Now conjurers, p.1
Now, Conjurers, page 1
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Union Square & Co., LLC, is a subsidiary of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
Text © 2024 Freddie Kölsch
Cover art © 2024 Colin Verdi
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4549-5159-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4549-5161-2 (e-book)
ISBN 978-1-4549-5160-5 (paperback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kölsch, Freddie, author.
Title: Now, conjurers / by Freddie Kölsch.
Description: New York, New York : Union Square & Co., 2024. | Audience: Ages 14-18. | Summary: "Following the murder of their leader and friend, a tight-knit coven of queer teens takes on a wish-granting demon lurking in their town"-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023029201 (print) | LCCN 2023029202 (ebook) | ISBN 9781454951599 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781454951605 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781454951612 (epub)
Subjects: CYAC: Witches--Fiction. | Supernatural--Fiction. | LGBTQ+ people--Fiction. | Horror stories. | BISAC: YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Horror | YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Paranormal, Occult & Supernatural | LCGFT: Paranormal fiction. | Horror fiction. | Romance fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.K67566 No 2024 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.K67566 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029201
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029202
For information about custom editions, special sales, and premium purchases, please contact specialsales@unionsquareandco.com.
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Cover and interior design by Liam Donnelly
This one is for Katharine Lynn Miyajima Hochswender.
After a while, crocodile.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Acknowledgments
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
Sunday, November 21, 1999
Bastion’s corpse was found in the thin woods at the edge of Stepwood Cemetery, covered in bite marks, by the biggest dickbag at Regional No. 9 High School. Cameron Winship, a junior and our school’s only notable track-and-field star, was taking his bleach-blond bowl cut out for a morning run when he literally stumbled across my boyfriend’s dead body.
Or so we thought at the time. Actually, at the time I wasn’t thinking at all, because North Coven had planned a ritual for eleven o’clock sharp, and the four of us had walked up to the crime scene about ten minutes after the cops and the first responders.
Cameron never went for a run without his $900 Nokia, which further illustrated what a total dickbag he was, but it came in handy when he discovered the cadaver of his murdered classmate. I think he was in a shock blanket when we walked out of the woods and tried to understand what we were seeing. I’m actually sure he was, sitting there like a wounded deer and tearfully talking to a cop, but I only noticed Cameron for a second before I started screaming.
They hadn’t covered Bastion up yet, and so I got a last look at him before he was loaded into a body bag, only to see that the fingers had been chewed off on both of his hands. His handsome face, with the white patch of vitiligo over the left eye, looked like it had been pushed through a lawn mower. Blood congealed over holes in his black jeans where something had eaten at him, chunk of flesh by chunk of flesh. So yeah, I screamed. I started screaming his name and then Dove started yelling and pushing her way through the people working, which made sense, because he was her baby brother, even if he was like a foot taller than her.
It was so obviously a murder that they didn’t want us contaminating the scene, if you follow me. I ran after her, trying to shove through the cops and EMTs and whoevers to get to Bastion, and when someone grabbed Dove in a way I felt (in my shock-induced freak-out) was too rough, I will admit that I started throwing my fists around, which is how it happened that three grown men had to pin me to the freezing November graveyard ground on the day I saw Bastion for the last time.
I mean, for the second-to-last time.
Later, when I’d been given “something to calm me down,” and Drea and Brandy had gone home with their respective moms, and Dove and Bastion’s parents had gotten the worst news of their lives, my older brother picked me up from the emergency clinic that was the closest thing North Dana had to a real hospital.
“Dad’s coming back from Boston right now,” Nic told me.
Like I cared at that moment. As far as my dad knew, Bastion was just my friend from my weird little witch group, not my first boyfriend and my true love and the most fascinating person to ever walk the earth.
“From the … Is he at the car show?” I asked. I felt like I was talking through a wad of cotton.
I don’t remember if Nic answered me, though, because the sedatives finally kicked in around then, and I faded into nightmares. I dreamed I was at the auto show my dad had gone to … but in that long gray room every dim spotlight lit a shining antique hearse, and from behind each silver grille of each black car I could hear Bastion crying out for me.
“Nesbit,” he called, faint and pleading. “Nesbit, you have the power now. Not just you—it’s for all five of you, of course—but you have the dreams—”
“Bastion!” I screamed, terrified for him even in my sleep. “Bastion! Where are you?!”
“No—please stop him, why won’t you stop him? Nesbit, I revoked the token, you have the power now … no, no, oh help oh god oh please he’s killing me—”
And in my dream, I clawed fruitlessly at the front of each car in turn until the skin on my hands tore and Bastion’s terrified entreaties turned into agonized, wordless shrieks. As something I couldn’t see ate him alive. When I woke up it was Monday afternoon, and I had pressed my nails so hard into my hands that I had eight bloody half-moon marks on the flesh of my palms.
