Set in the Ravensblood universe, this story started out as one of my little holiday vignettes and ended as. . .a longer vignette with a plot structure? It’s set after Raven’s Vow, and possibly partway into the yet-unnamed and -unwritten fifth book of the series. Sorry that the story is late—I meant to have send it out in the Halloween newsletter, but I’m not always great at deadlines and now I’m having trouble with the newsletter plug-in. The story also hasn’t been beta’d, except by you, now.  (Feel free to let me know of any issues you find, as I hope to have a cover made and release it more formally next year on Amazon.)

Rest for the Wicked

Raven walked into the sitting room and saw the message crystal flashing red.  Urgent.

Had something come up at GII that required his assistance? Worse, had something had happened to Cassandra? Or to their son? He tapped the crystal to play the message.

Mr. Ravenscroft? This is Chester Wood. The name sounded slightly familiar, but Raven couldn’t quite place it. I hate to bother you at home, sir, but something has happened at your father’s grave. I think you might want to take a look.

Ah, that’s right. Chester was the caretaker his lawyer had found to look after the small Ravenscroft family cemetery. He mowed the lawn and did battle with the omnipresent Oregon blackberry vines. His main job, however, was to monitor the wards that protected the cemetery. While Raven’s feelings toward his ancestors were complicated and mostly negative, he was still a Ravenscroft. He would not allow his family’s graves desecrated.

He tapped the message crystal once to respond, and Chester answered almost immediately.

Hello?

“This is Raven. I am going to the cemetery immediately. If it is convenient, please meet me there.”

Raven teleported to just outside the ornate wrought iron gate. The invisible wards that surrounded the cemetery recognized him as a Ravenscroft and let him in.  Inside the black iron fence he turned to inspect the wards, closing his eyes in concentration as he reached out with his will to feel along the complicated weave of magic. They were perfectly intact and undamaged. He looked closer, closer still. No matter how he tried, he could not find a strand out of place, could nor find any place where the ward had been untangled and re-tied in a slightly different style. He checked again, and found still nothing.

Chester waited for him by his father’s grave. He hadn’t seen the man since his lawyer had arranged a perfunctory meeting before hiring him several years ago, and probably would not have recognized him out of context.

“Mr. Ravenscroft, thank you for coming out on such short notice,” the man greeted him.

“Thank you for alerting me so promptly.” He looked down at his father’s stone, a smooth black granite affair with a stylized raven carved over the words Bredon Arthfael Ravenscroft.

There was nothing else, not even the dates. Raven had been a child when his father had been cornered and killed by Guardians at the end of the Mage Wars. He had no idea who had claimed his father’s body and arranged for the burial. Most likely it had been Alexander Chen, who had been his father’s lawyer before he became Raven’s. At least the stone did not say Loving Father or some such lie.

Scrawled across the stone in bright red were the words Blood calls to blood.

No doubt the author meant for the red to look like blood, but Raven had seen fresh blood on many surfaces, and it would not show so brightly against the black nor would it adhere so well to vertical polished granite.

“Paint?” he asked Chester.

“That’s what I thought at first. Would be a bitch to get off the granite, but I know all the tricks. But feel.” He ran his hand over the stone.

Raven hesitated to follow suit. He had never touched his father’s gravestone. Had only properly visited the grave once, and that from a respectful difference. Ridiculous, really. It wasn’t as though the bastard was going to rise up out of the grave. For that matter, Raven now was far more powerful than his father had been in life. He was no longer a helpless little boy facing a dark mage who seemed like a god in his omnipotence.

Deliberately, he reached out and trailed a hand over the cold surface. The cold, smooth surface. He realized now what Chester meant.  There should be a roughness, an unevenness where paint had been applied to the polished stone. He looked up to meet Chester’s gaze.

“No common vandal, then,” Raven said. “Although we knew as much by how he got through the wards.”

Chester frowned and shook his head. “I’d swear that no one has gotten through them before except you, your wife, and myself. Well, and the workmen you brought in to dig those last two graves.”

