by Lisa Daniels
My mother, Ellie thought with a jolt in her stomach. Yes, she would recognize that aura anywhere. Which meant the other one was Rickard Grieves, surely. Where had they been? She watched nervously as the two spirits sank into the back of the enemy, and passed through like they were hot knives through butter. They… what was happening?
She wasn’t the only one baffled. Mason hovered in the air, clearly as confused as she felt. The fighting didn’t stop, and Ellie’s energy reserves were falling frighteningly low, but something happened to the undead around where Rickard Grieves had penetrated. They halted, as if running into a brick wall, acting nothing like the others around them. More and more seemed to catch this freezing, and Rickard seemed to be heading straight for the other deep red slash in the army. Heading toward Zaimov.
They’re the same, Ellie realized suddenly. Zaimov and Rickard. They’re doing the same thing. They’ve contracted with a spirit, somehow, and it’s given them this power… the power to control? Perhaps people didn’t know of this, because there were few revenants in the world that would bargain with a living person, in the wake of their single-minded vengeance and thirst for destruction. Mason drew them closer, though he still kept a careful distance, and there was tension in his body that made Ellie suspect he was one second away from zipping through the air and making their escape instead, just to protect her. She really hoped he didn’t. The others needed help. They needed Ellie’s magic. She winced, feeling her energy go dangerously low, noticing that a swarm of her own summons were all that remained ahead of the precinct's side. One breakthrough from the enemy, and Talia would die. All the people she’d gotten to know, gone.
Ellie let out a demonic yell as her energy dipped to dangerous levels—she needed Mason to land, before it was too late.
“I’m going to run out, Mason!” She tried to say something else, but the words in her mouth became garbled, and her brain suddenly felt as if it had been hit by a sledgehammer. Exhaustion consumed her body, and blackness rushed to greet her.
Chapter Twelve – Mason
He felt Ellie slip from his back, and in a panic, veered sharply toward the ground. She lifted off his back, but he managed to spin around and seize her in his limbs, forcing him to make a rough, painful landing, snapping one of his wing joints in the process. He bellowed in pain, but still cradled her as gently as a babe. Not on his watch. Never on his watch. Although now they were in direct danger from the heaving hordes on the ground, and he couldn’t fly with just one wing. Reluctantly, he shifted back into his human form, grimacing as the broken wing joint translated to a broken wrist, but he hefted her up all the same, attempting to carry her unconscious form to safety.
Thankfully, all the undead seemed to be distracted by other things, as they ignored Mason, and he was able to creep back to their side of the map.
You’re okay, he thought desperately, clutching Ellie’s body tight. I won’t let you die. I’ve got you. You’ll be safe with me. Though the thought that she might have died sent cold shivers throughout his body. She was precious to him. Perhaps more than she’d ever know. That moment they had shared together was nothing compared to the abyssal depths of his feelings—ones that he’d refused to address for a long time. He had so many good excuses. So many ways to reject her—and yet now he couldn’t even contemplate doing such a thing. Though it did add a considerable amount of emotional stress to know that he might end up being the one responsible for losing her.
“Oh, Jesus,” Janos said, darting forward to pluck Ellie out of Mason’s one-armed grasp. “Well done on the catch, but you better stay out of the action now.”
“Hmm?” Mason noticed Janos pointing, and turned around, still gripping his broken wrist, to see that the undead were now turned away from their own troops, advancing instead on what seemed to be two malevolently glowing people.
“That’s my father,” Rosen said, breaking into their conversation and wearing a proud smile. “He’s cracked the same thing Zaimov has. He’s giving Zaimov a taste of his own medicine. With the revenant inside him having a deep, hungering thirst for our resident evil here.”
It certainly did look like the way she described it. Their troops were relieved of all pressure, though there were two dead necromancers, a dead strike force, and a few members of the precinct fallen in the line of duty. The battle now concentrated on the red glowing auras, who seemed to push against one another, straining for control of the numerous guardian angel/revenant experiments. They clashed with unbridled ferocity, and were buried under the swarm of guardian angels, all flashing and sacrificing themselves to protect their new masters. Light blazed over the battle, blue and gold and red, and gradually, the number of undead seemed to dwindle, fed into the sacrificial grinder, not making a return. Their numbers visibly collapsed before Mason’s wide eyes, until with a final burst of energy, they all vanished, turning into ash or still bodies, leaving a rather victorious Rickard Grieves standing over the body of his fallen foe.
The enemy simply folded into nothing, their destructive force now only a living memory. Though people would remember the chaos for quite some time, given the fact that the undead had rampaged all the way from near Stoneshire to Lasthearth, ruining numerous villages, towns, and cities beforehand. By the time they had mustered up an efficient defense involving international necromancers, there had already been thousands lost.
One question remained though. Why? Why go through all that effort? What did Zaimov possibly hope to achieve by enacting this and trampling people across the continent? It didn’t make sense.
