by D. D. Miers
“He had some other things, too,” I told her. “A chest full of stuff and a bunch of art. A portrait of this guy, Prince Aethon Tzarnavaras, holding the candle.”
“Really?” I heard the sudden excitement in Percy's voice. “A portrait of Prince Aethon? He's supposed to be the source of the gift in our family! A fascinating and incredibly powerful man.”
“Then why haven't I ever heard of him?” I asked with a frown.
“Oh, well, supposedly he misused his gift,” Aunt Persephona said dismissively. “Touched the forbidden, meddled in the affairs of the gods, you know how they were back then. Whatever he did was so scandalous the family disavowed him entirely. Struck all mention of him from the histories. I had to find out about him from contemporary historical sources.”
Remembering the intense dark eyes of the man in the portrait, I imagined him meddling in the affairs of the gods.
“Uncle Ptolemy's lawyer wanted me to encourage you to make a bid for the inheritance,” I told her. “He says you have a better claim than Georgiana and Roland. And if he was hiding anything else like the candle, it's probably better if it stays in the family.”
“Yes, you're probably right,” she agreed. “It didn't seem worth the fight before, not when I was busy mourning my brother. But that sort of thing falling into the wrong hands could be a serious issue.”
“Definitely,” I agreed, and yawned.
“I'll let you get some rest,” Aunt Persephona said instantly. “I'll keep looking for more about the candle and any way we may be able to track it down.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I'm going to take some painkillers and pass out. Do me a favor and don't tell my parents about the accident. I don't want them to worry about it for no reason.”
“Their daughter being nearly murdered seems like a reason to be worried,” Persephona said with a sniff. “But I won't say anything if you don't want me to.”
“Thank you,” I said sincerely, and with our goodbyes said, I hung up and climbed out of the bath, dragging myself up to bed. By the time I fell face first into the mattress, I remembered the painkillers, downstairs on the kitchen counter. I groaned and decided I could sleep without them. I'd probably regret it later, but right now I was too tired to care and the thought of walking downstairs sounded painful.
I dragged the blankets over myself and closed my eyes, the traumas of the day replaying at a numb distance. The rush of power and the heat of the blue flame from the candle. Uncle Ptolemy, cotton balls and posthumous prophecies spilling from his lips. The tooth-shaking sudden impact of the car accident and the strange arm reaching through the wreckage to take the box. Images that haunted my dreams as I slipped into a troubled, restless sleep.
Chapter 6
I woke to the sound of a thump downstairs.
At first, fuzzy-headed and aching, I assumed I'd just been woken up by the pain again. I’m pretty sure I’d been waking up every few minutes, trying to find a position that caused less pressure on my bruised limbs. The one across my chest and shoulder from the seat belt was especially bad and impossible to find a comfortable position with. But the numerous bruises on my arms and legs weren't proving easy to deal with, either.
But as I lay there trying to find a way to rest on the least bruised parts of my body, I heard a second noise from downstairs.
I sat up too quickly, my neck searing with pain and my head spinning. For a moment, I regretted not taking those painkillers. On the other hand, if I had I would definitely be too out of it to hear the person currently breaking into my apartment. This day just kept getting better.
I reached for the metal baseball bat I kept near my bed. I'd never had a break-in before, but it wasn't a great neighborhood. Keenly aware I wore only a long T-shirt and my underwear, I edged toward the stairs, gripping the bat tightly.
Something was definitely moving around downstairs, but it didn't really sound like a person, which confused me rather than reassured me as I tried to determine what it did sound like.
I moved down the stairs as quietly as possible, sticking to the edges to avoid the creaking steps. As the cramped kitchen and living area came into view, I saw something huge moving between the fridge and the island counter. Its dark fur was highlighted in silver by the moonlight spilling through the open French doors to the backyard. It's huge, curved back rose higher than the countertops.
Holy shit, I thought, knees weak. There is a goddamn bear in my kitchen. How in the hell had it ended up here? None lived in the area. The only bears in this part of town were in the leather bar up the road.
