Only Human

by Meredith Katz

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Book Details

  Dedication

  Only Human

  About the Author

  ONLY HUMAN

  MEREDITH KATZ

  Getting sick sucks, and magic sucks worse. So when Saul finds out that his sudden bout of sickness is actually a curse, he's understandably freaked out by being referred to a necromantic specialist. But the ordeal is made moderately better by the cute receptionist, Theo, who is exactly Saul's type—aside from the fact that he's dead.

  Sure, he's gray-skinned and put together from the remains of various corpses, but Theo is gentle, kind, and shares Saul's tastes in TV and video games. He knows all the right places for coffee, and enjoys long walks in the park. Maybe getting involved with the undead isn't so bad after all—and maybe you don't have to have a heartbeat to win someone's heart.

  Only Human

  By Meredith Katz

  Published by Less Than Three Press LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.

  Edited by Samantha M. Derr

  Cover designed by Kirby Crow

  This book is a work of fiction and all names, characters, places, and incidents are fictional or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental.

  Second Edition October 2018

  First Edition published in Less Than Dead by Less Than Three Press October 2016

  Copyright © 2018 by Meredith Katz

  Printed in the United States of America

  Digital ISBN 9781684313815

  To my beloved Sam,

  Who took all the scattered, stitched-together parts of me, and loved them as a whole.

  ONLY HUMAN

  At first he'd thought it was the flu: achy skin, a general sense of being under the weather, background headache. The health clinic at the university had seemed to support the idea. The doctor there had listened to his symptoms, obligingly wrote him a note for his classes, and waved him out the door.

  But after a week, it still hadn't improved, and when his aching skin began to develop strange, darkening spots, Saul decided to skip the school clinic entirely and went to the hospital's outpatient instead. He sat for a few hours in processing, glad for Ontario's health insurance and vaguely hoping that whatever he had—which, to his mind, could very well have been the bubonic plague, making an unlikely resurgence just for him—wasn't too infectious.

  The doctor took one look at him, put a reassuring hand on his shoulder, told him to take some time off and rest, and then referred him to a magical illness specialist, which was exactly the type of second opinion Saul had never wanted to get.

  Plague aside, most physical ailments were at least predictable. They might kill you, and they would probably make you suffer first, but the details of what to do and how to treat them were almost certainly written down somewhere. Magic, he'd always thought, seemed like it could do anything. There was no way of predicting what was wrong with him if it was a spell. It opened up a wide world of impossible horrors.

  No. Calm down. Breathe.

  Saul tried to take a mental step back and view this logically. He couldn't think of any situation he'd been in where anyone might have practiced magic on him—couldn't come up with anything that had broken up his status quo in any way, really. The closest he could come was his last hookup, and that only because she'd shared a charm against disease and pregnancy. Couldn't be too safe, she'd said, and he'd agreed.

  That type of charm wasn't too uncommon, but to the best of his knowledge, it was the only magic he'd interacted with recently. It wasn't like he lived a particularly exciting life, especially not one that was likely to get him cursed. He got up, went to class, worked at his part-time job at HMV. Most of his time was spent in his apartment, playing games, browsing cat blogs, and sleeping. The occasional Saturday night at the bar was the exception rather than the rule.

  He was pretty sure he still had Jill's number. He searched his phone, eventually located her name typoed badly and under 'K', which was a momentary heart attack until he realized what had happened. He gave her a call as soon as he got back to his apartment.

  "Jill? It's Saul."

  A brief pause, and he opened his mouth to add, awkwardly, from the bar, because he couldn't think of a way to describe himself that would be particularly helpful. Short, curly brown hair, skinny, wore that Final Fantasy T-shirt, might help narrow him down but would make it weirder that she didn't remember him.

  Fortunately, she spoke before he could put his foot in his mouth. Just as well, since this conversation was going to be weird enough as it was. "Oh! From Henderson's, right? Nice to hear from you again…"

  That last was said slightly uncomfortably, and Saul shifted a little, rubbing at one of the discolored marks on his forearm. "Uh, yeah, you too," he said. "Listen, I was wondering…"

  "No, um, listen," she said. "I'd love to, really, but I'm actually, I've actually just started seeing someone, and—"

  He realized abruptly that they were having two very different conversations. "Oh. No," he said. "Not that. This is maybe a weird question, but you're not a—" He cut himself off. She certainly hadn't sounded like someone who would curse him. "I'm having a bit of a problem with a magical situation, and I was wondering if you—had any idea what could… I mean, it started shortly after you and I hooked up—"

  "Hey," she said, tone concerned. "You're sounding kind of freaked out there. Can you slow down a bit and… I don't know, deep breaths?"

  Saul drew a deep breath, counted to three, and let it out. "Sorry," he said. "It looks like I've been cursed, and since it happened after the bar, I was wondering if you knew anything about it. At all. If the charm turned out to have been bad or if you were having any problems too?"

  "I haven't had any…" Her voice had gone cautious. "I don't even know any real magicians either. At least none who could cast a real curse. I'll get the charm checked and get back to you?"

  It already felt like a dead end. At least she was being decent about it. "Thanks," he said. "I appreciate it."

