“You’re not surprised,” I rasped, locking my knees to keep me upright. “You knew.”
The rich navy of his gaze was a punch to my gut, a wordless confirmation.
The smidgen of resolve I had gathered around myself crumbled. “How did…?”
Black mist spun across the surface of his skin, hiding his expression, the vortex cloaking him in midnight.
A vortex of midnight.
“It was you. In my dream.” Legs buckling, hope failing, I sank onto the floor. “You were there.”
All that dark power had cocooned him, embraced him…devoured him.
“I—” I bit my lip, tried again. “I remember now.”
The voice pleading with me to heed his warnings, the figure clawing at his face after I failed to listen…was Linus.
Linus had been there, in Woolly, with me, when my world ended for the second time.
Just like that, the other shoe dropped, and it squished my hopes and dreams flat as pancakes.
A gasp broke free of my chest, and then another and another.
Lungs burning, I gulped oxygen until I choked from swallowing. Not enough. Never enough. I scratched at my throat, raking furrows in my skin. I couldn’t breathe. The walls pressed closer, suffocating me. Air whistled through my teeth. No use. It was no use. None of it.
Linus caught my hands and pinned them down at my sides before I clawed myself bloody.
The peaceful afterlife I had imagined for Maud had been just that—a dream.
The nightmare—that was reality. Hers and mine. And neither of us could wake from it.
How much of what I dreamed was real? Accurate? How much was tainted by drugs and time and Atramentous? There was only one way to find out, and that was by asking the man across from me to tell me the truth, even if it hurt, even if it left us both raw and empty.
“Let me go,” I rasped, and he folded his hands in his lap.
Wiping my face dry on the hem of my shirt, I focused on my breathing until my pulse stopped roaring in my ears and my breaths came easier. I don’t know how long I sat there while my hiccupping sobs tapered into a breathless quiet that ended with puffy eyes and a graveled voice.
“I found Maud sprawled on the carpet like she had fallen. Blood everywhere. Her chest…” I rubbed my throat, but it didn’t help. Maybe nothing would ever again. “Someone killed her and cut out her heart.”
“They wanted to punish her,” he said softly. “They took the heart to prevent us from performing the culmination.”
“They must have hated her,” I whispered, “to do that.”
The culmination was a ceremony where, hours after death, the heart was removed and burned to ash to release the spirit. The remains got swept into a box for the mantle. Necromancers didn’t bother with the rest. The graves. The flowers. Our bodies got incinerated then left for the wind to collect. It was the heart that mattered, and someone had taken hers.
I dropped my face into my hands and wept. I’m not sure where I found the tears. I should have run out by now. No one person should be able to hurt so much at once without dying.
The Grande Dame had entrusted Maud’s heart to me, the remains encased in a gold box, meaning they had recovered it at some point, but it must not have offered them any leads as to her killer’s identity.
Woolly gathered her consciousness around me, soothing as best she could, but I was hollow.
“Tell me the truth.” I couldn’t look him in the eye. “All of it.”
“I came to spend the weekend with Maud.” Entire minutes lapsed before he continued. “I was on break at Strophalos, and she had a new project she wanted a second opinion on. I met Mother for lunch. She wanted to see me, pretend hurt that I hadn’t stayed with her, but she wanted to know what her sister was working on more. When I got back to Woolly…” A horrible finality laced his voice. “I was too late.”
“Maud was dead when you arrived,” I said, not exactly a question.
“Yes.” Exhaustion made it sound like he had dragged the word up from his toes to his mouth. “You must have beaten me there by minutes.” He drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them like a child in need of comfort he knew better than to expect would come from anyone other than himself. “You were covered in blood, scooping handfuls off the floor to fill the hole in her chest.”
I crushed my eyes shut, but that didn’t stop me from hearing the rest.
“You were in shock. I was screaming at you to stop, to listen, but you didn’t hear me. You had covered her body in sigils I had never come across in all my studies.” He rested his forehead on his arms. “I couldn’t read them, but I could guess what they did.”
