by Lisa Daniels
“This is a safe neighborhood,” the man scoffed. “She’s not going to be in danger here.”
“Just because something’s safe one day doesn’t mean it’s safe the next. My recommendation is to always check when you hear the buzzer go off.”
The man’s eyes took on a mean, belligerent glint. “Who do you think you are, coming here and demanding us to do things?”
“A person who is doing the job he’s been paid to,” Albert said, ending the matter, already deciding this partner was an idiot. Rosen had remained mostly quiet, but gave him a small smile as he moved in, and she offered him some leftover take-out, which he gladly accepted. He soon deduced the man’s name was James, and James insisted on showing off that Rosen was his at every opportunity. Looping an arm around her neck, giving her kisses while not taking his eyes off Albert, and one time even reaching down Rosen’s pants, to which she slapped his hand away at last with an exclamation of anger.
“For god’s sake, James, not in front of him.”
“This is our house. We can do what we want,” he muttered, but at least had the decency to look contrite.
“I’m not your little object to paw over just because you feel threatened by the presence of another man,” she said, and Albert casually slid out of the room as they began to explode into an argument.
Didn’t take too long before the demons came bubbling to the surface, then. Usually people kept up the pretense of a perfect family life for a week or so, until the novelty wore off. Then they went straight back to their rotten ways.
They both retired to bed shortly afterwards, but Albert suspected he’d be able to talk to Rosen in the morning. Someone like her would be used to getting up early, likely earlier than her partner. He could have a better discussion with her then, without the constraints of an insecure boyfriend.
* * *
Rosen made him coffee in the morning. Dawn hadn’t even broken, and her partner slumbered in bed, snoring loud enough to awaken the dead.
“Can’t sleep, and I have a lecture, so I may as well stay up to perfect it,” she told him, and he accepted the coffee with a curt nod.
“I’d like to establish some ground rules with you, Miss Grieves—preferably without your partner breathing down your neck.”
“Sure,” she said. “I actually wanted to talk to you before, but James was feeling a little… fragile. He didn’t find out until a few hours before. Mostly I think he’s just upset that he can’t lounge around in his boxers while you’re here.”
Albert patted down the comfortable green sofa he’d been lying on, to get rid of the faint impression of his body. “Men can be strange when it comes to their women. Don’t worry about it. I am fully aware these are not ideal circumstances, but I do insist I’ll try to make it as stress-free as possible between us.”
“Not sure that can be avoided,” she replied wryly, with a smile to match. “This isn’t an arrangement I or James asked for.”
“No, I suppose not.” For a second, a lump caught in his throat. Picturing the necromancer long ago. The one who spoke to his father, who promised to speak with him again. Absently, he touched the locket under his shirt. “But as you know, necromancer lives are in danger. These are dangerous times, and until the crime of harming one becomes a heavy punishment, until people are more accepting… it falls to those like me to ensure that you’re able to do your everyday work. Which I assure you, is important. It’s people like you that help make the world a better place. And I will do everything in my power to keep you alive.”
“How… kind of you,” she said, bemused, but not exactly unopposed to his words. “Though I’m no damsel in distress. I’m trained to be able to protect myself, too.”
“I’m sure you are. Now I must ask: is there any chance of giving me more private space than the sofa? Because I don’t want to be right in the way of your regular routine.”
“No,” she said. “But...” She trailed off. Frowned some more. “I could speak to my father. See if he’d be willing to have me living at his estate. There’s plenty of room there. And my sister also has a bodyguard. You two could go there and talk about bodyguard things.”
“Bodyguard things.” The corner of his mouth curled up. “Yes.” He tapped at his mug. “If this is a feasible arrangement...”
“I’m not exactly thrilled at the idea of being back in his shadow,” she said. “But I think it would be a preferable arrangement to this.” She looked as if she were about to say something else, then decided against it.
They both sipped at their coffees for a moment in amiable silence. “So… what kind of shifter are you, anyway?”
“Panther,” he said, before adding, “The best one there is.”
“Is that so?”
“We’ve better hearing than your average werewolf. We’re faster, more agile...”
“Are you a normal panther or a bipedal one?”
“I’m on four legs,” he said. “You know of the bipedal shifters?”
“My sister has a werewolf one guarding her,” Rosen admitted, and Albert gave a soft whistle.
“Not bad. They’re an expensive type to procure. Your family is well off?”
“You could say that.” Her mouth formed a tight line, and he felt it better not to pry too much into that.
When he asked for her schedule, she ceded it to him with little drama. Quite a busy week, from what he saw, and she meticulously recorded her days. Teaching in the morning, followed by training her sister in the afternoon, and an evening shift at the precinct, before transferring to western Samhain temporarily to solve a cold case in Stoneshire. Which he knew to be the unofficial city where all the scientists and students went. Lasthearth was actually the third-largest city in Samhain, and probably the oldest.
This was a woman who liked to be organized. And probably didn’t appreciate sudden surprises like being assigned security. The main problem about her safety, Albert reflected, was the fact that her partner seemed like the type to do things out of spite. Buzz someone in, for example, just to stick the middle finger up in Albert’s face. Then again, maybe the man would surprise him and buckle up for the ride.
