by Lisa Daniels
“I missed the last lecture, can I copy your notes...”
“What was the name? … I didn’t...”
Nothing particularly incriminating or worthwhile eavesdropping on. However, he was trained to pay attention, no matter how bored he became, and distractions were few and far between.
At the end of this lecture, when he fell into step behind her, he heard her complain to Jake and the newly joined Elodie, “I swear to fucking god, this bodyguard’s just putting a target on my back. How am I supposed to hide when it’s obvious who I am?”
“I know, right? So annoying...”
“I don’t know,” Elodie said. “I think it’s useful. Remember how those people started throwing things at you? They wouldn’t dare with him there.”
He smirked to himself and puffed out his chest a little harder, making sure he cleared a path around himself, and people avoided him as if he carried some highly infectious disease. He snapped at a waifish-looking woman, and she let out a squeak of terror and stumbled backwards into a knot of people. Others goggled, since the one thing rarer than a necromancer happened to be his kind.
Noises in the distance sent him on full alert. They were different from the usual babble of sound, of bored and excited teenagers, of chattering in the dining hall, and the whispers of students stealing away for a quick drink or a fumble in an abandoned classroom.
Something resembling a muted scream ended in a rattling gurgle, and there was a cold, chilling presence that seemed to sweep through the corridor and settle deep in his bones. Magic sometimes had that feel, but he couldn’t always pick up upon it.
Now he did. More muted screams—and now at the end of the corridor, where it split off into two directions, one to the canteen, the other to a cluster of lecture halls, students were hesitating. The chatter died, and comprehension remained blank.
“What’s happening?” Elodie said, the same question being repeated among others. Talia, however, had frozen like a statue. He could sense an oppressive amount of tension radiating off her, and he briefly examined her dark, shoulder-length hair, the awkward posture, and the backpack that had a rolled-up piece of paper sticking up from it…
“This is...” she began to say, and for a moment, the words stuck. But they didn’t need to be finished.
Screams turned into the spray of red, and people dashed back the way they walked, rapidly turning the whole thing into a stampede.
With a snarl, brain working overtime, Janos lunged forward to seize Talia by the backpack, dragging her with him. She let out a squeal of surprise, before registering it was him, but before either of them managed an exchange with each other, shambling bones entered the hallway, eyes glowing a ghostly blue, the tips of their spiritual bodies glistening in blood.
Necromancy.
Elodie and Jake let out yelps of terror, drowned out by the rest of the panic, but Janos only focused on Talia. One of the resurrected shambled into sight, wielding what looked like a crossbow. A bolt sank into the back of one unfortunate student, and Janos felt his inner wolf itching to burst out of his skin, to take down these travesties, to tear them limb from limb and then seek out whatever monster was behind them, but he swallowed down that hatred long enough to bodily haul Talia down what should have been an exit, only to find it barred.
Whoever was behind this attack, they’d chosen to block the entrance, judging by the looks of it.
“But it’s a necromancer,” Talia was saying, her voice high-pitched in stress and fear. “What’s a necromancer doing with this?”
“It’s her!” someone screamed, and one mad-eyed male student jabbed an accusing finger at her. “She’s doing it! Seize her!”
“It’s not me!” Talia bellowed, but people didn’t listen. Hands grabbed for her, faces twisted, and Janos let his inner wolf seep out of his skin, snarling and growling at those who tried to grab his ward. His nose and mouth fused into a snout, and he snapped at one boy, who squealed and backed off. “It’s not me!” Talia repeated, and Jake took up the chant as well. Elodie was nowhere to be seen, the hall too packed to make her out, and Janos instead retreated, going for a lecture hall, hoping to utilize a side exit in one of them instead.
Even with the insistence and his threatening presence, some people kept getting the bright idea to seize the only necromancer they knew. Emerging into the corridor, a bolt whistled narrowly over his ears. Clamping down on his instinct to charge at the threat or flee from it recklessly, he located the lecture hall they’d recently come out of and shouldered into it, dragging Talia with him. Jake followed, red-faced, shivering from adrenaline and fear.
Janos breathed a sigh of relief when he spotted the ajar side exit. In the unthinking panic, most people had completely avoided side exits, instead flocking automatically to the ones they used every day for entering and leaving Rosewood University.
“Are you doing this?” Jake said then, as they hastened towards their escape. “Like… could you be doing this by accident?”
“No!” wailed Talia, practically in tears. “It’s not me! I’m not doing this!”
Janos now scooped Talia up over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Not exactly the most elegant way of picking someone up, but it gave him the mobility to still defend her if the corpses burst in through the door.
“Can you sense the person using the magic?” Janos rumbled. His voice became more guttural in werewolf form, harder to form the English language. “Can you find them?”
Talia’s voice wobbled with every step he took, as she said, “I—I feel something. I don’t know where exactly, but it’s getting weaker as we go in this direction...”
Their advance outside screeched to an ungainly halt when two corpses shuffled through the other side of the exit. Jake, who was nearest, let out a gasp and stumbled backwards, trying to get away from the murderous, blue-eyed monsters.
