Talia's Bodyguard

by Lisa Daniels

  Something about her voice lulled everyone into silence, as if she were Commanding them to do so. He noted that there seemed to be shadowy bags beneath her eyes, a sign that she’d been working overtime. Same with Talia, though Talia, for all her excitement, struggled to focus. She’d been worn to the bone and then some. She needed rest, in Janos’ honest opinion, but he knew Talia by now to be more stubborn, determined, maybe even a little stupid, rather than sensible. Stubborn people were like that.

  “We have collaborated with the police department and hospital, who have kindly consented to lend us two sets of bones that were donated to the care of medical science. You will soon see what happens when I tend to them. But for now, I would like for the class to ask questions regarding what they think they know about necromancy. If no one wants to ask, then I will tell you of the ones I’ve heard. Now… can you tell me?”

  To her credit, her tone and easy demeanor resulted in a few students tentatively putting up their hands. Janos was tempted to put up his, except he wasn’t a student, though he was sure Rosen would take the question as quickly as the others. Classrooms were all about momentum, after all.

  “I heard that necromancers need to make a blood sacrifice before they can do a spell.”

  “I thought they had to sacrifice their soul?”

  The statements overlapped, and Rosen gently disproved every one of them. The only “sacrifice” a necromancer had to make was their time, energy, and proximity to the bones they wanted to raise. The closer the bones, the easier it was, though it was also possible for one to raise them a mile away or so as well. Just expect that to cost a frightening amount of energy.

  No, they didn’t eat maggots for food, or did anything… sexual with the dead (yes, someone had seriously asked this, with a smirking expression upon their features). They also asked other insolent questions, while someone (Jake, Talia’s friend) asked if they used the dead to contact loved ones.

  At this, Rosen gave a small, sad smile. “We do, yes. But depending on the violence of their passing, and how eager or scared they are to move on, if you will, this will determine the type of soul we will have to speak to. Sometimes the last act they do or that is committed to them to lead to death can place a stranglehold upon their minds. When you speak to them, their personality tends to be rigid in a way it wasn’t in life. A shadow of it. So although we can speak to them, and sometimes conjure them up for those who desperately want to speak to the departed, they would not find everything to their satisfaction.”

  Janos had gone completely still at this. Remembering his mother. The blue-red glint in her ruined eyes, the twisted, burned flesh squeezing into what resembled a snarl. She should never have been brought back. Even if the reasoning behind it was good.

  “The stronger the necromancer’s connection to the soul, the more likely they’ll find them passive and gentle. Pulling a hostile soul out of the Other Side can result in a lot of trouble. But of course, I have to pull hostile souls out a lot, to try and glean information that leads to investigations being solved.”

  “What’s the Other Side?” one female student asked, her face flushed in interest.

  Even Talia leaned closer at this question. Perhaps she didn’t know quite as much as her sister. The sister who had the same profession as the person who had brought back his mother’s soul. Janos still felt that internal conflict, perhaps to leave the room and avoid having to be exposed to knowledge of this vile sorcery, or to listen, and feel doors in his mind gradually tease open, and not all of the doors he liked.

  “I call it the Other Side, but some will call it the realm of the dead, or Samhain’s Beard, because contact with the Other Side is stronger in this country than any other country, though we’ve yet to ascertain why. Put simply, it’s a place the necromancer can visit, and it has the souls of all the previously living in it. But it’s also a place they travel in. We have, I suppose, an out-of-body experience, where our own soul goes into the Other Side, when we want to pluck a soul from it. The Other Side has layers, too. The first layer is the brightest one, and here reside the most malleable and gentlest souls. Usually pets, plants, animals. They don’t have resentment and hate like humans do for the most part as they operate by instincts, so they are less likely to turn hostile. Though, of course, there are hostile ones.”

  She paused, and saw that she had the whole class listening in rapt interest. “The deeper you go into the Other Side, the less colorful it becomes. The deepest levels bleed out all color except black and white, and the deeper you go, the more hostile, the more malevolent and ancient the souls tend to be. The most dangerous souls have red eyes. I assume it’s a sign of the hatred that has corrupted their essence, since these souls, if unleashed onto the world, tend to go on destructive rampages, unable to be secured by necromancers.”

  Janos thought now of Talia’s kitten gaining a red glint to its eyes, how he’d held that tainted thing in his hands as it glared at him with such malevolence that he felt his own soul buckling under the pressure. Some things were just not meant to be.

  The last, rather obvious question before Rosen was going to demonstrate her abilities in a more practical sense was: “Can a necromancer take over another necromancer’s summons?” Glances at Talia suggested that people still doubted her version of events, even now.

  “They can,” Rosen confirmed. “It’s not easy, but it’s possible. The further away the summons is from their master, the more likely it is for another necromancer to take over. The example being the attack in the university, of course, when Talia was able to overcome the willpower of the opposing necromancer and call off the attack. We are currently investigating the whereabouts of the criminal, and as it is an ongoing investigation, we are not at liberty to discuss anything about it. Now… let’s show you how we do things.”