  "I mean, I can also…" She trailed off.

  "Jill?"

  "I'll get back to you," she said, and hung up.

  It hadn't made him feel any better, but there was nothing he could do but wait for his next appointment or for her to call again. He tried to look up more about magical curses online—but as usual, the internet wasn't a huge help, and mostly just did its best to convince him he was about to die.

  He did at least confirm that maleficia—the use of magic to harm someone else—was super illegal. He obviously intended to report it if it turned out that some charm peddler was selling cursed charms to mess with people having sex, but the whole thing sounded pretty fake already. He turned it over and over in his head, struggling to find some way to make sense of it, and came up with nothing. If it had been the charm Jill had used, it would probably be affecting her too.

  He still hadn't heard back from her by the time his appointment with the magical specialist rolled around. The doctor did a few tests that involved painting Saul in blood and making him swallow weird powders, clicked his tongue judgmentally for a while, and then told him flatly that while, yes, it was a curse, it wasn't in his field and wasn't something he could treat.

  And then he referred Saul to a necromancer.

  He wanted to scream.

  If he was resistant to the idea of seeing a magician about this, the idea of seeing a necromancer gave him chills. Necromancy was legal, sure, and had all kinds of rigid rules as a result. Even Saul, who made a habit of staying as far away from dead bodies as possible, knew that the dead had t
o consent to being raised or be laid back to rest immediately, that no rotting corpse could be used since that would constitute torture, and that magic was used to maintain the body's state for the same reason.

  He'd done his best to ignore that it was even a thing, had tried not to look zombies in their weird golden eyes when running into them on the subway—didn't want to look someone in the face and see some dead person still stuck in their corpse.

  Going to a necromancer himself was a recipe for a panic attack.

  He didn't do anything at all for the next few days, as if the problem would somehow go away if he just ignored it long enough, and Jill actually got back to him before he could work up the guts to make his move.

  "Heyyy," she said awkwardly. "This is Jill. You know, from—"

  "Henderson's," Saul said. "Right."

  "Right," she said. "I got the charm checked, and it's fine. Nothing on it but protection from disease. Definitely shouldn't cause any disease. I had multiple people take a look at it to be sure."

  He felt his heart fall a little. "Right," he said, mouth dry. "Thanks. I… I appreciate it."

  "But," she said, "look. It might still be. I mean, I have this ex."

  An ex. He pinched the bridge of his nose. He'd definitely read a comic with this exact plot. Maybe more than one. "Uh-huh?"

  "We broke up a couple weeks before you and I… I didn't see him at the bar or anything, but he lives in the area too, he could have been there. He likes tinkering with magic. He's not any good, though," she added hastily. "Not… that I knew of, anyway, it always seemed like it was something he was just playing around with. So I don't know if whatever curse is on you is because of him? He hasn't done anything to me, and hasn't said anything to me about it, but he always was the kind of guy who gets mad at the other party. It's just a possibility."

  Not one that made him feel any better. He drew a deep breath. At least it was something. "What's his name?"

  "Jack Godard."

  "… Jack and Jill?" Despite his lousy mood, he managed to get an edge of teasing in his voice, because, really?

  "I know," she said, pained. "He thought it was so fucking cute. God. Anyway, obviously, I don't know if that'll help, but I figured I'd say something."

  He sighed, managed to smile at the phone, and hoped the tone would come across. "Thanks," he said. "I appreciate it. You keep your new boyfriend away from him just in case, okay?"

  "I've let my girlfriend know already," she said neutrally.

  "Oh, I—" Embarrassing. He, of all people, should know better.

  "And I'll try," she added, relenting. "Keep me updated? If it's not too weird. I feel a little responsible."

  "You're not," Saul said. "But I'll let you know."

  *~*~*

  The discolored patches of skin began to get worse, and since things with Jill hadn't really gone anywhere useful, Saul had to admit he couldn't put it off any more. The sluggishness, the aches and pains—they stayed at around flu level: not pleasant, but tolerable. The grayish spots spreading in small spots over his skin, though—it was the sight of those, not just his fever, that left him shivering.

  He had to stay calm, Saul reminded himself, probably for about the tenth time in five minutes. The necromancer would be a professional. The creepy reputation they had was likely unfair. Necromancers were there to help. They aided the police with murder cases, gave closure to families, were first responders who helped resuscitate people on the edge of death.

  It was a perfectly legitimate profession, and the doctor was probably a very nice person.

  But his imagination was running wild. The clinic itself was behind a single steel door and down a set of stairs, which was probably the worst possible place to put anything you were reluctant to go to. Even a normal doctor's office would suck if it were down there. He put his hand on the doorknob, shuddering when it was cold to the touch, vividly picturing a morgue on the other side, corpses laid out and ready, weird markings on the wall, strange chanting playing on an old-fashioned tape deck in the examination room. Bones hanging from the ceiling to make a curtain. Maybe a finger as a doorstop.

