As soon as the police arrived, we tiptoed behind them back into the alley. It took them a while to catalogue everything, but when they finally moved the dumpster, I caught a look at the guy’s neck and gasped, slamming my hand over my mouth and backing away.
I knew what he was. And what was worse, I knew him. I’d just never realized that my Aunt’s old friend was a necromancer. I tried to keep from hyperventilating as I looked at the gray tattoo on his neck.
It looked just the way my Auntie’s had. The way my Yaya’s had, and the way mine had before I’d changed it. Witch marks were only visible to other witches, so I’d enlisted the help of Aunt Winnie. The tattoo was invisible to humans, thanks to her spell on the ink, but to other witches it appeared green, like the Earth witches on my mother's side of the family. I got the other part of myself, the part I kept locked away, hidden, from Dad.
The police whirled around when they heard me, to see what I was gasping about. I had to think fast. Telling them that this poor dead guy was a necromancer wasn’t an option. I had no idea which of them knew that I was a witch. Only Sam knew I was one as well, and he knew why I hated that power.
Probably none of the officers there had the first clue since I didn’t recognize any of them. “Is Sam coming?” I whispered.
One of the officers walked closer. “He’s on his way. Are you okay?”
“I just… I know the victim.” A sob caught in my throat as the rest of the words froze there. He’d been killed. Necromancers were incredibly difficult to kill. I could see blood and what to me looked like a stab wound through his shirt. “How did he die?” I asked.
"Stabbed.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
But how? Necromancers didn’t just die when we were injured. The injury had to be incredibly bad. Either something fast and severe, or so massive there was no recovering. “Stabbed where?” I asked.
“Directly in the heart.”
Oh. That would do it if the knife was big enough and long enough.
But who would kill a necromancer? Who would know to stab in just the right spot?
I knew the answer, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself.
Likely only another necromancer or a very advanced magic user. We held our secrets close to our chests, and it wasn’t common knowledge that we were hard to kill. Not common at all.
This whole debacle threw me back into the memory I tried so hard to repress.
The day I stopped using my necromancy magic was the single most traumatic day of my life.
My dad had been dead for five years. He was in a horrific car accident on the interstate involving a semi-truck driver falling asleep at the wheel. He’d been basically crushed, which explained how he’d died in a car wreck of all things. As a necromancer, a car wreck would’ve had to have been pretty significant to kill him.
And it was.
When he died, Mom mourned deeply and intently. Their love story was one for the ages, as she loved to tell me. But he’d died, and we came to live with Yaya and Aunt Winnie.
All I really remember from those years was intense pain and great joy. Yaya and Auntie did everything in their power to help us through our grief, and once the worst of it passed, my childhood was pretty idyllic. They made sure we never felt the pain of not having a father figure, besides of course our grief of missing the man himself.
Christmas the year I turned ten was the day my life changed, and no matter how they tried after that, my life never turned idyllic again.
We were putting up lights on the side of the house. Winnie and Yaya had gone in to get another box of lights and Mom stood high up on the ladder. I held the bottom steady. Mom stayed still while we waited, not wanting to move that high up on the ladder without Winnie and Yaya out there to hold the ladder. Yaya was a strong enough witch that she would’ve slowed Mom down if she fell.
And the next thing I knew, the ladder rattled, and it happened so fast I never could say why or how it happened. One second Mom was on the ladder, the next she was on the ground with her head bent at an unnatural angle.
Her eyes were wide and staring, and my magic whispered to me as I stared down at my mother, my best friend and biggest supporter. She was dead.
I screamed, unable to accept what I was seeing. Pain and torment filled my soul, and all I thought about was that I couldn’t lose my mom like I lost my dad. Tears blurred my vision, and my breaths came in gasps of sobbing hiccups.
Mustering every bit of the shadow magic inside me, I shoved it all into my mother’s body as Winnie and Yaya ran from the house.
“Ava, no!” Winne cried.
But it was too late. My mother rose from the grass, her limbs jerking and popping.
“Mommy?” I whispered in horror. Backing away, tears streaming down my face, I immediately regretted what I’d done. I hadn’t been trained in necromancy at all. I didn’t know what I was doing. And I’d thrown every ounce of power in me at my mother.
It had animated her, but it hadn’t healed her.
Yaya yanked me behind her. “Ava you’ve got to pull it out.”
Mom turned to us with her head still flopped all wrong. It must’ve broken significantly, because it hung from her shoulders by the skin, like nothing I’d ever seen before. “What’s wrong with her?” I sobbed as I clung to Yaya’s back.
Winnie put herself between Mom and me as well. “Honey, she was gone. Too far gone. You’ve animated her body, but your mother isn’t in there. She’s essentially a ghoul. You’ve got to pull the magic out of her.” She spoke over her shoulder with her hands out, dark green smoke around them. She was ready to hit Mom with a spell, but I didn’t know what good an Earth witch would be if I’d turned Mom into a ghoul.
Sobbing harder, I tried to yank on my power, but it was too hard. “I can’t!” I cried out. “I can’t do it.”
Yaya dropped to her knees and turned to face me. “Ava Calliope Howe. Grab a hold of your power inside your mother’s body and yank as hard as you can!”
I wiped my eyes and with my stomach heaving, I did as she said. I pulled so hard on my magic that when it snapped back into me, I flew backward with my gaze on my mother’s body as it crumpled to the ground.
She was dead. My mother was dead, and I hadn’t been able to save her.
For months, I had nightmares of my mother’s body filled with demons and crawling out of the grave to scratch at my window.
And from that day, I’d never used my necromancy power again. Well, except once. I had to save my Snoozles. I’d stamped it down. Until this week, when I reluctantly used it to see if that poor man was dead or alive, I’d pushed it away and ignored it.
Chapter Six
Clint put his arm around me, pulling me out of the memory. “Come on. Let’s go over here and let them do what they do.”
I let him drag me away from the crime scene while my stomach rolled with grief. I’d known William for years. All my life now that I thought about. But I’d never known he was a necromancer. How had he hidden it?
I tried to think about the last time I’d seen him. At Aunt Winnie’s funeral. What had he been wearing?
I closed my eyes and leaned against the cool brick wall of the bookstore around the corner of the alley and sucked in air, trying to calm my racing heart.