Just as he began to relax, something reared up in front of him, Ellie, and Janos. A kind of darkness flickering with red and black, cascading over Ellie, wrapping noxious tendrils around her. “No!” he roared, lunging forward. He’d prevented her from falling once. No way was he going to let her fall into someone’s evil spiritual clutches. Battering at the tendrils was worse than useless, and they began to envelop her quickly. Mason yelled out in terror, causing Rickard Grieves to stamp over to them and grab the blackness himself. Unlike Mason, who couldn’t seem to be able to get any kind of grip on the shadows, Rickard was able to seize and tug upon it, like a blanket being torn off a bed. It unraveled from Ellie, leaving her still mercifully unconscious, though Janos, the one holding her at the time, appeared frazzled and unhappy. He’d gotten a rather unpleasant dosage of that thing as well.
“He should be gone now,” Rickard growled, his voice distorted. “I can’t promise he won’t be back, as he seems to have abandoned his mortal body in favor of revenant possession.” Rickard remained still for a moment. “It seems he wanted eternal life. He hoped to have the ultimate protection of guardian angels to shield him from physical death. As a last resort, he had the cover of his bond with a hostile spirit. One capable of possessing.”
“He can possess other people?” Rosen Grieves stared at her father with a formal, blank expression. Perhaps she wasn’t sure if she was speaking to her father or to the revenant inside him. Not that Mason blamed her. He knew enough about revenants from Ellie and his time protecting her in the underworld to understand that they were vicious, malevolent beings consumed by an utter thirst for vengeance. A one-track mind incapable of tracking anything else. Unless, apparently, they had bargained with a human like Rickard.
“Yes. He is gone from this place, stripped of power and weakened—but it is entirely possible he might have a safe-place for his spirit.”
“We have to keep an eye out for him emerging again?” Morgana said, aghast and exasperated at the same time. “We barely even managed this time...”
“You’ll have me, and we’ll know what to expect. We know what I can do to counter it,” he said. Then, Rickard Grieves stepped aside, gesturing toward a blue-gold spirit, the one that Ellie spoke to. Her mother. The mother instantly went to Ellie’s side, touching a black mark upon her skin, lifting her face to reveal one that looked drained of all color. Mason’s heart twisted into little knots. He should have checked. He ass
umed that she was okay, because the spirit had been wrested away by Rickard. Instead, she looked as if she was at death’s door.
“Tell her please that I love her,” the guardian angel said. “Tell her to not be so hasty in meeting me again in the afterlife.” Her lips spread into a ghostly smile, before she disappeared in a blaze of light. But not before she’d been able to enact her sacrificial magic upon Ellie, chasing away the black spots upon her body, chasing away the pale, pallid stretch of her face so that she looked more animated and lively, rather than appropriate for an open-casket funeral.
He hoped sincerely that she was gone for good. That poor soul deserved her rest. She deserved not to be yanked out of the afterlife again and again to service someone else and their selfish aims.
Ellie would be sad, of course. Since in a way, it was like having her mother back, even if the mother’s thinking and personality had changed somewhat after death. He crouched beside her, watching as her eyelids flickered, and she opened her eyes to fix those wondrous blue ones on his own green.
“Welcome back,” he murmured. He smiled, and her smile answered his, before she jerked upright suddenly.
“The battle! What happened? I must get back—hm.” She paused, taking in the noticeable lack of body-to-body conflict. Also the fact that everyone was more or less calm, but checking over the fallen to identify them, to begin to gather them together, preparing their fallen allies against the nameless dead.
“The battle was won shortly after you fell unconscious,” Mason informed her, wincing when he put a little too much pressure on his broken wrist, causing Ellie to look at it and then frown.
“What happened?”
“I… stopped you from falling,” he replied simply. Her expression darkened at that.
“Thank you.” She looked around once more. “Is it over, then? Truly? How?”
He explained as best as he could about Rickard Grieves and his personal battle against Zaimov, utilizing the same power. Stealing the army from him. Mason didn’t fully understand all the technical details about the necromancy, but Ellie followed thoughtfully, nodding and frowning at several places, until he finished, and she cupped one palm around his cheek.
“I’m glad to have someone like you at my side. Have I told you this already?”
“Only, like, a few dozen times,” he said, now grinning, leaning into her touch. “I’m just doing my best.” He decided not to mention the few moments of sheer panic that he had experienced. She didn’t need to know that, of course.
At all.
“Really? I hadn’t noticed.” She tilted her face a little closer to his, and he obligingly sank into the kiss, aiming to keep it short and chaste, as there were people around them, and quite a few were weepy-eyed from losing someone beloved to them. Best not to slap it in their faces any further by showing off the connection he and Ellie had. There would be a time and a place for that. And… ow. He sort of needed to wait for his own wrist to heal. It would take several hours for his regenerating to go through it efficiently. Until then, he had to sit back and watch as they picked through the aftermath. He took the opportunity to contact his family as well, to inform them all that he was okay, to confirm to himself that so were they. They were doing much better off on Mason’s increased wages, but he planned to keep his income to them low enough so that they wouldn’t grow completely complacent.
He also contacted Ellie’s father, just to confirm to him Ellie’s living status. In true Regal fashion, he acted dismissive of the news, though Mason felt fairly sure that the older man was secretly relieved. Though he definitely needed to do something about those suppressed emotions.
