The Necromancer's Dilemma (The Beacon Hill Sorcerer Book 2)

by SJ Himes

Eventually Simeon found him at the tunnel’s entrance, his mate covered in blood, but uninjured. Simeon held his face between his palms and kissed Angel, a nearly chaste kiss full of comfort and love. Simeon tugged on his arm, and Angel held his mate’s hand as they walked up the tunnel.

  Simeon all but had to pull him to the top when the angle grew too extreme, but Angel didn’t mind. He was tired, dirty, and wanted a shower. Angel didn’t speak until Simeon returned them to the alleyway, jumping them up through the hidden door. He asked, “The vampire, the one Cian killed for his heart. Is he dead for good?”

  Simeon led Angel to the end of the alley, where a limo idled, waiting for them. Vampires milled about, politely ignoring them both as they parted for their passage. Simeon opened the limo door, and said, “My Master was able to restore the soldier. It was close, though. His body had started to decay. Batiste’s blood is powerful; he will survive.”

  “Gross. And good. But still gross,” Angel muttered, climbing in the limo.

  Simeon laughed, getting in behind him and shutting the door.

  Epilogue

  Redemption

  A crash made Angel jump, and he fell from bed, hitting the floor. He groaned, rolling on his side and clutching his knee. “What the fuck!”

  Crashing and shouting came from the bathroom, and the bedroom door opened with a bang, Simeon blurring through the bedroom. Angel sat up, grumbling, and used the bed to get to his feet. Glass broke, and Angel heard Eroch screeching.

  “Wee beastie, if you’ve brought the Pigeon Wars into the house I’m gonna be pissed!” he shouted, heading for the bathroom door. He made it just in time to see Simeon punch a bleeding Ballacree in the face, breaking his nose again. Eroch flew around the screaming man’s face, tearing skin and belching out bursts of flame.

  “Oh, what the hell,” Angel breathed out. There was an unfamiliar dagger on the floor, some noxious chemical spilling from a vial, and to top off the insult, an ashwood stake. “You dumb fuck, you really thought you could sneak in here? Stake my boyfriend and do nasty things to me while I slept, drugged out my ass? Eroch, eat his face off. I’m calling the police.”

  Simeon yanked Ballacree all the way through the window that led to the fire escape, the man apparently having made it halfway through the space they kept open for Eroch to come and go. Ballacree was screaming, and Angel spun back just as surge of magic came from the wizard. A spell, orange and black and stinking of sulfur came from the wizard struggling in Simeon’s arms, and Angel tried to shout a warning. He blocked the spell, sending it into the mirror over the sink, the glass shattering and the wall smoking as flames devoured the plaster. He was about to cast his own spell, but Simeon lifted Ballacree upright, and struck. His fangs sank into the wizard’s neck, and Simeon ravaged his throat.

  Angel shook off his surprise, feeling the soul bond cycle the harmful magic in Ballacree’s blood into Angel, allowing Simeon to drink without dying from poisoning. It was odd, having another’s magic come along the soul bond, but Angel stayed quiet. Ballacree came with the intent to murder Simeon, and just tried to kill Angel when he was stopped from carrying out his plan. Killing in self-defense was perfectly acceptable to them both.

  Simeon drained Ballacree in moments, the wizard dying quietly. Angel stayed, witnessing, unwilling to give Simeon any doubts that Angel accepted this part of his nature. His mate was a vampire. He drank human blood. And sometimes, he killed that way.

  The cleaning service eyed Simeon with some fear and a lot of respect. Angel smirked, holding the door for the humans as they carried their equipment and left the apartment. Daniel and Isaac were huddled together on the couch, snickering. Simeon crossed his arms and leveled a stern glance on the young men, who merely broke out in loud chuckles. Milly shook her head, sipping her tea and passing O’Malley a fresh scone. Angel closed the door with a bang, and rounded on the room.

  “Evil bad guys need to stop interrupting my sleep,” he said, cranky and owning it. “Do you forgive me?” Angel asked O’Malley, who glared at him as he chewed on a mouthful of cranberry scone.

