by Lisa Daniels
She’d only been into the monochrome several times in her life. She’d really hoped the previous time was the last—that came from a particularly vile murder case where several of the victims, so incensed at the way they were killed, had started festering and burning with a violent hatred. Not quite revenants, but they were extraordinarily resistent to Rosen’s attempts to coerce them.
She saw Albert and Hargrave’s souls flickering like lighthouses in the main world, through the perspective of her soul—doing its little astral travel into the depths.
With a heavy, sinking feeling, she began to sense the spirit with the strongest attachment to the bones, far, far down in the monochrome. The same layer where revenants lingered.
A shapeless, dark mass hovered by the blip of gray that would have been its bones. It pulsed an angry aura at times, crackling with energy.
This ain’t good, Rosen thought. She could practically taste the malevolent, negative aura the soul created. A kind of anti-luck that sucked on people’s probability lines and replaced their chances with something abysmal. The kind of anti-luck that resulted in freak accidents and near fatalities on a regular basis.
Not quite a revenant. But getting there. Holy hells, was it getting there. Do I have the power to address this? Only one way to see. She reached out for the pulsing darkness, felt it recoil at her presence, then howl in a kind of wordless, incomprehensible fury.
“Sorry,” she told the soul. “I have questions. Specifically for the being once known as Laogh McKenna.”
The thrashing, wailing spirit came to a sudden halt, quivering from the use of its name.
That means it still identifies strongly as Laogh, Rosen considered. Not all spirits clung so strongly to their sense of self. Some preferred their sense of vengeance.
“All we want to do is ask you some questions. It will be easier if you inhabit your former body for this purpose. I can force you to it, or you can consent. Will you tell us your story?”
The pulsating, flickering mass that was Laogh, so tainted with malevolence that Rosen hated being near its presence, seemed to digest the words.
“I have not been addressed in many years,” Laogh rumbled, in that ethereal, spiritual voice the Other Side gave. “Why would you know my story?”
“Many years have passed, Laogh. We are people in your distant future, who have found your bones and want to know the story behind them. Of what happened to that beautiful woman so long ago in our histories.”
The spirit again digested this. Although they didn’t pay much attention to the passing of time in the Other Side, they usually retained a dim awareness that times were not the same as the ones they left.
Usually.
Without another word, Laogh began to wrap around Rosen’s essence, digging sharply into her soul.
“I shan’t obey anything you ask. I’ll curse the people around you—just like I was cursed.”
With a shuddering gasp, Rosen summoned her energies to force Laogh off her, but it was hard against that sticky, cloying feeling. “Why? Who killed you? What made you so angry?”
“My family,” Laogh hissed in a demonic, guttural tone. “His family. They all wanted me dead, I was too willful, too independent. Brain fever from all those books, they said… thought I was poisoning my son… but I just wanted him to be goooood...” The last word came out as a hysterical wail, and Rosen felt the red in Laogh’s soul, the gibbering need for vengeance, burning out every other thought. She caught images, flickerings of Laogh’s life in that claustrophobic space, blurring together in a confusing medley.
Rosen’s energies burned away at an incredible rate, and it was all she could do to throw Laogh off her and claw her way back up into color, trying to avoid the urge to retch from being exposed to such malevolence. She opened her eyes, witnessing an extremely worried panther bodyguard hovering over her, hand poised as if he was about to slap her, while Hargraves seemed to have her hand in her pocket, perhaps grasped around a gun.
“How do I look?” she asked, and her voice sounded hoarse.
Albert blinked. Then he shifted his hand away. “You’re alright, Miss Grieves?”
“As alright as I can be. What did you witness?”
Albert looked to Hargraves, who cleared her throat and said, “Well… your eyelids started glowing a crazy red color there. And you were screeching about how you wanted everyone dead. It was a little… disturbing.”