  Rosen smiled, though in Janos’ eyes, there was a slight ghoulish quality to it, probably because he knew she was about to raise the dead in front of an entire assembly of people—hundreds of students in attendance.

  “Case one—the animal.” Rosen revealed the bones of what seemed to be a dog. They were a polished white and didn’t look particularly scary lying down there. “I dip into the Other Side now. I can choose any soul to place into it, and Command it to obey me in everything I instruct. If the soul matches the original body better, however, such as a dog soul to a dog’s body, it is easier. And if you can place the original soul in its original body, the transition causes the least stress between the necromancer and the soul in question.”

  She closed her eyes and the corpse began to glow softly, until blue, glowing eyes appeared in the sockets, and the bones assembled, threaded together by a ghostly body. The dog sat up and began wagging its tail. There were a few chuckles in the auditorium, but mostly there was silence.

  “This one is a gentle, beautiful boy,” Rosen said, sounding sad. “And he should have been loved, but his owner decided he was too big to handle and sent him to a shelter. Because he was a ‘bully’ breed, he was put down five days after joining it. He was soft, playful, and sad, and went to his death thinking that he was going out for a walk.” Her lips twisted and her expression darkened. “We get a sense of these things when we connect with the soul. Others, we’d have to ask them ourselves.”

  “Can an animal speak?” someone asked, astonished.

  “Not in the way a human can, but we can… learn to listen to them. He still thinks that his family will come back to him, so he has been waiting on the Other Side.” Rosen now stroked the dog in a tender manner.

  Even if this was all made up, this was a clever way to get the whole room of people listening—by showing the kindness of the soul, and the empathy the necromancer felt towards the thing they brought up. Whether people chose to believe it or dismiss it was another matter, of course.

  “Another thing a necromancer can do, but it’s very advanced magic on their part, is to encourage the soul to move on. Moving on means it can no longer be found on the Other Side. I t
hink it goes somewhere to be eventually reincarnated, but of course, people have different beliefs depending on whom you ask.”

  She made the dog do some tricks, let it go near the students after ensuring them it would be friendly the whole time, and some people even petted it, though they described the sensation as weird. Others refused to touch it and shrank back in their seats. Overall, Janos thought the reception seemed okay. But he didn’t think it would change everyone in a day. It certainly wouldn’t change him.

  The big moment came after she demonstrated sending the dog to move on, which showed its eyes shift from blue to yellow for a brief moment until the ghostly body dissipated and its presence disappeared from the room. Rosen bent her will onto the collection of human bones she revealed from underneath the sheet. Some people were already muttering about how unethical this was, but Rosen quietened the room once more, and the bones rose up, forming the semblance of a human, though the whole effect seemed menacing, somehow.

  “This man was murdered,” Rosen said. “A John Doe case, a cold case that no one was able to solve back in 1967, before they allowed necromancers to be recognized in places as lawful citizens, and let them contribute to society. People like me are set on these cases to try and solve cold cases by attempting to commune with the dead. Or sometimes in recent homicides where the evidence is lacking, or there is a genuine fear that the killer might strike again soon. I am asked to handle them as delicately as possible. It’s not easy, because many, of course, will resist. Yet my profession gives me no choice.” She now faced the John Doe. “I Command you to tell me who you were in life.”

  The blue eyes seemed to flicker at her balefully. “Edmond Ward,” he said in a hollow, empty voice that sent a sliver of distaste through Janos. “I was a teacher, husband, father, grandfather, born in Lasthearth in 1901.” The corpse seemed unwilling to give out more information, and Rosen asked him next how he died.

  Murdered, he said. Lynched due to a hate crime, because he was a human who married a supernatural woman, responsible for spawning halfbloods.

  “Oh, I know that case!” someone spoke up suddenly, and all eyes turned to Elodie, who now looked extremely flushed. “There were several people lynched in 1967. They said there was a mob that went around trying to locate the families who had… married across lines.”

  When Rosen Commanded the spirit to answer Elodie, he replied, “Yes. I was the third one to be killed in that. Except my death was more out of the way—they didn’t find my body for many weeks.”

  “You… you were aware you were dead?” Elodie asked, and her voice trembled slightly. The spirit let out a dry, resonant chuckle.

  “I was. I didn’t want to—I didn’t want to go, until they stopped the monsters who hung me—and then got my little grandson not long after. I saw his little soul enter. I told him to move on. He was so happy to see me.”

  As the spirit’s voice choked up, Janos again privately thought that Rosen had most likely specifically selected a spirit that was as accommodating as possible. It wouldn’t really help to have her gain more attention due to said spirit attempting to kill her upon revival. Like… like…

  Fool. She is near twenty years dead and you still insist on haunting your own memories. You still insist on this, even now. Let her rest.

  He still had that awful churning clogging up his guts, though. He wasn’t sure if it’d ever go away.

  “People still think there is heaven, or nirvana, or whatever afterlife there is,” Elodie said, and the whole assembly was listening with her.

  “I do not know. I...” The corpse fell silent, and Rosen suddenly went still. Her eyes narrowed, her lips pursed.

