Page 1 of Necromancers Don't Raise

Chapter 1

Necromancers Don’t Raise

Arat bit me.

It had to be a rat in the dark with me, because there was the familiar squeaking, and then the snuffling, and then the bite on my arm that hurt less than I remembered it hurting.

My roommate at the boarding school had rats, so I knew the feeling intimately. Fin had liked to let them out in the middle of the dark night, so they could be free. Free to snack on my fingers.

My mind was fuzzy. My body was heavy, distant, and so were my thoughts.

Was I back at school? I’d been put in with her because I was able to keep the peace with anyone, even the anti-social girl who desperately wanted to be misunderstood. My problem was that I always understood. We still kept in touch, even if she’d left respectable society behind long ago. No. I wasn’t still at school.

My mind spun and drifted before I was brought back by the smell. It was so incredibly bad, like sewage and rotten produce, with an undercurrent of swamp. I blinked in the darkness and made out the glowing eyes of a rat. We stared at each other for a long time while I struggled to compute. It finally clicked. Rats’ eyes didn’t glow unless the creature was possessed.

After another moment of shock, I gurgled a scream and flailed around in panic when my body didn’t stand up and sprint away who knew where. My limbs were disconnected, sloppy, lacking all grace and precision I expected. My convulsing sent me sliding off the slimy rocks and into ice-cold water. The cold was a shock. I gasped and inhaled filthy water until I came up, coughing, gagging, and struggling to stay afloat when none of my limbs worked right. I’d always been an extremely competent swimmer, and no clothes dragged me down, but I barely made it back to the slick rocks and trash that I’d been laying on.

I pulled myself up onto the sharp rocks and rotting things with hands that couldn’t grasp any better than they could swim. They could hurt, though. The rats were still watching with their glowing eyes that spoke of infernal magic, but I just curled up in a ball, coughing and gasping, trying to get the water out of me. Evil rats were better than freezing, disgusting water.

Where was I? Why wasn’t my body working right? I’d always been able to trust myself to have quick reflexes, whether it was tennis, swimming, or shooting, especially shooting, but now I couldn’t even cling to a rock right.

I was Cassandra Clarence, heir to Clarence Corp, nominated the most beautiful human woman in the world four years in a row. Or was it five? The details were fuzzy. I had to get to a meeting with…I couldn’t remember, but I always had meetings. My life was a beautifully choreographed dance of business and charity, with some time for mixed martial and Pilates to keep my body as perfectly functional as my mind.

I blinked water out of my eyes and stared at the rat’s glowing eyes. Was it going to bite my face or just stay there staring at me? Was I actually in a sewer? I pulled up and away from the rock at the thought, but my legs were shaky, and I couldn’t stand all the way, so I just crouched in the smelly refuse with icy water dripping off my hair and running down my spine. My nakedspine. Was Cassandra Clarence naked in a sewer? My mother would have a heart attack at the thought.

I laughed at the look that would be on my mother’s face. At least it would have been a laugh if my lungs and throat were working any better than the rest of me. What came out was this gurgling rasp that burned my throat like daggers ripping the delicate tissue. Something terrible had happened to me.

“No kidding, Sherlock,” I mouthed, but no sound came out. It hurt too much to be a dream, although I’d had horribly vivid nightmares when I was young, before my mother sourced the only magical artifact she allowed in our lives. I’d given it away in a moment of thoughtless generosity that had driven a wedge between my mother and I that we’d never quite overcome.

She wanted me to stop travelling for the charitable arm of Clarence Corp to such dangerous places, and I’d refused. I didn’t usually stand up to my mother, not when she was always on the side of logic, reason, and the greater good, but knowing that I was making an immediate difference to individuals, seeing the impact first-hand was the only thing that made the rest of my life bearable. Employing millions was important, but it was too far away for me to really feel.

Speaking of feeling, a rush of pain went through me that left me blinking until I could refocus on those creepy, glowing eyes. I’d seen those eyes in one ofTheDetective Warlockepisodes. The warlock’s nemesis was a dark sorcerer who used his rats to infiltrate the enemy and, of course, do battle, a horde of rats rolling over the show’s extras, stripping their flesh from their bones.

