Now, Conjurers

by Freddie Kölsch

Genres: YA Horror; YA LGBT & Pride; YA Paranormal

Synopsis

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, weaving together murder mystery with the occult in this YA horror novel perfect for fans of V. E. Schwab and Leigh Bardugo books.

NOW PAY ATTENTION, BECAUSE ALL THE DETAILS MATTER.
 
November 1999. North Dana, Massachusetts.
 
Nesbit Nuñez discovers the partially devoured body of Bastion Attia: star quarterback, secret witch, and Nesbit’s even-more-secret boyfriend. No one knew why brilliant, gentle Bastion lived his life by a seemingly arcane set of rules, including a strange manner of speech and an inability to say his own name.
Now the remaining members of North Coven—Nesbit, Dove, Drea, and Brandy—vow to get answers. Nothing can prepare them for what they uncover: Bastion had been locked in a terrifying battle of wits and wills with something living deep beneath an ancient mausoleum in the local cemetery.
 
North Coven must confront the red-gloved monster that took piece after piece of Bastion, that he fought until his last breath. Not knowing that Bastion left behind the key to its destruction . . .

Now, Conjurers is perfect for fans of darkly atmospheric queer books that blend bone-chilling supernatural thrills with insightful explorations of grief, identity, and the power of found family. This wildly original and nostalgic gothic novel will appeal to readers craving spine-tingling occult books inspired by 90s classics or anyone searching for horror books for teens with a lovable oddball cast of characters and raw examinations of grief and love.

Release date: June 4, 2024

Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Print pages: 368

Sample

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.

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 the holly bushes crinkled and Dove appeared, with Drea and Brandy behind her. It was funny—they wore black from head to toe every day, so their wake clothing just looked like business as usual. Brandy was blotchy from crying, but everything else seemed normal.

“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.

“Nexus?” Brandy asked, and I pushed the button on my box cutter. The razor slid out with a satisfying schnnk, and I held the blade aloft in the direction of the North Star.

Nexus. Bastion’s word for a pact made by the coven, to be used only for the most important business.

“Nexus, my nulligravida,” I said. That was Bastion-speak for time to make an oath, bitches. Making fun of his way of talking was easily one of our favorite pastimes when he was alive, but without him there to look unfazed by our teasing, it fell flat.

Brandy let out a shaky breath, and I cut a capital N lightly into the skin above the bone of her left wrist before she could start crying again. I waited until I saw a few tiny beads of blood appear on the cut to move on to Dove, then Drea. Finally, I handed the blade to Brandy so she could do mine. Bloodwork was rare, and any cuts we made on ourselves in the name of North Coven usually faded entirely after we completed the ritual associated with them. All of our lingering scars were from other, non-magic-related crap.

“Tomorrow at eight we investigate,” I said, and kissed the N on Brandy’s wrist.

“Tomorrow at eight we investigate,” Brandy echoed, and kissed Dove’s wrist. Dove repeated this to Drea, and Drea then kissed my wrist, and the pact was sealed. I felt no thrum of power, no sudden hush in the air, nothing like before.

“It will work,” Dove said, acknowledging the fact that nothing seemed to be happening, no matter how defiantly. “It has to.”

“I hope so,” Drea said, and the three of them trudged back up the stone path to the grief-stricken Attia household.

I retreated to my car, slammed the bright-orange door (custom-painted by yours truly), and drove home. I wanted to listen to Cause for Alarm again because it felt like a night to blast music until I couldn’t think anymore, but I fat-fingered the panel when I was putting the disc into the (custom-installed by yours truly) CD player and ended up slapping the FM button. The radio blared to life and filled my car with thunderous classical music. It was still tuned to WJIN, the Northampton public access station that played three hours of orchestral pieces every Friday night. The station Bastion always put on when he got into the Hyundai for a date night after his football games. Just like he had a week ago, when he was still alive, grinning his broad, handsome grin and declaring Now, this is music, Nesbit!, or something equally pompous. I thought about our last date. Couldn’t bring myself to change the station. It felt like a betrayal somehow. I couldn’t bring myself to go home just then either, so I ended up taking a drive around the reservoir after all, and I didn’t head home until the guy who ran the classical bloc passed the radio-program torch to two college girls doing a show that consisted of spoken-word poetry read over a background of acid house music.

