burst into hysterical laughter. “That barely tickles, little necromancer.”

“Get out of here,” I growled, continuing to grip the candle tightly. Blue light burned my hands, pulsing through the spirit realm, but my hands passed straight through the ghost. Damn. It was worth a try.

The spirit realm disappeared as the poltergeist threw itself at the bookcase. Lloyd and I both jumped in to steady it, and the kinetic blast knocked both of us off our feet. Books rained down around us. One struck me in the forehead and stars blinked before my eyes. “Ow. Bastard. It’s way too strong.”

“Can’t you borrow a boost from you-know-who?” Lloyd said, groaning.

“You know why I can’t.” If I revealed my Hemlock witch magic in front of anyone remotely connected to the mage council, I could say farewell to more than my apprenticeship. More to the point, I couldn’t invite Evelyn Hemlock to give the poltergeist a fright, because she was out of commission. 

The ghost reappeared, the ceiling lights flickering above his head. Oh, no. Now he’d figured out he could screw with electricity as well as throwing shit around.

As the room was plunged into darkness, blasts of kinetic energy struck the walls and the wine cabinet rose an inch or two off the ground.

“Please, no,” I said.

The cabinet moved higher, tilting forwards. Meanwhile, the crisscrossing red lines of the spell trapping the other cabinet flickered and died.

“No!”

Lloyd grabbed one cabinet, I lunged for the other, and a spell went off like a firecracker. A second later, a foam-like substance filled the room, smothering everything in thick fluffiness.

“Ow,” said Lloyd, pressed against the wall. “Didn’t know what that one did.”

“Isabel’s, by any chance?” The foamy fluffiness had shoved me right up against the cabinet, but at least it’d stopped anything from falling over.

“Yep,” he said, his voice muffled. “Now we need to squeeze the bugger into the candles.”

“Uh, Lloyd, I can’t even move.” The squishy substance filled the entire room, and moving between bubbles was like wading through thick toffee. The spirit wasn’t affected by the spell, but with everything encased in foaminess, he could no longer destroy any of the mage’s possessions, either. But the moment the spell wore off, the ghost would unleash all its rage, and we’d be looking at a bill that would take a lifetime to pay off.

I squeezed my way around the cabinet, found a gap in the foam, and eased a spell off my wrist into my hand. Taking careful aim, I raised my palm.

Power hummed in my hand beneath the spell, briefly. Even with Evelyn gone, I could still feel the echo of her presence whenever I held a witch spell in my hand or went near a ward. White light sparked at my fingertips, and I drew in a quick breath before letting the spark grow. I can control this, I told myself, and threw the spell into the air.

Flames tore through the foam, and a body appeared below. I’d got only a glimpse of the ghost’s real face, but it was enough.

The poltergeist appeared, looking down at his own dead body, and screamed.

When all else fails: force the ghost to come face to face with their own mortality. With a wail of anguish, the poltergeist flew out of the room—right into the candles.

Lights snapped on at my command, trapping the ghost between them.

“Is it gone?” said the mage’s demanding voice from below.

I looked down at the illusion of the dead man. Yeah. Your friend is. Getting a mage locked up for murder wasn’t exactly avoiding attention, and yet…

“Tell me the truth,” I whispered to the trapped poltergeist. “Did he really poison you? Can you prove it?”

The man floated in the circle, his eyes luminous, his mouth stretched wide in horror. “The wine cabinet… the poison… my body is in the basement…”

Footsteps sounded on the stairs. Lloyd squeezed out of the room and grabbed my arm. “The foam. Jas, turn off the foam.”

“On it.” I raised my hands, let the merest trickle of magic flow through, and the foam disappeared, leaving the room bare. Lloyd scrambled to shove books back onto the shelves, while I walked up to the wine cabinet and employed a quick unlocking spell on it. I didn’t like holding the magic in my hands for too long, even knowing Evelyn couldn’t touch me. I’d been forced to imprison her in the spirit realm to stop her from hijacking my body and going on a rampage, and I sincerely hoped she’d stay that way.

“Don’t break the expensive furniture, don’t smash the windows, and don’t get us blacklisted,” said Lloyd. “I think that went pretty well.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” I said in a low voice. “Someone’s going to get an unwelcome visit from the mages’ enforcement squad.”

Mages were rich snobs, but even they couldn’t escape justice when it came to the murder of their own people. I was surprised at the dude’s audacity if nothing else, but maybe he hadn’t figured his friend would stick around and haunt him.

When we’d shoved the last book back into place and checked there weren’t any scratches on the cabinets, Lloyd and I returned to the candles. As we did so, Lord Bentley appeared on the stairs, giving our dishevelled appearances a look of disdain. “You definitely didn’t break anything?”

“Nope,” I said cheerily. “One spirit, signed and delivered.” 

The mage sniffed. “Good enough, I suppose.”

“Just need to banish him,” I said, though there was fat chance of that happening, not when the ghost was the only person who could testify against his killer. Still, I could put on a good show.

I faced the candles, which looked oddly pale. Grey light filtered through, showing me the spirit realm. Being on a spirit line, ghosts were brighter than they usually were and kinetic power hit harder, which gave us less time than usual to get him out of the circle.

The only problem was, the ghost wasn’t there.

“Did you banish it?” said the mage expectantly. Mages couldn’t detect changes in the spirit realm the way necromancers could, and they didn’t get the same boost other supernaturals did from being close to spirit lines. It was the one area they weren’t leagues ahead of the rest of us in.

“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.