Page 28 of Devil Bound
He’d taken that in stride, apologized, and offered to buy her an apology smoothie on top of that.She’d told him that would be inappropriate, so Simon and I had ended up having coffee in the cafeteria.
Simon threw me a peace sign for a greeting, which I wasn’t sure was appropriate, but by then, I was having a hard time concentrating on keeping myself from dry heaving.Gods, the smell was bad.The sight of the parts arranged for examination was worse.
“Is it admissible in court when you assess the number of victims by matching the parts with magic?”Mitch asked, and I was glad for the distraction.
“Since I’m Collegium certified, it is.All the evidence I help gather is.”I stepped up to Simon’s work area—just another table that would need a good cleaning after this.
He had more parts than the other tech did.I tried not to look too closely at any, only at the head.One eye was gone, and the other was that sort of boiled egg white, the pupil more a dark smudge than anything that reminded me of a living person.
The skin was severely rotted in some places, and I saw the yellowish white of bone poke through, whiter than the teeth, which were stained and broken.I wasn’t even sure whether this was a man’s or a woman’s head.
“Lionel is great,” Simon said.“Much faster than waiting for DNA, and the way he can give you a time and cause of death…”
Simon made a chef’s kiss gesture.It was nice knowing he appreciated me, but yuck.Plus, there were more things about me that one could appreciate.At least, I hoped Detective Sexy Mitch would think so.
“I’m just here to do my job,” I told Simon, and given that I was all for getting this done and leaving the tent ASAP, I went straight to the raising.
Some necromancers were very particular, and they needed a lot of stuff to guide and funnel their magic.Like other magic users, they needed talismans, and using those to focus their magic was the best way for them to work.
I didn’t.My necromantic power was vast, and I could say that without any boasting.In terms of magical strength, I was on par with any mage, except I did necromancy and not much else.
It had taken me time to learn control, especially early on.When I started having dead cats show up at the orphanage without me ever consciously raising them, I found I didn’t mind that the Collegium granted me early admission.
With all the kitty corpses following me home each day from school, I’d been pretty sure any chance of adoption had gone out of the window anyway.The Collegium had at least offered permanence while I learned to control my magic and eventually use it.
And they had taught me control, as well as the will to do what needed doing, even in the face of…parts.To find out if the head had anything to tell, all I had to do was raise my hands above it and dip into my power, let it flow from me to the corpse.The dead tissue immediately twitched to life.
“This is just so cool,” Simon said.
I had to agree in so far as using my power felt good, but the circumstances weren’t cool at all.
“Speak.What’s your name?”
What my magic did was get the nervous system and the brain to work again past their sell-by date.People had a certain weight of essence to them, a resonance corresponding to what they had done and experienced while they had been alive in the world.That essence was more karma than the metaphysical idea of a soul, but religions and people unaware of magical science liked to conflate the two and accused necromancers of pulling said imaginary soul back into a cadaver.It would have been easier if the soul existed, because experiencing death wouldn’t have hurt it.Dying did degrade the stuff I worked with though.In this case, a lot.
The head moved their jaw and lips, but I could feel a struggle there, some trauma making it impossible to relate personal information.I changed tack.
“What do you recall of your death?”I asked, and next to me, Sexy Mitch drew in a breath as if this were the most thrilling thing he’d ever seen.
The head made a sound.Calling it a groan would have been too kind.
“Daaark,” it said.The voice was androgynous and thoroughly eerie.Voices could be bolstered with essence and magic, and I tried that, using more of my power to make the head resonate with the essence of the person.“Cold and dark.Tiles,” the head said.“I was being punished, but I did nothing.”It made a wailing sound, and what remained of its lips trembled.“I did nothing wrong.I did nothing wrong, nothing.Tell her I love her.I love her, love her, love her—”
I dropped my hands, and the head stilled.“That’s all there is.”
The head was too far gone, and as was often the case, the essence wanted to connect more to the people left behind rather than the terrible events right before the death.The living were the strongest connection the dead person still had to life, so that was only natural.
“Wow,” Mitch said.“That was quite something.What does it feel like from your end?”
That took me aback, because it wasn’t a question I often got.I didn’t even really consider answering truthfully.“I don’t feel much of anything.I concentrate.It requires a lot of concentration.”
Mitch nodded, and that was that.
The truth I had always refused to share with anyone was that raising feltgood.I loved letting my power flow through me and give life back to something that had lost it.
No, I didn’t like the violence and the personal tragedies; I wasn’t a monster.But the dead had once held a place in this world, and when I got to focus on that and call their essence forth, there was something sublime about having it respond.Once we figured out who this was—who this had been and whom they still loved in death—we could tell that person.We could give them a little more than just remains to put in a coffin and bury.
“You wanna go check out the other bags or mix and match first?”Simon asked.
