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  Who by Water

  Voices of the Dead: Book One

  Victoria Raschke

  Who by Water

  Voices of the Dead: Book One

  Copyright © 2017 by Victoria Raschke

  Griffyn Ink. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  For further information, please contact:

  Griffyn Ink

  [email protected]

  www.victoriaraschke.com

  Cover photo, design and book layout: keifel a. agostini.

  Find him at keifelagostini.com.

  The book is typeset in Brisio Pro. The font was chosen specifically for the shape of the letters and support of Slovene character sets.

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN: 978-1-937996-73-4

  Acknowledgements

  If I’ve learned anything on this adventure, it is that novels, like children, take a village.

  I’ve had the great good fortune to learn from and work with teachers and writers who shaped my writing and voice in ways both obvious and mysterious. Caroline Eldridge, Anthony Keko, Roma Lingerfelt, Naomi Davis, Ralph King, Richard Jackson, Ken Smith, Earl Braggs, Boris Novak, Lori Berryhill, Aleš Debeljak, Art Smith, and Marilyn Kallett, thank you all for your knowledge, encouragement, instructive criticism, and your many kindnesses.

  For Keifel, Julian, and Ishara. Thank you for putting up with the neurotic outbursts and general weirdnesses that come of living with a writer and for remembering to feed the cats, Orion and Vega, and yourselves when I was trying to finish a chapter.

  The village that has tended the birth of this book is an especially large one. From the beginning my sister Lynne Rose and my friend Janet Neely have been the best beta readers a writer could have. In working with Griffyn Ink, I gained a second family of writers and readers who hold each other up and want nothing more than for all of us to be successful in following our crazy dreams. Thank you to Eli Jackson - indie publisher badass, A.J. Scudiere, D. B. Sieders, and Steve Bradshaw. I am honored to be both on your team and in your company. A thousand thank yous to my editors, Beth Terrell for helping me craft a better story and Christina Wilburn for making it polished. Any mistakes you encounter are mine, because these women are incredible pros. Another huge thank you goes to R.D. Morgan who took me under her wing when it dawned on me that writing a book is about a third of the work of getting the story into your hands. And finally, thank you to all of the folks at Wild Love Bakehouse in Knoxville. Fully two thirds of the writing of this book took place there, fueled on some of the best almond croissants to be had on this side of the Atlantic.

  The setting for this book is a world I had the privilege to live in a very long time ago. I’ve relied on kind friends and new acquaintances to fill in details and try to do justice to a place that will always feel magical to me. Thank you to Irena Šumi, Tit Škerget, Polona Debeljak, Matjaž Praprotnik, Matjaž Lulik, Erica and Aleš Debeljak, Rok Gros, and many others who’ve helped in small ways they may not have even realized during my travels. A special thank you to Aleksander and Tiha Šenekar and their daughters, Brina, Bistra, and Tisa, for their friendship and for believing in this project.

  And a final shout out to Dean Stamoulis, wherever you may be. I told you I was writing a novel; it just took a lot longer than I thought it would.

  for A.

  A note on Slovenian pronunciation

  Slovenian uses a few extra characters.

  č is pronounced like the ch in church

  š is pronounced like the sh in shirt

  ž is pronounced like the second g in garage

  Familiar letters are pronounced differently.

  e is most often pronounced like a in bay

  i is most often pronounced like the e in be

  j is pronounced like a y

  r without a paired vowel is pronounced like the ir in skirt

  “In time and with water, everything changes.”

  Leonardo DaVinci

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Voices of the Dead Book Two

  The Zombie Church is Real

  About the author

  Chapter 1

  Gustaf had only himself to blame. When he told Bettine she needed to assign an Observer to Slovenia, he hadn’t anticipated her retaliation: for telling her how she should do her job, she sent him back to the place he’d hated.

  Hated, past tense. Ljubljana had grown on him in a decade’s time. Much of its architecture was the work of Jože Plečnik, and reminded him of his beloved home of Vienna. Begrudgingly at first, and largely for the sake of his sanity, he had embraced the change. A decade later, his appreciation was real. The jewel box capital city belonged to him, or he to it.

  The walls of Gustaf’s garret flat were lined with shelves and covered in maps. A battered door divided his living and sleeping area from his closet-sized bathroom. He stood in the larger room, in a sea of dust motes electrified by the early morning light that burst through the wavy panes of the dormer window.

  His focus for the past hour had been the cup of coffee cooling in his hand and a large map of the city stuck with color-coded pins. The green ones marked historic sites of supernatural interest: Plečnik’s church in the marshes, Prešeren’s statue and the bust of his love Julija across the square, the Trnovo church, Roman sites known and unknown to the general public, and various spots along the river. The red pins, each with a flag and a date, were the incidents that had threatened the Veil. The flagged blue pins noted the names and the addresses, or lairs, of people and beings of supernatural origin or ability.