Her partner still wasn’t up by the time she needed to head to Rosewood University, and Albert followed, asking as well if he could drive. Rosen seemed a little reluctant to let someone else drive but sat passenger side anyway, and when he probed her further, she spoke.
“Assassination attempt on my father. I was in the car at the time. Someone T-boned us.”
“Which junction?” he asked sharply. “Can you get it on Google Earth?”
He carefully drove them to the university, and she showed him the location. He nodded thoughtfully to himself. “Yes… I can see why that might be a good spot. Three traffic lights and a zebra crossing… and a blind spot here. A car could wait...” he pointed at the small, grassy knoll that led into a nearby park. Rosen stared at it as well, her expression unfathomable.
“Yeah.” Her voice was a croak. “They came from there.” Pulled up at last, she gave him an appraising look. “Something’s been bothering me about you.”
“What is it, Miss Grieves?”
“I don’t really know how to explain it…” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Okay. Have you worked with necromancers before?”
“I have.” He gave her back the keys to her own car.
“I thought so… you seem to be really relaxed in my presence. You… well, I’m used to there being a little bit of a… warming period.”
“I harbor no ill will for necromancers, Miss Grieves. You can have good ones and bad ones, and that remains true, whoever you are, wherever you’re from. That’s what I’ve learned, anyway.” He gave her the friendliest smile he could muster in his arsenal. Which wasn’t a large arsenal by any means.
“That’s a healthy attitude,” she said, giving him a small smile of her own. “Perhaps I’ll enjoy being protected by you more than expected.”
They shared another smile, the first tr
uly genuine one between them. People didn’t generally enjoy being protected by him. He was just a necessity, and what people wanted tended to sorely clash with what they needed. With that smile, they clambered out of the car, and she headed into the auditorium, ready to give a guest lecture on necromancy, and the work they did in the force.
He saw a small group of about four people near the entrance of the university, holding signs declaring that they didn’t want their children corrupted by the sins of necromancy. One sign was just a “FUK U NEKO” with a picture of an angry skull next to it. He shook his head. Not everyone liked change. Or having their world view challenged. So when they grew up believing necromancers were bad, it was difficult to shake off that kind of thinking. Even to the point where they hunted down news to prove and validate their viewpoints, and dismissed the views that showed something else.
Balance, he reflected. It’s all about balance.
He watched the lecture from his vantage point next to Rosen, in front of hundreds of students. She had a corpse brought in from the morgue, explained how once a corpse had a soul stuffed in it, the soul had no choice but to obey. But there were ways to make the controlling easier. If it was the same body as the soul, for example. If they were initially willing to talk. If they weren’t so consumed by vengeance that they risked turning into a revenant.
“Revenants are the ones we usually find horror stories about,” Rosen explained, coolly pacing around the revived corpse, who stood there with his dead, still face, eyes seeing nothing. “If you can imagine a dissatisfied soul, one with many regrets in their life, dying, usually in an abrupt and violent manner—it sometimes creates the perfect conditions for a soul to cling on. A single, dominating thought infects their thinking process, until they corrupt, and will zealously, desperately want to fulfill that one thought. They are vengeance incarnate.” She struck a dramatic pose, and her entire audience seemed to be on the edge of their seats, hanging onto her every word. Seemed to be a good teacher. Though she also had a stern manner around her, a sense of authority that probably came from her training at the police academy.
He understood a fair amount of what she was saying, from his work with necromancers before, though revenants remained the field of knowledge he had filled in the least.
“We have the power to help most stubborn souls to move on, as well as Command them to our will as best as able. They can stay, sometimes, in fear of someone they love coping badly without them.” She smiled, and a cold chill lanced through Albert’s heart. “Sometimes they stay for beautiful reasons, but it still hurts them at a base level. I have known the souls of mothers and fathers to hold on to watch their children grow to adulthood. I have known husbands and wives too anxious to leave their loved one’s side, trying desperately to find a way to communicate with them, to tell them not to be so sad, that the end isn’t the end, and they deserve to be happy.”
She probed the body standing to attention gently, Commanding him to talk freely, and the body began to speak in that ghostly voice, the lips not moving, since they didn’t use the body’s vocal chords to speak.
“I… wait,” the soul said. “I lived with my daughter, but I died suddenly. I thought I only had a headache. But it wasn’t a headache. The doctors said something about a ruptured aneurysm. I didn’t have a last will, I didn’t have anything. I didn’t think I would die.” There was a plaintive note of sadness in the spirit’s voice, and Rosen nodded sympathetically to the story. “She went into foster care. Treated… treated awfully. She started using. She’s destroying herself, and I want to help, but I can’t.” The note of distress in his voice alerted Albert. He knew when a soul started getting too emotional; they couldn’t always control themselves.
