Page 2 of Death Warden
I loved these shows.
They inspired me.
I set the pizza down and pulled my laptop onto my lap. I’d been halfway through a chapter when Barb had called. We’d known each other for years. I’d been there when she met Jimmy at the bar.
Heck, I’d rooted for them. And then he’d died of an aneurysm at twenty-nine. Fucking ridiculous. I hadn’t told her he was hanging about at first, but she soon picked up on his presence. At first, she’d been comforted by it, but a year turned into two and she was more than ready to move on.
I couldn’t blame her for wanting him gone, but…could I really blame Jimmy for wanting to stay?
His life had been cut short too soon, and like most people who’d died young, he felt he still had a life to live.
Maybe I should have been nicer to him? Fuck, I was shit at this. Necromancing, ghost whispering, I didn’t have the soft touch. I was more of a push-them-into-the light, exorcise, and ward-them-off kinda gal. I’d asked about Death when I’d discovered what I was, images of a grim reaper swirling in my head. Surely as a necromancer I should get to see Death, right?
Yeah, I was a morbid little thing.
But Death was an absent god, turning up only to guide a necromancer into death, or so I’d heard. The only guides to the regular dead were people like me and the reapers. Although I’d never met one of those. Rumor had it they were few and far between. I mean, reapers were born for the whole help-the-dead-cross-over thing. Necromancers did it because we could. Still, once I knew what my nature entailed, necromancy didn’t seem like so much fun.
But my nature wasn’t a choice, and I’d learned early on that I couldn’t run away from it. I reached up to touch the amulet around my neck.
It was all I had left of my family, an heirloom that I’d promised never to take off.
Movement at the window drew my attention and Finley leapt into the room a moment later. He landed on the rug with easy feline grace, then sat and stared at me with intelligent green eyes.
“Pizza again?” he said in his habitually bored tone.
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t even get started with me, Fin. I’ve had a long day.”
“Oh, you finished the book?”
Ah, the book that was giving me writer’s block. But I guess after writing twenty novels and having fifteen published, I was due a dry spell. Frederick Harding, my pen name, needed a break.
I shoved the laptop aside. “No, I didnotfinish the book. I had a job.”
He padded closer and then leapt onto the arm of the sofa. “Dead things?”
“Jimmy.”
“Ah, that wretch.”
I stroked Fin’s black fur and he lifted his head, offering me his chest. I scratched the white patch and then picked up my beer again. “He’s gone. Someplace where ghosts can exist forever.”
“You don’t think it’s real?” Fin asked.
I tipped my head toward him. “And you do?”
He flashed a fang. “You’re talking to a cat, Adi. Anything is possible in my world.”
I grinned. “A cat-sith, not a cat.”
He sniffed the pizza. “I’m hungry. We should go out.”
In other words, he needed to hunt. “Fine. Let me finish my supper, then we’ll go get you a bite.”
He hopped off the sofa and padded over to the fireplace to lie down. “Wake me when you’re done.”
A wave of love washed over me as I watched him settle. Finley had been in my family for…I had no clue how long, to be honest. But he was in three generations of Blackmore family portraits.
The cat-sith was bonded to the Blackmore bloodline somehow. He’d been a mentor to my mother and her mother before. He’d gotten me out of the house when it burned. Saved my life.