  On the map, the lines of the city looked sinuous, as if it were molten, trying to ooze between two green boulders and carry all his carefully placed flags with it along the path of the river. The old part of the city, the part the Romans named Emona and the modern residents call Staro Mesto, sat between the castle hill and the city’s lungs, orderly Tivoli Park and the wilder Rožnik hill beyond it. On either end of this pinch, modern Ljubljana spread into the river valley and the marshes, a mix of sparkling glass and marble and somber Brutalist architecture.

  On the Tivoli side of the river, the pedestrian-only streets of the old town ran largely perpendicular to the water. Buildings huddled together along the streets, differentiated by the colors of the new or peeling paint on the façades. Each building had its own arched wooden door that opened into a cobblestone courtyard. Shops and restaurants occupied the ground floors, and Ljubljančans, the flats a
bove.

  The address on the map for his building had four blue pins. One for him. One for Vesna Kos, the scion of a family of Witchfinders. One for Goran, a university professor and antique dealer who was more than he seemed. And one for Jolene Wiley.

  The flag on Jolene’s pin had an asterisk. Her mother and her aunt were both vox de mortuis, Voices of the Dead, but Jolene had been skipped by her family’s gift. He probably didn’t need to keep an eye on her, but she seemed to have a knack for associating with supernatural beings, or they for seeking her out.

  The blue flags spiraled out from the center of the city, but their galaxy-like distribution wasn’t the focus of his scrutiny. He was looking at the dates on the red pin’s flags, noting in particular that none of them were dated within the last year.

  He’d been an Observer long enough to know how rare it was for what was concealed behind the Veil to keep quiet that long. The hidden never seemed to want to remain so.

  The subtle signs were simple to explain. It wasn’t hard to convince witnesses they hadn’t seen things they didn’t really want to believe. Ljubljana had long been witness to larger breaches of the membrane between the unknown and the everyday. Even the earthquake that transformed the city at the end of the 19th century was explained as a microseismic rupture. It had proven to the Board the old, forgotten Slavic gods were not as powerless as believed.

  Smaller incidents of violent trespass could be easier to conceal, but harder to forget. In his darker moments, Gustaf was haunted by the eyes of a murdered young woman and the image of her neck ravaged by a monster, and he wished to walk away. But he couldn’t un-know what was known. He could only protect others from their fantasies fed by a popular culture that celebrated old dark magicks as broodingly romantic.

  He stepped closer to the map and ran his index finger along the river through the old town, stopping at the location of the City Museum. Over the summer he’d watched the Emona celebrations throughout the city, and tried to dismiss the idea that so much focus on the past, even in celebration, had a way of waking up things best left to sleep. In anticipation of the bimillenary festivities, there had been a flurry of excavating and cataloging. Archeology had its lessons, but it also had its dangers. Gustaf wasn’t empowered to prevent digging, but he could speak to the dangers of digging in this particular earth better than most.

  Chapter 2

  Jo untangled herself from Milo and the sheets. She sat up and squinted at the phone display to see two messages from Vesna. The first message was, “Where are you?” The second was, “No. Really. Where are you?”

  “Dammit.” Reaching for Milo’s shoulder to wake him, she shook off the remnants of a dream. Something about home. It was probably best not to remember.

  She texted Vesna back. “Sorry. Thought he was coming later. Clear the bed, clothes on, and I’ll be down.”

  Vesna replied immediately, “Milo or Rok?”

  She wouldn’t dignify that question with a reply. She snorted and shook Milo’s shoulder again. This time he at least grunted.

  “Em, you really need to get going. I’ve got to meet Vesna. Now.”

  Milo mumbled something uncharitable toward Vesna and Christ’s balls. “You’re just going downstairs and it’s Saturday morning. Can’t I sleep for a bit?” He rolled over and put his hand on her thigh.

  “No.” She moved his hand. “You know the rule.” She gave his shoulder another push for good measure.

  “If you’re not here, I’m not here.” He followed that with a disgusted grunt and sat up, reaching for his glasses on the white drum table on his side of the bed.

  “What if one of my many paramours came by to find you curled up in my bed? Think of the awkwardness.” She was only half kidding.

  He wasn’t under any delusion about being the only person sharing her bed, but she really didn’t want any of them meeting and comparing notes over her crockery. Ljubljana was small, and keeping things quiet, let alone secret, was hard enough. And it weirded her out to think of Milo in her place alone. That would be more intimate than anything they’d done in her bed.

  He waved his hand at her dismissively and stood to dress. She watched him; it was like watching a particularly lanky cat putting on pants. He looked at her as he buttoned the wrinkled shirt he’d worn the day before.

  “Are you enjoying the show this morning?” He wasn’t being sarcastic. His baritone had an invitation in it.