Originally set by a Ravenscroft ancestor in generations back, the wards were of an old-fashioned type keyed to the family. They recognized Raven, of course, and also Cassandra as a Ravenscroft by marriage, even though she kept her maiden name. They would recognize Ransley as his son without Raven having to key them to accept the youngest scion. Raven had reinforced the wards over the years, but never changed their essential nature. He’d permanently keyed the wards to Chester when the man was first hired and had never had reason to doubt the man. The workmen he had escorted through the wards and back out again. The wards were made to allow strangers to cross if they were accompanied by a Ravenscroft, but those same men would not have been able to return on their own.

The fact that someone dared desecrate a Ravenscroft grave enraged him. The thought of someone walking through Ravenscroft wards as if they weren’t there sent chills down his spine. But he could think of no other explanation.

“Could there be another Ravenscroft that you don’t know about?”

“One directly related to the bloodline?” Raven shook his head. “Cassandra and our friend Chuckie did some pretty extensive research when the Ravensblood went missing. While one can’t prove a negative, I’d bet my life that Ransley and I are the last of the line.”

A line that Raven had thought would end with him, the good and the bad, centuries of scholarship, dedication, and dark magic. He may have mixed feelings about the continuance of the family name, but he could never regret his son.

He ran his hand over the stone, feeling for even a hint of a magical signature. For a moment, he thinks he senses something, like a ghost of a signature. No, not just any signature, but that of a man who has haunted his nightmares since childhood.

And that is how he knows he is imagining things. His father has been dead for decades.

“I’ll add another layer of reinforcement to the wards,” Raven says. “Keep me apprised of any new developments.”

#

Raven spent the rest of the day and far into the night researching in his library, but found no answers. No explanation for how the ward was breached and no explanation for the non-paint graffiti. Normally he enjoyed an intriguing magical puzzle, and at the moment he had nothing but time on his hands. Cassandra was in Seattle visiting an old friend from her General Academy days and had taken Ransley to meet her. Their nanny had taken the opportunity to throw his new tent into the back of his Mundane girlfriend’s ancient jeep and take off camping. Why anyone would want to sleep in the woods in October was quite beyond him, but Tony was welcome to do as he wanted in his free time.

This puzzle, however, was a little too personal. If the mage behind it planned more than a little property damage, Cassandra and Ransley could be targets. And Raven had had quite enough of enemies hurting his loved ones to get to him.

Never again.

The problem was that, even with all his power and learning, he had no idea how he was going to keep that promise.

#

But he hadn’t slept well last night, dropping off with the sheer impossibility of events in the cemetery churning in his brain, only to be woken with a start by nightmares he couldn’t quite remember, until a little after nine in the morning he gave it up as a lost cause and came down to start his breakfast. Usually he was barely out of bed by ten or so. He’d developed the habit of late nights when he was in the service of the dark mage William and, barring the occasional morning consultation at GII, he still had little use for the hours before noon. He wished he could say he was surprised when the message crystal flashed red before he had even finished his tea and toast.

He tapped the message crystal to open the link. “Raven here.”

“Ah, hi, this is Chester. I was expecting to Have to leave a message. I didn’t wake you, did I?

“No, it’s fine. I woke early.” He deliberately did not elaborate. “I take it something happened in the night?”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

The good news was that the previous message was gone as mysteriously as it had come. The bad news was that it had been replaced by a single word. Corwyn.

He could count on one finger the number of people in his life who called him by his given name. “I’m coming out there.”

The cemetery was near enough and familiar enough that Raven could teleport there with little more than a thought. Chester already waited for him, shoulders hunched against the damp in his faded, flannel-lined jacket. The caretaker nodded a greeting to acknowledge Raven’s arrival without taking his eyes from the defaced tombstone.

“The thing is, I spent the night in the cemetery. I swear I didn’t close my eyes for more than a minute or two at a time.” Chester did look up then, blue eyes sincere under his mop of slightly graying curls.

“I believe you,” Raven reassured him. “As far as I know, your job description does not include sleepovers in the cemetery.”

Chester drew himself up, squaring his shoulders. “My job is to make sure that everything within that fancy iron fence is well-kept and protected. You have your professional pride, I have mine.”

Raven bowed his head in acknowledgement. “Indeed. I have nothing but appreciation for your loyalty to your work.”

At the time Alexander had hired Chester, there were few who would accept employment with a Ravenscroft and fewer still who could be trusted to protect the family’s private cemetery.

