Page 24 of The Witch & the Wolf

Arlo suppressed a laugh, covering his mouth.

“I heard something. Do show.”

“Mom, you don’t have to be this nosy…”

“Show.”

With an exasperated sigh, Holly turned the phone to show Arlo, who also stamped on a lovely smile. “Hi, Holly’s mom.”

“Ah ha. You’re more handsome than the cards implied. Alright, now, my reading of Holly showed that she was with a young man, surrounded by death. I would like to do a reading of you to make sure you’re not a serial killer.”

Holy crap. “Mom, are you for real? You called to read Arlo’s cards?”

Arlo, of course, kept laughing, unable to conceal it.

“I will do a six-card reading.” With a rather dramatic flair, eyes glaring out of the phone at Arlo, her mother produced six cards, spreading them out in a circle. The angle only briefly showed the cards before her mother infuriatingly tilted the cards from view. “Mm hm. Mm hm. Fascinating…”

Arlo mouthed, “You weren’t kidding when you said she had powers.”

Help me, Holly mouthed back, and he bit back another laugh.

“I see. It appears… you are a man who works with death. Many spirits clamor around you, attracted to your light. You must be careful not to let them suck that light from you because they would if you do not keep adequate control of your powers. A long, dark tunnel – an unknown path awaits you. That path must not be trod alone. One light in the darkness is a treasure, but two is even better.”

Arlo blinked a few times.

“A necromancer?” Her mother dropped the dramatic voice. “Is my daughter dating a necromancer? My word, I’ve never heard of such a thing…”

“Mom!” Holly whipped the phone back so Arlo no longer hovered in sight. “We’re not dating!”

Not yet.

“We just sit together in class, and we have shared assignments. We’re going on an assignment right now!”

“Sure, sure, ‘assignments.’ That’s what the kids call it these days.”

“Mom!” Holly flushed, wanting to sink into a hole in the ground. “Can you not embarrass me in front of my friend? God!”

“Necromancer!” her mother exclaimed again, shaking her head, and the various earrings attached to her lobes jangled. “I never…”

“I hope you can read the tarot still because maybe it’ll show me turning up at your door with an ax.”

Holly ended the call, cheeks twin furnaces at this point, and Arlo burst out into raucous laughter.

“Ha, ha, she must be fun at parties!”

“Oh, my God…” Holly threw her hands in the air, almost chucking her phone away in the same motion. “I can’t believe her. She knew what she was doing. She wanted to embarrass me.”

“I mean, are they even your parents if they don’t want to embarrass their own child from time to time?” Arlo asked, grinning. Of course, he kept poking her about it all the way to the village.

However, the mood turned more somber once they approached the field with the well near the lip of the glowing woodland. Z’Hana waited by the stile, idly browsing through her cell phone, and nodded curtly to them when they arrived.

“Good idea to have brought jackets – it might get chilly later. Now… I may not have the type of powers you two hold, but that doesn’t mean I will be useless on this trip.” She fished something out of her pocket – a leather bracelet with some patterns carved into it. “I was able to get permission to requisition this from our artifact stores. It’s not a powerful artifact by itself – but it can be very useful for a medium.” She handed it to Holly, who peered closer at the patterns decorating it. They appeared to depict what looked like a stick man waving a spear at floating stickmen without legs.

“What does it do?” she asked, even as Z’Hana helped her fasten it to her wrist.

“It can protect from possession. More than that, it can make it a little easier for you to be able to resist the emotions of the ghost you contact. Since mediums cannot only be possessed – they can be trapped in hallucinations and strong echoes of emotion from the ghost that can affect their ability to function. As we don’t really have many mediums going through the academy, this bracelet is normally lent out to mediums in some of the other schools. Luckily, we had it on hand this time.”

Holly regarded the bracelet with a lot more respect. Something like this had the potential to really save her ass. She shuddered, remembering the loss of control over her limbs and knowing she didn’t want to feel like that ever again.

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