Death Mask
What have I done?
I’m Oliver Greer, and I’m on my own. My family is missing—or in hiding, as a masked man with unstoppable magic chases me through the streets.
Our own magic calls up whispers of the past, and for years we’ve secretly used it to help where people need it. But tonight, we touched something else.
Now a ghost walks the city, a silent spirit that brings agony to everyone in his presence.
And my enemies won’t let me stop him.
To save the city and my family, I have to stay ahead of ward traps and conjured blades to discover the truth. About the ghost and the people involved in his death. About why my father was so eager to contact spirits, and how long my uncle has feared them—and now why that masked mage knows our secrets so well. How far back do the secrets go?
Who will I have to face, to undo what I’ve done?
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Sample
Dimness stretched out of reach beyond the shadows, behind the black.
I squinted, shook the haze from my eyes—city lights shone out there against the night, but all blurred by the half-visible barrier in front of me—
The wall. The trap.
I dragged myself up from cold concrete, from the pale speckles of bird droppings I had… fallen onto, that was it. Darker, harder darkness pressed in behind me, and utter black above me where no light could reach. Muted rumblings made their way above that where cars drove by, above this underpass.
A figure watched me.
Yes, I’d just been chasing it, chasing him, to this place… now he stood at the outer corner of the tunnel, out where dimness and the haze of this barrier reduced him to a long-coated shadow. A hood covered his face, but something within that caught a gleam of light.
I’d lost something—
Easy, Oliver. I pulled in a breath of night air, and my side twinged in pain. But I had been flying—
Clumsy flying. My still-chilled face remembered one of the wildest, most wind-whipped rides that clinging to a stream of ether had ever given me. When I’d hauled my magic into form and flung myself up after the retreating shape that should have been my father.
After we’d tried it. After Dad and I really had made the attempt, to not simply call up memories from the ether but to find an actual spirit of the departed… and the ether had twisted, had screamed in my head and sent me sprawling, and then I’d looked up to see that one shape flying away.
And now I was trapped.
The barrier lay curving around the underpass—more a dimness than a solid shape, and like no magic we’d ever called up—but it fenced me off from the empty side-street. A white patch fluttered against the curb, some chunk of paper that must have been pinned there when the ward had sprung up.
I shoved against it. My shoulder met the surface, and it pulsed and threw me stumbling back—
Not back there! I twisted forward again, away from what I remembered I’d set down behind me, the talisman of horn we’d used to tear at the ether. It was one of the two pieces I’d used all my life, but now knowing it lay back there left me cringing more away from it than from the wall.
That was all of it. The rest of the night fell into place—Dad’s experiment with the ether, the shock of whatever we did wrong, flying after that shape and losing it near the underpass… setting down the horn talisman and how hungry it felt now, seeing a figure here, walking into a wall that hadn’t been there…
That figure watched me now. Silent.
He didn’t move—even through the barrier’s dimness he looked still. But he’d led me here, he must have summoned this trap with some magic of his own—
Did he see my talisman down there? God, not that one—for most of my twenty-five years I’ve been hiding from Dad how I shiver when I touch that talisman, that ether-opening magic, and tonight we went behind Uncle Theo’s back and we tore…
I squared my shoulders. Shoes scraped on concrete as I turned to face the watcher again, hoping he hadn’t seen me flinching away from the space behind me. The screen he trapped me with had to be hiding the details of me as much as they did him,
But he still hadn’t moved, I could tell that much. And even with that hood up, he was almost a head shorter than my father or me. Now that he wasn’t just a distant shape riding a stream of ether in the night.
Another magician—not me or Dad or Theo, not even using our ether energy to make this, a ward like our power could never sustain. After all this time, another spellkeeper actually made contact with us.
And he’d trapped me.
Dad would smash his way out and then talk, but Theo or I would…
I moved up to the edge of the ward, still hiding the talisman that lay behind me.
“So you’ve got me.” My words must have reached him through the wall, I saw him move at last as his hood tilted to the side, and I went on, “Even if I was helpless, do you want to make an enemy of Elliot Greer?”
My father’s name sounded clean, like the threat it was.
My captor stirred again—the warning meant something to him, whether it was fear or regret or that he considered us enemies already. But instead of answering, he only watched me. Or he was looking for the talisman behind me.
No you don’t.
In my pocket I still had my other talisman, a lump of honest iron, still heavy with power even after our chase.
One pull of my will brought it to life.
A portion of my own strength passed into it, shifted—and ether burst from that layer of the world into ours, made real, and a wave of green-blue light swung around like a phantom arm and slammed into the barrier.
Thud. The muffled sound mocked me, as my sight blurred until I gasped in another breath.
