The Necromancer's Seduction (16 page)

Chapter Fifteen

A knock on the door broke my concentration. A quick look through the peephole confirmed
Adam’s arrival. He greeted me with a broad smile and bowed. “Milady beckons.”

“Must you?”

“Absolutely.” Adam made himself comfortable on my couch and cocked his head. “You
seem none too worse for the wear.”

“What do you mean? Aside from general chaos.” I tossed the blue books I’d graded onto
a pile on the floor.

“Spending the night with a demon.”

“You don’t like demons much, do you? Even when you were alive,” I said, trying to
divert him from the spending-the-night-with-a-demon topic.

“I don’t trust them.”

“Let’s talk about something else.” I coughed when a sharp pain jabbed my chest. I
pressed on my breastbone and concentrated on breathing. “Adam, what the hell?”

He narrowed his eyes. “I can affect the bond. Control you. Hurt you.” His voice had
taken on a dark timbre. He jerked on the bond, and my chest constricted, but I was
prepared. I ran for the kitchen, heard his footsteps pursuing me, slow and steady.
I opened the fridge, pulled out a bag of blood, and tossed it at him just as he entered
the kitchen. He caught the bag, looked at it in confusion, scowled and left the kitchen.

I sat to catch my breath and let my heart slow. I’d wrangled the blood from Jax earlier
in the day and made him promise not to tell Ewan. The blood wasn’t a permanent solution,
but it’d buy me time. The question was how much?

I walked into the hallway and found him looking at a picture of me as a kid, holding
a surfboard on the beach in Santa Monica. I’d done my share of surfing, mostly on
the underside of the board. Adam turned around, his eyes solemn, bordering on apologetic.
I didn’t notice the bag or any blood on his clothes or face, but I knew he’d drunk
it, sensed his satiation through the bond.

“How long did you surf?” I asked.

“Since I was a kid. I learned by myself. I hit the surf almost every day.”

“Why did you stop?”

He pointed at the picture, at my board. “That board was way too big for you.”

I laughed. “That information would have been helpful then.”

“So what’s the plan for tonight?”

He’d deftly sidestepped my question about why he’d stopped surfing. I considered pursuing
the matter, then decided it wasn’t worth it. “Kara and I talked about going to the
carnival or fair or something. Wanna come?”

“Nutty rides? Greasy hot dogs? Raging teen hormones? Sure, I’m in.”

“Let’s just hope no zombies are in as well.”

* * * *

“The traveling carnivals in the early nineteen hundreds were cool, especially the
sideshow freaks,” Kara said as we maneuvered through the throngs of families pushing
strollers and teens yelling as they assessed their possibilities of hooking up. Hawkers
called out, inviting us to play ring toss or Whack-A-Mole. The smell of cinnamon from
frying churros warmed the cool night air around us.

“You looking for a new job?” I asked.

“You know, some of the old circus and carnival freaks were supernaturals,” she said.

“That’s kind of depressing. So was the hairy man a werewolf?”

“I don’t know, but maybe it wasn’t so depressing. The carnivals allowed them to come
out of hiding, to a certain extent.”

She bumped into me to avoid being hit by a kid running to get on the Twist-O-Rama
ride.

“Why would they like being gawked at? Treated like a freak for being themselves?”
I asked.

“Did you ever see the old black and white movie
Freaks
about the circus sideshow freaks?” she asked. “The non-freak trapeze artist and her
boyfriend schemed to kill one of the midgets because he was rich. She pretended to
love him and married him.”

“Gobble, gobble, we accept her, one of us,” Adam said in a squeaky voice. “That’s
one of the best movie lines ever. They cast real people with deformities as the sideshow
freaks.”

“That movie was horrifying in ways horror directors today could never imitate,” I
said, images from the movie vivid in my mind. When the sideshow freaks found out that
the trapeze artist planned to kill their midget friend, they attacked her, turning
her into a deformed freak. “They don’t make movies like that anymore.”

“I’m confused,” Kara said. “A supe who loves horror movies. That I get. But you love
horror movies and hate supes.”

