by Lisa Daniels
But for that scenario to happen, it likely meant that the rest of them might be dead. This was her work, of course, but it still felt daunting to consider that this might be the day her work ended. She sent a quick I love you to her mother, sister, and a little more reluctantly, her father. Regardless of what she felt about him at this moment in time, about the deal he made—he was still her father.
Her sister was the only one who replied, instantly asking what was wrong. She knew Rosen only ever admitted to icky feelings like that when she was in real danger.
In a sticky sitch, sis. Not sure if I’ll make it, but we’ve prepared all we can. Hopefully I’ll see you after.
Her sister Talia had replied: Hopefully I’ll get to see you, too. Preferably in the flesh, and not the soul.
A small joke shared between necromancers, but it made her smile all the same.
“Let’s prepare,” Bauman said, and the three necromancers huddled together. They all briefly dipped themselves into the Other Side, checking if they could sense a disturbance. If Laogh was generating such a wave of bad fortune, they should be able to see a ripple when she was close. Rosen certainly saw something, spotting it within seconds, seeing the pulsing gray and red aura advancing on them like a hungry wolf.
Necromancers needed to test their energies, and release some of them into the Other Side as an attempt to negate the bad fortune. Whether it would be enough was another matter entirely. A sense of foreboding crept over her, from the faint taint of a dark soul unleashing its energies. Of thoughts and vengeance gone stagnant and potent, like a still pool which had time to accumulate disease and an unpleasant, cloying texture.
She didn’t like working with unfamiliar necromancers, not knowing their skill levels, their morals, or the kinds of things they had done with their lives. Both were supposed to be with law enforcement, one from another state, one from another country. But you did get corrupt cops mixed in with the good ones.
Albert, prowling in his powerful, sinuous panther form began to growl ominously, the hairs on his black fur bristling, his tail up, rigid and flared to make him bigger. The sight of him sent a small sliver of courage within her, and she mustered the last scraps of her confidence to emanate to the others that she knew what she was doing, and everything was going to be fine.
The darkness crept closer, sending a wave of shadow over the Other Side—a wave ordinary people couldn’t see, as it corrupted the surroundings with bad luck. A distant scream rent the air. The Tremaines were under order to evacuate if it went wrong, but they were needed to bait Laogh back to her bones.
Another scream accompanied the first. And now they felt other souls. Misplaced ones, belonging to the wrong bodies.
“Oh, hell no,” Bauman said, opening her eyes to stare directly into Rosen’s. “She’s resurrecting.”
“You mean you couldn’t sense that already? You must be a bad necromancer,” Gallagher said with a slight snip to his tone.
“Do we counter by doing the same?” asked Rosen. “There’s a cemetery nearby.”
“I think we should save our energy for Laogh alone. We remove the head of the snake and the rest should follow suit.”
Rosen felt uneasy, but agreed. The unease came from realizing that the others with them, the police surrounding the premises, the shape shifters, the other supernaturals who had squeezed their way in, were effectively useless.
The sound of collapsing architecture penetrated their ears, but they waited in the laboratory, pulsing out their bubble of protection, pushing against the noxious bad luck, even as it pushed against them.
A cold chill blasted them, and the door burst open. Shambling, jerky humans forced their way inside, and it only took one glance to see they were raised, all bones and burned faces and recent accidents that never made it to the hospitals.
Albert snarled and lunged himself at the nearest one, toppling it down and raking at it with sharp claws. He knew the drill. A body knitted itself together, but injuring it in the right places ensured that it took longer to pull itself together. That rippling power from him at first inspired the others in the room with them, but it soon turned to dismay when they realized his strength meant nothing.
“Do something!” Sten screamed, spittle flying out of his mouth, eyes wild with terror and disgust. “Don’t just stand there!”
The necromancers ignored him, now holding hands. Bauman’s hand was soft and cool, Gallagher’s rough and callused, beaded with sweat. Rosen’s throat was dry, and her heart beat an anxious staccato, pounding in her ears and drowning out some of the shouts of terror.