“Ugh. She must have gained brief control of my voice,” Rosen said. “I threw her off, but… she’s too dangerous to talk to.” Rosen began to rub at her arms, as if still feeling the cloying embrace of Laogh’s corrupted spirit. “That’s over three hundred years of insanity perfectly wrapped up down there. I got a glimpse of her life, too—I saw it as how she saw it.” Sifting through her thoughts, Rosen sought to explain, because she knew it would be needed for the research.
Before she then proposed her central idea concerning Laogh McKenna.
“She was very full of herself, believed herself superior, god’s creature and all that. She hated her husband, seeing him as a beast, but his family was wealthy. She hated being sold like cattle to this family. She wanted to kill her son when he was born, but when that didn’t work out, she thought maybe she could groom him to be something else. Her family decided she was too dangerous to live… but for her, it felt like a life of constant injustice. All these things happening to her that she never wanted to happen. So when her husband bashed in her head… yes… it was the husband… that was the last straw to her egotism. So she’s spent all these years since, outraged, finding more and more reasons to be outraged.” Rosen licked her lips. Hargraves followed the words in rapt fascination, while Albert kept glancing nervously at the bones, as if expecting them to animate at any moment.
“The bones need to be destroyed,” Rosen said. “We need to give her so little to hold onto that it will be more straightforward to force her spirit to move on. She’s too dangerous. She’s a magnet for bad luck.”
At this, Hargraves looked like she’d swallowed something bad. “Destroy… the bones?”
“Yes,” Rosen said. “They must carry a trail of strange accidents around them. Though maybe people didn’t think those accidents were associated with the presence of this evil spirit.”
“Destroy...” Hargraves sounded faint. “Grieves, these bones are of supreme historic value. They’re one of the earliest murder cases in our earliest municipality in Samhain. Countless people tried to find her killer—her husband. Though, of course, there were some fingers pointed at her father, too… what wondrous news you have unearthed! But no. We can’t destroy them.”
“Excuse me?” Rosen puffed up at this stupidity. “You won’t destroy them? Even though they’re dangerous?”
“It’d have to be approved...” Hargraves shook her head. “These aren’t my bones to make decisions on. They’re loaned for a start by the Tremaine family. They’re descendants of the McKennas. And other institutes around the world have booked to have these bones. We have students coming to base their essays and internships on these bones.”
The more Rosen listened to the reasons, the more her heart sank in the process. These bones were wrapped by future plans, by the will of the descendants, by the revenue they generated. “I don’t think I’d be able to banish the soul without weakening its hold upon the world first. That’s the only other solution I have.”
But before Rosen could elaborate further, the door burst open behind them and Sten stormed in, fury printed upon his face. “Did I hear correctly? You were planning to destroy the bones?” He was almost spitting fire at this point, and Rosen held up her palms in a placating gesture.
“The spirit attached to these bones is a dangerous one. It causes bad luck—accidents. Things that might be passed off as unfortunate, and that’d be right. Since the spirit causes the misfortune.”
Sten simply glared at her, at a loss for words in his indignation. “Poppycock,” he said. “You’ll do nothing to these
bones, and you certainly won’t banish the spirit. We’ll get a medium in. We don’t need your kind here.”
A medium, to say the least, was an incredibly bad idea. Necromancers had the means to wriggle out of the confinement a spirit attempted, because in the pecking order of things, necromancers ruled over the spirits. They had complete dominion and power. A medium, however, was a spirit’s punching bag. They could channel it… but unless they were grounded, it’d simply see the medium as a free possession. Especially if strong enough.
“I must advise against that, Sten. This spirit means business.”
“Regardless,” he said, “you’re not to come near again. Get out.”
“Sten,” Hargraves said with a note of warning in her throat. “She’s a police officer with every right to be here, and every right to voice her opinion on the matter, given her area of expertise…”
The gray-haired man shook his head like a wet dog shedding water. “It doesn’t matter if she’s the president of the USA. These bones are not ours to give. I’ll put the request in myself to get more appropriate help. And we have two more students coming tomorrow. One’s parents are good friends with my brother.”