“I don’t hate supes. I never said I hated them.”

Her eyebrow rose until it reached just under her hairline.

“I don’t,” I insisted. “My best friend is a witch.” I flicked my palm at Adam. “We
have here a revenant. I’m all about the supes.”

And I just slept with a demon, I added silently. If Cora could see me now.

“You know,” Kara said, “if you could reconcile the two, you’d be horribly self-actualized.”
She and Adam laughed at her stupid joke.

“Let’s get some cotton candy,” said Adam. He stared, eyes wide, at the blue and pink
wads of cotton stickiness hanging from food booths. Kara mouthed to me that he doesn’t
eat. I shrugged.

After purchasing cotton candy, we made our way to the Ferris wheel. I sat on the cracked
seat cushion and waited for the large wheel to transport us to the top of the city.

“Wasn’t coming here a great idea?” Kara said as she licked the melted cotton candy
strands off her fingers.

“I hope we stop at the very top,” Adam said. “See life out there in all its dysfunctional
glory.”

He leaned his forehead against the steel frame of the cabin window.

Kara gave me a quick look, then glanced out at the city lights. A heavy ache weighed
on my gut through the bond. What could I say? Sorry your life was cut short? Seemed
inadequate. I shoved a large, wispy glob of blue sugar into my mouth.

Adam reared his head. “Let’s go in one of those cheesy haunted houses next.”

“Actually,” Kara said, “this carnival is supposed to have a pretty good haunted house.”

After a few more rotations, we left the Ferris wheel and headed for the haunted house.
Once inside, Adam yelled, “I call middle!”

Crap. I hated being at the end of the line, the last woman standing, exposed to the
screams and slime and scares of the haunted house actors lurking in the shadows. If
anything, they should be scared of us.

The thought no more entered my mind than a creepy clown jumped straight out from under
the proverbial childhood bed to cackle in my face. I jumped and moved my shaking frame
closer to Adam’s laughing one. Why did I still jump and scream when I knew this was
fake?

We passed a vibrating door smeared with fake blood. Adam turned his head to me, his
eyes soft, and I realized I had my hands on his waist. I dropped my hands. Last night’s
sex with Ewan invaded my mind. Picturing him with a smear of blue sugar goo on his
face, my hands around his waist, while we snuck through the haunted house, I regretted
not asking him to come with us.

We entered a hallway lit by wall sconces dripping black and green candle wax on the
walls. I smelled the faint odor of urine. The hall shrunk as we walked through until
my head scraped against the ceiling. Distant screams and laughter from other haunted
house revelers echoed around us.

“Let’s go this way,” Kara said, poking through a curtain, her squeal telling me she’d
encountered some other creep.

“Kara,” I called after her, carefully moving through the curtain. Strobe lights flashed,
disrupting my vision and disorienting my equilibrium.

“I should be scaring people in this place,” Adam said from behind me.

“You look normal. You wouldn’t scare anyone.”

“Can’t I make my flesh decompose at will or something?” He sounded disappointed.

“I don’t think so and don’t want to find out.” The last thing I needed was Adam purposely
grossing me out with exposed body organs. “Where the hell did Kara go?”

Adam moved in front of me as we continued down the strobe-lit passage. I heard more
screams.

“Check this guy out. His head’s about to come off,” Adam said, standing in front of
a guy hanging from the ceiling. “The makeup is pretty good. How is he hanging like
that?”

Another scream, more laughter.

“Hey, I think I hear Kara.” Adam jogged farther down the hall, his figure blurring
into the flashing lights.

“Wait up!” A worm of anxiety wriggled up my neck. Something was off, but the loud
noises, lights, and manufactured smells were confusing my senses. As I passed the
hanging man, I half expected him to fall. His body rocked. Blood trickled on my arm.
A shard of ice terror scraped up my spine. I willed my legs to move.

“Adam!” I shrieked. The last thing I remember before hitting the floor was pain.