I leaned forward, trying to get a better look at what the bear was doing. It ambled through my kitchen to my living room, and I heard its snuffling breaths as it sniffed for something. Not food apparently, considering it hadn't dug into anything in my kitchen. Instead, it pawed at my couch cushions and prodded my purse off of the end table.
I wrinkled my nose in confusion and moved down another step, forgetting to stick near the edge. The stair creaked, loudly, and the animal's head shot up and turned in my direction at once. The moonlight caught the shape of its high, triangular ears and long snout and I realized it wasn't a bear after all.
It was the largest wolf I'd ever seen.
I lashed out with my powers without thinking twice, reaching for the nearest source of death. The wolf, as though sensing what I was doing, lunged forward with a snarl to the bottom of the stairs. I swung wildly with the bat, nearly catching it in the head and it fell back, no longer advancing but barking urgently. Whatever it was trying to communicate, I didn't understand. A moment later, a dead dog slammed into its side.
The neighbor's wolfhound had been dead, at an educated guess, around a month. Most of the soft tissue was gone, leaving a loose and ragged pelt hanging from dark bones. If it hadn't been for the necromantic energy holding it together, it would have fallen into pieces. The empty eye sockets of its skull glowed with blue fire as it did its best to bury its teeth in the throat of the wolf.
The wolf was nearly twice the size of the dog, but it had been caught off guard and the dog had the benefit of not giving a damn if it lived through this. The two canines rolled across my front hall, slamming into a wall as they tore at each other. The wolf's teeth ripped out chunks of the dog's fur, but the dog, being dead, didn't care, and its teeth and claws were leaving significantly nasty bloody gouges in the wolf's fur.
That's the great thing about resurrecting animals as opposed to humans. Humans needed specific instructions to do anything. The list of instinctive behaviors a resurrected human can do I could count on one hand, while animals live on repeated instinctive behaviors and only get stuck when it comes to complex problem-solving. A dog knows how to hunt and fight from birth. So, as long as what you're asking them to do isn't too complicated, you can let an animal run on autopilot.
I stood on the stairs, bat ready, and watched the animals wrestle. The dog was winning, but it was losing body mass at a worrying speed as the wolf tore at it. Soon there wouldn't be enough for my magic to hold it together. Steeling myself, I moved down the stairs to end this the only way I could.
I waited, subtly steering the dog, until it had driven the wolf back to the stairs. Gathering my courage and using every ounce of leverage my position higher on the staircase gave me, I waited until the dog was clear and swung the bat down hard at the wolf's head. It looked up just a second too late and caught the full force of my swing in the face. The blow knocked it back, sprawling across my front hall, where it lay motionless.
The dead dog and I watched it silently, waiting to see if it would move again. But it appeared to be out cold. I breathed a sigh of relief, only to tense again a moment later as the wolf appeared to move. But as I raised the bat to hit it again, I realized it wasn't getting up, but rather . . . shrinking. I watched in morbid fascination as the hair and muscle melted away, revealing a familiar, human shape underneath. Too familiar. I used my toe to flip the wolf, now a naked man, onto his back. The wolf was unmistak
ably Ethan the EMT.
“Son of a bitch,” I muttered, lowering my bat. “No wonder he didn't want to go out with me.”
By the time Ethan came around, he wore my favorite bathrobe and was tied to a kitchen chair. I sat on the island countertop, the bat across my knees and the undead dog sitting at my heels, watching him squint and shake his head as he tried to figure out what had happened. The wound hadn't disappeared when he'd become human again. I'd done my best to patch it up, but having his curly brown hair caked to his head with blood made him marginally less charming. The dog growled threateningly as soon as Ethan was aware enough to notice it. Ethan jumped and the kitchen chair squeaked under him. I'd put my years of funeral corpse preparation to use trying to patch the dog up while Ethan was out, reattaching the bits it had lost and sewing its fur more solidly into place. It looked, arguably, better than it had when it had climbed out of its grave. Unfortunately, stuffing its hollow spaces with potpourri had only done so much for the stench of death.
