The Necromancer's Nephew Read Free

loathsome curios and frightful reagents, useful for only the darkest of magic. He paused at the door of the endmost shop. Its broad window glowed with the golden warmth of a hundred luminous creatures. Fairies and their kin, captured in the wild southern forests, were bound with magic inside tiny silver cages. Such bright and beautiful pets demanded a high price in the twilight city and brought great wealth to those who could catch them. Very few creatures could catch a fairy, and one of these was a vampire.
    Garrett cleared his throat and brushed the wrinkles from his purple robe. His gloved hand trembled a little on the handle of the door, as it always did. The boy marshaled his courage and opened the door. The tinkling doorbells drew the attention of the girl inside the shop.
    She turned and greeted him with a smile brighter than any fairy's wing, the vampire girl, slender and tall, pale and perfect. She dropped with silent grace from a ladder that rolled upon a track the length of the shelf-lined back wall. Her long dark hair framed her sad-sweet eyes, spilling down to the shoulders of her gray linen coveralls. "Hi, Garrett!" she said.
    "Hi, Marla!" Garrett smiled, immensely pleased that his voice had not cracked this time.
    "Your uncle's package arr ived this morning," she said, "W e've got it in the back." She swung op en the waist-high gate that led behind the shop's counter and motioned for Garrett to follow her. He did so without hesitation.
    Marla's long fingers drew back a heavy curtain, painted with swirling runes, and Garrett stepped through. His shoulder brushed against hers as he moved past .
    "Good evening, Garrett," Marla's mother greeted him as he entered the back room of the pet store .
    "Good evening, Mrs. Veranu," Garrett said.
    "How's your uncle these days?" she asked, pulling a largish paper-wrapped bundle down from a shelf. As with most vampires that Garrett had met, he could hazard no guess at her age. Taller than Marla, but of a similar slim build, she looked no older than a woman in her mid twenties. Her short, sandy brown hair added to her youthful appearance. Her amber eyes flashed with an impish gleam, undimmed by her ghostly complexion. Nevertheless, her lips remained hidden behind a red silk scarf coiled around her neck, a colorful accessory that contrasted sharply with her somber gray clothing in the style favored by the vampires of the city .
    "Uncle's doing well," Garrett said, "I think he's really excited about this package, whatever's in it. Do you know what it is?"
    "Of course I know what it is, you goose!" Mrs. Veranu laughed, "I had to find the beastly thing, and it wasn't easy! Still, if you want to know, you'd better ask him, though I can't imagine what's so secret about it." She let the heavy package drop on a stained workbench.
    "Oh," Garrett said, "I also needed to get a flask of essence while I'm here, if I could."
    "Certainly," Mrs. Veranu said, "Marla will help you with that. I need to finish a bit of inventory before we close for the night."
    "Thank you," Garrett said, pulling a glass and steel canister from his shoulder bag. As soon as the canister was clear of the bag, it disappeared from his grasp. Startled, he turned to find Marla holding it, smiling at him from across the room. He shook his head. Her ability to move with inhuman speed, in complete silence, still unnerved him each time she played these little tricks on him. And each time, it seemed, she got a little bit faster.
    "This won't take a minute," she said. Marla opened the canister's valve and fitted it into the base of a large mechanical grinder , " Is elkhorn all right?"
    "Yeah," Garrett said, "we don't need anything fancy. Uncle's just got a few rezzes for a contract this week."
    Marla nodded and began to lift large scoopfuls of wriggling horned beetles from a barrel and drop them into the grinder's hopper. Garrett winced at the awful crunching sound as the vampire girl spun the wheel of the machine, and a