They plunged into the Other Side, effectively leaving their bodies comatose and in a trance, searching for Laogh’s essence. Drawn to it like moths to flame, they converged upon it, slipping past the others that were stuffed into bodies, conserving their energy as best as able.
“Laogh McKenna,” Rosen roared, and the spirit stopped in its inexorable advance long enough to register the appearance of three necromancers on her plane. “It’s time for you to move on. Your time has passed. Your desire for revenge is slaughtering many innocents, taking them when it is not their time. You must go.”
A horrible, grating laugh came from the soul. “Go? But I’ve only just started to live again. Why would I want to leave?”
Gallagher held out his astral hands and frowned in concentration. Laogh’s spirit recoiled from his magic, quickly joined by Bauman’s and Rosen’s.
“Never,” she hissed as they squeezed upon the soul, attempting to sever her mortal connections. Three was what it should take. But there was something rotten and resilient in the spirit, something that made her resist the cutting with a hateful tenacity, and exhausted Rosen’s magic, even though she’d been so careful…
Perhaps, perhaps she shouldn’t have spoken to Albert’s father. Perhaps she should have waited, and saved every ounce of her energy for this. Her magic drained away at a terrifying pace as the corrupted soul began to writhe, thrash, and howl in their combined grip.
Gallagher let out a gasp, and a strange blaze of pain entered Rosen’s soul as well, raking from her cheek down to her neck and arm.
Our bodies… they must be under attack, she thought groggily, before giving all her focus onto the soul.
“I shan’t leave!” Laogh shrieked, blood-chilling and knifing deep into Rosen’s soul. “They must suffer! They must die!”
Something brushed over Rosen’s soul, like the passing of a shadow, and in the distance, in the dim awareness she had of the real world, which felt like a dream, like witnessing a world beneath water, or a thick, crusted layer of ice… a panther, slashing at her attackers, furious strength bursting out of his limbs.
“You’ll die,” Laogh promised, starting to laugh demonically as they pressed her in tight, and her soul contracted like a balloon about to explode. “You’ll die and become just like me...”
“A little… more,” Gallagher panted. “I’m afraid I think my physical body is done for.”
“No, it’s not,” Bauman hissed back. “It’s not… endure. Come on...”
Another dim pain flooded Rosen’s leg. Her astral form crumpled to one knee, but she kept pushing, kept fighting, even though she felt like she was being torn in two, and there were screams everywhere, inside and outside and blurring her senses into a kind of drunken shock.
With a last, furious howl, Laogh McKenna’s essence shattered. A white light appeared above the drifting pieces, sucking them up, taking them to the place where all spirits went.
The light. So pretty. So bright. Its warmth called to her, and her soul shuffled closer to it, desperate to feel that warmth.
It promised to take away the pain. All the sorrow, all the things she thought mattered, but didn’t actually matter at all.
Take me, she thought. Take me, take me…
Chapter Ten – Albert
The paramedics shocked Rosen in the ambulance, and Albert watched from the side seat, hands clasped in prayer.
The two paramedics tending to Rosen yelled at each other, scuttling over their patient like ants, efficient as they sought to stabilize her and keep her breathing. The mask went on and they fed her a saline drip to keep her pressure normal. They didn’t know her blood type, so they couldn’t risk a transfusion, even though they did have blood on standby.
Deep cuts ran over Rosen’s face, leaving her smudged in crimson, leaking all the way down one side. He watched her with a kind of numbness.
Despite all his efforts, he’d failed in his duty to fully protect her. There were so many corpses, so many things squashing their way inside and shambling toward the Tremaines—and then suddenly switching targets, going for the three necromancers inside. The police that survived rained bullets on them, but bullets didn’t hurt a soul, just the flesh it was caged in. He’d done everything he could, crippling them as Rosen had suggested, keeping them off the innocents—but when they all rushed toward the trance-laden necromancers, it was all he could do to stop them from completely cutting up the trio. But all three needed the hospital. They were defenseless, like newborn lambs, unable to lift a muscle to fend for themselves.
