Page 68 of Necromancers Don't Raise

“Oh. Thank you,” I said and ducked inside. I made sure to walk around the star burned into the floor and to the desk where the laptop with engraved marking waited for me. I opened it, and on the screensaver was the picture, the one of him standing at the top of a cliff with the undead all around, only it was a more extended version that showed more of the background, more of the lightning, and didn’t show off his chest quite so much.

“I apologize I couldn’t be with you,” Mercury’s voice said in my ear, low, melodious, but still rippling with danger.

I turned to look, but there was nothing there. “Oh, that’s all right,” I said, feeling weird. I’d just pretend we were on speaker phone. “I did miss you when I woke up alone, though.” Could I say that? We were courting. I was supposed to miss him while we were courting.

“I apologize for the waffles, but your health is my greatest concern.”

I frowned. That hadn’t sounded like a response as much as a recording. “My concern is seeing your bare chest as soon as possible. Are shirts a requirement at dinner tonight?”

“I’m looking into some different methods for assuring your well-being.”

Definitely a recording. I focused on the computer screen. “I feel the same way about you.” I typed into the search bar for news about the fire, the cast ofThe Detective Warlock, and all the chatter surrounding them. Were they going to cancel the show? Was it a sign? Also of great interest was the fact that Patricia Clarence had hired five different detectives from around the world to look into the fire and her precious daughter’s death. The news people tried to make it sound very exciting, like they might get an even better story than hundreds of people dead in a tragic accident.

When I looked up Mercury, I read about undead cleaning up the streets, and a photo of a particularly gruesome corpseholding a garbage bag and smiling with very few intact teeth. I shuddered in spite of myself and scrolled on. I stopped when I saw myself in Sebastian’s dress, wearing the Daphne gems and looking like the world’s most expensive prostitute. The ones where I was pointing a gun at someone were particularly evocative. I shuddered even harder at that. My mother would roll over in her grave, except that she wasn’t dead.

I frowned and after hesitating a moment, went back to nine months before I was born, and looked at everything I could find on Clarence Corp. I’d heard that there had been some instability in the company, but with good allies, Clarence corp had come through. The good ally that featured heavily in the rescue was Aquaco, a company I knew very, very well. It was the parent company of dozens of other companies that Clarence Corp had worked with my whole life, particularly in the welfare arm. Acts of Good. Mr. Good. An alliance bought with my mother’s soul and my life.

I held my breath for a moment while my stomach churned. Was Mr. Good right? Had everything I’d ever believed been a lie? I gritted my teeth and continued probing deeper into Aquaco and its subsidiaries. There were so many arms, so many webs wrapped around Clarence co, focusing in a way that one did when considering taking over a company, aligning values, shifting interests, cutting back on the shady imports and expanding into the medical sector. Aquaco ran a tight ship, was earning a place as a respectable company, even if it was run by a coalition without any proper representation. No figurehead. Why would Mr. Good want me to take over his business?

Everyone knew that he was cold calculation with a dash of sadism to give him some personality. Why wouldn’t he kill me the second he realized I was a threat to his immortality? There must have been a catch in the deal. I mean, that was the catch, that the most selfish person in the world would lose hisimmortality if he had children. Not a problem, since why would he ever have children? He wasn’t a womanizer. He was too cold to be seduced by something like passion. Except, apparently, where my mother was concerned. It was too bizarre. Impossible. And yet, I had come back from the dead.

I went back over my mother’s history, Patricia Watford as she’d been before she married my dad. He’d always be my dad, however many other men popped up claiming paternity. The Watford history was cloaked in tragedy, what with the fire that had killed both of my grandparents while my mother had been at a boarding school in Switzerland, and of course the goblin burglar who had messed up the job so terribly, ending up burned horribly in the fire he’d accidentally caused that had taken the two respectable humans’ lives. Was it more than just a tragedy? Did my mother actually have something to do with it?

