I know this house and everything inside me starts screaming.
The last time I was here it had been a crime scene. Furniture shattered, blood on the walls. The white carpet was so soaked through with blood it crunched under my feet as I walked across it.
I saw Lucy’s Echo here. Forced myself to watch her murder replay itself so I could find some clue to who killed her. She lasted a long time before finally dying and I sat there and witnessed the whole thing with no way to do a goddamn thing about it.
When she finally died after being beaten and tortured and brutalized, the murderer wrote a note in her blood using her body as a paintbrush. Then they wiped it out so the only way anyone could read it would be if they could see her Echo. If they could watch her die.
In other words, it was tailor-made for me. I spent the next half-hour being violently ill in the sink.
I walk down the short hall and come to a den that fits the same motif as the rest of the house and stop dead.
Lucy sits curled up on the couch wearing yoga pants, her brown hair dyed black. She walks a familiar looking silver dollar back and forth across the back of her knuckles with a practiced air. I’ve only ever seen her dressed like this in a handful of photos and when I watched her Echo. I left L.A. too early to see her grow up into this woman.
“Hi, Eric,” she says. “Come to murder me again?”
When Lucy was a kid I tried to help her find her magic. Pretty much a pointless endeavor. She didn’t have enough to register, but we did it anyway. I bought her an old silver dollar and we worked day and night trying to see if she could manipulate a coin toss.
For most mages that’s dirt simple. Pretty much the first thing we learn. It’s also one of the reasons we don’t usually lack for things like money. But she couldn’t get it. She’d get frustrated, have a tantrum for a bit, cry about it. But then get back to it. She’d gnaw at it like a dog with a bone. Never giving up. I found out after she died that she finally got that coin toss. Took her years to do it, but she got there.
I wasn’t around to see it.
“You’re just pulling out all the stops, aren’t you?” I say.
“What, this?” she says, tossing the coin in the air with a flick of her thumb and catching it in the palm of her hand. She smiles and it’s a smile I remember from when we were kids. Seeing her with the coin hurts. Seeing that smile hurts more.
I know she’s not really here. It’s not her soul. She’s not in Mictlan. Why would she be? Santa Muerte might have killed her, but unless she was a follower she should have gone somewhere else, though where I have no idea.
That’s one of the biggest problems with necromancy. I know how ghosts are made, I can talk to them, influence them, control them, even. I know there are afterlives, but before I met Santa Muerte I’d never actually seen one up close or figured out how to get to one. I mean, besides the obvious way, of course.
Mages are surprisingly agnostic. Yes, we know there are gods, we deal with them all the time. We just think they’re largely irrelevant and mostly assholes. In case you hadn’t figured it out, yet, we’re pretty fucking arrogant.
Gods have limits, boundaries, rules. We exploit those, twist them to our own ends. Or don’t and end up a smear on the floor if we’re lucky.
So where did Lucy end up? The most popular guess, and that’s all we’ve got, guesses, is that we go to what we’re most drawn to. Gods don’t choose it. We do.
Christian? Go to Heaven. Norse Pagan? Valhalla. Hate yourself and everything you’ve ever done and have a vague idea that there’s probably a God, but you’re really not sure and if there is boy howdy are you ever fucked? One of a thousand random Hells, probably.
Point is, when you die you’ll go somewhere. Even if it’s only to be recycled into the universe.
So Lucy’s out there, somewhere. But she’s not here.
I sit down in an easy chair opposite her. I wonder what would happen if I stabbed her with Mictlantecuhtli’s blade. Would it kill the thing that’s impersonating her? Or is she just an illusion being fed to me the way Vivian was and it wouldn’t do anything?
I’ll do it if this thing starts to piss me off, but otherwise I might as well see how things play out. I slide the knife back into the sheath in my coat pocket.