The Necromancer's Seduction

by Mimi Sebastian

  Chapter Fifteen

  A knock on the door broke my concentration. A quick look through the peephole confirmed Adam’s arrival. He greeted me with a broad smile and bowed. “Milady beckons.”

  “Must you?”

  “Absolutely.” Adam made himself comfortable on my couch and cocked his head. “You seem none too worse for the wear.”

  “What do you mean? Aside from general chaos.” I tossed the blue books I’d graded onto a pile on the floor.

  “Spending the night with a demon.”

  “You don’t like demons much, do you? Even when you were alive,” I said, trying to divert him from the spending-the-night-with-a-demon topic.

  “I don’t trust them.”

  “Let’s talk about something else.” I coughed when a sharp pain jabbed my chest. I pressed on my breastbone and concentrated on breathing. “Adam, what the hell?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “I can affect the bond. Control you. Hurt you.” His voice had taken on a dark timbre. He jerked on the bond, and my chest constricted, but I was prepared. I ran for the kitchen, heard his footsteps pursuing me, slow and steady. I opened the fridge, pulled out a bag of blood, and tossed it at him just as he entered the kitchen. He caught the bag, looked at it in confusion, scowled and left the kitchen.

  I sat to catch my breath and let my heart slow. I’d wrangled the blood from Jax earlier in the day and made him promise not to tell Ewan. The blood wasn’t a permanent solution, but it’d buy me time. The question was how much?

  I walked into the hallway and found him looking at a picture of me as a kid, holding a surfboard on the beach in Santa Monica. I’d done my share of surfing, mostly on the underside of the board. Adam turned around, his eyes solemn, bordering on apologetic. I didn’t notice the bag or any blood on his clothes or face, but I knew he’d drunk it, sensed his satiation through the bond.

  “How long did you surf?” I asked.

  “Since I was a kid. I learned by myself. I hit the surf almost every day.”

  “Why did you stop?”

  He pointed at the picture, at my board. “That board was way too big for you.”

  I laughed. “That information would have been helpful then.”

  “So what’s the plan for tonight?”

  He’d deftly sidestepped my question about why he’d stopped surfing. I considered pursuing the matter, then decided it wasn’t worth it. “Kara and I talked about going to the carnival or fair or something. Wanna come?”

  “Nutty rides? Greasy hot dogs? Raging teen hormones? Sure, I’m in.”

  “Let’s just hope no zombies are in as well.”

  * * * *

  “The traveling carnivals in the early nineteen hundreds were cool, especially the sideshow freaks,” Kara said as we maneuvered through the throngs of families pushing strollers and teens yelling as they assessed their possibilities of hooking up. Hawkers called out, inviting us to play ring toss or Whack-A-Mole. The smell of cinnamon from frying churros warmed the cool night air around us.

  “You looking for a new job?” I asked.

  “You know, some of the old circus and carnival freaks were supernaturals,” she said.

  “That’s kind of depressing. So was the hairy man a werewolf?”

  “I don’t know, but maybe it wasn’t so depressing. The carnivals allowed them to come out of hiding, to a certain extent.”

  She bumped into me to avoid being hit by a kid running to get on the Twist-O-Rama ride.

  “Why would they like being gawked at? Treated like a freak for being themselves?” I asked.

  “Did you ever see the old black and white movie Freaks about the circus sideshow freaks?” she asked. “The non-freak trapeze artist and her boyfriend schemed to kill one of the midgets because he was rich. She pretended to love him and married him.”

  “Gobble, gobble, we accept her, one of us,” Adam said in a squeaky voice. “That’s one of the best movie lines ever. They cast real people with deformities as the sideshow freaks.”

  “That movie was horrifying in ways horror directors today could never imitate,” I said, images from the movie vivid in my mind. When the sideshow freaks found out that the trapeze artist planned to kill their midget friend, they attacked her, turning her into a deformed freak. “They don’t make movies like that anymore.”

  “I’m confused,” Kara said. “A supe who loves horror movies. That I get. But you love horror movies and hate supes.”

