Finn Fancy Necromancy Read Free Page A

At least the tree line stood a ways back from the trailer and everything looked well rained upon, so Smokey the Bear would have no reason to chastise me, I hoped.
    I soon found my way to Highway 101 North around the Olympic National Rainforest, and finally to Port Townsend, my hometown. The clock in the car said 9:27 P . M . as I passed the first outlying houses and shops.
    Unfamiliar streetlights and strip malls had replaced what once was a wooded approach to the small seaside town. But I had no fear that I would find my family home replaced by a record store or 7-Eleven. Port Townsend protected its funky old houses, and our family would never sell that house anyway. Beneath it lay our necrotorium. The work my family performed there—properly disposing of dead arcana and feyblood creatures saturated with magic—had resulted in the land being contaminated with whatever magic managed to escape our capture.
    I heard that someone once built a Dunkin’ Donuts down near New Orleans, and the round donuts became mini portals to a shadowy corner of the Other Realm. The only way to close the portals and stop the invasion of gremlins had been for a group of enforcers to eat all of the donuts, followed by a pot of mushy lentils. Lentils, by the way, are a quick and dirty cure for ingested magics should you ever need one. In fact, there are few foods less magical than lentils.
    Anyway, it turned out the land under the Dunkin’ Donuts had been a necrotorium in the long ago, and the records were lost during one of the Fey-Arcana wars. Point being, graveyards and old Indian burial grounds have nothing on necrotorium sites for lingering mojo.
    So it was with relief but little surprise that I found my family home standing much as I remembered it, its peaked towers and gabled roof visible over the madrona trees that screened the property from the road.
    I spotted movement in a car parked across the street and a little ways past our house. A pale face framed by an equally pale bowl cut leaned forward, watching. No beard. So not the guy who attacked me at the transfer. But there was something familiar about him—
    I turned off our street before passing him, and hoped he took no special notice of me.
    Memory clicked, and I knew who he reminded me of. Felicity. Which made him one of the Króls, the Germanic clan of feyblood witches that Felicity came from—or escaped from, by her account—when she moved to America. I’d feared they might seek revenge on me for my supposed past crimes against their kin, but I’d expected to have enforcer protection from them when I returned. Unfortunately, until I figured out who’d just killed Felicity, enforcers were the last people I wanted to see. Going to the arcana authorities last time about Felicity’s assault had resulted in my exile. I didn’t trust her death would lead to better results.
    Were the Króls behind the attack on my transfer? Possibly. And equally possible they’d killed Felicity for leaving their clan at the same time they sought revenge against me for hurting her. Witch clans had their own twisted sense of justice that more resembled something from a bad mafia movie than anything sane or logical.
    I took the back streets through town and drove around for several minutes to make certain I wasn’t followed. The residential streets were imaginatively named. There was “A” street, followed by “B” street, followed by “C” street. You’d think Big Bird had been the founding mayor.
    The town had changed quite a bit since I’d left. Before my exile, a clash had begun between wealthy retirees versus the resident hippies, laborers, and artists, a clash that ran like an undercurrent through everything in the town. Clearly, that clash had continued during my absence, evident in the large golf course, cookie cutter mansions, and a lot of new franchise stores and restaurants versus the funky old houses and