Chapter Sixteen

My body was stiff. I tried to move my arms and legs, but encountered resistance. My
eyelids stuttered as I tried to lift them. I blinked a few times to clear the gray
glaze from my vision only to see green and blue neon. I was strapped to a metal chair
with bike chains and sat next to a score table in a bowling alley.

I heard shuffling from the darkened corners. The hanging zombie from the haunted house
ambled past me, blood oozing down its face, a patch of skin flapping against its chin.
A moaning mass of at least ten zombies followed, their garbage can smell overpowering
the bowling alley aroma of stale beer and sweaty shoes. Then another figure emerged
from the dark.

I was stunned, my tongue paralyzed at the sight of wire-rimmed glasses illuminated
by the green neon. No fucking way. Was this a post-traumatic hallucination? I couldn’t
be looking at . . .
Brad?

“Hello, professor.” He stopped in front of me and put his hands in his pockets, an
arrogant twitch to his lips. “My name is Cael.”

“You’re—” The word caught in my throat. “—the necromancer Cael?”

“I knew you were smart. By the way, I really like your class. Too bad most of the
students are brainless. They’d make good zombies.”

Anger replaced my shock. I strained at the bike chains that held me. “Fuck the jokes.
You killed my grandmother and Adam and the other supes.”

“I guess this means I won’t get an A?”

His expression was dead serious.

How the hell did I miss this? But then his demeanor had changed entirely from the
student. He stood taller, abandoning the telltale campus slouch. His eyes, brown and
open and earnest in class, were now dark, reflecting cynicism and something else that
made my palms sweat.

He adjusted his glasses. “You may not believe me, but I regret your grandmother’s
death. The few of us left face nothing but persecution and scorn. The loss of any
necromancer is a tragedy.”

I stared at him. My lungs hurt, as if I were breathing in air at twenty thousand feet.
He was seriously cracked.

“Don’t insult me.” My voice was a low whisper. “Why did you kill her?”

“Let’s clarify one point, shall we? I did
not
kill your grandmother. She had a choice. She picked the wrong door.” His lips narrowed.
“She refused to create a supernatural revenant and suffered the consequences.”

I fought back the tears rising from the thought of Cora dying at the hands of this
bastard. “She couldn’t create one. She tried once before and failed.”

“She helped your mother. She knew how.”

Jesus, my mother plagued our lives. I felt a tiny hammer banging on the inside of
my skull, causing my already aching head to throb. “All this time, you’ve been trying
to create a supernatural revenant. You took my grandmother, thinking she had some
secret that would make it work for you, but you failed.”

His face twisted with anger. Maybe the visit with Arthur wasn’t a complete failure.
I’d learned a possible weakness in Cael and decided to chip away at his vulnerabilities
in hope of mining out the insanity. Nutty people who tried to act normal never made
sense. Nutty people stripped to their core? They revealed the brutal logic of their
pain. I needed to see his pain to understand the truth.

“You, your grandmother, so self-righteous. You both deny the true nature of a necromancer.
The glory. You think you’re so different from me? Tell me, how do you suppose Adam
feels about his predicament?” The words seethed through his teeth.

I’d made a small hole. I ventured down the mine shaft, hoping to keep him talking.
If I kept picking away I might buy some time for Kara and Adam to locate me. The bond
with Adam had to be good for something besides making my stomach feel weird.

“I don’t kill people. I’m nothing like you.”

He motioned to one of the zombies who straggled into the darkness, his shoes scraping
the floor. The zombie left and returned, scraping and scratching, with a body that
he plopped in front of me. Bile rose to choke my throat. At my feet lay the werewolf
Brandon, still in his priest’s habit. This time I let the tears come.

“You will make this werewolf a revenant,” Cael said. Not a command. A statement of
fact.

“No way. Do it yourself. Oh, wait, you can’t.” I let my words shovel away.

Cael’s nostrils flared. He reached over and squeezed my chin, holding it for a moment,
then releasing it with a jerk.

“It’s not even a full moon. It won’t work,” I said.