  “I don’t hate supes. I never said I hated them.”

  Her eyebrow rose until it reached just under her hairline.

  “I don’t,” I insisted. “My best friend is a witch.” I flicked my palm at Adam. “We have here a revenant. I’m all about the supes.”

  And I just slept with a demon, I added silently. If Cora could see me now.

  “You know,” Kara said, “if you could reconcile the two, you’d be horribly self-actualized.” She and Adam laughed at her stupid joke.

  “Let’s get some cotton candy,” said Adam. He stared, eyes wide, at the blue and pink wads of cotton stickiness hanging from food booths. Kara mouthed to me that he doesn’t eat. I shrugged.

  After purchasing cotton candy, we made our way to the Ferris wheel. I sat on the cracked seat cushion and waited for the large wheel to transport us to the top of the city.

  “Wasn’t coming here a great idea?” Kara said as she licked the melted cotton candy strands off her fingers.

  “I hope we stop at the very top,” Adam said. “See life out there in all its dysfunctional glory.”

  He leaned his forehead against the steel frame of the cabin window.

  Kara gave me a quick look, then glanced out at the city lights. A heavy ache weighed on my gut through the bond. What could I say? Sorry your life was cut short? Seemed inadequate. I shoved a large, wispy glob of blue sugar into my mouth.

  Adam reared his head. “Let’s go in one of those cheesy haunted houses next.”

  “Actually,” Kara said, “this carnival is supposed to have a pretty good haunted house.”

  After a few more rotations, we left the Ferris wheel and headed for the haunted house. Once inside, Adam yelled, “I call middle!”

  Crap. I hated being at the end of the line, the last woman standing, exposed to the screams and slime and scares of the haunted house actors lurking in the shadows. If anything, they should be scared of us.

  The thought no more entered my mind than a creepy clown jumped straight out from under the proverbial childhood bed to cackle in my face. I jumped and moved my shaking frame closer to Adam’s laughing one. Why did I still jump and scream when I knew this was fake?

  We passed a vibrating door smeared with fake blood. Adam turned his head to me, his eyes soft, and I realized I had my hands on his waist. I dropped my hands. Last night’s sex with Ewan invaded my mind. Picturing him with a smear of blue sugar goo on his face, my hands around his waist, while we snuck through the haunted house, I regretted not asking him to come with us.

  We entered a hallway lit by wall sconces dripping black and green candle wax on the walls. I smelled the faint odor of urine. The hall shrunk as we walked through until my head scraped against the ceiling. Distant screams and laughter from other haunted house revelers echoed around us.

  “Let’s go this way,” Kara said, poking through a curtain, her squeal telling me she’d encountered some other creep.

  “Kara,” I called after her, carefully moving through the curtain. Strobe lights flashed, disrupting my vision and disorienting my equilibrium.

  “I should be scaring people in this place,” Adam said from behind me.

  “You look normal. You wouldn’t scare anyone.”

  “Can’t I make my flesh decompose at will or something?” He sounded disappointed.

  “I don’t think so and don’t want to find out.” The last thing I needed was Adam purposely grossing me out with exposed body organs. “Where the hell did Kara go?”

  Adam moved in front of me as we co
ntinued down the strobe-lit passage. I heard more screams.

  “Check this guy out. His head’s about to come off,” Adam said, standing in front of a guy hanging from the ceiling. “The makeup is pretty good. How is he hanging like that?”

  Another scream, more laughter.

  “Hey, I think I hear Kara.” Adam jogged farther down the hall, his figure blurring into the flashing lights.

  “Wait up!” A worm of anxiety wriggled up my neck. Something was off, but the loud noises, lights, and manufactured smells were confusing my senses. As I passed the hanging man, I half expected him to fall. His body rocked. Blood trickled on my arm. A shard of ice terror scraped up my spine. I willed my legs to move.

  “Adam!” I shrieked. The last thing I remember before hitting the floor was pain.