“We used this soul to help locate his daughter,” Rosen said then. “The daughter was fourteen, and trapped in a place no fourteen-year-old wants to be. So we don’t always speak to the dead to find out who killed them. We also speak to find out about those who still need help. Who might be lost and needs to be found. The father here wants to be able to talk to his daughter, but she’s terrified and fearful of necromancers, and I’m not about to force something on her she doesn’t want. But he insists on keeping watch over her until he’s sure her life is back on track. Then, he’ll move on.” She nodded to the spirit, who bowed clumsily in response.
“Thank you,” he said then. “For giving her a chance.”
When the lesson ended, Albert noted a fair amount of students swayed by what they saw, and others stating that this spirit was clearly controlled by her to say the things it had said, so they couldn’t trust anything. Opinions were mixed, as always, though he slid in beside her to congratulate her on a job well done.
“Thanks. Though I wish they’d find someone else to do the teaching. I’m hardly the best out there. And students get nervous to say what they think when they consider they’re talking to a cop. They think most likely I’m going to find a great reason to arrest them, or check their lockers. Look.” As she spoke, students were cautiously shrinking back from her, and one, who seemed to be rolling something in his hand, hastily placed his hand behind his back and pretended to be interested in a piece of gum stuck to his shoe.
“That’s what I think makes a good teacher,” he replied. “People can respect authority. Especially the kind that can place them behind bars on a whim.” Again, she smiled at his words, and he noted to himself that she had a rather nice smile. It didn’t seem like she was a person who smiled a lot. And that felt like a great shame to him. People who didn’t smile much tended to take the world too seriously, and were probably a little too used to seeing the murkier side of life.
Well, that’d make sense. With the whole necromancy thing. All the ghosts she must have spoken to. The ones crying out for vengeance, the others crying for the ones still alive. Walking that tightrope day in and day out. Consorting with death, and risking it every moment.
He spotted one student giving her a particularly filthy stare, and kept close attention on that student, in case he ended up overreacting and potentially harming Rosen. Nothing happened, thankfully, but it always paid to be aware. Just like Rosen at times, he saw shadows and danger in every corner, too. He waited for death to strike. Most likely his job would give him fully gray hair by the time he hit forty—he was already forming some white hairs in his thin sideburns, and when it came to thinking about his clients, sometimes that tight band of stress formed over his brain, and refused to go away.
There’s better things in your life to do, son, than protect things like them, his mother had said. So many people dislike them—it must be for a reason, and you know it.
Albert didn’t agree. The human and supernatural brain was a strange thing. If many people collectively believed in one thing, then the brain had a way of telling itself: You must be wrong. Because everyone else thinks they’re right. Even if an individual was completely right in whatever their initial thought was, their brain tried to say otherwise. It planted doubts. A survival mechanism when being part of a crowd meant everything, and being exiled from that crowd meant death.
Many people still hated those like Rosen Grieves and her family because they thought it was the right, acceptable thing to do.
Albert trailed behind her, watching how efficiently she strode through the university, out of the campus, and toward her car, as if she was hurtling herself forward by the force of whatever plans she had in her head.
She had more plans, too. Ones that involved examining ancient corpses and ancient murder suspects. It might grow ugly. And he looked forward to seeing the results.
He also—but not now, of course—intended to ask Rosen Grieves a very specific question. One that had been on his mind for years. One that he felt sure she would be able to answer.
After all, there had been one necromancer before who did. And it made all the difference.
Chapter Three – Rosen
They arranged to move into her father’s place that very afternoon. All it took was a
phone call. They’d still be paying rent on the property she and James owned, but spending time over at this place.
Rosen, in all honesty, didn’t feel particularly comfortable being near her father nowadays. Especially due to the fact that the wretched old man had made an unfortunate bargain with a revenant—making him a partial revenant, while not completely alive in the same sense. Ever since the… accident (she still disliked thinking about it), Rickard Grieves’ brain had been damaged beyond endurance. Leaving him a vegetable.
It was just like her father to strike a bargain with the underworld. He’d already managed to squirm his way into a powerful position in Lasthearth. He’d hardly let a little thing like brain death stop him from achieving his goals.
“Good to see you again,” Rickard said, giving her a friendly smile, though she wondered just how genuine that smile was. How much she saw was her father, and how much was the revenant. “I trust everything is going well with you?”
“More or less,” she said cautiously, before introducing Albert as her bodyguard. “Here’s what the police have assigned me. A shifter. Panther.”
“Hmm...” Rickard gave a slow nod, inspecting Albert’s stature, the bulge of his arms, the stoic expression, the glint of animal yellow eyes. “Looks like a dependable fellow. I’m sure you’ll do just fine with him. I would have assigned you one myself. Things feel a little more tenuous with our type nowadays. Have some vicious and vocal opposition, but I’m handling them as best as able. I’ll need you to keep doing your lectures. We’re getting a lot of positive feedback from them...”
“Yes, Father,” Rosen said sourly. Well, this sounded more like her father than the revenant. James slouched in an hour or so later, only having a brief and terse exchange with Rickard, before retreating to their section of the estate.
Where, of course, he complained. “This is so inconvenient,” he said for the seventh time that week. “This increases my commuting time by almost fifteen minutes. That’s half an hour. Half an hour less time that I could spend with you, or do something useful.” He folded his arms in a huff.