The show didn’t have the greatest special effects, but I watched it for the eye candy. I secretly had a crush on the actor who played Vilus the Dark Sorcerer, while my good friends never missed an episode to ogle Winston the Warlock, who was a male witch in real life.

A rush of memories had me shuddering. The rocking of a train, blonde Callie’s bright blue eyes and nervous bounce,Bree’swhispered comment with mischievous dark eyes that sent us all into gales of laughter. The train was taking us to Singsong City, where the entire cast ofTheDetective Warlockwould do interviews, autographs and fan photos.

That’s where I must be, in Singsong city, where the infernal mingled with the angelic, a place that everyone had been talking about ever since the jubilee that angels and ogres had sponsored.

A flash of pain went through my head and body, sending me arching back, my spine curling in the wrong direction while this sound came out of my throat, the horrible out-of-tune croaking of a hurt animal that had been hit by a car and would have to be put down. It hurt so much more than liposuction.

After that, I must have lost consciousness for a long time, because there was no pain. When I woke up, my thoughts were slightly more focused, the pain less intense.

I couldn’t stay in a sewer passing in and out of consciousness, or I’d die. I needed to get help. Fueled with determination, I surged to my feet. After a moment of triumph, the world spun around me dizzyingly and I fell back over in a flop that ended with my head thudding against a rock. Yes, this plan was going brilliantly. I’d just thump my head against rocks in SOS morse code. No way I could possibly fail.

I frowned because that wasn’t an entirely bad idea. I grabbed a rock that fit in my hand and started rapping it on another rock. Three short, three long, three short. Or was that backwards? Did it matter?

Maybe Philip would be looking for me. He was in Singsong City for a few weeks to take care of a merger. That’s how I talked myself into coming to Singsong, because it would be good to surprise my fiancé with a visit while he was only a few hours southwest of Apple City, after I indulged in my secret obsessionwith Vilus, the Dark Sorcerer. Philip usually stayed on the west coast where he ran his father’s company very well. We’d been engaged for years, but I only saw him on holidays when our families got together. I didn’t want our relationship to be a merger between two corporations, but sometimes I felt like I didn’t know him at all. After we went to the Warlock Detective Con, I could get time alone with him, at least if he didn’t have too many business meetings to go to.

Before I ended up in a sewer, had I made it to see Philip? I couldn’t remember. I didn’t really have a solid grasp on anything past the train ride with my two friends. Where were they?

What happened to Breanne and Calista? I wasn’t close to very many people because I always had to maintain the proper boundaries, but we’d shared an obsession with Warlock Detective that trumped everything else. Were they okay?

I reached out and batted the squishy lump to my right. It oozed and something rotting slithered out when I poked at it. No, that wasn’t one of my friends. Maybe a rotten orange. I’d pretend it was a rotten orange instead of something that used to be alive and kicking. I gagged at the thought and tried to wipe my hand on the rock. My hands felt so weird, so wrong, like they were the wrong shape and size.

The sound of rippling water caught my attention, and I looked away from the direction of the rats and towards the water. It was dark, I couldn’t see anything, but it seemed like the darkness got darker in the water, spreading towards me until it flickered with pale blue lightning, like veins across the surface, and then a head emerged, the silhouette outlined with that same pale blue electric pulse that spread down until the figure was entirely out, towering over me.

“Pity I couldn’t see that entrance better,” I whispered, and some sound came out that must have been slightly understandable, because a faint light ball formed in thesilhouette’s hand, revealing Vilus’s dangerous older brother. I mean, in the show Vilus had no family, but if he did, it would be this person, tall, imposingly broad-shouldered, and here to take my soul or my body. Whichever. His eyes were dark with those flickers of lightning, glowing like the rats’ eyes had glowed. His face was strong more than handsome, so strong, with a jaw and cheekbones that looked like they could cut silk, or iron. Whichever.

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