Five Dead Herrings by E.J. Russell

“Y-you’re dead,” I croaked.

Reid’s smirk wasn’t nearly as engaging as Mal’s. In fact, it raised the hair on my neck. “Death,” he drawled. “Such a relative state, don’t you agree?”

I backed away, trying to keep a safe distance between us. Although I wasn’t entirely sure what constituted a safe distance from somebody who was recently extremely waterlogged and not breathing. “It’s always seemed pretty final to me.”

He wagged a finger almost playfully. “Ah, that’s because you’re mired in those limited human perceptions. So one dimensional.” He shook his head pityingly. “It’s sad, really. If you only knew…”

“Knew what? That you’re an entitled, abusive SOB whose father’s been throwing money at him all his life to compensate for him being essentially…what is it now?” I tapped my chin, trying for a little bravado. “Oh, yes. Human.”

That ripped away Reid’s mischievous veneer. “I’m not human,” he snarled. “I never was. But now I’m so much more than you could ever aspire to.”

“What? You mean recently deceased?”

He advanced on me. “I mean extraordinary. Powerful. Invincible. Not even death can stop me.”

I tried to cover my stumbling retreat with bravado. “Please tell me you’re not going to break out with a bwahahaha.”

Instead of making him angry, though, my pathetic little snark seemed to settle him. I took advantage of his relative calm to sneak my hand toward my pocket and the emergency beacon.

“Ah ah ah,” he said, which was a little too close to bwahahaha for my liking. “None of that.” He flicked a finger at me and something jerked against my hip. “I think you’ll find that your little beacon is…how did you put it? Recently deceased.”

I shoved my hand into my pocket and pulled out the device, although I had to drop it because it was hot. It fell to the grass, smoking, all its LED indicators extinguished. “How did you—”

“Death. It’s what I do now.” He paused as if a thought had just occurred to him. “No. Not what I do.” He grinned, and in the moonlight, he looked more like a skull than a man. “Who I am.”

My knees threatened to buckle and my fingers went numb. “Necromancer,” I whispered.

“Exactly!” His grin widened. He looked positively delighted. Or positively deranged. “The only one in existence now. So that makes me extra special.” His delight morphed into menace. “That makes me a god.”

“That makes you a criminal.” And probably a psychopath. “Necromancy is illegal!”

“Shortsighted, hide-bound thinking,” he scoffed. “The last refuge of the weak, those without the courage and strrrength”—he accompanied his rolled Rs with a raised fist—”to complete the rituals.”

The numbness in my fingers had reached my heart. “What rituals?”

He strolled toward me and I noticed that where he stepped, the grass withered. “Little deaths. Insignificant, really.”

“Except to whatever died.”

He scoffed. “Fish. They’re hardly worth noting.”

My jaw sagged as the pieces fell into place. “It was you. You put the dead herrings on Lachlan’s boat.” I retreated further, almost to the hedge and its aggressive vines, but given a choice between surly dryads and a megalomaniacal psychopath whose touch was literally death? No brainer.

“Not the first one.” In the moonlight, his skin was dead white. “But it didn’t take much to convince Wyn to take that step after the dead thing washed ashore. Not when we’d made sure he’d been rendered…suggestible.”

Suggestible? “You roofied him?”

He waved a negligent hand. “Drugs are so crude. Spells are more elegant.”

“So you magically roofied him. Is that how you got him to cheat on Lachlan in the first place?”

“That oaf. Wyn would have left eventually. We merely…accelerated the process.” His expression darkened. “Then the little fool got cold feet after I had him call the next herrings to me. He actually had the audacity to leave me. Me!”

“Yeah,” I muttered. “Go figure.” The hedge was brushing my back now, and I could swear that its leaves were quivering. Trying to decide how best to throttle me? Frankly, I didn’t really care. “Still not getting why you’re standing here instead of six feet under.”

“So ignorant, you humans. Never see what’s right in front of you. Once I’m in charge, that will change. You’ll be much easier to control once you understand exactly where you fall on the food chain.” He spread his arms wide. “Didn’t you know? After the little deaths to prepare the vessel—”

“Vessel? As in a boat?” Is that why he’d targeted the Cridhe na Mara?

“Can you really be this stupid? Vessel as in receptacle.” He bared his teeth. “The receptacle of power. But before the ascension, before the vessel is consumed, those who walk The Path”—I could hear the capitalization in his tone—“must pass the Great Trial to prove ourselves worthy.” He stooped and uprooted a blade of grass with a vicious yank. “Most are too weak, too irresolute, too soft to take that step. But I am not weak, irresolute, or soft.”