  O’Malley swallowed and said, “No, but I’m not gonna pretend I don’t know you were acting in my best interest or that or my department. Officers would have died going down there into the temple.”

  “I am sorry,” Angel said, heading for Simeon who opened his arms and gathered him close.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Yeah, I’m not.”

  “I’ll forgive you for another scone.”

  “Done.”

  “If only forgiveness were always so easy,” Simeon said with a chuckle.

  Everyone laughed but Isaac, his brother freezing. Angel watched as he got up from the couch, and headed for his bedroom.

  Simeon spoke to O’Malley, discussing Cian, the fae having been turned over to the human authorities since the vampires he captured all made it, and Stone was dead. No fae had been tried for murder in Massachusetts, ever, so the state and the city were arguing about how to handle it. There was no death penalty in the state, and life imprisonment took on a new twist when the sentence could last eternity. Ruairí had disappeared when Batiste took Cian to the police, and Angel was worried for the fae lord. He’d been asleep the last two hundred years. The world was vastly different from what he once knew.

  Simeon did explain one thing, and that Cian and Ruairí were known to Batiste. The Master was over a thousand years old, and had meet the twins centuries ago in the Old World, long before the Revolution.

  Angel kissed Simeon, then followed after Isaac. He paused in the hall outside his brother’s door, but he knocked. He waited, and entered after a long pause when no answer came.

  Isaac sat on his bed, and Angel shut the door behind him at the tears running down Isaac’s face. He knelt on the floor, and took his brother’s hands in his, rubbing them. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I…I did something horrible, and you’ll hate me,” Isaac sobbed quietly, clutching at Angel’s hands. “I can’t tell you. I love you too much to tell you.”

  “What happened? I love you. Please believe me. I won’t hate you. You are the only person in this entire world that I can never hate. And that includes Simeon. Tell me, Isaac.”

  “The night they came for our family,” Isaac whispered, meaning the vampire army that decimated their family and Angel eventually stopped almost accidentally, “The reason the wards didn’t come up correctly that night wasn’t because everyone tried to do it themselves and they fought over control…it was because that morning I was trying to control them. I did something to the runes by accident, and warped a few of them. I was trying to use the lessons Dad and August taught me earlier that week, and I wanted to impress everyone. But I fucked up.”

  Angel fell on his ass. His heart stopped, and his memories of the last decade blurred and twisted. Isaac gulped, and gripped his hands so tightly his bones creaked. “I killed our family.”

  The End

  Sneak Preview

  Book Three of The Beacon Hill Sorcerer coming Winter 2016.

  Please continue reading for a Bonus Story set in the Beacon Hill Sorcerer Universe.

  Bonus Story

  Written for Crystal’s Many Reviewers Blog Birthday Celebration,

  March 2016.

  (This story takes place between the end of Book Two and before Book Three. Some aspects may not be canonically correct or relevant in the series.)

  Necromancer’s Birthday Surprise

  By SJ Himes

  Angel huffed out a breath, watching as it fogged up before dissipating into the cold spring night air. The cemetery was quiet, and his breathing and the scuffing of his boots on the stone mausoleum’s roof traveled farther than was wiser considering his errand that night. It was also way too bright, the moon full overhead, not a cloud in the sky, the stars almost as bright as the moon, illuminating the whole of the graveyard.
So Angel decided he would be in plain sight, but hidden—and as long as he waited until his quarry was in range and in the act before leaving his perch, he would remain invisible behind his spells.

  For the last two weeks, cemeteries around the greater Boston areas and surrounding burbs had been visited by grave robbers, digging up the recently deceased and taking everything from jewelry, clothing, and even organs. The last part was what made BPD finally call Angel, Detective O’Malley briefing him with a look of disgust on his face and confusion in his eyes.

  “We’ve got 20 bodies desecrated, Angel, and no leads,” O’Malley had grumbled to him yesterday morning when he stopped by Angel’s studio, file an inch thick in his hands. The detective looked frumpier than usual, his red hair lightened by strands of gray and the lines on his face seeming to be deeper, etched by exhaustion instead of age. “I’m at a loss about what to do—and I finally figured if we couldn’t track the stolen goods, we’d follow the stolen organs. But that was a bust as well, and now I need you.”