I’d had to give that surge my own strength as well as stored magic, without what ether the horn talisman could store… and tonight that other power felt more ominous than ever…
Was that it? This ward-maker had been watching the test we’d done, and after it he’d trapped me? Was he here because of what we’d done tonight?
The ether had stirred where we’d tried to call up a spirit, it had folded, and creaked like some vibration deep enough to leave me staggering, had filled my ears with screaming… we’d done that, when the ether had never…
My gaze locked onto my warden. Did he make it go wrong?
Fury drummed through me, but the beat faltered. It had been Dad and me prying at the ether, and nothing that felt like some outside magic. No, I could only wish it was my “warden’s” fault.
We’d known this test would be dangerous—it was always dangerous, and we were always careful. But:
“No, I can do it myself,” Theo had told us. “All Lonnie needs is a glimpse of something like his brother, a simple memory or two. Then he’ll be ready to let go.”
And Dad had said “What if he didn’t have to?”
When my father used that voice, he made anything sound possible, or almost anything. And here I was, still…
I drew up another wave of ether and flung it down at the base of the barrier. But the power splashed away from it, splashed like his ward had always been a seamless part of the concrete… and I staggered, caught my balance on suddenly-weak legs. I knew better than to make this much ether into force without the horn drawing it in for me.
The street down here looked deserted. I drew in a deeper breath and cast around for someone to shout to, but all I saw was empty concrete and dimness. The whole city could have been deathly still except for the blind rumble of the cars above. The wards around me muffled that sound, and they’d muffle any I made too.
If someone did come by, would they glance at the shadows down here and not see the wards? No, even if they did, my warden might not let a witness escape.
“What do you want with me?” My voice pressed out at the night, at his silence. “Talk to me. You snared me here, so there must be something. What can we help you with?”
I brought another trickle of ether into life, just enough to settle a light over my shoulders like a blueish green cloak. Let him wonder what else the Greers could do, for him or against him.
His hooded head tilted, his shoulders rolled… and a crackle of ether flared out and settled over him to match mine.
So he did know our magic. He had his own warding energy, but somehow he held our secret too.
“It’s too late now. You crossed a line.”
His voice was a whisper lower than any night breeze, and muffled by his magic—too soft a thing to be crushing my stubborn hope that he’d torn the ether himself.
Then the whisper had passed. The night was empty again, with only the grind of the cars passing moving around us.
Crossed a line. My nerves tried to remember that feeling again, of the ether tearing and shaking me at a level that left me blindly following the first movement I saw.
The sounds in my ears.
The ether-cloak flickered around me. I let it fade away and locked my knees against a wave of dizziness. It would be different with the horn talisman… but that had been what twisted the world.
Damn it, what was that rip doing now? I’d just left it there on the street where we’d made it—was Dad trying to close it up right now? I’d never seen how that power had hit him, I’d thought that flying shape had to be him.
All we needed were details about a friend’s death. Theo had been right, we could have stopped at calling up the ether’s memories…
My eyes snapped open wide.
I drew myself up straighter, and leaned closer to the ward and its warden. “You knew, didn’t you?” I said. “You knew we were going to reach into the ether, and you let us cross that ‘line.’” As if my accusing him balanced the scales for what we’d done.
He only stood silent, watching me.
How had he even found out? We hadn’t thought there were any other spellkeepers in the city, if there were any left anywhere.
Unless Dad told him. He had been hinting that he’d found something on our last walkabout. And if there had been any hint of someone he could reach out to about more magic… no, he’d never be that reckless. Or hide it from me.
And this “warden” with his wards was still just standing there letting me make myself crazy. I clamped my jaw shut and glared back at him.
And he whispered again:
“You actually tried it. I warned him… and it won’t end here.”
Regret seeped through his voice, what I could hear of it.
He warned us?
What the hell was going on, what did he know and what was happening?
If the ether was still torn… was that what I felt in the horn talisman now? The thing was lying right behind me, I could imagine it right there—
And I was just leaving it down there?
“So this is about what we did? Alright, if we broke something let us fix it! Let me out, let me do something about it!”
He didn’t answer. He could have been a shape of dark stone, a hooded shape set up at the tunnel’s end to watch me.
“Let me fix it!” Dad had to be already working on it—he could have cleared it up by now, or called Theo in too, and I was stuck here— “You have to let us help, me and my family!”
He took a step toward me.
“They… won’t be a problem.”
What did you do?
The question roared up in my throat, but I swallowed it and only glared at him. What had he done, what was he going to do to Dad and Theo…
I banged a fist on the ward. The magic swallowed the sound.
With another slow movement, the warden drew toward me.
One step, another, he moved past what light fell beyond the tunnel and stepped in among the shadows beneath it.