“So,” I said as Ethan eyed the patchwork black wolfhound warily. “You're a werewolf.”
“Uhhh, what gave you that idea?” Ethan replied with a nervous laugh.
The dog, under my influence, gave another warning growl.
“Yeah, all right, yeah, I am,” Ethan gave in. “But you're a witch, so I think we're even.”
“Necromancer, actually,” I said primly, leaning back on the counter. He was close enough that I could rest my foot on the chair seat between his thighs. “There's a difference. And being able to raise the dead doesn't mean I can't be a respectable member of society, unlike you, who apparently uses his job to rob the houses of people he knows will be out cold on painkillers!”
“It's not like that,” Ethan said, looking a little pale. “Honestly! I'm just here for the candle.”
My eyes widened and I gripped the bat tighter. I planted a foot in the center of his chest and leaned closer to menace him with the bat.
“How do you know about that?”
“It's—” he sighed, flustered, and looked for the right words. “It's my job, okay? My other job, I mean. Aside from being an EMT. I work for a group of people who try to keep things like that candle from falling into the wrong hands. Someone who works with us said it was at the funeral home, about to be given to some normies who would probably sell it.”
“Yeah, that’d be my cousins,” I said, beginning to understand.
“The plan was just to buy it whenever your cousins sold it,” Ethan said. “Except then our contact told us you’d taken it.”
I nodded, jaw tightening with anger, and raised the bat a little higher
“So you tried to kill me and take it back,” I finished for him. “It was one of your people that totalled my car this afternoon!”
“No!” Ethan said quickly. “God, no! Never! Even if we were willing to murder people, which we aren’t, we’d never risk bringing that much attention to it! I figured you didn’t know what it was and I’d just sneak in and grab it while you were asleep. If I’d known you were planning to use it, I wouldn’t have come here without backup, for one thing.”
“What do you mean ‘use it’?” I asked, cold with suspicion.
Ethan looked at me in confusion for a moment.
“You’ve bonded to it,” he explained. “I can smell it on you. And you on it. You’ve made the covenant.”
I stared at him, waiting for further explanation, and he took a deep breath.
“You really didn’t know what it was, did you?”
“No,” I answered tersely. “I didn’t. But when I touched it, it woke every dead body in the building, so I figured it was a good idea to get it out of the funeral home.”
Ethan leaned back in the chair and blew out a long breath, eyes wide.
“Oh boy. Well. Uh, you did at least know about the necromancy thing, yeah?”
“Of course,” I told him, and leaned back myself, lowering the bat back onto my lap. “It runs in my family. But my aunt can barely raise a mouse, so she never really taught me anything beyond how to keep from using my powers by accident. I didn’t even know werewolves were a thing until tonight.”
“Oh, really?” Ethan looked slightly impressed. “Well, damn. You’re handling this really well.”
“I work with dead people,” I said with a shrug. “Your shock response ends up kind of numb after a while. Are there a lot of werewolves?”
“Well that kind of depends on which kind of werewolves you mean,” Ethan replied casually. “Natural werewolves are critically endangered, less than a hundred left on the continent. Viral lycanthropy is a little more widespread, but there are people working to control infection rates and they’re saying it’ll die out in a few generations. Curse-associated lycanthropy and spell wolves are so rare that I don’t even know the official numbers on them.”
“So . . . no?” I summarized.
“Pretty much.”
We sat staring at one another for a moment. Guilt hit me for tying him to the chair and whacking him with the bat, now that I knew he didn’t mean any harm. I mean, assuming he was telling the truth. I didn’t sense any lies so far, but I didn’t know the guy that well. And cute guys were always great at lying.
“So, where did you put the candle?” Ethan asked, looking around curiously like I might have left it sitting on the kitchen counter.