“The Great Trial,” I said, my throat dry. Why the heck wasn’t Mal coming out? “I take it that means death.”

He chuckled. “Maybe you’re not so stupid after all. You could make a decent minion under my new order.” He tossed the blade of grass aside. It was brown and withered. “And if you’re unsatisfactory, you’ll do for spell fodder.”

“Yeah, sorry if I’m not signing up for that.” I was practically sitting inside the hedge by now.

“Nonsense. You’ll be so grateful to set aside burdens not meant for your frail shoulders, to take your proper place, that you’ll fall on your knees to thank me.” He smiled, the most horrifying thing I’d ever seen. “Of course, you’ll be on your knees, anyway. And once I’ve consumed my vessel—”

“Hold on. I thought you’d already done that.”

He scowled. “No. The Great Trial first. Then the sacrifice of the vessel.”

Holy crap. Was he intending to murder Wyn for this ascension of his? No wonder the poor guy turned to Lachlan for help. “If Wyn was your vessel, that’ll be a little tough, considering he’s disappeared.”

If I thought that last smile was horrifying, it had nothing on his grin. “Wyn? He was the conduit. The connection. The…” He laughed, and it was totally a bwahahaha. “The bait to lure the proper vessel to me at the proper time.”

My knees finally gave out, and only the sturdy hedge kept me from falling on my butt. “You’re not… You don’t mean…”

“You?” He laughed. “Human blood isn’t potent enough to exalt me.”

The shoe dropped, and my stomach threatened to rebel all over Reid’s bare toes. “Lachlan. You’ve targeted him from the first.”

Reid sighed, almost dreamily. “The raw potential. You’ve no idea. A king who refuses to take his throne. A supe who lives as human. Who panders to humans. All of it is wasted on Brodie. I can make much better use of it. Once I’ve consumed his essence, I’ll achieve my true power.”

If this was him on low-power setting, I really didn’t want to see what he was like cranked up to eleven.

Come on, Mal. Now would be a really good time to show up.“I don’t think—”

“Martinson!” The roar from the gates made me lose my balance and fall all the way into the shrubbery.

“Oh, God, Lachlan, not now.” I struggled to regain my feet, expecting the plants to hinder me, but instead it was almost as if a firm hand—in this case, a branch—pushed me upright. “Get back, you idiot,” I shouted.

Naturally, he didn’t listen. He came charging across the driveway and onto the lawn like an avenging angel. Okay, so the angels I knew weren’t exactly the avenging type, but you get the idea. He was big and built and really, really pissed off.

I’d never seen anybody as beautiful.

God damn it.

Reid’s expression turned absolutely avaricious. Mine probably wasn’t all that different—although for a different reason—but mine was also infused with a healthy dollop of terror. How exactly was Reid planning to consume Lachlan? Did he need to touch him the way he touched the grass? Could he point his finger at Lachlan and just zap him like he’d done to my beacon? Clearly, I needed to brush up on necromancy lore.

Assuming I got out of this alive.

Lachlan stopped a good fifteen feet from Reid, and I was surprised Reid didn’t burst into flames from the force of his glare. “Where’s my skin, you bloody bastard?”

“Don’t worry,” Reid said. “We have it safe inside. You’ll get it in good time.”

I blinked. He didn’t know Jordan and I had taken the pack? Unless…

My belly clenched tighter. Oh, God, could he have broken into the Quest offices? Stolen the skin? Hurt Zeke? Demons were especially susceptible to necromancy, and if this jerk had harmed him… Only one way to find out.

“We know you paid Ronnie Purl to steal Lachlan’s backpack,” I called.

He shot me an irritated glance. “We shouldn’t have had to pay him at all, considering he owed us for having the temerity to steal from us in the first place. It hardly matters how we acquired it though. The point is that we’ve got it. And once the council rules to form-lock Brodie, nobody will care how.”

So he didn’t know the skin was gone. Good. Guess necromancy didn’t make you omnipotent and all-knowing, despite Reid’s delusions of godhood.

He turned back to Lachlan. But Lachlan wasn’t paying attention to him. He was looking at me. “You all right, lad?”

“Fine. But you need to— Look out!”

Lachlan dove to one side in a shoulder roll and fetched up in a crouch at the base of the hedge. Consequently, the energy blast from Reid’s outthrust hand missed him and hit a rose bush. Its leaves immediately withered and browned, its blooms blackening.

