Affairs of the Dead (5 page)

Plus, if I wanted to feel as though I was important to Andrew, all I had to do was think about the fact that even though I’d been punished, he’d let me slide with my gray-area activities for quite some time.

I caught up on reports for the rest of the afternoon, and around five-thirty, it was time to get ready for a night of track and retrieval. Yippie.

I left the suite, but not before I ran into Micah coming back in. I prepared to walk past him like I hadn’t seen him, but he grabbed my arm and stopped me. So he wanted to go another round? Fine.

“What?” I snapped, turning on him and tugging my arm out of his grasp. “I’m on my way to get ready for track and retrieval. Want to get your jabs in? Go right ahead.”

“The bigwigs are sending dead witches down tomorrow to do the scan,” he said, face serious, voice low so only I could hear him. Then he walked away, leaving me staring after him.

I had the very strong urge to have a tantrum right there at the front of the suite. Micah’s words had been a warning, not an insult, and it reminded me of two things. One, that I was among a small population of necromancers who carried the very illegal ability to reanimate the dead, and two, that Micah was the only person who knew that.

Chapter Four

I left the suite and headed back to the eighth floor, but my thoughts were distracted. Reanimating the dead meant exactly that—taking a corpse and bringing it back to life, though if you wanted to get technical, it was sort of a pseudo life since the body would be living off someone else’s soul, and it didn’t last forever.

Reanimation used to be done a lot more hundreds of years ago, when it was harder to regulate and punish those who performed it. The solution had eventually come down to murder, and history books spoke of a bloody era where reanimators all over the world were ruthlessly hunted down with the complete support of the government and the church. And since, in those days, it was harder to discern which necromancers could reanimate, a lot of necromancers who didn’t carry the power were also murdered.

However, some reanimators were able to stay out of the blood bath, and I am one of the few descended from them. Thankfully, modern government had gotten off the murderous track, but that didn’t mean reanimators were safe. Nowadays, the government sanctioned dead witches to do random checks to see if any of us were also reanimators. If you thought of necromancer magic as a blue light, reanimation magic was like a red bolt that streaked through it, thus it was detectable using rune stones created to seek it out.

That one drunken night with Micah had revealed to him more than just what I looked like naked. I’d also blabbered to him that I could reanimate, and told him long and winding stories about how, as a teenager, I used to kill squirrels only to reanimate them with the souls of other squirrels.

Reanimators who were found out were subjected to the unpleasant process of having their reanimation power drawn out, and from what I heard, they were never the same again. “Sickly, raving lunatics” was the phrase often used when talking about stripped reanimators. But the government clearly didn’t give a damn about what the person was like after they were stripped.

I had my methods of finding out when the checks were happening, but truth be told, I’d sort of dropped the ball on keeping up with monitoring things lately because work had been keeping me busy. Oddly enough, Micah was sort of the ace up my sleeve, seeing as this wasn’t the first time he’d given me a heads-up about the dead witches coming. I didn’t know exactly how he found out, but I did know he had a family member who worked in the paranormal section of the government, so my best guess was that he got his information that way. I got mine through e-mail hacking.

Micah hating me one minute and warning me about something that could be detrimental to me the next did baffle me though, don’t get me wrong. Maybe he wouldn’t out me until he’d gotten his confession of love from me. Guess I’d be safe forever then.

As it was, I’d have to worry about tomorrow later since right now I had to prepare for track and retrieval. I wasn’t really worried about being found out since I had evaded them before. It was just that my process of evasion was a pain in the ass.

“Selene, you can find your equipment in workroom B. It’s labeled with your name,” the dead witches’ receptionist told me when I entered the suite.

I nodded and headed to the workroom, where there was a black pouch waiting for me. Inside were several rune stones. One of them was attached to a chain, which I slipped around my neck. The roughly cut stone was yellow and vaguely diamond shaped, and it would alert me to the presence of ghosts.

