Winchester Stone
I tugged down on my waistcoat. It was an empty movement. I needed my hands to do something. Because if they didn’t do anything, I would spend the rest of the day behind my desk, standing like a rigid guard dog, staring out on the square behind the Academy, and waiting. For what? Simple. Death. Not the death of everyone in the city, but the revival of those who had gone before.
I shuddered as I thought of the tome stolen from the Lamberts. How they had ever managed to acquire it, I did not know, and Grace had not said. If I weren’t the wizard I was, if I didn’t have the ability to interact with the dead, I would never have believed her tale. But one step into that attic had confirmed it had most definitely held such a sacrilegious grimoire.
Now it left me here, still standing rigidly, hands weak by my sides, eyes wide open, gaze and attention locked far within on the nightmare unfolding somewhere inside my heart.
There was a sudden rapid knock at the door. It startled me out of my reverie so badly, I could’ve yelped. I controlled the urge. I turned. “Come in.”
The door opened.
I had thought it would be one of my secretaries. Perhaps it would be a student. I had never expected… my brother.
Bram walked in. Though he never walked anywhere. He strode. For there didn’t seem to be any barrier anywhere, be it under the earth or atop, that could stop him for long.
He paused and looked at me.
The slightest smile spread his lips. “I was here on business and thought I’d drop in. It’s been some time since we have seen each other, hasn’t it, Brother?”
I nodded once.
I had not run into my brother because I always avoided him. I kept many surveillance spells throughout the city to track his movements. How he had dodged them, I didn’t know. Likely he hadn’t. I was simply too distracted. I’d failed to check in with them this morning, and now I was paying the price.
There was a very good reason I didn’t want to run into my brother, an exceptional reason, in fact – for I couldn’t spend too much time in his presence. One day soon, he would find out. He had been scratching at the surface of my secret for years. And when he finally discovered it, make no mistake, he would not protect me.
I was his flesh and blood. All of the rest of our family were dead. And while I had shed tears at their funerals, Bram never had. For he was a man of singular will. And that will had only ever been directed upward.
If he found that I was a ghost wizard, he would use that to ingratiate himself with the king and rise to the position of his senior advisor.
“And how was she?” Bram suddenly asked off-topic.
There was only one thing he could be speaking about. So he’d discovered that Grace had come to see me last night? I doubted… no, I hoped that Grace hadn’t been the one to tell him herself. But who knew? She was a mess, and quite rightly so. If people found out what had been stolen from her house, her mother would be torn down.
Did Bram know…?
No. If he knew, he would most definitely have used his fiancée’s mother on his never-ending mission to ingratiate himself with the king.
I forced myself to release my shoulders.
I nodded once. “Grace came to see me last night. Seems she’s quite distressed. There was a murder—”
“You do know that I’m here for my fiancée, don’t you? I was busy yesterday. I understand she must’ve gone to you because she felt she didn’t have anyone else to turn to.”
I looked at my brother.
I smiled. Was it hard? Oh yes. Smiling in front of a shark never gets easy. The more you do it, the more you simply reinforce that the shark will always be in control.
But I had made it this far for this long against Bram because I knew how to act and when to act.
“Can I get you a drink, Brother?” I asked as I strategically turned my back from him and stared at a reflective, clean window to my side. Bram’s expression was always even. I often tried to catch him out like this – in the few times I couldn’t dodge him. But I never actually caught his real expressions. Perhaps I didn’t want to. I’d seen them growing up.
I often saw them in my nightmares, too.
Bram drummed his fingers on the armrest of the chair. The dull beat of his short nails against the hardwood filled the room and fortunately gave me something to concentrate on other than my droning heartbeat. “There’s something I’ve come to discuss with you, Brother.”
“So this is not simply a familial visit, then?” I poured him a whiskey and, with a perfectly solid grip, handed it over. I could shake on the inside. I would never shake in front of him.
Bram took the drink, didn’t sip it, and slowly slid his gaze up to me. “One does not need to visit family to reinforce the fact they are still one’s flesh and blood, do they?”
I looked at the way he said one’s. The way his lips moved, the way they carved that possessive out of the air.
My brother had a problem. You could say that it was the macrocosm of the slightly smaller problem I had. When I wanted something, I took it. But at least I didn’t think it was mine until I had it. Bram did not have that compunction.
I needed to say something. The more I spent silently in my brother’s presence, the more likely it was that I would wriggle out of my skin. I might have a long history of controlling my nerves around him, but at some point, I would break. The more stresses you mount on a man, the more likely he is to bend. And so many stresses were coming upon me from every angle, one of these days, I would snap right down to my knee in front of Bram and reveal who I was.
Maybe he’d get there first. He hadn’t touched his drink until now. Slowly, like a particularly sadistic hangman placing a noose over your throat, he drew it up to his lips, let it pause there, then said, “I’m back on the hunt for a dead practitioner.”
Just like that, my world came crumbling down. Instinct alone, and nothing more, saw me stand my ground. It stopped the quick sweat that threatened to drench my brow. It held my hands in place even though they wanted to tremble to my pocket and clutch at my sleep charm.