Please be alright, he prayed as his mind ran through the scenario again, wondering if there was anything he might have done differently. Maybe he could have persuaded them to box themselves in. Maybe he should have expected this and been faster to leap to her defense.
But now he was in the ambulance, tearing its way to the hospital, and not entirely certain she might survive. Though he’d seen worse injuries, there was still a frightening amount of blood lost. A frightening chance for it to all go wrong forever.
When they were bundled out of the van, he stood by helplessly in the waiting room, unable to be of use unless, for some ridiculous reason, assassins turned up at the hospital. He watched the news on the television screen propped up in the room, and saw after five minutes or so that they were reporting the “massacre” at the institution, where a great heap of dead bodies were found, most of the victims plucked from earlier accident scenes. The renowned Esther Leroy was in a coma, with speculation about whether she might ever wake again. The news credited the necromancers for saving the day, but a small part of it wondered how such a situation was allowed to spiral out of control in the first place. Meaning there was a tiny amount of blame upon the necromancers themselves, in a rather indirect way.
And, of course, there were people saying that, well, if necromancy didn’t exist, then none of these problems would have occurred in the first place.
But it did exist, and it couldn’t be eliminated. The Other Side was waiting for all of them when they died. And some people had the ability to access it while alive. That was all.
He found himself growing more irritated with the news the more he watched it, but the others waiting seemed attached to it, soaking up all the thoughts about the institute.
“Nonsense,” one patient said. “A bad luck curse? That can’t be right.”
“My da’s part leprechaun,” another patient piped up, giving the original female speaker a wry look. “He’s able to make people lucky just by association. Says nearly all the leprechauns were wiped out because of it. People wanted their luck. So if someone can give luck, then surely luck can be stolen as well.”
“Can’t be that lucky if you’re here,” the woman shot back, but the young man let out a chuckle.
“I’m here for my wife.” He winked at her, and smiled at Albert. “She works as a nurse, and I thought I’d surprise her by being here early. Best place to wait. Food’s just next door through there.” He jabbed at a door, from where the faint smell of cooking meat drifted, permeating Albert’s sensitive nostrils. The man and woman continued their pointless bickering, but he did reflect on the luck and misfortune aspect. The idea that some things gave it, and some took it away. He’d never particularly considered luck to be a valuable resource, or, well, even a resource.
But given the sheer scale of accidents, and the number of people stuffed in this waiting room, all likely anxious to hear good news about their loved one, the mood settled over him like a grim cloud.
He waited for hours, grabbing some food, occasionally pacing in anxiety, and wondering if Rosen would even want to keep him on as a bodyguard if she recovered.
The moment they had shared between them was just that, after all. A moment.
When he was finally approached by a doctor, told she would recover and had permission to visit her, he almost sobbed in relief. Keeping himself at a calm, steady walk proved difficult when all he wanted to do was sprint and barge through the door into her room. She was propped up on her bed, and there were other beds in the ward as well, most with their privacy curtains up, though hers were open.
“You’re alive, I see,” she said by way of greeting, and he plastered a small grin onto his face.
“I’m not about to die before I make sure everything’s well with you, Miss Grieves. You gave me quite the scare there.”
“Mm.” A shadow seemed to pass over her beautiful face. “What I wouldn’t give for a nice, uncomplicated day, where people actually trust my judgments for once and stop pretending they know better than a person actually qualified to know the things they don’t.”
“All I can say is that they brought it upon themselves, Miss Grieves. But are you alright? Is there anything I can do for you right now?” Will you fire me?
She touched the stitches on her cheek, seven of them. “Thank you for saving my life. I felt it, you know. What you were doing. Even from beyond the veil. You did a good job.”