  Chapter Sixteen

  My body was stiff. I tried to move my arms and legs, but encountered resistance. My eyelids stuttered as I tried to lift them. I blinked a few times to clear the gray glaze from my vision only to see green and blue neon. I was strapped to a metal chair with bike chains and sat next to a score table in a bowling alley.

  I heard shuffling from the darkened corners. The hanging zombie from the haunted house ambled past me, blood oozing down its face, a patch of skin flapping against its chin. A moaning mass of at least ten zombies followed, their garbage can smell overpowering the bowling alley aroma of stale beer and sweaty shoes. Then another figure emerged from the dark.

  I was stunned, my tongue paralyzed at the sight of wire-rimmed glasses illuminated by the green neon. No fucking way. Was this a post-traumatic hallucination? I couldn’t be looking at . . . Brad?

  “Hello, professor.” He stopped in front of me and put his hands in his pockets, an arrogant twitch to his lips. “My name is Cael.”

  “You’re—” The word caught in my throat. “—the necromancer Cael?”

  “I knew you were smart. By the way, I really like your class. Too bad most of the students are brainless. They’d make good zombies.”

  Anger replaced my shock. I strained at the bike chains that held me. “Fuck the jokes. You killed my grandmother and Adam and the other supes.”

  “I guess this means I won’t get an A?”

  His expression was dead serious.

  How the hell did I miss this? But then his demeanor had changed entirely from the student. He stood taller, abandoning the telltale campus slouch. His eyes, brown and open and earnest in class, were now dark, reflecting cynicism and something else that made my palms sweat.

  He adjusted his glasses. “You may not believe me, but I regret your grandmother’s death. The few of us left face nothing but persecution and scorn. The loss of any necromancer is a tragedy.”

  I stared at him. My lungs hurt, as if I were breathing in air at twenty thousand feet. He was seriously cracked.

  “Don’t insult me.” My voice was a low whisper. “Why did you kill her?”

  “Let’s clarify one point, shall we? I did not kill your grandmother. She had a choice. She picked the wrong door.” His lips narrowed. “She refused to create a supernatural revenant and suffered the consequences.”

  I fought back the tears rising from the thought of Cora dying at the hands of this bastard. “She couldn’t create one. She tried once before and failed.”

  “She helped your mother. She knew how.”

  Jesus, my mother plagued our lives. I felt a tiny hammer banging on the inside of my skull, causing my already aching head to throb. “All this time, you’ve been trying to create a supernatural revenant. You took my grandmother, thinking she had some secret that would make it work for you, but you failed.”

  His face twisted with anger. Maybe the visit with Arthur wasn’t a complete failure. I’d learned a possible weakness in Cael and decided to chip away at his vulnerabilities in hope of mining out the insanity. Nutty people who tried to act normal never made sense. Nutty people stripped to their core? They revealed the brutal logic of their pain. I needed to see his pain to understand the truth.

  “You, your grandmother, so self-righteous. You both deny the true nature of a necromancer. The glory. You think you’re so different from me? Tell me, how do you suppose Adam feels about his predicament?” The words seethed through his teeth.

  I’d made a small hole. I ventured down the mine shaft, hoping to keep him talking. If I kept picking away I might buy some time for Kara and Adam to locate me. The bond with Adam had to be good for something besides making my stomach feel weird.

  “I don’t kill people. I’m nothing like you.”

  He motioned to one of the zombies who straggled into the darkness, his shoes scraping the floor. The zombie left and returned, scraping and scratching, with a body that he plopped in front of me. Bile rose to choke my throat. At my feet lay the werewolf Brandon, still in his priest’s habit. This time I let the tears come.

  “You will make this werewolf a revenant,” Cael said. Not a command. A statement of fact.

  “No way. Do it yourself. Oh, wait, you can’t.” I let my words shovel away.

  Cael’s nostrils flared. He reached over and squeezed my chin, holding it for a moment, then releasing it with a jerk.

  “It’s not even a full moon. It won’t work,” I said.

  He pulled a chair to face me and sat down, placing his hands on his knees. “You haven’t checked your lunar calendar. Tonight is a waxing gibbous, an almost full moon. It’s enough strength to make Brandon a revenant.”