“Before your lawyer contacted me, I was scraping a living together on seasonal work, with crappy retail jobs in between. This is the first time I’ve had a steady job that suits me and offers financial security and benefits. I work out-of-doors with green, growing things, make my own schedule, and the clients that I come in contact with regularly—” he made a sweeping gesture to indicate the graves—“are pretty quiet and undemanding.”

“If you think I would fire you for incidents beyond your control, incidents that even I have been unable to resolve, you do not know me well.” Raven had a temper, sometimes too much of one, if one took Cassandra’s opinion, but certain events in his life had given him a great appreciation for fairness.

“Nah, man.” Chester said. “I’ve never had a complaint in all the years I’ve worked for you. But I owe you and Chen for the life you’ve made possible for me.”

“Fair enough,” Raven said.

“So, anyway,” Chester continued, seemingly as glad as Raven to step away from the edge of messy emotional expression, “I stayed awake all night. Probably not as close to the trouble spot as I should have been but. . .” he looked down and then away.

“It’s all right,” Raven said. “I am one of the least superstitious men you will meet, and even I would not wish to spend a night sleeping right by my father’s grave. Certainly not this near the night when Craft practitioners say the wall between the worlds grow thin.”

Raven looked down at his father’s polished back tombstone. Seeing his given name, the name of his childhood, in bold red script raised the hair on the back of his neck. He focused on the writing itself. Did it look familiar? Maybe. But it was hard to compare handwriting done with pen on paper to handwriting done—however this was done. The author used strong, heavy, slanted strokes, but so did many others. Superficially, yes, it matched his father’s signature in the Ravenscroft journal, the only sample of his father’s writing that Raven could remember with any clarity. But surely there were others with a similar hand. For that matter, he was not matching signature to signature.  Given the small size of the sample, and the difference in medium, he could not make a conclusive comparison.

And, gods help him, he had been hanging out with Guardians long enough to start thinking like them. If his father hadn’t been lying uneasy in his grave before, that surely would be enough to make the man rise screaming. If the dead did such things, and he was pretty sure that they did not.

Just as he had done yesterday, he reached out to see if he could read the magical signature. He found only a barely-there whisper, maybe a touch stronger than before, though he could not swear to it. Again, it felt vaguely familiar. . .so vaguely that it could just be his imagination. It was probably just the fact that they were standing by his father’s grave that made him so suggestible. Yes, he had encountered enough strangeness in the universe to accept that there were, to paraphrase the Bard, more things on heaven and earth than he had dreamt of. Still, he had no reason to believe in ghosts.

Still, there was very clearly something going on. With both Raven’s father and Raven’s former master dead, it was neither ego nor exaggeration to say that he was likely the most knowledgeable practitioner of Art in the Three Communities, if not the world. Still, knowing more didn’t mean knowing all, and there were plenty of mages in Guardian International Investigations who had their own, specialized skill sets. With all the times he’d worked with GII many of those mages might feel they owed him a favor. But until he saw some indication of a threat to anything outside the family cemetery, this was a purely private matter. He would not abuse his connections to resolve it.

He thanked Chester for his vigilance and started his way home, choosing to walk rather than teleport in the hope that the exercise would help his thought process. By the time he arrived home, he decided that maybe the answer wasn’t in the province of Art at all. He tapped the message crystal to open a link, and reached out to Mother Crone.

“Raven, dear, I was just about to hop over to the Craftlands.”

He cringed a bit at the dear, though part of him warmed just a bit at the familiar appellation.

“This is kind of a busy time for us,” she continued. “As I’m sure you know. We’re still getting ready for the ritual tonight. Is this something that can wait?”

“To be honest, I’m not certain. I have a. . .situation, for lack of a better word. I’ve reached the limits of my own knowledge, and I think it might be more your field. If I’m right in that, the timing plays a part.”

“Oh,” she said. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“Especially if it involves my own ancestors.”

Her sharp-drawn breath came through even on the crystal. “No offense, but that could be a problem, indeed.”

Damn. He only realized now that what he really wanted was for her to tell him that he was being silly and superstitious. “I don’t want to interrupt your preparations.  I could meet you at the Craftlands and if you could give me a few moments while I set up.”

“For you, child, always.”

Raven smiled to himself as he cut the connection. Few people had the nerve to call even a reformed dark mage child. Few people could get away with it as she did.