  It wasn’t a bad idea, considering. Most grave robbers went after what the dead were buried with—as Angel was a sorcerer, and his people cremated their deceased, he was still floored by normal humans burying their dead with valuables and mementos. Since the cops couldn’t track the sale of the stolen goods, that either meant the thieves weren’t selling them yet, or the goods weren’t taken for monetary gain. Along with the stolen organs, Angel had a theory—ghost calling.

  It was a cruel, harsh, and complicated process, but boiled down to its essential pieces it meant pulling a departed soul back from the Other Side. Then it was anchored to an item that soul had a connection to as a mortal—like a favored watch or wedding ring—and then using the summoned spirit for some task. Historically, that meant revenge hauntings, guards for territory or homes where a ghostly warden would scare intruders off, even as spies.

  In the modern era, it involved stolen identities and password theft. In the days and early weeks after death, unless the deceased had a definite plan for closing and freezing financial accounts after death, rarely did anyone handling the affairs of the departed think to change passwords or financial access codes. Angel’s theory was that the organs were used to in the spells to call up the ghosts, the items to anchor them on this plane, and then the information forced from the returned souls was used to rob the dead and their families.

  Angel sighed, wishing he had thought ahead and brought something to sit on, but his desire to get out of the apartment for a night alone had overwhelmed his better sense. Angel came prepared for almost anything, and his traps were set around the two most recent graves in the cemetery, ready to go with a thought. This cemetery was one of the first to be hit, so the police had discounted it, but a car accident several days prior that killed an elderly and wealthy married couple had to be too much temptation for the thieves. At least in Angel’s opinion. The police were on a stakeout at a few other cemeteries, but Angel was sure tonight, this cemetery, and these graves were too prime of a target for the culprits to pass up.

  And Angel wanted, no needed, to get out of the apartment. Isaac was skulking about like a wraith, though his little brother was hardly dead, just not quite alive. He was still grieving for his boyfriend, killed five months before by a rogue vampire. Not to mention the revelation Isaac dropped on him about what really happened the night their family died. He had no idea what to do with that bomb of information. And Daniel, his apprentice, was the type to hover around Angel as if afraid Angel would disappear if Daniel let him out of his sight for longer than a minute.

  And Simeon, his lover, the vampire Elder, was busy at the Tower, handling clan matters for The Master. And while Angel loved Simeon more than he had ever loved anyone or anything before, he needed to be alone. Especially tonight.

  It was his birthday tomorrow, and he would be thirty years old. And he felt ancient. He hadn’t had a happy birthday in over a decade and didn’t know how to handle having one now.

  A sharp chirp came from above, and the familiar flapping of wings warned him he had company. Eroch came winging in from above, slipping through Angel’s illusion of a bare roof to the mausoleum, and landed on his shoulder. Angel held still while Eroch pulled his wings in, the tiny dragon chattering up a storm, poking at Angel’s cheek with his snout, sniffing in his face. Eroch sounded annoyed and affectionate at the same time, probably scolding him for leaving the apartment without him when he left for the cemetery.

  “Shhh, I’m trying to catch bad guys,” Angel whispered, scratching under the dragon’s chin, Eroch purring like a cat. The little dragon was the size of a housecat, with mannerisms to match, but he was sentient and as smart a human. More intelligent, some days. “Think we’ll catch them?”

  Eroch chirped, and Angel chuckled. “I think so, too, my wee beastie. Won’t the cops be happy I got the bad guys first?” Eroch tipped his head, yellow eyes flashing, and Angel grinned. “No, I didn’t think so either. At least, O’Malley won’t mind all that much.”

  Angel shifted, his ass numb, glad the dragon took it upon himself to find Angel. The dragon was his familiar though Angel had yet to use the wee beastie in that manner. It smacked too much of ownership, and he wasn’t comfortable making Eroch serve that purpose, no matter that the dragon apparently decided he would be doing so on his own. The tiny dragon gave off a surprising amount of heat, warming Angel even through his weather-proof sweater. Eroch draped himself over Angel’s shoulders, head on one shoulder, tail hanging down Angel’s opposite arm like a living shawl. He had to deal with a wing messing with the hair on the back of his head, but he was used to it by now. Eroch hung on him all the time unless the wee beastie was begging for scraps from someone’s plate.