After a minute of staring at my hands, I flipped my left hand over to look at the little tattoos that ornamented each of my fingers.
A heart for Dove.
A sword for Bastion.
An eye for Brandy.
A mouth for Drea.
And finally, on my thumb, a little miniature hand, index finger pointing skyward, like you sometimes see on the top of old gravestones.
My most meaningful tattoos. North Coven, united.
Never to be united again.
“Bastion.”
I said his name out loud. Once. Just one time, like I was talking to him.
Then I went out to the kitchen and started my life without him. If you can believe it, things only got worse from there.
CHAPTER TWO
Friday, November 26, & Saturday, November 27, 1999
The wake was held at the Attias’ rambling colonial mansion on Friday night. I didn’t want to talk about the wake with Dad or Nic, so I lied and said I was going to skip it entirely and take a long calming drive around the reservoir.
I did head to the wake, though, and made it as far as the Osiris statue that guarded the long front porch before I felt sick to my stomach. I put my Walkman on and listened to the entirety of Cause for Alarm while I hid on one of the garden benches scattered throughout the huge yard, watching people come and go from behind a shield of holly bushes. I tried to make myself go in. I would stand in the line of mourners and shake hands with the family of the dead boy I had kissed less than a week before. I would say the right things. Be sad but not so sad that it was embarrassing for everyone else. I would try to act normal. Any second now I would get up.
The people came and went, and I stayed still. In a world where Bastion wasn’t dead, North Coven would be heading over to the Micenmachers’ Y2K party tonight. But the party had been canceled, out of respect for the murdered quarterback.
Every breath I exhaled in the freezing air looked like a tiny phantom, and I watched the foggy air dissipate and thought about the first time I ever met Bastion, how it seemed like I’d been waiting to meet him forever without knowing it.
I restarted the CD at the same time that t
“Hiding?” Dove asked. Her eyes were dry, but she looked like she hadn’t slept in days. School had only been a two-day week before Thanksgiving break, and I had stayed home Monday and Tuesday, unable to handle the thought of sitting through a weepy memorial service for Bastion on the gym bleachers. So it was the first time the four of us had been face-to-face since the day we’d seen Bastion’s body, and I saw a terrible feeling reflected back at me in the faces of my three best friends. Haunted. We all looked haunted.
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t think I can go in there. And see your parents and … everyone.”
Brandy sat down next to me, tucking her long black skirt around her for maximum heat retention.
“But what if his killer shows up?” Drea countered, sitting on my other side. “He could be anybody here.”
Dove stayed standing and pulled out one of her extra-skinny, extra-long menthol cigarettes. Her prized red S.T. Dupont lighter appeared from her pocket like magic, flamed into the air, and vanished again. Drea reached out for a drag, and I watched the shapes the cigarette smoke made in the air and thought about ghosts.
“If he does, we won’t know it,” Brandy said. “He’ll just seem like anybody else.”
We all knew enough about murder statistics to assume the killer was a man. Murders, serial killers, violent crimes, conspiracies: these things were basically Drea’s greatest passion in life, and she had educated the rest of the us extensively. Her VCR played taped-off-the-network episodes of The X-Files and Unsolved Mysteries in an endless alternating loop.
“The coroner’s office confirmed it was a murder,” Dove said when I looked at her questioningly. “They thought animal attack for a little while, they said, because of the … intensity of the wounds.”
Dove’s mouth was set in a grim line. Her eyes were the same honey-brown color as Bastion’s, and for a second, I had to glance down at my lap and realign myself to this awful new world instead of just getting lost in the unreality of it.
If I went inside right then, I thought, Bastion would be waiting for me, and everything would be normal. We could have dinner with his folks and then go for a drive around the Quabbin Reservoir. I would give him another lesson on parallel parking, the only thing I’d ever seen Bastion actually suck at, and then I’d park in a secluded spot and we would make out while the windows on my aging Hyundai fogged up and the stars came out.
If only you would just be okay, I begged, silently. I would even let you pick the music tonight. Even if it was that droning classical crap with harps. Anything. I would hardly even tease you about it, Bastion. You can forget about our last fight, too. I’ll never bring it up again. Just don’t be dead.
“Bastion told me you guys had a fight,” Dove said, in the mind-reader way that she has sometimes.
“Yeah,” I admitted, embarrassed by how choked up I sounded. “We did. About the ‘I love you’ thing.”