“No!” Talia’s hands scrabbled uselessly at his back. No choice remained to Janos except to drop her and launch himself at the corpses. The spirits were resilient, meeting his lunge. His claws, stretched to their full length, slashed at the creatures, doing little to the spiritual essence, but snapping the first corpse at the knee joints, causing him—it—to buckle and fall. The second grabbed his back, and he felt those unexpectedly strong fingers digging into his flesh in a wave of pain, and there were screams from Jake and Talia, and from the door above them as it opened and more people or perhaps corpses joined the fray.
“Do something!” Jake screamed at Talia, while Janos ripped at his new attacker, snarling in pain and defiance. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the one whose bones he’d broken reassemble in a casual, almost contemptuous way. Now a sick fear and realization entered his heart.
These fucking things are near indestructible…
“I’m trying!” a shrill voice said, and Janos wanted to yell something back, except he was a little too occupied with stopping the two corpses upon him from snapping his neck. Jesus Christ, why wouldn’t they go down?
Do something was repeated from more than one throat, merging into a cacophony of panic.
A fresh wave of cold emanated from nearby, from Talia, and in that instant, the corpses twisting his body into an unnatural position froze in their assault completely.
He took the opportunity to back off and take in the new situation. Several students had fled into the lecture room in addition to Talia and Jake. A gaggle of about nine. Six corpses—four from the top, two from the exit—stood utterly still. The screams in the room died out when people registered that the bodies were no longer moving at all.
His eyes swept over Talia, who had her hands thrust out in a dramatic fashion, and her eyes were wide, amazed. Sweat beaded on her forehead, moistening her nose and cheeks. “I… I did it.” She sounded as if she hardly dared believe what had happened. “I overrode their Commands.”
“You did what?” Jake said, echoed by another student.
“The necromancer who sent them… my will was stronger than theirs.
I didn’t even know I could do that...”
Janos grabbed at his aching shoulder, and his hand came away warm and wet. “Is this all of them?”
Talia shook her head.
“Can you, like, get them to find whoever’s doing this?” Jake suggested, and Talia glanced at him in surprise.
“Huh. Maybe I could. Okay… I Command you all to lead us to the person who was formerly in control of you.”
At once, all six corpses marched towards the exit.
“Wait, no, I Command you to stop.” The corpses rolled to a halt. “I better secure the other ones first, right?”
“Yes,” Janos growled, and he stalked behind her as they quickly established plans to keep the corpses waiting in the room.
“I won’t lose control of them, I promise,” Talia said, though she looked a little pale as she said so. Perhaps holding so many bodies was draining her energy. He remembered how she’d said that vile soul she’d stuffed into the body of her cat took far more energy than her cat’s soul. So how much did it take to keep six of them contained?
Now that Talia seemed to have figured out how to wrest control from the other necromancer, a new burst of confidence sent her forward—though it unfortunately meant more mix-ups. One teacher pointed a gun at Talia, and it took some very fast talking to explain she was saving people, not killing them. Janos was positioned to take down that teacher, in case he dared to shoot at his charge.
Corpse after corpse fell under her control, most of them just a jumble of bones, but some still wearing their flesh. The worst was that some of the recently deceased students had ended up joining the attack. The crush of students that were relatively safe watched in murmuring fear as Talia secured the last of the corpses and sent them marching into the lecture hall. The teacher wielding the gun followed as well, and Elodie, lost in the chaos, finally rejoined her friend’s side. No sign of Nadine, but Janos suspected this was actually Nadine’s day off. Lucky her.
The teacher with the gun glared at the fifteen corpses loitering in the lecture room. Janos saw the strain in Talia’s features as she attempted to keep a hold of all the corpses at once.
“I can’t do it,” she said then. “I don’t think I can hold these for much longer—the other necromancer’s fighting to gain back control...”
“Dismiss them,” Janos said sharply. “Make sure they are out of reach. You seemed to need close contact… to bring something back. Maybe it’s the same for this.”
“Right.” Talia nodded, before closing her eyes to focus. Her veins protruded slightly from her temples—a sign of stress. Something twitched in her jaw. One by one, the corpses collapsed, until only one remained. “I must ask this one questions. While I still have strength.” She’d chosen the corpse that was completely bones. “They are angry at being forced to do the other one’s bidding.”
When she strode confidently to the body, the others in the lecture hall watched her in silence. The teacher finally seemed able to take his finger off the trigger. That was a relief. Janos wasn’t sure if the individual could keep his cool before deciding that shooting Talia might be a better idea anyway. Stress decisions were not his favorite ones to deal with within the job. Stress tended to lead people to make reckless, devastating choices, and usually accounted for a lot of his needed protection attempts. Someone jerking the wheel when someone else went in front of them, for example, but too violently, causing the car to swerve and crash anyway. A police officer shooting in a situation where an individual might have been holding a cigarette, but to them, it seemed like a deadly weapon.
“I Command you to tell us who your former master is, so that we may capture them,” she said.
The spirit seemed to sway on the spot for a moment, before it said, “I know not their name.”
“Fuck,” Talia said, a little less graceful than before. “I don’t have enough energy to make the spirit walk to them… uh, um...”