“It’s gone,” I said, deciding there was no benefit to hiding the truth. “I told you while I was loopy from the car accident. Whoever hit me took it.”
“That’s not good.” Ethan paled with concern. “If they’re willing to go to those kinds of lengths for it, they are definitely not the kind of people that should have it.”
“What even is it?” I asked impatiently. “You said I was bound to it. What the hell does that mean?”
Ethan chewed his lip for a moment, considering.
“I’m not sure if I’m the right person to tell you,” he said after a moment. “I don’t know everything. But Yvette, a friend of mine back at the library, could probably give you a better explanation. She knows more about this sort of thing.”
“Yvette isn’t here,” I said impatiently. “You’ll do your best if you ever want to get untied from that chair.”
“Point taken,” Ethan agreed. “To put it as simply as I know how, it’s the source of all necromantic magic.”
“What?” I stared at him, certain I’d heard wrong.
“All necromancy that’s ever been done is connected to that thing,” he said. “It’s older than time. Beyond time. It’s directly tapped into—to death itself, I guess. A necromancer properly bound to it has basically unlimited power. They could do just about anything. Which is why it’s a really bad idea for it to be floating around out there unaccounted for. Not to mention what it could possibly do to you.”
“What’s it doing to me?” I asked, my heart rate skyrocketing.
“It is you, magically speaking,” Ethan said. “The flame is bound to your life force. It’s not easy to put a fire like that out, but if someone did manage to snuff it, well, let’s just say you wouldn’t be far behind.”
“Holy shit,” I said, turning pale. “We need to find that candle. Immediately.”
“I agree,” Ethan said at once. “If you let me take you back to the library, Yvette can scry for it—"
“No need,” I said, shaking my head and sliding off the counter onto my feet, ignoring the ache of my bruises and intense exhaustion. I turned my head west, feeling the buzz of what I now realized must be the magical bond between me and the artifact currently holding my life force hostage. “I can track it.”
“Shit, really?” Ethan looked excited for a moment, then shook his head. “Wait, no, look at you. You can’t go fighting evil right now. You just got hit by a car.”
“Well, then it’s a good thing I’ve got a professional EMT coming with me,” I said. “Quit moving and I’ll untie you.”
“Don’t bother,” he said, holding up his completely unboun
d hands, currently more paw than hand and tipped in sharp black claws. “I broke loose right after I woke up. Figured you’d be more comfortable if I kept pretending to be caught.”
“How considerate,” I said dryly. I guess that did prove he was at least somewhat trustworthy. If he’d wanted to attack me again, he could have done it at any time. “Let’s just get going.”
“Uh, you may want to put on pants first,” Ethan suggested, and I remembered that I was in my nightclothes. “Although I guess that’s the pot calling the kettle black . . .”
He scratched his head, looking down at the bathrobe he wore. It didn’t fit him, but he still managed to look fantastic, unlike me in my ancient band T-shirt. Scowling, I headed for the stairs. This guy had two impressions of me so far: immediately post-car accident and makeup-less in my rattiest nightshirt. Fantastic.
“Don’t go anywhere,” I warned him as I left and sent the undead dog to sit in front of the door. As I hurried up the stairs, Ethan took a seat on the bottom step, locking eyes with the partially decomposed wolfhound, who stared back with eerily illuminated eyes. I felt its desire to fight Ethan again. Apparently, it had found the first fight pretty enjoyable. This was going to be a long night.
Chapter 7
As I got dressed, I worried, among other things, about what I was going to do with the dog.
It bursted with energy. I’d thrown everything I had at it in my panic. I could put it to rest again, but it would take time I didn’t have right now. Hopefully, I’d be able to get it back into its grave before the neighbors noticed.
I went downstairs once I was a little more presentable in gray denim shorts and a black-collared sweater with golden bees embroidered on the points. I’d pulled my hair up into a high ponytail and thrown on as little makeup as I could stand, considering the time constraints.