“You know he can’t!” Dove snapped, almost viciously. “Christ, Nez, like you don’t know he has problems—” She cut herself off, her anger vanishing as quickly as it’d appeared. “Had problems,” she amended, taking a long drag from her skinny cigarette.
Brandy started to cry, and Drea reached an arm behind me to grab her shoulder.
“We have to figure out who did this before the cops,” Dove said, throwing the end of her menthol onto the ground and crushing it out with one heavy stomp of her boot. “I want to kill whoever it was. Find him. End him. If the cops get him, he’ll just go to jail.”
“I do, too,” Drea said, and even Brandy nodded through her tears. They all looked at me, waiting for my answer.
I thought about it. Even if we somehow managed to figure anything out, Bastion wouldn’t have wanted us to exact vigilante justice. Off the football field, he was a pacifist. He disliked violence, bullying, and general cruelty in all forms, which was part of what had made him clash with Cameron Winship’s group so frequently.
“They tore him apart, Nez,” Dove said when I was quiet for a beat too long. “Somebody ate my little brother’s tongue and his heart. Chewed on him.”
“Jesus. Stop,” I said, holding up a hand. But Dove was relentless.
“They did it with their hands and teeth. Anna freaked out when they told her it was gonna have to be a closed-casket funeral because his body was so … wrecked. We can’t ever tell Wren or Robin or Lark what happened because they’re too little and it will, like, damage them forever. I … can’t live in a world where we don’t find this bastard. Please. Help me.”
“Dove—”
“Please. We have to.”
They were all my best friends, but Dove was my best best friend, and she had never asked for anything this important before. Still, it wasn’t her asking that decided me. I was remembering the way Bastion’s hands, his fingers gnawed to nothing, were curled into his chest. Like he had been trying to protect himself from something even as it consumed him.
“Fine,” I said. “We can investigate. I don’t know if I want to kill him … them, or whatever. I might want to turn him in. If we find him.”
“Let’s decide that when we find him,” Drea said.
“If we can find them,” Brandy said, her voice still a little teary. “It seems like not a … natural killing, doesn’t it? Monstrous. An inhuman murderer. With the … wounds being so severe.”
That idea sent an icy bolt of fright down my spine. My forearms broke out in goose bumps. Drea looked equally creeped out.
Bastion had been eaten alive. Now that Brandy had said it aloud, it couldn’t be unsaid. The grim possibility of other magic—magic beyond our own—filled the silence around us with an ominous feeling. Until Dove dismissed it.
“No way,” she said. “We’ve been practicing together for years and the only supernatural things I’ve ever seen in the Near-Depths—or anywhere else—are us.”
I didn’t know if I entirely agreed with her. But I was not in the mood to think about monsters.
“I’ll help you investigate,” I said. “We’ll all do it together. Then, if we find the murderer, we can figure out what kind of justice we want to exact, okay?”
“Agreed,” Drea said.
“Agreed,” Brandy said.
“Agreed,” Dove said, with a look that did nothing to convince me she wouldn’t try to kill the guy who killed Bastion the instant we had a name.
“We should meet tomorrow,” Brandy whispered. “After the … after. And do a spell. For answers.”
None of us voiced our doubts about whether a spell would even work with only four members of the coven. We didn’t have to say it. I couldn’t imagine our magic working without Bastion to lead us.
“It’s just like the other murder,” Dove said, after a beat of silence while I hunted around in my jacket for my box cutter. I’d worn a black sweater to look decent, just in case I actually attended the wake, but I only had one jacket: my dad’s cast-off black work one with the shoulder patches and Dickies tag, the Nuñez Auto Body logo my brother had designed for him stitched on the back in red.
“What other murder?” I asked, finding the blade in my inside left pocket. “The body you guys found when you were kids?”
“That was like nine years ago,” Drea said, sitting forward. “You think it’s the same killer?”
“Most definitely,” Dove said, pulling up her sleeve. “The way we found that lady, the Jane Doe, it was … it was the same, and it was like twenty yards from where Bastion was. You know. Found. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”
“We’re not going to be allowed to go back to Stepwood after two murders,” Brandy said, pulling off her fancy gloves.
“So we’ll make something up,” Drea said, and I nodded in agreement. “It’s not like they’re going to ban us from hanging out.”
“We’ll be okay if we’re all together,” I said. “They might do a town curfew or something. They never caught the guy who killed your Jane Doe, did they?”
“No. No, they did not,” Dove said. I understood a little better why she was so vehement about us investigating. The idea of someone doing that to Bastion and getting away with it sat in my stomach like a stone.
