by Lisa Daniels
She’d tried perusing the shitty magazines in the waiting area, had Janos take her phone from her completely to stop looking at bad news and vitriol, and once, under a fresh wave of anxiety, found him patting her back, not saying anything, but offering the comfort of his presence. Not really used to being comforted in this manner, and especially by men, she had no idea how to react. Except maybe to accept it.
“I didn’t know you could be nice,” she muttered to him as his hand made soothing circles upon her back.
“I can be nice,” he muttered back, not stopping his motion. “And it’s either do something, or watch you wallow some more in abject despair. My mother used to do this to me when I felt bad. Maybe it helps.”
“It does help a little,” she admitted, “but I keep imagining the worse things that can happen. And I keep having bad dreams at night. Always someone suffering and dying in them. Feels like I made this happen.”
All because I dared to venture too deep, entering that monochrome blur of the Other Side.
She still couldn’t shrug off the feeling that she brought something back with her that shouldn’t have been brought back.
When one of the surgeons came out, she leaped to attention when he approached her. His grave expression sent a kick of fear into her stomach.
“You are Miss Grieve, yes?” he asked softly, his voice in that special tone reserved for soothing others. She gripped Janos’ wrist hard, and the werewolf used his other hand to squeeze hers in a comforting grip. “I have some news for you. You may want to sit down to hear it.”
“No. Tell me like this.”
“As you wish.” The doctor with the sad, brown eyes cleared his throat. “The operation for Rosen Grieve was a success—she sustained injuries that were reasonable to deal with, if still critical at the time. Rickard Grieve, however… I’m afraid the injuries to him are rather extensive. He is currently in a coma, but his brain shows no activity. We will, of course, keep him and monitor to see if there is any improvement… but it’s my duty to inform you now that there is a possibility that Rickard Grieve may never wake up again.”
“Right,” Talia said stiffly, her head bobbing, feeling wobbly and loose. All her insides had turned to Jell-O, and the news sank into her like a poison. Her father… brain damaged? In a coma? And her sister still in recovery… She had to—she had to tell her mother. Caroline had to know what happened to her husband and daughter, if she didn’t already suspect something had happened.
I have to tell her, Talia thought numbly. There was a stone wedged in her chest. A heaviness to her feet that she couldn’t shake away.
“I’m sorry,” Janos said softly as the doctor asked if she wanted to see her father. She agreed, just because refusing seemed like a worse idea, but she didn’t want to see her father in a coma. Didn’t want to think about all those ill-wishers longing for his death. He was supposed to offer change. Make life better for necromancers and supernaturals in general. He had aspirations to seek out healers as well and build a business with them to counter the rising prices of the medical market. He might have been stern at times, but he did care. Even if she hadn’t chosen the kind of career he approved of, why else resort to training her, when it was clear she might be in danger? Why else act like a father when it mattered?
Janos was allowed to follow her into the room after a brief hesitation, and she saw her father lying there, wrapped in white sheets, lines and wires sprouting around him like twigs, and the steady, slow beep of the EKG.
The numbness continued to knife her inside, leaving little room for mourning. She couldn’t—no—refused to think that her father was no more. Rickard still had so many things to do. So much to offer. More than she might ever offer. All that magical training he’d endured certainly couldn’t stop a normal car accident from taking him out. It was an insult to his prowess, really. An insult to everything they had endured.
Part of her expected Rickard to wake up, to say something to the effect of it takes more than this to kill a Grieve, but there was nothing. She wondered if she’d find her father’s soul on the Other Side. She didn’t want to look. A faint whispering tinged her ears, and she felt something dark and heavy lift off her. For a moment, that heavy darkness lingered over her father’s still form, but when she blinked, it was gone, and she wondered if she imagined the whole thing. It was possible, given the nightmares, the stress, her tenuous contact to the Other Side giving her closer proximity to the spirits there.