The hood shifted on his head. That flash of smoothness below it—that had to be a mask over his features. I’d seen masks like those before, even Uncle Theo had a few, but any spellkeeper might want something to keep his secrets…
I flicked ether at the ward again—the energy only stopped it cold, of course it did, and I was still throwing blasts with just one talisman and wasting my own body’s strength.
The warden’s arm moved, slowly rising. His gloved hand pointed toward me.
I whirled around. I lunged, dived, scooped up the ridged rod of animal horn… waiting right where I’d left it.
The back of the tunnel was too close—I twisted, rolled my shoulder off it and spun around along concrete to glare back at my enemy, talisman in hand.
The world went dark.
For one instant I saw it happen, the deep, thick wall of his ward energy coalescing before me, killing the light. The shape of him faded.
I blasted ether at it again. The surge splattered to a halt, one lightning-flash of my power’s light splattering off a prison of darkness, a cocoon of black that hung just beyond my fingertips and shut me away in the night. The world went silent, all but my own trapped, gasping breath.
One sound filtered through it. A footstep, another, walking away.
He’d trapped me, sealed me here in a cell, a coffin—
He sealed off the air, how long did I have—
And he was walking away, going after Dad and Theo.
I squeezed my eyes shut, blocked off the glimpse of my tiny new cell and willed my breathing to calm. Light and darkness, sensation and stillness, they were all just tools a spellkeeper moved among.
But not these wards. I couldn’t even crack his first screen, and now this prison was so thick it left me blind, buried alive.
Still, it had to break down in time, he wasn’t even staying here to hold it…
I shook my head. This magic was nothing like ours, and for all I knew it would still be here when I was crumbling bones. Or it could come down in an hour, and be too late for my family anyway.
Except… my back still leaned against cool, real concrete. And I did have the horn talisman again.
The tunnel’s back behind me felt like a mountain. I pulled away, moving in the dark, and drew out the other talisman from my pocket, a two-inch rod of simple iron that fitted my hand.
The spiral-grooved section of animal horn was a fraction longer, and it still felt off—not just the restless hunger I knew too well, but something more. Dad had changed it for tonight, he really would try anything if it would work toward bringing Mother’s spirit back…
I clamped my hands around the two together, anything to let the power flow.
The darkness still pressed around me. Some dim, distant sound did penetrate here, the last muffled hints of the city on the other side of this mass.
The two talismans buzzed in my grip. The iron felt cold, with its more-than-metal weight of the power it could project outward, but the horn wriggled like its magic couldn’t mesh, not now when I needed it most.
Dad could do this.
Light, spectral green-blue light, spilled from between my fingers.
Colors sprang out of what had been blackness—red and orange shapes on the wall that must be graffiti, lumps of trash below me all over a carpet of white bird-waste—but the power flickered and fought me when I needed more. I drew deeper—
Far away, a whole muffled world behind me, footsteps broke the stillness. The wards thinned them almost to nothing, but they came from where the warden had gone and they were running toward me. He’d stayed close by. He’d known.
I couldn’t even look back. The magic writhed like it could jump from my hands any instant, and I only had seconds, seconds before the warden could act, and I had to blast through solid concrete.
Pull.
I thrust my strength into the talismans, all my will deep into them and through them, fighting to hold their warped patterns still as my pull spread out and gathered in force from all through the pocket of ether within reach…
The “pocket” turned. The shape of it twisted inside out to rush out through me and swallow my scream… sight blurred away with one last glimpse of the warden’s mask…
Falling, no, floating or spinning through a world of flooding energy, can’t be can’t be, but the wrongness flooded through me all the same—I’d known it was wrong all my life and still I pulled it into me, me into it. Shaking tore through me, would have if I still had hands to tremble, spending forever afraid of this boundary and now nothing was left to hide me from it…
All wrong. Wrongness, twisted and out of line from what I knew… catch at that feeling, I know how it flows and where to slide away—
I fell. Twisting and tumbling I fell out into cool air and real starlight, rolling to settle on strange, familiar roughness, something I should know.
Pavement. The night coolness, the street roars ringing free in the air.
I hauled my head up from the asphalt. One direction drew my gaze, and I stared back across what had to be the distance I’d passed through, back from this street to up on the block where it slid through the underpass. My balance swayed as I staggered up.
A shape stepped out from where I’d been. Running toward me.
At least the headlights and the noises on this street were scattered. Nobody to see us, if I was quick.
I pulled my hands apart; I’d need my arms to hold on for this. Leaning and stepping forward was a single, familiar motion, that pushed back the alienness of what I’d fallen through and left me with simply an iron talisman and a still-working horn talisman ready in my hands.
Horn poured out its ether, and iron had it falling into shape. Between one footstep and the next, the stream of magic formed and rose up as I dove to clamp myself around it.
It swept me up for the sky.