He pulled a chair to face me and sat down, placing his hands on his knees. “You haven’t
checked your lunar calendar. Tonight is a waxing gibbous, an almost full moon. It’s
enough strength to make Brandon a revenant.”

He shifted his glasses. “Why can’t you see it? We are the reason the supernaturals
fear death. They will never treat you as their full equal, only call upon you to perform
the deeds they disdain. Why not take some power, some assurance to put us on equal
footing with them? You and I could take control.”

“Why?”

The ends of his mouth twitched, forming a smile that teetered on the brink of insanity.
He shrugged. “Why? I don’t need a reason to spread chaos.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“However, you do, so . . . maybe for insurance.”

My head throbbed. I wasn’t able to think through his nonsensical, deranged logic.
“You don’t want equal footing. You want total dominance.”

No wonder supes feared and distrusted necros. As I stared at Cael’s twisted face looming
over me, I realized it was twisted from his power over death, twisted from his own
weakness. I eyed Brandon lying on the ground, his face pale and stripped of life.
I cried fresh tears, remembering his humor and his sly jabs at the demons, his voice
soothing, virile, tinged with a vulnerability that hinted at a story I’d now never
hear.

“We are a person’s chance at redemption. A chance to right a wrong that was done to
them in life.” My voice hitched as I spoke.

“You think that’s the reason Malthus had you raise Adam? To help Adam atone for his
sins?”

“Malthus is trying to stop you. He doesn’t want power the way you do.”

He shook his head, his expression almost pitying. “Now we are deluding ourselves.
If you think for a moment Malthus—” He paused. “—or any demon like him wouldn’t kill
to protect his position, his influence over the supernaturals and humans, well, you’re
in for quite a shock. You and I are pawns in the demons’ games. You have no idea what’s
going on behind the scenes.” He bent slightly to move his face closer to mine. “Malthus
would sacrifice you.”

I raised my head, my lips forming a thin, brittle line. “You’re full of shit.”

Cael sat back, his expression thoughtful. “Malthus hasn’t told you, has he?”

Goosebumps rose along my neck. Whatever he had to tell me, it couldn’t be good.

“Malthus knows about me, knows who I am. He could’ve just told you, but he didn’t.
Kind of makes you wonder why.”

I lost my breath for a moment, shock blocking Cael’s words. He’s lying, I told myself.
Trying to mess with my head. I had to focus on getting out of this mess.

“I don’t care if Malthus knew about you. Doesn’t change anything. Doesn’t change that
I’m not going to help you.”

The room turned eerily quiet. Even the zombies stopped their moans and scratches.
He waved to one of them, a young woman. Her face tugged at my memory. She scrambled
to the wall and flicked a switch.

Her eyes. Faded now, but once bright.

The missing girl on the poster of Kurt’s coffee shop.

The section of the bowling alley to my side illuminated, revealing Kara stretched
out, hands and feet bound, lying on the wood floor of one of the bowling lanes. Her
mouth was taped, but her eyes flashed at Cael. Being bound in that manner prevented
her from calling on a spell.

The female zombie grabbed a bowling ball, stumbled over to Kara and lifted the ball
over her head.

“Kara would make quite the zombie,” Cael said, and I saw Kara’s eyes widen.

“Bra . . . Cael, no.” Terror reached into my bone marrow, freezing me from the inside
out.

“Don’t worry, she won’t drop it unless I tell her to.” He rested his elbow on his
arm that was folded across his waist and tapped his mouth with his fingers. “However,
I’m not quite sure how long that arm is going to stay attached.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. I had to do this. I sought the feel of my necklace against
my chest and forced out a shivering breath. “Fine. You have to release me.”

He bent behind me and unlocked the chain securing my upper body. He left my thighs
and legs chained to the chair, but at least I now had some movement. I rubbed my arms
and flexed my tight shoulders. “I have no ritual prepared. I may not be able to do
this.”