Rosen felt herself going red in the face with anger and frustration. Albert stepped beside her and placed a light, restraining arm upon her shoulder.
“I’ll ask the others,” Hargraves said then. “But is there another solution for… this problem you’re talking about?” She looked at Rosen, and seemed deadly serious about helping.
“More necromancers,” Rosen replied. “Summon at least two more to come here. Then maybe between the three of us we can do what one can’t.”
“More necromancers?” Sten spluttered. “You’d defile these bones further?”
“Sten, shut up, you’re making yourself look like an idiot,” Hargraves muttered, but the accusation didn’t go down too well with him. He threatened her job, huffed and puffed some more, then slunk out, most likely to round up all the people who supported him, and to eject Rosen from the facility. Hargraves said she couldn’t make any promises, but she’d look into securing more necromancers. As soon as possible, if she wanted to make sure Sten didn’t get his way.
The sooner, the better. Hargraves exploited Rosen for any extra information she was able to glean of the history of the bones, that she might not have considered before. Then Rosen and Albert retired to their suite, though Rosen no longer felt particularly comfortable with staying nearby the bones.
“I don’t think they’re going to destroy them,” Albert said, after Rosen had flumped out on the bed. “There seems to be too much protocol around them.”
“That’s the message I obtained as well, yes.” Rosen clapped her hand over her eyes and groaned. “It’s worse than I thought. I mean, I suspected it might be a stubborn spirit, but no one had mentioned about those accidents, or bothered linking the accidents to the presence of the bones. That spirit’s about to turn full-on revenant,” she said. “And it’s so twisted. It’s not the person it was when alive anymore. It’s some grotesque magnification of all their worst traits. Their need for vengeance.” A thought occurred to Rosen. “Hargraves mentioned surviving family members, didn’t she?”
“Yeah...” Albert appeared to wrack his brains for a moment. “Tremaine, I think the family name was.”
“Tremaine… Tremaine...” Rosen fumbled for her cellphone, logging into the institute’s free WiFi to crawl through the internet for information on “Tremaine – Samhain – McKenna.” The combined keywords brought her up a rather old, wealthy Lasthearth family. And it seemed their current patriarch was on the council. With her father.
“Jesus,” she whispered softly. No wonder the name had felt scratchingly familiar. It was a small coincidence, as most old families seemed to settle in Lasthearth sooner or later, since it had the cheapest properties and more picturesque land around it than the other cities. Compared to the grim contours of Stoneshire, Lasthearth was vibrant and colorful.
Albert watched her as she scurried for information, jotting down what she could, including a new plan of the things she needed to do. Which involved cajoling Hargraves to try and get her sister and father to come to Stoneshire. They’d be the closest, easiest necromancers to obtain, though they weren’t officially registered with the task force. Her father was in civil services, for sure, and sometimes worked as a consultant… but surely Talia’s status as an archeology student would gain her some traction with an institute dedicated to bones, artifacts, and students.
“Are you always like this?” he asked, yanking her out of concentration.
“Huh?”
“Always running ahead at full steam. Always planning the next thing. Never staying in the present?”
She blinked, then stared at him in bemusement. “This is a little heavy right now, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think so. Seems to me that you have very little time for yourself.”
“There’s too much to do,” she said curtly, pretending to focus back on her phone, though in reality, her concentration was off, since she was busy mulling over Albert’s words.
“There’s no need to schedule your entire life. Sometimes it can help to live in the present. Forget about what’s waiting.”
She put her phone away. “You’re paid to protect me. Not philosophize or point out things.”
“I know, Miss Grieves. But I can’t help but notice all this. How long are you planning to stay here?”
“As long as it takes to make sure that Laogh’s spirit doesn’t harm other people. I can book an extra week off. Even if I can’t stop it directly, I can lessen some of the negativity her spirit exudes.”