When she did dare peek, she saw nothing out of the ordinary, other than the souls that you sometimes saw in a hospital, as it was a heavy place, a place of death and the desperate fight for life. She dreaded finding her father’s and sister’s souls among the small selection there, but there was nothing. She risked probing deeper, further—but the thing that troubled her most was that her father’s body didn’t contain anything. He wasn’t there—he wasn’t in the Other Side. It was as if he had ceased to exist.
With a gasp, she pulled out of the Other Side. Janos took one look at her features and wrapped her up into a hug. The first hug she’d ever experienced from him. Warm and enveloping, with his chest like a cushion, his chin tucked against the top of her head. The contact made her shake harder, until tears burst out of her eyes and slithered down her cheeks like snail tracks, and grief hit her in a huge wave.
Hard, firm hands stroked her hair, ruffling it up. He said no words, only stroking her and offering himself through the storm. She cried it all out, but still felt numb, as well as exhausted.
“You can’t find him?” he asked delicately. She appreciated him in that moment for remembering her power, for knowing that might be the first thing she’d consider doing.
“He’s nowhere. Not in his body, not in the Other Side.” But I thought I saw something about him for a moment—a shadow of sorts. She didn’t want to frighten Janos with speculation, however. She couldn’t see him reacting well, and she wanted this closeness for a little longer. How long had it been since she had felt like this? Her brief forays into relationships didn’t exactly end well, and her sister wasn’t the best at showing emotion. They both sought comfort, it seemed, in their pets, living and dead.
The strokes eventually slowed. “What does it mean for the estate—your family—if your father isn’t around?”
“My mother has to come back. She’ll need to set things straight. Decide if we’d keep this place or… or sell it.” Thinking about something helped provide a distraction for Talia. Instead of… that, better to start planning ahead. Without any response from her father, she said a few last words, hoping they wouldn’t be last words, knowing in her heart they were. Then she left the ward, not yet allowed to see her sister until two hours later. She didn’t leave the hospital, but ate within its shoddy cafeteria, barely managing two bites of the cake that was on offer there. Janos had a little more of an appetite. She nursed her cup, Janos offering a steady presence the whole time, and ventured towards her sister when allowed. When Rosen demanded that they give it to her straight, of course, they had to.
Rosen took it with a more stoic expression, and a leaden “Oh.” She seemed too exhausted to handle more, so they left her in peace, after a quick, sisterly hug, made awkward by all the wires and the position of Rosen on the bed.
“What the hell do I do?” Talia whispered to Janos, after they had made their way back home and informed the workers and her friends.
“Tell your mother,” Janos replied. She didn’t want to just yet. If she messaged her mother, the woman would be angry that Talia resorted to text or voicemail to announce such an important thing. Yet she couldn’t exactly sit on it, either.
I’ll do it later. It’ll be fine.
She sat with Janos in the garden, half happy with his sympathy, half annoyed by it, because she wanted to have reasons to dislike him, but he was giving her reasons not to. Any attraction and interest in him beyond that, though, was dried up in light of the news slamming into her. His yellow eyes, which once looked at her w
ith so much hatred, were softened, more accepting.
There was also something else less easily definable in his expression. She couldn’t quite figure it out, and when she asked him what he was thinking, he actually winced.
“It doesn’t matter right now. It can wait.”
“What can wait? Talk to me. Please.”
“I...” He shook his head, clearly reluctant to say what was on his mind. So she turned her puppy-dog eyes upon him. He gave a little snort of disgust. “Fine. I was thinking… two things, actually. One—if your father is gone, will this mean the termination of my contract? Or will I continue to be paid?”
Her heart hardened at these words, but of course, the person being paid to protect her would want to know if he was still necessary. “I’m sure you have a standing order set of payments that will persist.”
Do I get rid of him, or honor my father’s wish? And is it necessary to still have him, when there is no necromancer in a prominent position anymore?
“But do you want me protecting you, still?”
“I don’t know,” she said truthfully. “What was your second… thought?” She braced herself for it, holding a metaphorical umbrella to the storm.