“I was trying to bring her back.” The horror of it struck me anew. “I was trying to resuscitate her.”
But necromantic magic doesn’t work on necromancers. We have one life, and that’s all. No extensions.
“Maud had no heart. She couldn’t return to her body. She wouldn’t have survived.” He kept going, voice going lower. “You called her soul, and it had nowhere to go.” He was barely whispering now. “I did what I had to do. I did the only thing for her—for you—that I could. I claimed her soul, bonded her to me as a wraith. That way at least she would be released into the afterlife when I died. Otherwise…”
Maud, one of the greatest necromancers of our time, would have been reduced to a flickering lamppost.
“But your sigil changed her.” Linus kept going, his voice muffled by his knees. “She was…something I have never seen before or since. I didn’t understand until I bound us. I had never bonded to a wraith, only read about it, but she…altered me.”
At last the true reason for all the side effects of bonding with a wraith were revealed.
Cletus was no ordinary wraith, and Linus no ordinary necromancer after their union.
Without the culmination, Maud would have been doomed to afterlife as a shade. The necromantic equivalent of ghosts, shades were imbued with the magic of their former lives. That power, and their ability to absorb energy from others, made them dangerous. Their hunger, over time, bloated them on power until they grew strong enough to possess the living.
That’s what happened to Ambrose.
That’s what created a…dybbuk.
Oh, goddess.
Someone must have hated Maud very much indeed to condemn her to an eternity as a parasite.
“I stopped sleeping, and then I stopped eating. My core temperature dropped, and I started manifesting the tattered cloak. The scythe came later, after I became hungry for…other things.” He glanced up then, and I met his gaze on reflex. His smile was brittle and terrible, and I wish I had never seen it. “I documented it all.”
“Of course you did,” I said softly, mind reeling with the implications.
“I’m not a dybbuk.” He tossed it out there before I could shape my thoughts, my words, into the damning question. “She and I struck no bargain, and our joining was only voluntary on my end. Even wraiths get a choice. They can bond or decline. She had none. I took it from her.”
The old house pressed in on me, and I sensed Linus through her. The scope of his pain was staggering. No wonder he sat before telling his side of the story. He might have collapsed otherwise.
“All this time, Amelie and Boaz have blamed me for the decisions they made in their lives, of their own free will.” I wiped my face dry with the backs of my hands. “I did this to you. I made you what you are.”
“An Eidolon.” He stared at the wall in front of him, at nothing. “A phantom.”
Eidolon. First a dybbuk and then vampires had hurled the word at Linus. But it wasn’t a title, it was a classification. “What does it mean?”
“The essence of other wraiths sustains me. I don’t devour them the way a dybbuk does, I gather them to me. They’re each a patch in the cloak I wear. Our joining is…symbiotic. They could separate if they wish, but I give them substance. Most choose to stay, at least for a little while, until they grow
strong enough to leave again. Maud is the only wraith within my control strong enough to manifest.”
All those wraiths tied to him. Maud bound to him. Because of me. Because I was weak. Because I was selfish. Because I had been a child who had lost too much and refused to be alone again.
“How can you stand to look at me?” I hid my face behind my cupped hands. “How can you stand to be in the same house as me, the same city?” The same city… But he didn’t live in Savannah. I dropped my palms to the floor to steady myself after this latest wretched revelation. “You moved to Atlanta because of this, because of me. You’re a potentate because I—”
“What I am,” he said, cutting me off, “I’ve done to myself. I’m unnatural, an aberration that shouldn’t exist.”
“No.”
“I’m a predator, Grier. Don’t pretend otherwise. You’ve seen me. I hunt because the urge drives me, not because I’m a good or decent person. I didn’t accept the mantle of potentate for Atlanta’s sake. I took it for myself.” He unfolded a bit, but not for the sake of comfort. He still looked miserable. “Potentates do bond with wraiths. Powerful necromancers do take on more than one. The position gave me a reason to hunt, an excuse for violence. It protects me, camouflages me, and I do my best to atone for my deceit by giving my all to my city.”