The other stones in the pouch were to throw at the ghosts and capture them, Pokémon style. Okay, I didn’t actually have to throw the stone at the ghost. Touching them with it would suck them into the stone, which made it a lot easier for trackers to gather a lot of ghosts and bring them back to headquarters. Otherwise, I figured it’d be some sort of Pied Piper scenario, where trackers would be walking around with a line of ghosts following them. Which could be fun but inconvenient.

I checked the schedule that was tacked up in the workroom and saw that I’d be covering downtown Manhattan, specifically an area that was part of the Underground. My lips twitched in a smile. The Underground was actually the ideal place for me to patrol tonight.

* * *

I’d been on tracking duty for three hours already and had rounded up seven ghosts. So far, my clothes were still clean, which meant I hadn’t been climbing into any sewers or scraping myself through narrow alleys, so my spirits were holding as well as they could.

It was after nine, so the sun had long set. I was strolling through a part of Chinatown that, at first glance, looked like any other shopping district lined with tiny stores selling a lot of junk aimed at tourists. However, the people who came here knew that beneath those stores or in their back rooms, the Underground was in full swing.

Necromancers who didn’t affiliate with an organization like Affairs of the Dead often set up shop in the Underground and offered the same services to ghosts that we did, except they weren’t always skilled enough to know what would really help the ghost cross over. Therefore, a lot of the ghost monsters came from ghosts snatched up by Underground necromancers. The Underground was also where off-the-radar dead witches worked, and Leech Baby junkies sought them out, willingly offering up their energy to their poorly made rune stones to get whatever fix they could from having their energy sucked out.

The Underground wasn’t only concentrated in this area of downtown Manhattan either. It spread across all of the boroughs in places so obscure even I didn’t know all of them. And neither did the authorities.

But necromancers and dead witches weren’t the only ones who set up shop in the Underground. The rune stone around my neck hadn’t picked up on any ghosts nearby, so I thought I’d pay a visit to one of the basement shops.

I walked down into thick, musty-smelling darkness and emerged into a small, bare room where it looked like there was no farther to proceed. But this wasn’t my first time here. I felt along the back wall, which was completely hidden by shadows, until I found a concealed door. I opened it; entered a tiny, dark room; then blindly pried up a couple of floorboards to reveal a ladder that led into yet more darkness.

When I stepped off the last rung, I was standing in another small room. Since it was windowless and two stories underground, the air was stale and stifling, and the candlelight picked up the plentiful dust particles floating around. The room was also crowded with cages that housed many a barking dog, sleeping cat, or fluttering bird. I even spied a rabbit or two. Thus, it smelled beyond atrocious, and I wrinkled my nose against the assault as I tripped my way over cages to the person bent over something on the other side of the room. When I tapped him on the shoulder, he yelped and fell over.

“Hello, Trevor,” I said, giving him a smile.

Trevor was a thin, greasy-faced man with adult acne, wispy black hair, and brown eyes that were always looking over his shoulder. Standing this close to him, I could tell it had been a few days since he’d managed to take a shower, and I was glad I was able to stop myself from saying something tactless like, “You smell like ass.”

Trevor recovered from his shock and gave me an untrusting look, even looking behind me to see if I had come alone. He then gathered up the thing he’d been bent over—the carcass of a Chihuahua and two live squirrels in a tiny cage—and walked over to his worktable. It was cluttered with rune stones.

“What are you doing here?” Trevor hissed, still looking around the room nervously.

“Just paying you a visit,” I said. “I was out patrolling the area so I thought I’d stop by.”

Trevor muttered curses under his breath as he put the squirrels and dead dog down. “You interrupted me,” he said, to which I shrugged. “And I have clients coming any moment to pick up their pets. They don’t need to see you here.”

“Why not? I think it would be good for your clients to see a pretty face down here for a change, don’t you agree?”

Trevor cursed again. “You’re going to get me in trouble, Selene!”

“Oh, come off it. I like to antagonize you, but what trouble could I actually get you in?”

“You’re an official necromancer. What if some cop tailed you down here thinking you had a lead on an Underground business like mine?”

