Page 19 of The Witch & the Wolf

“If there are any more of the dead, you will need people who can sense that type of presence: mediums, necromancers, and psychics. I won’t be here after tomorrow since I’m currently involved in a high-profile investigation, and I’m booked up for a week. The other nearest necromancer is currently in Peru dealing with an excavation of an Incan site; the rest are also overseas.” She didn’t reveal the reasons why – but the meaning was clear.

Use the powers of the people you have here.

“If you intend for us to use these two,” Eldan said, his frown deepening, “I would point out that they are not the most experienced. I would much rather have a professional who has gone through years of training handle this. I also don’t want the academy to be liable for any… accidents.”

Arlo decided at that moment that he really didn’t like the principal. He acted like a tiresome bureaucrat, concerned only for the image of the school and not for anything else. He certainly didn’t seem to care that one of his students was currently slumped over, unconscious and cradled in the arms of a Sixclaw werewolf.

“The more they practice, the more efficient they’ll become,” Z’Hana said with a dark glare. “They seem to be already picking up on things well, but the medium, in particular, is going to need some assistance from possession. A necromancer can help against that, but I believe we may have something in our school that might help or that we can request from Lostwithiel.”

The suggestion to involve Lostwithiel Academy seemed to incense the principal more. “Absolutely not. I hate dealing with them. You may check our own artifact reserves. If we have something that can protect the medium, then we can investigate this issue ourselves. The sooner we begin, the better. I don’t want Archon people crawling over my space and accusing us of being lax.”

Arlo didn’t think Archon Academy would be that unreasonable. After all, Dreadmor did have a fairly good explanation for why an investigation might not commence straight away. Necromancers and certified mediums weren’t exactly a common resource to be summoned with the snap of a finger.

Now, Marisha turned to Arlo and the unconscious medium. “It was, overall, a fantastic effort on her part.” Her meaning Holly, of course. “Thanks to her, we have a name, Emilia Gold. We have a suggestion that multiple people were aware of something happening to Charles Suntooth. We still don’t have a location, but I should imagine it won’t be too far from the well. It’s not easy to carry a body unnoticed, and you can’t drive a car up to the well. So, we can begin to extrapolate from there.” She folded her arms. “Which teacher will be overseeing them?”

“I will, I suppose,” Z’Hana said. “I went with them to the village before we met up with you.”

“Good. Give them at least a day to recover. Give them some time off lessons if need be. And they’ll be on the way to solving a fifteen-year-old mystery.”

After being dismissed from the morgue, Arlo carried Holly to the infirmary, where a couple of other students lay, partially concealed by curtains, and he handed her over to the nurse on duty with a brief explanation of the circumstances that led to her condition.

“Possession coma. Been a while since we’ve had one of those.” Nurse Fila bustled around Holly, giving her a visual checkup. “Happens if they contact a powerful, angry spirit – and if they haven’t had enough training. First-year student looks like. What have you people been up to?”

“Nothing intentional,” Arlo said, not liking her attitude either. It wasn’t as if he and Holly had wanted this to happen. They weren’t troublemakers. But people now eyed him discreetly, as if they expected him to go ahead and conjure up some undead army on a whim. “When she wakes up, can you let her know Arlo is worried about her?”

“Sure thing. If you want to get her something for when she wakes up – you can leave it by the side of the door here. We’ll make sure she gets it.”

He did end up buying something – a small box of chocolates, believing it to be a gift safe enough to appear friendly. At the infirmary, he met Skyla and Lujan, who were also worried about Holly, and gave them a shorthand version of everything that had occurred: too much excitement for one day; a body in a well, long forgotten; a spirit full of burning resentment still loitering around the body after all that time, a spirit he’d fought with and which had possessed Holly after her attempts to dig deep and understand the motivations and the circumstances of the spirit.

All of it didn’t seem fair, somehow. Weren’t the first few weeks of school meant to be relaxing? Or was this the type of experience to be expected with those of their kind, with their kind of powers?

“They do keep your type busy,” Lujan noted with a smirk. “Seems it’s far more exciting to be a necromancer than it is to be a wind mage. Though I am proud to have my powers.”

“If you used them for more than just stealing other people’s drinks, maybe you’d have a better time with them, too,” Arlo pointed out, which simply caused the other werewolf’s smile to widen.

News spread fast at Dreadmor, and some unknown students approached him to ask him for information – none of which he planned to provide to strangers.

Only later, when back in his room, staring out to the night and the globe lamps dotting the gardens, did he finally get a message from Holly, thanking him for the chocolates and reassuring him that everything was fine.

“Are you sure? If you feel anything like how I felt the other day… you’re going to be super out of it.”

“I already was super out of it,” she texted back.

“What did it feel like? The whole… possession thing?”

A pause. Several times, she typed and then stopped typing. He waited impatiently for her to send something, flopping back on the bed, holding the phone above him so the pale light illuminated his face.

“A part of me was aware,” came the response. “I just didn’t have control of my own body anymore. This is something I’ve read about – something that is considered one of the major dangers of being a psychic, a medium that hasn’t been fully trained. But even psychics who are properly trained might encounter a spirit that is too strong if they go into a dangerous area… so I don’t know if I’m feeling that awesome about my powers at the moment. Feels more like a liability than anything else.”

Arlo typed back furiously. “Your powers are awesome. Anyone who disagrees can fight me,” he replied. “But they want us to continue helping them. I think the idea is that we’re going to go and try and find out how the body ended up in the well. They need people with our powers – and we’re not going to have anyone like a necromancer or medium watching over us while we do it.”

She typed back. “What? Seriously?” He sensed her outrage from how fast the letters appeared – and the typos that emerged. “No way would they be putting us out there again to investigate. We’re first-year students. It’s been, what, way less than a month since we even started here. What the actual hell are they thinking?”

“I don’t think they’re thinking, exactly. But I’m sure we can do it. I don’t believe we should have any issues.”

Holly exclaimed, “That’s not the point! It’s stupid! It was a complete accident that we found that body. I wish we hadn’t found it.”

Arlo’s heart ached at that comment. He didn’t know how to comfort her, how to reassure her that everything would be okay. A part of him wanted to find out where she was right now, go running over, and just… what, hug her? Feed her more chocolate? Go for a late-night walk in the gardens?

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