Giving his all. He had certainly done that. He had given everything he had and then some. For me.
“I have to see…Cletus.” I stood before I lost my nerve. “I’m going to the porch.”
Linus kept his head bent, his gaze distant, his hands laced on his lap where they twitched like he wanted to reach for me but didn’t dare try.
Downstairs, I procrastinated under the foyer chandelier, telling myself I was waiting for Linus to join me. But he didn’t come. Through Woolly, I saw he remained where he’d set down his burden, the twisted chains of his past anchoring him to the spot.
Finally, I worked up the courage to ask the old house, “Do you remember how Maud died?”
The lights dimmed, the walls leaning in, and the wet gurgle of the water heater sounded like a sob.
Hands balled into fists, fingernails pricking palms, I readied myself for the truth. “Can you show me?”
Eyes shut, I waited for the deluge, for the movie to play along the backs of my eyelids that would put the past to rest.
Only the blackness of expectation greeted me.
“I don’t understand.” I probed her consciousness. “Why can’t you share what happened that night?”
Woolly broadcasted a series of images: Maud climbing the stairs from the basement, the front door opening, and then…nothing.
“You don’t know, do you?” I placed my open palm against the door. “You didn’t see.”
The list of people Maud would have welcomed into her home wasn’t all that long. The list of people able to bypass Woolly in her heyday was shorter still. Other than myself, Linus was the only one I could name off the top of my head. Odette would know the details, if there were any, but she wasn’t here to ask.
“What’s the first thing you remember after that?”
An overhead shot of me kneeling in blood, screaming for Maud, flashed in my head. The perspective was skewed, but the scene came straight out of my dreams.
Through her, I watched Linus choose to finish what I started. I watched him buck and writhe as her soul knitted together with his, heard him scream until he lost his voice. And when it was done, when he had condemned himself, he looked at me with eyes gone full black. I recoiled from him, from what I had done, and the mask of Scion Lawson snapped into place, obscuring the fathomless pools of his gaze.
Even then, he had shielded the worst of himself from me, and I had been too blind to notice.
“It will be all right.” His hands were bloody when he reached for me, but mine were too, and he was all I had in that moment. I hugged him close, sobbing against his shoulder, his arms stiff as wood around me. “We’ll find out who did this, and I promise they will pay.”
The rest of Woolly’s recollection showed him calling for help that would come too late, and the way the Elite stormed the house. Their gazes fastened on me, on the blood covering me from head to toe, and the verdict was passed on the spot.
Guilty.
Traitor.
Murderer.
One sentinel hooked his arms around my middle, hauling me away from Linus like I might pose a threat to him, while another one clamped down on Linus’s shoulders to keep him kneeling. Linus held on to me, our hands grasping, but the blood made our fingers too slick to clasp, and the Elite pulled us apart.
Three more Elite piled on Linus when he started swinging at them. They knocked him down and shoved his face in the blood to keep him from coming after me. I was howling for him, for Maud, for anyone to help me.
Woolly had been oddly inert. I remembered that now. How the Elite burst into my home and dragged me kicking and screeching out the door without any pushback from the old house who would have given her life, such as it was, to protect me.
The last flash showed the black look Linus turned on the Elite while he struggled to hold on and not explode into the grim creature now prowling beneath his skin, eager for the fight, ready to kill for me.
As a boy I sometimes ate across the table from, he had been willing to end lives to save mine.
This was in the aftermath of Maud’s death. How much worse must his reaction have been when I was sentenced to Atramentous? How much deadlier had his rage grown before he harnessed his new appetites? How much agony had he endured knowing I had bound him to a creature, a shadow of a woman he loved like a mother, who bore no resemblance to her at all, who would never be more than an extension of his will?