At home, I slept badly and woke up around noon the following day to the sound of my brother using the table saw directly behind my bedroom wall. Lately, Nic spent weekends working on our eternally under-construction “back deck,” a project I liked way less than his spring and summer weekend project, when he’d been apprenticing at Black Thistle Tattoo over in Gardner. Throughout my entire summer vacation, he had spent weekends honing his craft on my skin. By the beginning of junior year, I had more tattoos—ranging in skill level as he got better, from extremely badly done to very cool—on my body than any other student at Regional 9. Now that Nic was a real tattoo artist and did it for work, he was way less inclined to ink me in his free time, so my Bad Brains sleeve had been in unfinished limbo for three months.

Dad was working at his shop on the lot to the left of our house, and when I went outside with my coffee, I could hear him talking to Manny and Erik in the pauses where Nic turned the saw off. Rich people came from all around central Massachusetts to have my dad fix their old cars, and rich people didn’t work weekends (if they worked at all), so Dad’s weekend was Monday and Tuesday. It was a relief that he wasn’t in the house. Dad had been hovering in an overprotective way since Bastion was murdered, asking me lots of prying questions, coming up with new rules to restrict my freedom and keep me safe that I planned on ignoring, and even calling Mom and sticking me on the phone with her so that we “could have a long talk.” He’d actually said I could take another week off from school after Thanksgiving break if I needed to, an unprecedented allowance in the Nuñez household.

Outside it was cold and bright. The sky was a solid blanket of light gray clouds. Nic was plugging the sander into an extension cord, but he stopped when he saw me.

“Dad wants me to take you to the funeral,” Nic said. “When is it?”

“Three. I don’t need you to come. I’m picking up Drea and Brandy on the way, we planned it days ago.”

“Tough titties,” Nic said, taking his cigarette-replacement toothpick out of his mouth and flicking it at me. I dodged it and gave him the finger.

“I’m serious, Nic, it’s private and we’re hanging out later,” I said. Nic produced another one of his gross, I-quit-smoking-this-year toothpicks and popped it between his teeth.

“Don’t care. Dad said I have to.”

I stomped back inside as loudly as I could manage with only socks on, dumped the dregs of my coffee in the sink, and went to the closet-sized third bedroom of our little ranch. When Nic had decided to assert his independence as an adult and “moved out” into the Winnebago in the driveway, we’d converted his old room into a workout space, but mostly I was the only one who used it to work out while Dad used it to expand his hoard of spare tools and junk. There was a boom box plugged in next to my weight bench, and I shoved a stack of Hemmings Motor News magazines off the top and turned it on.

I heard the screen door slam and a minute later Nic was in front of me, chewing his toothpick like he hadn’t eaten a decent breakfast.

“Nez, come on,” he half-yelled over the opening of “Victim in Pain.” “Dad’s just worried.”

“Yeah, well, he should be,” I snapped. “There’s a murderer in North Dana. Since there are only like two thousand people who live here, we have a good chance of knowing the bastard.”

“He’s worried about you.”

“I’m fine.”

“Dude. It was your boyfriend who got—”

“Dad doesn’t know that.” Shut up, I added silently. Normally I didn’t pick fights with Nic, especially over meaningless crap like who drove where, but I needed to be alone with the coven so we could do what we had sworn to do.

“I know,” Nic said, but his forehead was wrinkled with concern. “I think he’s worried you’re going to kill yourself.”

“I’m not going to kill myself,” I said, feeling incredibly indignant. “That’s projection or something. He’s worried about that because you OD’d.”

“Aaaand I’ve been clean for fourteen months,” Nic said. “He’s probably also worried that whoever targeted Bastion is going to target you. Dad’s not completely up his own ass, Nez. He definitely suspects your little Wiccan group is ‘unique.’”

I loaded weights onto the barbell so I didn’t have to look at Nic’s stupid worried face. Unique probably meant gay, which infuriated me. Bastion insisted we were safe, for reasons he’d only barely elaborated on, but I lived in the real world. In the real world, national headlines from the last year included an obviously gay kid getting tortured and left to die, tied to a fence in Wyoming like the world’s saddest scarecrow. Despite the obvious parallels, I hadn’t thought that Bastion could have been the victim of that kind of crime until the very moment that Nic brought it up, and the sudden chill I felt made me rack my weights before I dropped them on the floor. Bastion had always seemed so unconcerned, so above it all, so certain of our untouchability. It was easy to get sucked into his worldview. Still—what if?