Bram watched me with the kind of eyes that would not miss a thing. For they had been schooled since birth to catch signs of anyone’s weakness. They darted up to my eyes, across to my ears in case they had receded behind my hair, then over to my brow, then finally to my loose hands.
I needed to be careful. No reaction is still a reaction. And news like this, even if it wasn’t directed at me, was still startling to any practitioner in the kingdom.
I slowly unstuck my lips. It was just as easy as removing one’s body from thick tar. “A dead practitioner?” I said, lips wobbling, throat parched, mind substituting the word practitioner for wizard, even though at the last moment my treacherous lips wanted me to give up the game.
Bram finally drank. It was a slow, engaged affair where his throat pushed out hard like the bellows of someone trying to light a fire. When it raged into life, run. It would burn everything you had.
“A witch,” he finally supplied.
My mind, which had been a thousand leagues below the situation, sinking through the terror I’d always held back, resurfaced for all of a second as I forced back a gulp and asked, “A woman?”
“You say that like it’s a surprise to you?” he asked slowly. His gaze flicked across his lead tumbler and settled on me again, that prying quality like having a crowbar shoved up your nostrils. It would prise apart your tender flesh until it reached your brain. Then it would slice right through and attempt to find your every secret. If they were not forthcoming, oh well. No great loss.
“It’s recently come to my attention that there is a dead practitioner in this town. Though I have suspected it for some time.” My brother always spoke with the same tone and the same pitch. It came hand-in-hand with the fact he was so very good at threatening people. He did not let emotion infiltrate him – until he finally had what he wanted in his sights.
But now I could hear the curiosity rising through every syllable. It made me tamp down on my own fear with all the more force. I even smiled. “Interesting. I suppose I might’ve wondered the same for some time.”
“You suppose,” he locked his gaze on his tumbler as he sloshed the liquid around and watched it slide over the patterned glass, “you might’ve suspected it for some time? Intriguing. I suppose we think alike,” he said, emphasizing the word suppose, letting it slip out of his mouth like an assassin might slide their dagger from their sheath without anyone hearing.
I had one option here. Distract him. And never a greater distraction had wandered across my path anyway. Statistically, there should only be me in the entire kingdom. Either this was a trap – and I had to remember that possibility – or there was… another. Another like me. No, not like me. A witch. Ineffectiveness aside, we were still technically a pair of dead practitioners.
“I have a few spells I would like to cast to find her. As I am unfortunately without magic,” Bram said, lifting a hand as if to emphasize that point, not that one could confirm lack of magic by staring at mere flesh, “I find myself requiring assistance.”
“The palace,” I had the temerity to begin. I hadn’t thought this through. When you had a conversation with Bram, you needed to remember every single tangent, because he would always come back to them. He would take them right out from underneath you and strike you over the head with them if you weren’t careful.
He pushed to his feet. He was still slow and deliberate, but the way he unfolded his body suggested that in a second – a snapped and very effective second – that could all change.
“We are brothers,” he emphasized, his voice dropping off for some reason as if his lips simply weren’t capable of stomaching that prospect for long. “And I need someone I can trust on this. Can I trust you, Brother?”
That gulp finally came, but I controlled it, and I did not let it force my collar out visibly. “Of course you can. Any assistance you need… I shall give it.”
“Good. You will come to the palace tonight.” With that, without another word of explanation, he pushed toward the door. And that would be when there was a light knock on it. It was only a knock. You cannot tell who is knocking based on how they knock. Perhaps if it’s a woodpecker you might have the ability to discern the hollow nature of a beak against wood. Not my point. Never my point. For my heart made all of the points as I knew, just knew it was Grace.
Either my brother knew how she knocked as well, or he expected her.
He opened the door, not me.
Grace’s expression, which had been open and easy, stopped. Was that to say it soured? Was that to suggest it stiffened? No. I couldn’t describe to you precisely what it did, but it did something at the sight of my brother. She blinked once. “There you are. I was told by the secretary at the front desk you were here.”
“You came looking for me at the Magical Academy, did you?” Bram asked, tone back to what it always was – neutral and hidden, somewhat like the glimpse of a rifle muzzle in a safe. An open safe. All one had to do was push the door slightly, and the rifle would be revealed, cocked and ready.
“Yes. I’m afraid it’s an urgent matter. Please come this way, Bram,” she said. She hesitated. She did not look at me, but she angled her head slightly my way. Then, shoulders stiff, the fabric of her purple taffeta dress no longer sitting smoothly against them, she leaned across and picked up Bram’s hand.
I won’t describe to you what my stomach did. I won’t describe to you what my heart did. My entire torso became off-limits to my discerning mind. For if I was stupid enough to describe it, it would rob me of my reason when I needed it most. Said reason held me together as both of them walked away.
I closed the door. I turned. I shook against it. I placed my hand on my chest. Then I let my fingers fall. I stared across at the window. I moved to it and peered out. “So there’s another… like me?” I muttered.
I remained at that window until I finally saw Grace and Bram walking across the grand square.
Bram paused at one point. I quickly turned away from the window. I did not turn back for another two minutes until he was finally out of sight. I laid my hands on the glass. Then I twisted as fast as I could. There was another dead practitioner out there, and I would capture her.
She was the insurance I’d always needed. A means to distract my brother. A card I could play when I had no other choice.