I wasn’t bluffing. I looked at Kara, then at Brandon. I’d have to depend on my instinct,
an instinct I’d spent years squashing, relying instead on tangible things. Fear was
tangible. I tasted it now. Cold. Metallic. It had turned my saliva to liquid nitrogen.

He seized my hand, holding it over Brandon’s face. He faced Kara with his whole body
to make his message clear. “You have no choice. If you fail . . . well, the zombies
haven’t eaten yet.”

One of the zombies licked his bloody lips.

I turned away from the grotesque sight, and Cael cut my upturned palm with a knife.
The blood dripped on Brandon’s face. I hadn’t seen my grandmother’s face when she
died. Had it been as peaceful as Brandon’s or as terrified as Mom’s?

My power seeped out of me into his corpse, taking the warmth of my body with it. Cael
slit his palm. I watched his blood mingle with mine on Brandon’s face. I didn’t know
why he offered his blood, but knew it had to be bad.

The same sharp pain that seared me when I’d raised Adam hit me again, and I doubled
over, my stomach wrenching, twisting. The chains dug painfully into my waist.

Brandon stirred.

“How do you think our werewolf priest will fare when he wakes to discover his god
has forsaken him?” Cael’s face contorted in a hideous smile, then tightened before
he dropped to the floor, heaving.

Rage clouded my vision. Brandon didn’t deserve this. The pain radiated through my
body. I took sharp, short breaths to keep from passing out or vomiting from the dizziness
that rocked me. Brandon began transforming into a wolf beside me. I jerked my eyes
away.

Cael rose from his knees, sweat trickling down the side of his face. He closed his
bleeding hand.

I caught movement in the corner of my eye, and my body stiffened at the sight of a
huge pitch-black wolf emerging from behind the wall of the pin deck accompanied by
two men—one tall and blond, the other, shorter with brown hair. Neither looked pleased.

The wolf had to be a werewolf, but the two men? Were they helping Cael?

More zombies scrabbled from the dark recesses of the bowling alley, like roaches scattering
out of kitchen corners, targeting the wolf and the two men. Definitely not on Cael’s
side, but would they help us?

Fully transformed, Brandon’s wolf, resplendent in his thick gray coat, lunged for
the black wolf. Judging by the guttural growl coming from the taller of the two men,
they were werewolves too. They fended off the zombies, tearing off limbs, but the
things kept jumping back up, attacking with only one arm or no head. I’d laugh if
the whole scene weren’t so macabre.

Why couldn’t I feel a bond with Brandon? Stop him? I concentrated, felt a slight pressure
different from Adam’s, but it slipped away. I stomped my foot in frustration and yanked
at the bike chains holding my legs and waist to the chair. I glanced at Kara. She
stared at me, eyes bulging.

The two wolves stood on their hind legs, hugging each other in a wolf wrestle hold.
They shuffled closer to me. I scooted the chair to avoid the random jaw snap or swipe
thrown my way. I hoped Brandon wasn’t fighting his pack Alpha, knowing as a revenant,
he posed a considerable threat. Why was he attacking?

Cael. The blood. Somehow, when Cael mixed his blood with mine, he created a bond with
Brandon, preventing me from controlling him. Where the hell was Cael?

In a quick movement, Brandon clamped his teeth around the other wolf’s neck and ripped
it open, releasing a spray of blood. Drops hit my face, wet and hot. I cringed and
tried again to touch Brandon through the bond, but my effort was akin to grasping
a greasy rope.

I surveyed the bedlam around me. Brandon leaped and snarled after the taller of the
two men while the short one fought off more zombies. Kara rolled on the floor, trying
to loosen the ropes binding her arms and hands.

I extended my arms and leaned until I’d tipped the chair forward, catching myself
with my hands before my face collided with the floor.

The dead wolf lay a few feet away, the bones of its neck exposed and entrails from
another gash around his belly strewn on the floor. I gagged. After a couple of calming
breaths, I flattened my hands and arms on the floor and slowly pulled myself. Fortunately,
the wood provided a slick surface for my caterpillar-like slide, but the movement
caused the chains to tighten painfully around my legs.