  The wind picked up, whistling through the cemetery, the headstones almost glowing from the silver light from the moon, and Angel felt cold. Colder than he should be wearing a dragon and a magicked weather-proof sweater, but it wasn’t the wind that chilled him to his bones.

  A sound that wasn’t the wind moaned long and low, seeming to echo off the stones upon which Angel sat. Careful not to move too much and disturb his illusion of an unoccupied roof, Angel peered through the distant shadows, checking the periphery of the cemetery. Eroch growled from his perch, and Angel agreed with him. Off to the east, near the direction of the groundskeepers’ gates, came a shift in the black, a flicker of light. The moaning rose to a thin wail, the wind carrying it across the full field of graves, and the hairs all along Angel’s body rose in one sweeping realization.

  Zombies.

  Angel reached for his bag where it was braced behind a statue of an avenging angel, out of reach of the wind, and pulled his athame from its depths, eyes locked on the gravel road that wound its way through the headstones and plots. Figures appeared from the blackness, two walking with an easy gait and carrying what seemed to be shovels, flashlights in hand. The other figures moved with a disjointed pace and pattern that was more a struggling shuffle, bodies bent and twisted as the spells that animated their corpses.

  Two men, probably sorcerers and the likely grave robbers, and six zombies.

  “Shit, I picked the wrong night to be the Lone Ranger,” Angel muttered to himself, tucking his athame under his belt, and reaching for his bag. The sorcerers and their minions were getting closer, heading for the graves Angel had marked as the likely targets. And once they hit his spell traps, they would know they weren’t alone.

  Angel had underestimated his quarry. Expecting it to be a pair or small team of low-ranked practitioners, he had come alone and with minimal supplies. He had expected to catch them in his trap, call the police, and then release them once the cops were on site. He might get lucky and take out some of the zombies, and with enough time he could wrest control of them from the sorcerers, but he was unlikely to get that time. Neither man was a necromancer; he would be able to sense their affinity for death, but they were still sorcerers, and creating zombie
s was within their reach, especially if they pooled resources, and that made them dangerous.

  A buzz and a sharp vibration on his hip made Angel gasp and jump, and he grabbed his cell before it could go off again and give away his position. The group was heading for the fresh graves, and Angel would have only a few minutes before his traps were set off. He glanced at the screen, and answered it, keeping his voice low.

  “Simeon.”

  “Good evening, a ghra,” Simeon purred in his ear, sexy as hell and the best thing Angel had heard all night. “Are you ready to celebrate your birthday?”

  “Where are you?” Angel whispered, eyeing the group as the sorcerers directed their undead troops, making them shuffle out among the headstones. He ignored the mention of his birthday, as the company he had in the cemetery was more pressing. Two zombies headed in his general direction, and would be able to smell him once they got close enough. His illusion did nothing to prevent his scent from escaping. “Tell me you’re near Heaven’s Gate Cemetery.”

  “Angel, did you take that case?” Simeon asked, and Angel could hear the frustration in his lover’s voice.

  “I took that case. Yes, I went off on my own. Yes, I am an idiot, and I need to make better life choices. And now instead of a ragtag crew of B-list wizards, I am looking at two sorcerers and half a dozen zombies. And they are going to know I’m here in less than a minute.”

  “I am on my way, Leannán. Stay in one piece until I get there. Ten minutes.”

  “You better make it in five,” Angel whispered, clicking off his cell as the two zombies came within a few yards of the mausoleum. Eroch growled from his shoulder, and Angel tucked his cell away in his pocket just as the two undead below him began to snuffle, their decomposing heads twitching left and right as they detected the presence of living flesh. They wouldn’t attack their masters, not unless the bonds were broken holding them in thrall, and Angel reached out for the cloud of death magic hovering around the zombies.