Some people needed to go to hospital, and a few news reporters hovered over the scene like vultures, having braved potential death to get a scoop and possibly a bonus wage for doing so. One of the paramedics examined Ellie and gave the all-clear, and when they came to Mason, he informed them of his accelerated healing, which they accepted, since they were already strained to capacity with the injured and critically wounded.
His heart burst with pride over Ellie and the way she conducted herself, and possibly burst from other feelings as well. That woman could turn on all his engines, and all she needed to do was exist, and smile, and be her.
* * *
They both read and watched the news the next day, having collapsed in bed the previous night to sleep until late morning. Each station or paper’s orientation depended on how people saw the necromancer battle. Some called it an epic clash of good versus evil. Plucky and friendly necromancers fighting against the swarm of suffering. Others… not so much. One even declared, in exclamations and question marks, it was an elaborate plot designed to gain sympathy to the necromancer cause, and the one person that was interviewed in a rival newspaper was clearly a crisis actor.
“Even after everything we did, they just assume it was a lie,” Ellie said flatly. Her head was rather aggressively pressed against Mason’s chest as they sat on the sofa in Mason’s room, watching the televised news. “Maybe I’m just a crisis necromancer. Maybe it was all a hoax because we decided to clear away the dead bodies from the middle of the street. How rude of us, right?”
“Very rude,” Mason agreed, grinning at her. He flexed his now healed wrist, stretching out the fingers. “Don’t think too much of it. People believe what they want to believe. Even if it doesn’t really make sense.”
She shook her head stubbornly, a small pout appearing on her lips. “It’s just annoying because I guess they do have some basis for thinking the way they do. There have been some awful necromancers out there.”
“Yes, but the mistake they make is to assume all necromancers are awful. Or that all low-caste dragons are useless and inbred, as the other dragons like to state.”
“You’re definitely not useless and inbred,” Ellie said, puffing up in offense, resting a fond hand on his chest. “You’re better than all of them put together. And yeah, okay, I say that because I like you.” He noticed, for a tiny instant, that it seemed as if she wanted to say something else rather than like, but she changed direction fast enough for it to almost be unnoticeable. Except by him. His heart rate increased a little in excitement. Maybe they could do more than just like each other. Maybe they would soon be able to say to each other’s faces that they loved one another.
Only they had already announced that. Just in a different context for love.
They grinned at each other like idiots, walking toward the front entrance, intending to soak up some rays in the mansion’s expansive garden. They picked up the small pile of letters that were shoved through the letterbox. Ellie absently rifled through them, before letting out a surprised gasp.
“Ellie?”
She showed him one letter addressed to her. “I think… I think this might be my university letter!” Her hands were shaking as she tore it open, unfolded the paper, and read the first paragraph. Then she let out a high-pitched squeal. “I’m in! They accepted! I’m going to start this September! I’m a student now!” She exclaimed again in sheer happiness, and Mason accepted her aggressive hug, spinning her around, almost catching her legs on the door as they whirled outside. She was just so damn happy. It made his own happiness catapult higher than ever, though a part of him felt a little sad, too, because he knew they would be gradually separating and having more time to themselves than before. He didn’t worry about there being a clean break between them, however, because he was sure now, more than ever, that they were meant to be together.
That fateful day when he first met Ellie had made sure to burn a permanent place for her in his heart. It had started off professional and friendly, once he was able to help that lonely girl have a friend of her very own. Somewhere along the way, they’d become the world to one another. Even if their future paths took them away from one another job- and education-wise, they’d always find a way back home.
He didn’t have a single regret about his life right now, and he hoped sincerely that Ellie didn’t, either. S
he had a future to look forward to. A wonderful one where she could explore the world and hunt down ancient sites, using her magic to make it easier. Showing the world that just as there were bad necromancers, there were also good ones, who genuinely wanted to do good and didn’t need to be feared. Fear, after all, came from being misunderstood. From not wanting to understand or sympathize. From the motivated reasoning that the world needed evil to fight against, and heroes to fight it.
Outside in the garden with its glistening rays of light, and the many colors of flowers blooming in their flowerbeds, he kissed Ellie hard, his arms secure around her. He felt her grin into the kiss and wrap her own arms around his neck, locking him in place. They indulged in this perfect moment for a while longer, exploring one another’s lips, promising each other without words that they would always be there if the other needed.
His family were secure. So was what remained of Ellie’s. She had friends in the form of Talia Grieves and Morgana Hargraves, and an acquaintance at the police precinct being Talia’s older sister, Rosen. He had potential friends to secure better relationships too, as Janos had asked him out for drinks again, and possibly some ten-pin bowling.
They’d also managed to fight away a dangerous threat, though word on the street was that they needed to be prepared, in case Zaimov’s spirit popped up again in an unexpected place. If he did, however, they’d be ready. They knew what to do, and they planned to keep the casualty count far lower than before.
Mason broke away from Ellie’s lips to snatch in a welcome breath of air, and she let out a delighted laugh, her cheeks flushed, her eyes sparkling. “You know what? I think I’d rather do my celebrations inside...”