Mother Crone, leader of the Craft community, had long ago given him permission to walk the Craftlands, and so it was no trouble at all for him to teleport through the wards. Usually he came here for peace and solitude among the ancient trees. Today, however, the woods were bustling with folks of all ages in bright tie-dyed t-shirts, tribal weaves, or organic cotton dyed in earth-tones. Stereotypes, but sometimes the stereotypes were true. And sometimes they weren’t, he thought, as he watched a young man in goth-black leathers and chains help a middle-aged woman in an oxford shirt and a plaid pencil skirt set up one of those temporary pop-up canopies.

Tonight, he knew, the Craft community would be holding a public ritual to mark the night where the walls between the worlds grew thin. Many Art practitioners marked the date more as a holiday than a spiritual experience, but among the European-based Craft traditions, the night had a deeper, more powerful significance.

Raven’s arrival brought a few curious glances but no concern. Because of Mother Crone’s acceptance, the Craft community had ceased to worry about Raven’s return to society much faster than either the Art or the Mundane communities. And lately many among the Art and Mundane communities had, as popular culture would say, stopped putting air quotes around the reformed part of reformed dark mage.

He caught the attention of a slender twenty-something with long, blond hair halfway down her back.

He relayed to the older woman the events that had been going on in the Ravenscroft cemetery.

“And you think it may be, what, a ghost?” Mother Crone said when he had finished.

Put that way, it did sound rather silly. “I don’t know what it is, what it could be. You know that I’ve studied a lot of magic but very little in the way of spiritual matters. Are ghosts even real?”

Mother Crone smiled.  “It depends on what you mean by ghosts, and what you mean by real.”

Raven took a deep breath, held it, let it out slowly. This was why he stayed away from the metaphysical. It always left him feeling like he was chasing his own footprints in the fog.

“What happens to the soul, or spirit, or what-have-you, after death?” he asked bluntly.

Mother Crone laughed, though not unkindly. “Oh, child, if I knew that for certain I’d write a book and make millions.”

The image of Mother Crone doing the holy roller lecture circuit caught him by surprise, triggering a snort of amusement.

“If the rumors are true and you practiced necromancy when you served William, you could know more than I do.”

He looked away. “The rumors are true. But I did it as little as possible, and only when William insisted. Mostly we were after what we could do with the unfortunate soul, or what we could learn from them. In a practical sense, not a metaphysical one.”

“I can tell you what I’ve observed, and what I’ve read, and what I believe to be true based on those things. Others have looked at the same things and drawn a very different conclusion. If anyone tells you that they know for absolute sure, they’re either lying or mad.”.

Raven took a deep breath for patience; he hadn’t expected it to be this complicated “What are ghosts, really? I’ve heard everything from just impressions, like a print made from an engraving, to something that’s essentially a person walking around without a body. In your experience, which is it?”

“All of them. Ghost is a single word used to describe many phenomena. Some thing called ghosts are nothing more than build-ups of spiritual energy, or magical energy, if you prefer.”

Raven wasn’t entirely convinced that the two were the same, but he never claimed to know too much about the former. “Like poltergeists,” he said.

“Poltergeists are one form,” she acknowledged. “Usually we use that word for a very specific type of energy that manifests around troubled teens. A place, like a house, a grove, a battlefield, can also be stained with the psychic energy of what has gone before. The effects don’t have to be bad—it’s one of the reasons we like to hold rituals over and over again in the same place. The energy settles in, builds over time. It’s why even an Art practitioner finds the Craftlands so peaceful and healing. But things like unexpected, violent death releases a lot of psychic force. A lot of places rumored to be ‘haunted’ or ‘cursed’ really just need a good cleansing to rid them of lingering dark energies.”

“Would a graveyard full of the bodies of dark mages have that sort of build-up.”

“Hm, maybe. Although usually the deaths have occurred long before the burial, so there’s less psychic bleeding.”

All this would have been rather interesting at another time, but this was one of the rare times he didn’t have the patience to drink in knowledge for knowledge’s sake. “Let me narrow the question. What’s happening with my father’s gravestone. Could it be his spirit, and, if so, how dangerous can he be?”