“Impossible.” I closed the computer and leaned back in Mercury’s incredibly comfortable chair. My mother had spent her entire life dedicated to protecting humanity. She wasn’t the kind of person who would steal someone’s identity. Or have an affair with a mobster. And yet…

I shook my head and looked up the burglar who had started the fire and was serving in the same prison as Mr. Good. Cordy Hood. What a name. Pity I hadn’t visited him while I was…

I sat up and felt a chill creep down my spine. Mr. Good had said that my grandfather was serving in jail, and this half-goblin…No. That would be ridiculous. Impossible. My mother was absolutely respectable. She didn’t go around plotting taking over families like the Watfords, who were respectable, but with crumbling fortunes. She’d needed my dad’s business, his money. If she were going to take the place of some girl, she’d go after money and respectability.

I stared at the picture of a young Patricia Watford. She looked eerily like me at age fourteen after I’d had extensivesurgery, only her eyes were sorrowful, haunted, weak. Those weren’t my mother’s eyes. She wasn’t ever weak or overly emotional. The blue was right, but those were contacts, the same ones I’d had. That was the only picture of the young woman as all the rest had been destroyed in the fire. What an amazingly convenient way to get rid of all the evidence. How lucky that the young woman herself was in a boarding school at the time. How lucky.

My stomach churned, but I swallowed down nausea and clicked on more information about the criminal Cordy Wood, but there weren’t many records about half-goblins online. His only prison record was from the time he was incarcerated for the fire. That was a dead end. What about the famous dancer I resembled? If that was my actual grandmother, there should be something to link her to Cordy Wood, and then maybe I could find out who he really was.

There was no shortage of images of the dancer, many of them embarrassingly risqué. I went back to the time around my mother’s birth, and carefully examined all of her escorts, of which she had a horrifying number, until I found the half-goblin, Cordy Hood. Not some random burglar. Actually, he was one of leaders of the Seven Sundry. An article about the Seven Sundry made my stomach want to throw up all those waffles, but no way I was tasting them twice. Murder, drugs, and even human trafficking were just the tip of the iceberg. The Seven were a group of men and women who profited off the weaknesses of others between wars and uprisings. Causing wars and uprisings. Did my mother actually come from that world? It wasn’t possible and yet…she understood evil. That’s why she was able to combat it so effectively.

Why would she defend humanity, allying with angels and gargoyles to save others if she herself had taken the lives of three innocent humans? Why would a mob boss go burglingsome humans who, by all accounts, were completely broke? My mother had gotten scholarships to attend the prestigious school her mother had gone to. She’d worked hard, and then worked harder to turn my father’s business into the conglomerate it was today. She’d been fighting my whole life against the evil that threatened everything with the conviction of an angel. I’d met the Commander of the Holy Order of the Swords of Truth once. He’d asked me why my mother wanted to save. I hadn’t understood why he’d asked the question. Of course we want to save. What else would we do with our power and influence? He’d patted my head, his hand feeling very heavy before he moved on. He’d found it unusual that my mother would be so passionate about something that didn’t come naturally to her.

I took a deep breath and got out my phone.

It rang a dozen times before Fin finally answered.

“The creative scammer. What do you want this time?”

I sighed heavily. This wouldn’t work, but I had to try. “I’d like to know everything about Patricia Watford. I can pay you well.”

“You want to know about…” There was the clicking sound in the background and then she whistled. “Mrs. Clarence?”

“No, Patricia Watford. Specifically the boarding school she went to, the people who knew her, personal contacts she had when she was young up until age fifteen.”

“Until the fire?”

I nodded, then said, “Yes, thank you,” because she couldn’t see me.

“The thing is, people are really vulnerable after someone dies. You have to be on guard because that’s when the buzzards come around, and yet, I’ve been digging into you, Nova Star. Not that it’s hard with the way your public indecency makes you easy click bait. You came out of nowhere two weeks after Cassandra Clarence died, and are living with a necromancer who was rumored to be obsessed with said Cassandra Clarence.”

“But that’s just circumstantial evidence. I’m just a scammer. But I can pay.”

She snorted. “You think I’d sell my only friend’s mother’s respectability for money? It’s like you know me. When do you need this info? It’ll take some digging.”

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