The door looms open in front of me. I run straight inside, still pulling a protesting necromancer behind me.
“Arienna!” Fabia shouts. “What’s taking – Oh my gods!”
Shooting a guilty look at my best friend coming down the hall, I slam the door shut. Shaking, feeling sick to my stomach as I twist my hands in front of me, I turn to my new friend. “You can fix this, right?” I ask, hoping she’s as good as she’s bragged about being.
When she doesn’t say anything, her eyes sweeping back and forth across the bloody room, I start to panic. “You can help me?” I repeat, needing her to say yes. Richard’s life is on the line, and I cannot – absolutelycannotaccept a no.
“Help?” Deirdre says, the word cracking. Swallowing, she finally turns her head to look at me. “You mean help you hide all the body… parts, right? Not bring them back?”
I pale. Shaking my head frantically, I grab her arm and pull her over to the first body. “No, no, no, no, you have to bring them all back. Start with this one. One at a time. I’ll pay. Whatever your fee is, I’ll –”
“Payment is not the problem,” she says, tugging her arm free. Waving it at a corpse, she says, “I need their body to put their soul back in. I can’t even tell who this is.”
“What if I found her head? I could match the cut on her neck with –”
“Match the…” She looks at me, her eyes wide. “Why would you need tomatchanything? Surely, it’s the only decapitated head in here?”
I swallow, my eyes darting to the left. “Well… uh… no. You see…”
“How many did you decapitate?”
“I didn’t really count.”
“Give me an estimate.”
“Six?” Maybe? I have no bloody idea. I haven’t counted at all. Glancing at her, I giggle nervously, then look away again. “Maybe eight?”
“Oh my gods. How?”
I open my mouth despite having no idea what I’m going to tell her. I can’t throw the yondu under the falling tree. She didn’t mean to hurt them; I’m sure of it. She probably just got bored at some point, and they didn’t stop her when she started to playwith them. So she didn’t realise she was playing too rough. This isn’t her fault at all. She’s just a big baby.
When I start to make a noise, Deirdre immediately holds up her hand. “Actually, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. You are so getting executed for this, and I don’t want to be charged with aiding and abetting.”
“But it was an accident!”
“An accident?” With a bark of laughter, she shakes her head, her eyes scanning the room again. “No way in hel was this an accident.” Her gaze flicks up, and I do the same even though I already know what’s up there.
A woman’s face was ripped apart by a fury of claws and then her body was flung up onto the dusty chandelier. One of her eyes drops out of her skull – or at least, I think it’s an eye; it’s really hard to tell at this point.
When it splatters in front of Deirdre, she looks at me dryly. “Please tell me that’s one of the eight you counted as being ‘headless’.”
“But she clearly has a head,” I squeak, my cheeks heating even though I’m absolutely correct.
“I still can’t bring her back.”
“You’re not even going to try?” I ask desperately.
“No.” She doesn’t hesitate at all. “Necromancy requires me to give up part of my own soul each time, regardless of whether it’s successful or not. I’m not wasting a limited resource.”
“But –”
“The earlier issue of needing a relatively intact body is still a requirement.”
“But that can’t be right,” I say, grasping. “You bring back dead people.”
“Dead people whose soul can be plonked back into their original body. I can’t just create a new one out of scraps.”
“So what are we going to do?”