“Well, they didn’t, so unclench,” I said, walking around and looking into some of the cages. I glanced at Trevor and knew it was unlikely that he would unclench.

Trevor was a fellow necromancer who could reanimate. His reanimation power had been found out during one of those check-ins about four years ago, but he’d escaped before being stripped. Trevor had been a hardworking, driven necromancer but had fallen pretty far since those days. He was still a wanted man since the government was relentless about stripping all reanimators, so he’d changed his name and appearance and become a part of the Underground, only able to make a living the illegal way.

I’d happened across him a few years ago when I had chased a ghost down here, but I let him be, since he and I were the same, though he didn’t know that I was also a reanimator. I couldn’t blame him for not trusting me though. Just like I thought Micah would rat me out, Trevor thought I’d rat him out.

“Come now, Trevor, I’m sure you lead a lonely life with your little hidey-hole business. I thought you’d relish a friendly face.”

“I just want you to leave me alone,” he said. “You think I like being reminded about what I will never be again?”

I looked up from where I’d been rifling through the many rune stones on his table. He stood on the other side of it with his arms folded across his chest and looked away from my gaze.

“Guess I never thought about it like that before,” I said. I really hadn’t.

“Of course you didn’t,” he snapped, still looking at the wall instead of at me. “I could be like you, making an honest living helping ghosts. But because I was born with a power I didn’t even ask for, I’m forced to spend the rest of my life down here, reanimating people’s stupid pets. And when I’m not here, I’m in some random park rounding up rats and squirrels at three in the morning.”

The rats and squirrels were the souls he took to reanimate said stupid pets. Whoever did business with Trevor was also breaking the law. Reanimated animals were no more legal than reanimated people, and they had to keep coming back if they wanted Fluffy or Mr. Whiskers to stay on all fours.

As far as I knew, Trevor only reanimated pets because reanimating people carried a much greater risk of being discovered. I knew there were some reanimators in the Underground who took that risk, but the majority of them stuck to animals. The government put a huge investment into making sure graveyards were heavily secured and patrolled to discourage reanimators and their clients from trying to dig up someone’s body.

However, that just led to people trying to get the body from the morgue, or not reporting someone’s death and hiding the corpse in a basement fridge. Then there was the issue of people being snatched off the street by hired thugs with chloroform so their souls could be used to reanimate Grandma or little Sue. Man was I glad I made an honest living. Illegal methods of helping ghost clients aside.

Now that I actually heard what Trevor was saying, I had to admit the life he lived wasn’t ideal. Here I was, bitching because my well-paying, comfortable job subjected me to a task I deemed beneath myself, when Trevor lived the life of a recluse, always in fear of being caught, living two stories underground in a stinking hole full of dead and once-dead animals. Here came the pity.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll admit, I never thought about it that way before, but trust me. I may jab at you, but I don’t have any plans to turn you in.”

“Why?” he said, looking at me. “Why the hell should you give a damn about me? Why not just let the dead witches take my power and leave me with nothing?”

“We were friends once, weren’t we?” I said with a shrug. “I think that counts for something. Besides, I’m not out to break others down, and it’s not like I don’t have some experience toeing the line of what’s legal and what’s not. That’s actually what got me reassigned to track and retrieval.”

Trevor regarded me for a few moments, but his face didn’t lose its distrustful look. “AOD acts like they’re in your corner, but they’re really out for themselves. They were willing to hand me over to the government like I was nothing. Andrew did nothing to help me, so I had to run.”

I could see where he was coming from, but his anger and bitterness had blinded him to the fact that there was nothing Andrew could have done to help him. The law was the law when it came to reanimators, but Trevor’s feelings were understandably skewed.

I was at a loss for words. I’d come here to tease him for a few moments, not to have such a difficult conversation.

“Trevor…” I was saved from trying to give him a sympathetic speech by the rune stone around my neck. It released a pulse of light and grew warm against my skin. “Ah, it seems a ghost is nearby,” I said, making my way back to the ladder. “I’d better get going. See you around.”