  “Can you feel that?” she addressed Talia then, and her younger sister nodded, appearing astonished.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I can.”

  People were mystified, but Rosen then went on with the lesson like it didn’t matter. She got the corpse to answer a few more questions, then dismissed him, and concluded with telling the assembly that necromancers can be used for good as well as bad. Just like a gun can be used for good, in the right hands, serving as an instrument of justice. They can be used to listen to those whom people no longer listen to.

  Janos noted that she completely avoided talking about the red-eyed revenants being created by necromancers. He supposed that was too heavy a truth to swallow. But if people found out something like that was being hidden from them, he thought they might freak out slightly.

  When the assembly cleared out, it sounded as if people were still mixed on their opinions. His sensitive ears picked up sentiments such as do you think she lied and whatever man, they’re still as creepy as hell, but a few voices sounded happy for the clarification, and others claimed to be experts that knew all of these things already.

  Rosen lured Talia and Janos into an unused classroom, not trusting herself to be unheard elsewhere, and gave them both a stern look.

  “Someone was trying to take over the body,” she explained to Janos. “I felt their attempt when I was planning to get the spirit to answer some more questions. I used an old word binding on the spirit, though, so the attempt led nowhere… but I’m starting to think the enemy necromancer we’re looking for attends this university.”

  Janos growled softly, while Talia let out a gasp. “You think a person from this university attacked other students? Really?”

  “That’s where my investigation will be heading now, yeah,” she said. Janos thought back to all the whispers he was hearing, wondering if any of them had been revealing, or whether it was all background noise, without any way of discerning.

  He didn’t mind the idea of helping to track down a rogue necromancer, anyway. That was more up his alley.

  “What do you think I should do, Janos?” Talia asked, once her sister had left, rushing off to another summons from her department, promising to look into things later. She gave him an expression of supplication, and he had no idea how to react to that.

  “Whatever you want,” he grunted, folding his arms and surveying her carefully. “I’m assuming you’re wondering if you should remain in the university or not.”

  “Yeah… just wondering if I’m placing my friends’ lives in danger just by being here.”

  “Of course not. That’s not your fault,” he said, emphatic. “Most likely someone who has a beef with your father. He must be stirring a lot of angry heads up there from his position.”

  “Mm...” She slumped and looked so forlorn that a stab of sympathy went through him. “I don’t know what to do. I just don’t. I feel like my sister’s demonstration here didn’t convince anyone. And we had someone trying to break through her defenses. They just hate us, don’t they?” She then lifted her chin up to stare at him. “Even you.”

  “I don’t,” he said, a lump forming in his throat. “I don’t hate you.”

  “I wish that were true,” she said sadly. “But thank you for protecting me anyway.”

  The lump in his throat increased in size. She left the room and he followed, unable to shrug off that strange, gnawing sense of guilt inside.

  I don’t hate you, he thought again, and knew it to be true. Whatever else their relationship might be as bodyguard and client, necromancer and werewolf—he didn’t hate her at all.

  Chapter Seven – Talia

  Three days later, Talia received a phone call that nobody wants to hear. The kind of call that sent all the hot blood in her body cold, and frosted up her lungs, making it hard to form words.

  Your father has had an accident, along with your sister.

  Both of them were in a car together, heading towards a meeting, some important arrangement that neither could apparently get out of.

  They said it was a normal accident, just some stupid T-boning from a drunk driver who wasn’t looking where he was going.

  Yet this drunk driver had conveniently hit her family, and died in the crash.

  All the information burbled over her, starting with the call from the police, who want
ed to check in with her, due to her relationship with Rosen, and of course, an important figure being caught in an accident generated mass hysteria. Social media was an awful, vile cesspit of hate and fear. Some people tried to pray for Rosen and her father, but many more seemed utterly delighted that these two were hospitalized.

  I hope they die, the maggot eaters.

  All the souls in hell are waiting for these two, now all we need to do is kill the youngest daughter and we’ve got the set.

  Insult after insult poured through the feeds, and Janos had to gently yank her away from the self-torture. She wasn’t allowed to visit either of them as they were both in intensive care.

  Why didn’t they have protection for themselves? Talia thought. Why her, and not them? They needed protection as much as she did. They needed werewolves or whatever was handy. And now they were injured, and all the powers they possessed couldn’t save them. People who had healing powers were virtually extinct in this day and age. Corporations tended to kill or negate them so that they could sell their own marketed goods as cures. Spontaneous healers, after all, were pretty bad for business. There was a big purge in the 70s, where governments across the world claimed they were rounding up healers to allocate them to hospitals, and the healers themselves happily went along.

  Four years later, the secret came out. They weren’t being allocated at all. They were killed, or their magic taken from them. The medical market industry skyrocketed since people could no longer find a healer to cure them of whatever ailment dragged them low.

  Talia waited now in the reception ward for news. Any kind of news regarding her family members. In particular, she didn’t want Rosen to die, and felt almost guilty for prioritizing her sister over her own father.

  But Rosen had always been kinder to her. The only one who really looked out for her, even when things changed and she wasn’t around quite so often, plunged into the chaos of her new blossoming career.