  Saul pushed the clinic's door open. It was, naturally, exactly the same kind of doctor's office he was used to. A divider separated the area for receptionists and assistants from the ubiquitous waiting room. Chairs ringed the walls, and little end tables had out-of-date magazines on them. The most recent Maclean's had to be from four months ago. Somehow, that helped him feel a little better.

  It was so refreshingly normal that he was completely unprepared for what he saw when he turned to the front desk.

  The receptionist standing behind the divider was enormous, well over seven feet tall, and looked like he worked out—broad shoulders and strong arms, with a narrower waist, though Saul wasn't about to peer over the divider to see if he'd been skipping leg day. He was nicely dressed in a blue button-down shirt and slim yellow tie instead of standard-issue scrubs. Tousled brown hair fell over a flat forehead on a nice face: strong nose, high cheekbones, chiseled clean-shaven jaw, and what looked like an easy smile.

  He was handsome, and might even be Saul's type—except for the part where he was dead.

  His eyes, meeting Saul's horrified ones, were that odd reflective gold that zombies all had. And his gray skin was strange, more grotesquely mottled than any zombie that Saul had seen.

  Saul heard himself make an awful noise.

  The receptionist was a type of zombie he recognized from spending too much time researching curses online lately, a sort that used to be called a drudge, and one even more unnerving than the normal kind of already creepy undead. The professional term was—what was it—homunculi? That was it, he thought, staring up at the receptionist's mismatched face. One homunculus, two homunculi.

  A normal zombie happened when the soul of the dead person reassumed their own body. If the body were fresh enough, it could even pass for a living human. If not—well, Saul had read more than enough horror stories on Reddit that week to call a few possibilities to mind. Even though he knew a generous portion of what he read on the internet was lies, they were sometimes really convincing lies.

  Homunculi were even worse. Those were constructed out of assorted body parts from any number of people to make a functional body when the original one wouldn't work, or could no longer be found. The necromantic magic fused the mishmash of parts into a cohesive whole, but left the skin a sickly patchwork of grays, a magical side effect from forcing them to join. Nothing he had read said anything about why someone might do something that awful—but he hadn't exactly gone looking. Just reading about it had left him a little freaked out.

  But only a little, he thought guiltily as the receptionist blinked at him slowly.

  "Good afternoon," the receptionist said. His voice was pleasant, deep, and rich, and his tone was mild. "Do you have an appointment?"

  Saul flushed, realizing how long he'd been staring. Embarrassed, he blurted out a quick, genuine, "Sorry," before realizing what he'd been asked. "Um, yes. Saul Jastrow. I had a referral—"

  "Right, got you," the receptionist said, and smiled, giving Saul a quick wink. I get it, it seemed to say. No need to apologize. Your reaction's between the two of us. Saul flushed again, almost taken aback, grateful for his tolerance. "Looks like you're about fifteen minutes early. Would you like to take a seat?"

  "Sure, thanks," Saul said, and did, looking him over again. Despite the homunculus's appearance, his attitude had helped put Saul a little more at ease. He seemed so unexpectedly… normal. Saul found himself blurting out, "I haven't been to a necromancer before. Anything I should know?"

  The receptionist hummed under his breath as he considered, tapping a pen to his gray lips, which were split down the middle by a darker shade. "Well. Of course I'm not qualified to comment on your specifics, since what happens will depend on why you need to see her." He spoke slowly but softly, with the air of someone that considered the weight of each word before setting it carefully down.
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  "Speaking generally," he continued, "probably she'll conduct a few magical tests and ask you a number of questions about the situation, and depending on what seems to be causing the problem, she'll either schedule further tests or recommend a course of treatment. It shouldn't be anything too surprising compared to your usual medical appointments, I imagine." He smiled, the pen dimpling his lower lip.

  "Thanks," Saul said. Then, a little embarrassed by his own reaction: "I mean it. I'm a little nervous."

  "Don't worry about it," the receptionist said. "Anything that deals with morbidity can be a big deal. I should know, right?" He winked, still smiling. "But I promise we do things pretty normally around here."

  Saul bobbed his head, reaching out blindly and picking up a magazine. He didn't read any articles, just watched the receptionist work and glanced down whenever it looked like those gold eyes were focusing on him.

  It only took ten minutes for Saul to be called in. Dr. Richardson looked just as normal as her office, wearing a pink dress shirt and a long white lab coat, her curly black hair pulled back in a tight bun. She introduced herself with a gentle voice and launched right into the tests which, sure enough, were fairly simple. The ground didn't open up, entrails weren't pulled from corpses and put into his own body, and the patient bench, while not terribly comfortable, was definitely nothing like a coffin. She took his temperature, drew some patterns on his arms, and murmured to herself with a frown while viewing the symbols that danced golden in the air as the spell read Saul's body.

  "Hm," Doctor Richardson said.

  "What does that mean?" Saul asked, because Richardson's frown had only deepened.

  "I'll need to run a few more tests," Richardson said, in an unsuccessfully reassuring tone.

  Saul's stomach churned as Richardson swabbed the discolored patches on his skin and then dropped the swab into a magic circle. He tried not to over-think what a necromancer could do with blood when she had to draw some, and then, at her request, filled a urine cup and watched her drop bits of both on the corners of the magic circle.