“Okay, so you might book extra time off. What about James, then?”
Ah.
James. The mere mention of the name seemed to draw her brain to a screeching stop, and that horrible, nauseating feeling of guilt crept through her body. “He knows the deal with my job. Sometimes I need the extra time. Accidents and emergencies don’t stop because we want them to, after all.”
He knew what he was signing up for, she wanted to say, but let that thought die before it left her mouth.
“Hmm,” Albert said. The type of hmm that conveyed doubt, disbelief, and slight judgment of her life choices. The guilt quickly prickled into annoyance.
“It’s none of your business, anyway. All relationships hit rough spots at some point. That’s just a fact of life.”
And not all people can fix those rough spots… She only had to think of her own parents to have a chill settle in her gut.
“Seems like you’re avoiding your partner, if I’m honest with you.”
“I’m not,” she snapped, incensed. “I’m just busy. I can’t help what’s thrown at me.”
“Sure,” Albert said, which wasn’t a satisfactory response at all. The seconds passed, and Rosen felt the need to fill up the silence.
“It’ll be alright.”
Albert simply smiled at her, and that was enough to crack the sudden, almost child-like doubt within. She hated herself suddenly, with a burning fervor that surprised even her. “I need him,” she said. “Because if not him… then I don’t know who else.”
At this, Albert appeared completely puzzled. As if what she’d just said was madness. “What on earth do you mean? You think no one would be interested in you?”
When he put it like that, it did sound rather stupid, to be honest. Stupid and childish. The kind of notion a teenager might have. Not an adult like her.
“Well… no,” she said, rather sheepishly. “I should think the reason obvious.”
Her bodyguard’s stark yellow eyes regarded her. “Because you’re a necromancer?”
“Bingo.” She rubbed the back of her neck, while lying on the bed. He knew already, and it helped to confirm her own view. “People don’t exactly line up to date necromancers.”
“That doesn’t seem to be a good enough reason to stay in a relationship, though,” Albert pointed out rather delic
ately. “Maybe Mr. Fraser doesn’t mind what kind of magic you use, but he does mind how the relationship is going at the moment, doesn’t he? And you don’t seem to want to spend a lot of time with him.”
“And you gained all of this information over a few days?” Rosen said, angry and amused at the same time.
“You started arguing within moments of me arriving at your place,” Albert said, causing Rosen to wince. “Most people at least take a little longer to reveal their issues. But your issues came out instantly. Whatever’s happening has been happening for a while. Since it exploded so quickly.”
Rosen let out a grunt that might have meant anything, not really wanting to answer this, but Albert simply smiled.
“If it makes you feel any better, there are… definitely people out there who would be interested in you. Even with your type of magic. People who don’t care. And people who can learn to love someone.”
“Huh.” Rosen arched an eyebrow at him, allowing herself a smile though she didn’t feel it. “Know anyone, then, who might?”
“I might,” he said, and left it at that.
“What?” she said, smiling and feeling slightly alarmed at the faster stuttering of her heart, because he’d left that incredibly ambiguous. “Be less vague.”
“I wasn’t being vague.”
She sat up quickly. “If you’re suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, then that would be inappropriate.” Certainly as inappropriate as the strange, chewy sensation she felt at the realization someone else might be interested in her. Not something to act upon, necessarily… but something that made her feel more powerful, somehow.
“I know, Miss Grieves. I have no plans to do anything about it. But I feel it important that you know there are others who like you.”
He didn’t seem to be lying. His expression was deadly serious. It always looked deadly serious. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”
“Don’t forget it. Whatever you may feel about Mr. Fraser, it won’t be the end of the world. There are always others. And I’m sure many would be proud to consider you their girlfriend.” With that, he looked away, breaking the intense eye contact, the odd, invisible crackle of electricity between them. She shrugged away the strange, animal impulse that wanted to approach him, to take him up on his words.