  He shifted his glasses. “Why can’t you see it? We are the reason the supernaturals fear death. They will never treat you as their full equal, only call upon you to perform the deeds they disdain. Why not take some power, some assurance to put us on equal footing with them? You and I could take control.”

  “Why?”

  The ends of his mouth twitched, forming a smile that teetered on the brink of insanity. He shrugged. “Why? I don’t need a reason to spread chaos.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “However, you do, so . . . maybe for insurance.”

  My head throbbed. I wasn’t able to think through his nonsensical, deranged logic. “You don’t want equal footing. You want total dominance.”

  No wonder supes feared and distrusted necros. As I stared at Cael’s twisted face looming over me, I realized it was twisted from his power over death, twisted from his own weakness. I eyed Brandon lying on the ground, his face pale and stripped of life. I cried fresh tears, remembering his humor and his sly jabs at the demons, his voice soothing, virile, tinged with a vulnerability that hinted at a story I’d now never hear.

  “We are a person’s chance at redemption. A chance to right a wrong that was done to them in life.” My voice hitched as I spoke.

  “You think that’s the reason Malthus had you raise Adam? To help Adam atone for his sins?”

  “Malthus is trying to stop you. He doesn’t want power the way you do.”

  He shook his head, his expression almost pitying. “Now we are deluding ourselves. If you think for a moment Malthus—” He paused. “—or any demon like him wouldn’t kill to protect his position, his influence over the supernaturals and humans, well, you’re in for quite a shock. You and I are pawns in the demons’ games. You have no idea what’s going on behind the scenes.” He bent slightly to move his face closer to mine. “Malthus would sacrifice you.”

  I raised my head, my lips forming a thin, brittle line. “You’re full of shit.”

  Cael sat back, his expression thoughtful. “Malthus hasn’t told you, has he?”

  Goosebumps rose along my neck. Whatever he had to tell me, it couldn’t be good.

  “Malthus knows about me, knows who I am. He could’ve just told you, but he didn’t. Kind of makes you wonder why.”

  I lost my breath for a moment, shock blocking Cael’s words. He’s lying, I told myself. Trying to mess with my head. I had to focus on getting out of this mess.

  “I don’t care if Malthus knew about you. Doesn’t change anything. Doesn’t change that I’m n
ot going to help you.”

  The room turned eerily quiet. Even the zombies stopped their moans and scratches. He waved to one of them, a young woman. Her face tugged at my memory. She scrambled to the wall and flicked a switch.

  Her eyes. Faded now, but once bright.

  The missing girl on the poster of Kurt’s coffee shop.

  The section of the bowling alley to my side illuminated, revealing Kara stretched out, hands and feet bound, lying on the wood floor of one of the bowling lanes. Her mouth was taped, but her eyes flashed at Cael. Being bound in that manner prevented her from calling on a spell.

  The female zombie grabbed a bowling ball, stumbled over to Kara and lifted the ball over her head.

  “Kara would make quite the zombie,” Cael said, and I saw Kara’s eyes widen.

  “Bra . . . Cael, no.” Terror reached into my bone marrow, freezing me from the inside out.

  “Don’t worry, she won’t drop it unless I tell her to.” He rested his elbow on his arm that was folded across his waist and tapped his mouth with his fingers. “However, I’m not quite sure how long that arm is going to stay attached.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. I had to do this. I sought the feel of my necklace against my chest and forced out a shivering breath. “Fine. You have to release me.”

  He bent behind me and unlocked the chain securing my upper body. He left my thighs and legs chained to the chair, but at least I now had some movement. I rubbed my arms and flexed my tight shoulders. “I have no ritual prepared. I may not be able to do this.”

  I wasn’t bluffing. I looked at Kara, then at Brandon. I’d have to depend on my instinct, an instinct I’d spent years squashing, relying instead on tangible things. Fear was tangible. I tasted it now. Cold. Metallic. It had turned my saliva to liquid nitrogen.