“My thinking is… that I’m not entirely sure this is an accident,” Janos said. “It’s far too convenient, two necromancers being hit in their car by a drunk driver. We know there’s another necromancer trying to make life harder for you guys. So I was wondering if… if...”
“If the drunk driver was a dead body,” Talia answered with a chill in her voice. “Is that what you’re hinting at?”
“We have to be open to the possibility.” His nose twitched. “I think it’s time we paid a visit to the morgue.”
* * *
They had to arrange it with Rosen Grieve first. Rosen called the police department to explain that her younger sister wanted to interrogate the drunk driver’s soul, if it was still hanging around. If the soul in the body was even the same soul, if the drunk driver was revived by necromancy. And then Rosen promised she’d call their mother, which left Talia feeling both relieved and guilty. Relieved because she didn’t have to endure that dreaded conversation, and guilty because she’d thrust all responsibility onto her sister’s lap like a coward.
Stepping into her sister’s place of work was strange, to say the least. She bore some similarities in appearance, and had seen the men and women before on guest visits, but never before had she come here with a purpose to use the facilities, to use the morgue room of the hospital to glean results. She needed to get permission directly from the office, a consultant badge, and a police detective to tag along with her before she attended the morgue.
Within the morgue, they were still waiting to perform the autopsy, and the body was in one of the shelves, cool and ready to be pulled out.
Detective Camilla picked at her teeth as she examined the body, which certainly looked as if it’d been involved in a car accident. “Can’t believe this sucker tried to do in Rosen. Pisses me off, thinking about it. And I’m with your bodyguard—I think it’s a deliberate attempt to bring down the necros.”
“You do?” Talia raised an eyebrow at her. The medical examiner watched them both and Janos with a rather nervous air about him. He was small, scrawny, with pale skin that suggested he either hated sunlight or was allergic to it.
Camilla in comparison was cool, confident, with a mess of wiry, black curls tied into a severe knot, leaving a large rabbit scut of hair reaching down to her neck. Rosen had mentioned some things about Camilla Arlove, who also seemed to be Rosen’s regular partner when it came to tasks.
“Of course.” Camilla gave a grim smile. “I’m a necromancer as well. But a very bad one.”
“You are?” Talia said in utter astonishment, while Janos scowled at her.
“Yes. But… let’s just say I don’t have those powers right now.” She held up her arm, which showed a faint white scar just below her elbow. “Got an implant to stop myself being able to use it.”
“Why?”
“Easier. Was never very good at it, and I mighta had a few… mishaps.” Her grin seemed false to Talia, somehow, but she decided not to comment upon it. She couldn’t imagine having her powers stripped away like that. She hated the thought that someone might impose something of that effect upon her. There was probably more to the story, but the flippantly dour Camilla wasn’t about to share with her. “But since I have some understanding of the whole shebang, they grouped me with your sister. Nice of them, really. Letting us hang out among our own kind. Now… let’s get this corpse talking.”
Janos seemed rather alarmed at her attitude. She didn’t blame him for it. She’d be alarmed at Camilla’s manner as well. It almost sounded disrespectful, but Talia suspected it was that whole “gallows” humor people tended to develop when they associated with death and subject matter relating to the darker side of humanity. Her sister had it. She also had it to a degree. Something in the brain switched. Either they became weighed down by the burden of all that darkness, or engineered a kind of coping mechanism to ensure that the darkness was kept at bay. Becoming a little twisted in themselves, but not broken.
The Other Side within the confines of the morgue was an awful, gibbering place. No souls loitered upon the first, easier layer, meaning they were all resilient to some degree. With an ill knot inside her, she ventured within, seeing the dancing white lights of the living souls of Camilla, the M.E., and Janos in the distance, like beacons shining upon a still and calm sea. Distorted whispering flooded her ears, and she swam through the deeper layers, watching the colors bleed out of the world. Soon she was down to sepia tones, brown-black-gray white, and there the majority of the morgue souls lingered.