Until I started changing the wraith, twisting its purpose, opening its eyes.
The dark pulse of hope that she might continue to heal I crushed underfoot with each measured step onto the porch. It would hurt too much to believe she might be restored when there was so much we didn’t know about my condition and how my blood affected others.
Cletus waited for me with a rose torn from its bush dangling from one hand.
Linus must have sent him.
Her.
Maud.
“Thanks.” I accepted the flower, Maud’s favorite variety, and inhaled the fragrant bloom. “I don’t know what to say.” I reached for the wraith, and he—she—took my hand in her bony fingers. “This is all my fault. I did this to you. I don’t know how much you remember, how much you understand, but I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, for all of this. I should have let you go. I shouldn’t have tried to hold on. It was wrong of me, and…” A fresh sob from a seemingly endless supply choked me. “What can I do? How can I make this better? For you? For Linus?” The papery skin covering those long fingers stroked my cheek in a caress I should have recognized a thousand times over but hadn’t given a second thought. “Are you…?”
Okay.
What a stupid thing to ask. What a stupid thing to wonder. What a stupid, selfish wish.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
A low moan rattled the wraith’s throat, the closest she could come to speaking, but I swear I heard my name in the sound.
“I’m going to spend the day on Abercorn.”
I spun away from the wraith to find Linus standing a few steps behind me. “You’re leaving?”
Surprise widened his eyes before he shuttered them, hiding his emotions behind a mask.
Hurt, anger, and grief welled in me, and I was about to light into him, but he raised a hand to silence me.
“You need time to think.” He adjusted the strap on the bag slung over his shoulder. “You have decisions to make.”
“I want Ma—Cletus—to stay with me.” I kept hold of the wraith. “I don’t want to let her—him—go just yet.”
“I understand.” He eased past me, careful not to brush my shoulder. “Lethe is waiting for you in the kitchen with Corbin. Hood is on patrol.”
“Linus?”
/>
He took the steps but hesitated in the grass. “Yes?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“The Cletus you first met is the only Cletus I had ever known until you. Wraiths are spirit and bone. They follow orders, they don’t make their own decisions. They don’t think, they don’t feel. They exist. That’s all.” He almost glanced back, the muscles in his neck twitching, but he wouldn’t look at me. “I would have told you if there was anything left of her, but there wasn’t, there still might not be, and giving you hope would have been cruel.” His head came up when lights splashed over the driveway. “I broke your friendship rules.” No more lying, no more omissions, no more skulking, no more attempting to get in the basement. Those had been my rules. “I omitted the truth about Cletus. It was a choice within my control, and I made it. Punish me however you see fit. I accept your ruling without question.”
Punish.
Of course, he would expect me to hurt him. Tit for tat. That’s what he had been taught. That’s all he knew. And I had warned him if he broke my trust again, I was done.
The urge to follow through with my threat, to cut him off cold turkey, was there. I didn’t want it to be. I wanted to be better than this. But I was heartsore. And I was so very tired of being hurt by those I cared for most.
That didn’t stop me from following him to the gate, taking his hand, and drawing the protective sigil on his wrist.
I didn’t say anything, and neither did he. He was out of words, and I had yet to find mine.
A crimson sedan pulled to a stop at the curb, and the driver got out, nodding to me and then Linus.
I turned away, unable to watch him get in the car, unable to bear him leaving, unable to ask him to stay.
Tires crunched as the sedan pulled back into the street. A wrenching pain in my chest made me wonder if this was how Maud felt having her soul ripped from her body.
Lethe met me halfway to the porch, tackled me with a bone-crunching hug, and we sank onto the grass in a tangle of limbs. Collapsing against her, my head on her shoulder, my tears soaking her shirt, I let the grief sweep me away, right up the stairway into my head, where there was no pain.
How to Live an Undead Lie (The Beginner's Guide to Necromancy Book 5) Page 9