“You still ended up in the hospital,” Albert said, allowing a trace of bitterness to enter his voice. “And I must say, if your work continues to be this dangerous, you might want to consider hiring more than one guard for your protection.”
“But I only want you.” She flushed as she seemed to realize what her words sounded like, and Albert’s heart did a funny little spasm all by itself, too. Because he wasn’t expecting to hear something like that.
Not too bad for a week of protecting if she now considered him indispensable.
“I am glad you are able to find some satisfaction in my services, Miss Grieves.”
“Oh, definitely,” she said with a light purr. Then she seemed to yank herself back into a more logical frame of mind. “I don’t want to spend any second longer in Stoneshire than necessary. But I know I’ll need to submit a statement to the precinct, confirm with the anthropologists that the bones are safe…” She paused. “Did the others make it?”
“Yes,” Albert said. “Bauman and Gallagher will likely need to spend longer in the hospital than you, but both are fine. So are Sten and Hargraves.”
“Unfortunate about Sten,” Rosen murmured, “but you can’t have it all, I guess.”
Albert laughed, and Rosen lit up.” I’m sure Sten is a wonderful human being in his own right...”
“Just not around me.”
He came closer to her, and when she reached out a hand, his slipped into it without any hesitation. The easy contact surprised him on an inner level, since he didn’t usually encourage intimacy. Except, well, he’d already screwed that rulebook and thrown it out the window.
“I want to thank you again for speaking to my father’s soul,” he said.
“You wanted someone to do this, didn’t you?” she replied, and he looked down at the bed, rather than at her face. “You wanted to get a necromancer to talk to your father. That’s why you carried his ashes around. Just in case he hadn’t left, right?”
“The necromancer I associated with as a child died a long time ago. But he was able to let me speak to my father, and promised to do so again. Sadly, that promise was never fulfilled. I still wanted to protect necromancers, yes… but I did hope that perhaps my father might still be around for that last conversation.”
“It’s a bad thing, to hold a spirit to a promise,” Rosen said, shaking her head and squeezing his hand tight. “I’m sure the necromancer didn’t intend to die, but
by promising to get the spirit to speak to you again, he bound that spirit to stay. That could have easily gone a lot more wrong.”
“I didn’t know,” Albert said. “I really didn’t.”
“It’s not your fault. I’m just glad the spirit remained benign all that time.”
“Could he have given me bad or good luck by staying?”
“Depends. Some spirits might be able to. But there’s no set manual that dictates what exactly they’re going to get. Sorry.”
They continued to talk, letting their subject slip between light and heavy. Happy to both be alive, happy that the spirit was finally banished to beyond.
“Do you feel sorry for Laogh’s spirit?” Albert asked, since he was aware that Laogh McKenna didn’t exactly have the best life possible.
“A little. She was a selfish, vindictive individual when alive, but she was also a victim of circumstance. And bad circumstances breed bad people. People don’t realize that, you know. They think that whatever they had in life, it can be resolved in death. Heaven and Hell, Paradise or Enlightenment—but truthfully, your quirks follow you to the Other Side, and then become magnified. So if you were a bitter and jealous person when alive, you’re a great candidate to become something much worse in death. We get ghosts, poltergeists, ghouls, and even some spontaneous zombies with this selection.”
“Spontaneous zombies?”
“Not all those coffins with scratch marks in them are because the occupant was alive,” she said ominously. Albert shuddered to think about that, but at the same time, he found the talk fascinating. All these things he still didn’t know. And if he stayed around Rosen, he’d learn them all. She seemed more willing to share her secrets than the others, more willing to trust, and that trust was so precious, so fragile, that he was scared to break it.
“My family’s flying in,” she said with a little less relish. “I told them not to waste their time and money, but they insisted. So there’s that, I suppose. I’m surprised you didn’t need to get treatment yourself, by the way.”