At once, she saw that many of them had suffered when it came to their deaths. Souls caught in traffic accidents, gunshots, and sometimes just the overreaching fear of dying in general, and refusing to accept the final death. They began drifting towards her, because her presence was different, alien—but her purpose was to find the original soul of the drunk driver.
No such soul lingered. Souls matched the other bodies in the complex, but none had a strong alignment to the deceased she sought.
What does this mean? What can this imply?
It troubled her, for sure. Maybe the soul had moved on. Some did—some felt satisfied enough to vanish. But in violent deaths… usually there was some dissent. Time for them to make sense of their new, horrible situation, and either dwell in denial, go the path of anger and vengeance, or boil passively in the background until they faded away into nothingness.
One soul grabbed her attention, however. Drifting in the background, it held a sense of not belonging, yet still loitered in the area nonetheless. Recently tethered to a body or bones that it did not belong to—and to her surprise, she recognized the soul.
The old, crotchety man. The one who did egregious things in his life, who hated women, who spoke keenly enough to her once she got him to open up about his sins. The one who identified strongly with his living name: Thomas Miller.
What the hell are you doing here? You should be closer to my home. You should be thinking your old vile thoughts there. Annoyed, she approached Miller’s spirit, and he pulsed in recognition, stretching out his horrible tendrils to probe about her.
“Ah… I knew you’d come.”
Damn fucking right I would. She Commanded him to enter the body, and he did so with a baleful aura, though he was more eager than baleful.
“The whore summons me again,” were his first words when he sat up in the body, eyes now shimmering a ghostly blue. She hadn’t yet given him the Command to respect her, or even to not kill her, and hastily delivered the fail-safes.
“You’ve made things far more interesting,” the spirit admitted. “If I wasn’t dead, I’d ask you to be my wife.”
Oh dear god please hell no. “That’s very kind of you to say,” she replied, while Janos covered his mouth, and Camilla instantly looked ready to murd
er Thomas Miller to a second death. The poor M.E. didn’t know what to think. “I’m sure you and the right woman would get on very well.”
“Don’t you know it, girl.”
‘Girl’ was less insulting than ‘whore’ at least. “I Command you to tell me everything that’s happened to you in the past week.” She didn’t know what she was going to glean from him, but she aimed to keep her strokes broad.
“Waiting,” he replied. “Waiting in this stinkin’ body at the B12 Grovend junction. Waiting for a near month, I was.”
When the question arose from the M.E., as it inevitably would, Talia, with the help of Camilla, explained that the spirit could help preserve the flesh for longer if they were dumped into it.
“But his body seems to be in a state of decay consistent with on-scene reports,” the M.E. spluttered.
“I was put in the body straight after it died, weren’t I?” the spirit answered the question at Talia’s prompting. “Nasty business, that. Killing a good, healthy man. I could feel it the moment I was in. Liver failure. Alcohol content so high it could knock out several damn bears.”
“That’d explain the ‘drunk’ part,” Janos muttered. Talia nodded with him.
“You sure he was poisoned?”
“Oh yeah. With the worst moonshine I’ve ever felt, let me tell you. And she—that other whore—she made me wait in that devil machine, day in, day out. Such ungodly things the people of this age have made up—the devil’s grip is everywhere. Y’all going to hell when you die.” He grinned grotesquely, made ugly by the ruined features of the car crash victim.
“I’m sure we are,” Talia said mildly. “We’ve strayed very far from the old ways.”
“Yes, indeed. I told her—I said I didn’t know how to work the devil machine, but she showed me soon enough. And I had to watch for another machine, lookin’ like the councilman’s. Missed him once,” he admitted with a grunt, shaking his head like a rag doll’s. “I started the devil machine too late. But second time he come, stopping at the red light—big, long line like a caterpillar—I could pick him out easy enough. Had himself a whore in there, too. Flattened with the thing I was in. Was like a bird squashing a worm,” he said, sounding far too pleased with himself.