“Try ‘where were you summoned?’” Janos suggested. Talia did so, and the spirit swayed once more, as if attempting to resist the order.
“I was summoned in Lasthearth Parish Cemetery.” The spirit began to vibrate more viciously. “If you want me out of their control, dismiss me now, little mage...”
Talia, flustered and disappointed, did just that. After the last spirit collapsed, she slumped herself. “I’m out. Can’t even raise a cockroach right now. Not that I would raise a cockroach,” she added hastily, catching the other people’s looks. “But why would someone attack my university?”
The teacher with the gun rubbed a hand through his curly black hair. “To frame you, perhaps. If you were not the one responsible for the attack.” Murmurs greeted this statement, and Janos gritted his teeth, seeing the sense in it.
“But… why?” Talia looked so helplessly confused that Janos felt oddly protective.
“Doesn’t matter why,” someone cut in. “This proves necromancers are just as evil as we thought. Just as—”
Others interrupted the speaker, raising their voices to let out their own viewpoints, and Janos thought grimly, If this was an attempt to turn the public against necromancy, this has done well. The only issue was—the person who had done the attacking was a necromancer themselves.
Why shoot their own foot? It didn’t make sense, considering who gained and who lost from this act. Attacking an institution like this would ensure social media exploded with the events of what had happened—and not everyone seemed entirely convinced that Talia had nothing to do with it. That was the problem. Half the school now would be convinced she set them on her fellow students, while the other half vocally defended her.
Talia seemed to come to this realization too, and her expression slumped. Over the noise, he heard, “This is because of my father, isn’t it? Someone’s angry he’s in power. Someone...” She trailed off into thoughtful silence.
“Well, if you want to make people hate necromancers, this is the way to do it,” Elodie said, chipping in with her two cents. “You’d have to try some… counter-campaign or something. Like those Muslims who stand in the street asking for hugs while blindfolded, yeah?”
“Really,” Jake said in tones of evident disgust, while Talia appeared to have not heard, staring off into some unfathomable distance. Unable to shake out that this had happened.
Janos didn’t blame her. Protecting her would also now be more of a chore. And it might be entirely possible she’d need to be pulled from university completely, if the threat continued to be this high. Anything could have happened. Her powers were not guaranteed, not trained.
And on that note, he knew what he’d have to do next. It twisted him up from the inside out, but he saw no other way around it, if he wanted to do his job properly.
He needed to talk to her father about securing lessons.
She couldn’t practice in a clandestine manner with souls in the estate. She needed to go to cemeteries, morgues, places where she’d have more access to bodies, and souls. She needed to train to protect herself, because the corpses were too hard to take down just with his power alone.
It was his duty, after all, to reduce threats to his charges. At all costs.
Chapter Five – Talia
Talia’s father summoned her to his study. Four days after the Rosewood University attack, she’d received a formal note from teachers suggesting that she be suspended for an indeterminable amount of time, until they could secure her safety on the premises. Prettily worded, but it amounted to one simple thing: they were removing her from the campus, and most probably due to the anti-necromancy pressure building up.
She’d spent most of the day moping in her bedroom, occasionally messaging her friends in the group chat and separately, who all assured her that people didn’t hate her, that they knew she’d saved a majority of the students, that the teachers really were looking into putting more precautionary measures in place.
Didn’t save eleven of them, though, did I? she thought to herself. Eleven people killed in the attack, and t
wenty-three injured, four of them critically so. Rosewood University was in mourning, lighting candles, vowing to remember the students. She’d retained their names in her head, just to remind herself of the people she’d failed to save, because she’d been too damn slow to realize how else necromancy might be used.
Ryse Walters. Emily de Have. Brandon Stevenson, Felicity Myles… she kept running through the names.
The cost of necromancy. The cost of her powers.
A part of her wished that she’d never been born with them.
Easier to be normal. Easier to not have to deal with the constant stigma of her gift every day.
So it came as no surprise that her father called for her on that day, when she’d refused a tentative offering from the servants, and her bodyguard continued to loiter outside, giving her enough privacy to sulk alone, but not enough so that she was unaware of his presence.
“Father,” she greeted, noting how impeccable he looked. Of course, he never had a hair out of place. He paid for someone to groom him, to keep his face clean-shaven. He had narrow, angular features that made her think of a blade, and she was secretly glad she’d inherited more of her mother’s looks, because her father wasn’t a handsome man. His nose was too big and sharp, his lips too big for his thin face, and those eyes looked at you as if they were contemplating vivisection. She’d seen how some of the newspapers described him.
Vampire. Ghoul.
“Talia,” he said, steepling his fingers together. He regarded her with icy blue eyes. “It has come to my attention that since my rise to councilman, you’ve been struggling at school. And with that vicious attack… with a necromancer turning against their own kind...” His lips sucked in slightly with fury and his wispy eyebrows crunched together. “It seems to me that we can’t neglect your training any longer. Your powers will be sorely needed now, more than ever.”
“Will you be training me?” Talia couldn’t help but feel a small ting of excitement, despite her previous brooding. One thing that would yank her out of the mood would be to have official training. So that she no longer needed to hide, to be the dutiful little girl who dared not touch the complexities of her magic until years later.