  If she hadn’t already been in the doghouse with Vesna she would have greedily pulled him back into bed. “Don’t test me, you tempter.” She shook the duvet out in his direction for punctuation.

  He laughed as he wound an elastic around his dark hair, making a ponytail at the nape of his neck. It was deeply unfair that a 40-year-old man should look that good after rolling unwillingly out of bed.

  He patted his pockets for his wallet and keys. “Can I at least get a coffee? You can’t be in that much of a hurry.”

  “Not this morning, I need to run.” She pulled an ancient Nick Cave t-shirt over her head. Why was he dragging this out?

  Milo plopped on the futon in the main room while she finished getting dressed. His gaze followed her. She moved through the flat, putting in small silver hoop earrings. She checked her messenger bag for the sketches she’d made for the graffiti artist. She went back to the wardrobe in the bedroom for a black cardigan and pulled it on over the t-shirt. All the while she was humming, though she couldn’t place the tune. Something from a television show?

  When she stayed at his place, there was none of the weirdness that came with booting him out so she could go to work, but he preferred to stay at her place now that he was seeing someone else. She’d asked several times if his new friend knew about their arrangement. He assured her everything was above board. She believed him, for the most part.

  They left together, bumping into each other as they tried to put their shoes on in the small closet that passed for the entryway to her flat.

  He stood from tying his shoes, then wrapped his arms around her waist, burying his face in her neck. “When do I get to see you again?” His hand slipped down and cupped her ass.

  “Right now I have no idea. Call me tonight. Or text.” She kissed him on the mouth and shooed him down the steps. She bounded down behind him with the laces of one boot trailing.

  Vesna opened the door to the shop before Jo could get her key in the lock. Her friend was dressed for a business meeting in a black skater skirt and tights and a red cowl-neck sweater. She’d even put on makeup. Her eyeliner was perfect.

  Jo hadn’t even remembered to brush her teeth. “I’m sorry. I really thought he was coming at noon.” She closed the door behind her and breathed into her hand to make sure she didn’t have dragon breath.

  “He was. Then he texted us both last night, could we do 8 instead. Didn’t you see it?” Vesna looked at her with equal parts concern and frustration.

  “No. Milo came over and we went at it like minks until the wee hours of the morning.”

  Vesna snorted at her and threw a napkin from one of the tables at her head.

  She feinted left to avoid the napkin. “Hey. You’re the one who was asking me about my sex life at the crack of dawn.”

  “8 o’clock is hardly the crack of dawn. And I was testy because you were late.”

  “Still. I don’t get all up in your sex life business.”

  “That’s because I don’t have any sex life business. I’m too busy keeping this place together.”

  Vesna had a fair point. Jo was the creative partner. She handled the décor, music, and menus. Vesna handled anything that involved money or the government. And for that, Jo was truly grateful.

  “Anyway. At least he’s a little late, so I don’t look totally flighty.” She ran her hands through her hair trying to at least smooth it to one side. It tended to have a mind of its own, especially the gray ones.<
br />
  There was a determined knock on the glass of the front door. They both looked to the door, where Igor, Ljubljana’s premiere graffiti artist, announced his arrival with a single wave. Vesna tucked her dark hair behind one ear and walked over to let him in, the heels of her ankle boots clicking on the wooden floor. Just before she turned the lock, she looked back over her shoulder at Jo and gave her the please-don’t-sleep-with-vendors face. Jo pointed to herself and mouthed, “Who, me?”

  She had expected a whippet-nervous, behoodied twentysomething. Igor was instead tall and wiry, probably in his mid-forties, with longish dirty blond hair going gray. He also had those piercing, glacial blue eyes Slovenes so often had and was dressed more cafe-poet than parkour-graffiti artist, in black from head to hi-tech hiking boots. She liked the unexpectedness of him, and Vesna seemed to have warmed up to the idea of working with “another flaky artist.”

  “I’m going to make us some tea and then we can get down to business.” Jo excused herself and headed toward the kitchen. She paused and turned to ask how Igor preferred his tea.

  “Strong and sweet.” A fleeting bolt of energy flew between them. Jo smiled even though she could almost hear Vesna rolling her eyes.

  Vesna called after her. “Hey, Jo, if you’re making black, may I have some milk? Warmed. Please.”

  Jo futzed at the tea station and grabbed a few things from the tiny restaurant kitchen. She filled an infuser with an English breakfast style tea and put some of the teahouse’s signature mismatched china cups and saucers on a tray with a small earthenware bowl of irregular brown sugar cubes and a creamer filled with warmed milk. She added a plate with a few sandwiches left over from yesterday’s service and a cookie or two. When the tea was ready, she deftly balanced the tray and turned to carry it out to the table. A glint of metal from the kitchen caught her eye. One of the plate racks they used for a full tea was lying in the middle of the floor.

  That was weird. It hadn’t been there a minute ago.