Behind me, the hedge thrashed and rattled. I started to grin. Oh, buddy, you just made a big mistake. For the first time since the Great Dryad Debacle, I was thankful for my stalkers.

As Reid advanced on Lachlan, I turned to the shrubs and said, “Go get him!”

The words had barely left my mouth when vines shot out from under the hedge, bypassing me and Lachlan completely, twining around Reid’s ankles and up his legs. Reid glanced down, annoyed rather than terrified as I would have been, and flicked them with his fingers. Some of the leaves died and fell off, but other tendrils took their place. Soon he was tearing at the vines with both hands. But as the vines crept up to his hips, fewer leaves falling by the second, he was clearly losing the battle. Without his full power, without consuming his vessel, he apparently didn’t have enough juice.

Unfortunately, he figured that out at the same time as I did. His head jerked up, and he focused on Lachlan.

“I was going to do this in the sea, to prove my dominion over the water. But unlike my late unlamented father”—wait, what?—”I’m willing to abandon elegance for expediency.”

“Your father’s dead?” I croaked.

He shrugged. “He will be. I don’t need him anymore, now that he’s performed the resurrection ritual. Besides, he had some preposterous notion that I would be subservient to him as the elder mage.” He scoffed. “As if.”

“So you consumed him too?”

His face twisted. “Of course not. That’s revolting. He was my father. I’ve arranged a more suitable end for him. Neither fire nor man can last very long in a room without air, and I was able to cut a pretty sweet deal with the air mage who’d been snapping at his heels, looking for dominance rather than cooperation.” He reached into his robe and drew out a dagger as long as my forearm. “I’ll deal with her later. If she’s not willing to submit to my rule…” He brandished the knife, admiring the flash of moonlight on the blade.

If Reid had trapped his father in an airless room and Pierce was with Mal at the time… I needed to get into that house. At least with Reid immobilized, the vines holding him in place, I might have a chance.

But Lachlan—that idiot—walked toward Reid as if he was offering himself on a platter.

“Lachlan, for God’s sake, stay away from him.”

“He must learn to stop preying on the less privileged and powerful.” He strode closer. “He doesn’t scare me.”

“Well, he should! He’s a freaking necromancer, and you’re his chosen freaking vessel. He kills you and we’ll all be less privileged and powerful. Except you. You’ll be dead.”

For a wonder, Lachlan actually stopped. He looked at me, a grin splitting his face. “Ah, lad. What makes you think I’d let him win?”

“But Mal’s inside. He might be trapped. Dying. If we—” A figure appeared from around the side of the house. My initial relief morphed into alarm, because it wasn’t Mal as I’d hoped. No, it was Eleri. If she got up to the same tricks as before, she could immobilize Lachlan, making him a sitting duck—and therefore unwilling—and me, too, leaving me helpless to rescue Mal.

As she raised her hands, I yanked the FTA tokens out of my pocket. I pressed the rune on the top one. “Cludo!” I shouted and cast it aside to activate the next one. “Cludo!” and the next, “Cludo!” And the next. “Cludo!”

Suddenly the lawn was crowded with FTA drivers: a bauchan, a trow, a dryad—wonderful—and Frang, my regular duergar driver. They all looked around quizzically. Frang lifted his heavy brows. “Where to?”

“The house!”

He glanced at it. “You don’t need a driver for that. Just walk in.”

“No, I don’t want to go inside.” Well, I did, but I was probably the least qualified to perform a rescue. Duergar, on the other hand, were practically indestructible. “Mal’s in there. Possibly trapped in some airless space. I need you to get him out of there. All of you.”

“Right,” he said. He gestured to the others. “You lot, with me.”

The bauchan raced to the door, quicker than the trow and the duergar, but they lumbered after him. The dryad, however, stared from me to Eleri and raised her hands.

“Oh, crap,” I muttered, and clenched my eyes shut.

But instead of the onslaught of twigs, branches, and thorns, there was…nothing. Well, nothing except a strangled cry that was abruptly cut off.

When I cracked one eye open, Lachlan was unharmed, but Reid had disappeared inside a veritable straightjacket of twined branches. Only his eyes were visible from inside the plant cocoon. Well, his eyes and the hand holding the knife. As I watched, a thorned tendril snaked around his wrist and insinuated itself between his fingers. The dagger dropped to the grass, accompanied by a spatter of blood.

Lachlan and I gazed at each other, wide-eyed.

“Finally,” Eleri said. “I’ve wanted to do that for months.” She glanced from the other dryad to me to Lachlan. “Now. Who wants ice cream?”