But: Dove’s Jane Doe, nine years before. Same spot, same circumstances.

“I’m pretty sure it’s not about that. Seriously. But we’ll stay together, in a group, I promise. We’re just going to Drea’s house. Her mom will be around all night. And I need therapeutic alone time with my friends,” I said, trying my most serious voice. It worked, kind of.

“I have to go with you, but we can take your car. You can drop me at home right after, okay?”

“Fine. Great,” I said, deliberately.

Then I spent an hour working out, trying to get lost in my music. And, of course, trying very, very hard not to think about the thing that hung around in every room I entered, just at the corner of my eye. A formless thing, but almost tangible, pushed to the edge of the space I occupied. If I focused too much on that thing, it slid closer to me, syrupy and hard to escape, like grief.

But worse. I had grieved for my grandfather and my dog. I’d even grieved when my folks got divorced, dumb as that may sound. This, however, was tainted by the viciousness of Bastion’s death. It felt filthy and … inhuman. Somehow it stained Bastion’s whole life, throwing a gauzy veil of shit over all the bright parts of his existence.

Obviously, I had no idea at that point that I was right about the inhuman thing. As far as I understood the world, there were witches. And spells that worked. But no monsters—never even a hint of one.

So I didn’t think about monsters. I thought that I was just processing my grief in the way people do when a loved one is violently murdered.

I showered and Nic emerged from the Winnebago looking like he usually did, except in a suit. We drove in silence to the Woodland Estates trailer park and pulled up to the purple double-wide with the moon and star ornaments hanging out front. Brandy and Drea were waiting in the living room with Drea’s mom.

“Hi, Jamie,” I said, nodding at Drea’s mom, who was surrounded by tissues and bleary-eyed on the couch. Agent Scully the tabby rubbed against my legs in greeting, leaving hair in her wake.

“Hi, Ms. Pearson,” said Nic, who thought that Drea’s mom was extremely hot. Hotness I can’t speak to, but she was definitely my favorite out of the other members of North Coven’s parents, the only one we could tell almost everything to, and the only one we had ever consulted for a spell.

“Hey, boys,” Jamie said, and burst into tears.

“Mom,” Drea said in the tone of someone who was currently being tortured in hell. “Please. Stop. Brandy will start again if you keep crying.”

“We should go,” I said.

“Are you coming, Ms. Pearson?” Nic asked with more than a glimmer of hope.

“I’m sorry, honey, I’ve got to work second shift,” Jamie said. “But I’ll be thinking about all of you. I’m so sorry. Please tell Anna and Youssef I send my love.”

“I will,” Nic promised.

I held my breath, waiting for Nic to realize that Drea’s mom was not, in fact, going to be around when we met tonight. But he either didn’t notice or didn’t care, probably because she had called him honey.

Nobody spoke on the way to the funeral. Nic fidgeted with his toothpick next to me, and when I glanced in the rearview mirror, I could see Brandy and Drea holding hands tightly in the back seat. It made my heart twist, not just out of envy or wistfulness, but out of fear for the stability of our circle. Bastion had said that two sets of people in relationships, with Dove taking the fifth and central role as a free agent (Free Space Slut, Dove called it), seemed to be particularly effective. Where would we be without that efficacy? Lost in a place where we couldn’t locate the murderer? What if everything went back to how it had been before?

I thought about Nic’s miraculously easy sobriety right after his overdose in the summer of 1998. He had no idea how we had assisted with that. How it remained, to me, the most important spell we had ever done. What if without our stable coven he started to use again?

“Nez,” Nic said.

“What?”

“You drove right by the funeral home.”

“Right. Just looking for parking,” I said, to cover the fact that I had been completely zoned out.

Luckily for my pride, I was correct: everywhere immediately outside of Ashby’s Funeral Parlor was completely packed with cars. Cars overflowed from the funeral home’s lot, and people had parked all the way up and down Main Street, slowing traffic to a crawl in North Dana’s tiny downtown. The houses of all the rich people in North Dana (there weren’t a ton of wealthy people in our town, but, except for the Micenmachers, the families that had money all lived right on Main) looked like they had been converted into miniature car p. . .