Mother Crone frowned. “Could it be his spirit, as in a conscious entity, capable of reacting to stimuli, capable of will? There are theories that some ghosts fall into that category.  I’ve never seen any convincing proof of such spirits, but I’m not going to discount the possibility.”

“Would such a spirit be dangerous?” Raven pressed.

She shook her head, but the gesture spoke more of doubt than negation. “Usually ghosts aren’t dangerous in a physical sense. Other than a feeling of cold or a movement of air, spirits really can’t affect the physical world. In rare cases they can haunt someone to the point of mental breakdown, but those cases are rare, and anyway I hardly would think you susceptible. You are one of the strongest-willed and resilient people I know.”

“You said ‘usually.’ So they can be dangerous?”

“In theory, if such spirits exist, the more powerful the person was in life, the stronger they would be in death.”

“Would a ghost be capable of defacing a granite tombstone?” Raven asked.

Mother Crone shrugged. “It would have to be a very powerful spirit indeed. But then your father was one of the strongest mages we faced, back then. Not hard to believe his ghost would be powerful, too.”

“But why deface his own tombstone? And why now?”

“I think you may be asking the wrong person. Or entity.”

#

Raven sat on a decorative bench that faced his father’s tomb at a little distance, wondering what ancestor of his thought that granite was a good material for seating. He pulled his long, black coat closer about himself  and thought with dark satisfaction that, whoever had commissioned the miserable bench, their bones were probably moldering nearby in the cold, frost-hardened ground. Shivering despite the thick wool of his coat, he pulled out his pocket watch to check the time. He’d been here since about half-past eleven and now it was nearly midnight. He hadn’t been about to camp out from sundown to sunup. He’d forgotten to ask Mother Crone if there was an optimum time for this sort of thing, so all he’d had to go on was superstition.

This was beyond ridiculous. Ghost-hunting. Probably a prankster had been the one to leave the messages, and was laughing at him even now. The great Corwyn Ravenscroft, sitting and waiting for his father’s ghost like that pathetic blanket-carrying kid in the pumpkin patch in that old-fashioned animation Chuckie and Cassandra had forced him to watch.

Of course, that was supposing a prankster good enough to cross Ravenscroft wards for a lark. And if it wasn’t a lark, but an old enemy setting him up for ambush? He bared his teeth in a smile. They’d better hope they were as good at combat magic as they were at ward-breaking, or he would incinerate them. And if it weren’t a prankster, he wanted to know if the spirit of his father walked in this world once again. No matter Mother Crone’s assurances, such a thing felt too dangerous to ignore.

He checked his watch again. A minute past midnight. He’d give it five more minutes, and then he’d go home and warm his frozen blood with some nice mulled wine, and leave ghosts and spirits and such to the Craft. He got to his feet, pacing to warm up, ready to call it a night—

A sense of damp chill washed over him, noticeable even in the cold of the night. It brought with it something else, something like a memory made real, fear and awe in equal parts, tinged with the sort of helpless rage only a child knows.  Feelings he hadn’t known since Guardians killed his father at the end of the Mage Wars when Raven was just a boy.

Corwyn. The single silent word sounded in his mind.

Raven tilted his chin up. “I go by Raven now.”

Yes, I know. How very Bohemian of you. At least you’re not running around in torn jeans and a rock band t-shirt. I suppose I should be grateful for that.

He wished he had the forethought to borrow a tie-dye t-shirt from the nanny. “I’m not afraid of you.”

I should hope not. I would hate to think I sired a son who was afraid of ghosts. Besides, I know how powerful you are in your own right. More powerful, I think, than I was when I was alive.

“Yes, GII has been very happy to have me as a consultant.” His tone was a challenge.

If you seek to shock me, you’ll have to do better. I know all about your dabbling. And your marriage to the Greensdowne girl. Tell me, how does she reconcile the fact that she is lying down with the son of her parents’ killer.

His father meant it as a barb; Raven refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing it draw blood. “It’s not an issue. She knows I am nothing like you.”

Oh, you were once, though.

“A mistake I have paid for.” And was still paying, would continue to pay. He could never complete wash the blood from his conscience, but he would do what he could to overlay it with something better.

“Why have you come? And how? And how do you know so much about my life?” A shudder ran through him as he thought of the dark mage his father lurking invisible, watching him, watching Cassandra, watching Ransley.

