Page 103 of The Wolf Queen’s Curse

Ann shakes her head, and I light a couple of balls and send them out so we can widen our search. I head off to the left, and I get about ten steps before finding a section of the floor that looks darker than the rest. I maneuver down with my light ball and confirm that this ground has been disturbed—dug up and then repacked.

I’m opening my mouth to speak when Ann whispers, “Here.”

Rufus and I converge on her and find the same thing—a dark oblong patch.

“Um, I found the same thing over there,” I say, pointing.

“And I think I found one there,” Rufus says. “I was just about to take a closer look.”

“That isn’t good,” I say.

“They might not be graves,” Ann says. “The soil could just be discolored.”

Rufus and I exchange a look but say nothing. Ann says she’ll see what she can do. Rufus figures out which of the three patches seems the most recent. As she lowers herself beside it, I whisper, “Wait! Don’t you need supplies of some sort?”

She frowns up at me. “No. Why?”

“That’s how I’ve seen it done.”

“I’ve never used anything. This is how my grandmother taught me. There’s a churchyard near Trevelyan, and we’d go there for lessons.”

Necromancers don’t need rituals or supplies to see spirits that walk the earth. But summoning the dead requires objects. Yet Ann’s confusion was genuine, as if she’d never heard of a necromancer needing supplies.

Has she ever made contact on her own before? I can’t imagine Silas let her slip off to that churchyard for practice after he relegated her to the basement.

I will have faith. And if she can’t do it, that’s not her fault—

“No,” she says sharply. “I’m sorry for the intrusion, but I really need to speak to you.”

I blink. She’s addressing thin air, which seems as if it’d be a ghost, but she only just began summoning. She can’t possibly—

“I don’t want to force you to stay,” she says. “But I will if I need to. I’ll offer a boon, though, for your cooperation. Is there a message you’d like passed along?”

A pause, and then, “Fine, forget the boon. There are others here who’ll answer—”

Pause.

“All right,” she says. “Thank you. I’ll keep this short. You can see my companions. I’m going to be relaying your words to them, as they are not—”

Pause.

“Ah.” She looks at Rufus. “He says he knows you. It seems you threw him into the Thames?”

“You’ll have to be more specific,” Rufus says.

“It was the middle of winter.”

“Mmm, still going to need more.”

Ann rolls her eyes. “He was trying to … Oh.” She glances at Rufus. “He got too close to Bishop and Julius, I think. He says he wanted to get a look at the Danvers boys.”

Rufus snorts. “No, he wanted to see if he could get close enough to hurt one of them. Repayment for a scar left by their grandfather.”

“On his cheek?” Ann motions along her own.

“Yep, that’s him. Don’t know his name. Didn’t bother to ask.”

Ann has indeed summoned the ghost of the man buried here. She did it in minutes, with no ritual supplies.