The impression of an ironic chuckle rippled across his mind. I thought you weren’t afraid of me. A pause, during which Raven could practically feel the weight of his father’s dark amusement. But no, death is not like that. I cannot hover over you and your family.

“What is it like, then?” Raven gave into the age-old curiosity.

A long pause. I think, somehow, it may be a little different for everyone who experiences it.  For me, it has been like a long, deep sleep. Sometimes I move closer to wakefulness,  something-or-other enters my consciousness, even as a sleeper may overhear and remember snatches of conversation, or incorporate them into the dream. I know of your wife, your son. I know that William had been your master, that you killed him, and that you buried him in this cemetery. That was well done, by the way. The poor boy had no peace in his life, so it’s fitting if he can find some in death.

It startled him to realize that anyone could think of William as a poor boy, but the most powerful dark mage of recent times would have been only a teenager at the time Raven’s father died.

What his father did to him, let be done to him, was unspeakable.

Raven closed his eyes. “I know. He told me some of it.”  It was a confidence Raven had never violated, no matter how many other ways he had betrayed his former master.

So at least you know I wasn’t the worst father in the world.

“If you wish to damn yourself with faint praise.” Apparently, he got his black sense of humor from his father, as well his power and his rather unfortunate nose. “So, you turning up here and now is, what? Post-mortem sleepwalking?”

Hardly. I had to draw together the last scraps of will left, the last vestiges of the power that used to run through me as sure and steady as the blood that ran in my veins.

“To what end?” Raven took a step back before he caught himself. His father’s plans seldom benefited anyone but his father.

Raven took a deep breath and steeled himself with the words Mother Crone had given him. No matter how evil his father was, he could not harm him, not physically, not anymore.

I have a feeling. . .I can’t explain it. But I think I will be leaving this, this wherever-and-whatever I drift in now. I don’t know what comes next, but I will be farther from this, from you. I don’t regret much of what I did in my life. We had a good run, the Blanchards and I and our followers. Most of the Three Communities can’t comprehend how close we came to winning, to bringing down the Joint Council and obliterating the Guardians. To setting up our own reign of dark magic. It would have been glorious.

The not-voice took the tone of a man recalling the fondest dreams of his youth. Raven shuddered.

“Do you regret killing my mother?” Raven asked. “Do you regret slitting her throat and letting her bleed out while you used the power of her stolen life to fuel your magic?”

No. No I do not.

The words came soft, quiet, matter-of-fact, and they sliced through Raven’s soul like a blade of ice. He found himself shaking, and hated that he showed such weakness before the ghost of the man he so despised.

I do regret that I let you find her body. I hoped that it would teach you the futility of love and the power of darkness, but instead it turned you further against me.

“Did you ever love her?” He hated the vulnerability of the question, but this was his last chance to get the answers that had been missing from his life.

No. Simple, and without hesitation. I have never had need of such frivolous emotion. I believe she loved me once. She was younger than I and very foolish.

Raven remembered how his relationship with Cassandra had started, and flinched. She had forgiven him, but he wasn’t certain he could ever forgive himself.

“So why are we hear, then?”

I’m not certain. It just felt necessary, to see my son once as an adult. I know you don’t think I could be proud of you, but I am. You grew into a powerful mage, far surpassing me in my prime. You are continuing the Ravenscroft line and its legacy of scholarship in the Art. A susurration that might have been a rueful laugh if it had come from a living person. You are continuing it in a direction I would have neither anticipated nor approved of, but maybe that is for the best. The times have changed, and adaption is survival.

“I can’t forgive you.”

I didn’t expect that you would. The voice in his mind grew fainter. Fare well, my son.

Raven suddenly found his throat too think to get words out, which was fine, because he didn’t know what words he would have chosen.  Fare well? Rest in peace? He wasn’t sure he could wish his father peace. But he didn’t feel as ready as he had been to tell him to burn in hell, either.

And then the presence was gone, and it was too late. He finally had answers, but they only led to more questions. What had made his father what he was? Was he a natural-born sociopath or had something happened to turn him into the unfeeling monster who had haunted some of Raven’s earliest nightmares? Or some combination of nature and nurture?

He shook himself and turned toward home. The past was done, and, as his father had said, the Ravenscroft family had a path forward that no one could have foreseen back when his father had met his end.