Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
EZRA
Ezra walked to the bedside and held a hand over Monica, trying to sense what type of magic might have crafted the artifact. Simmons spluttered in anger behind him, but Ezra ignored him.
The medical wizard hurried around her desk and all but sprinted to his side, ready to leap on him to protect her patient. Her name tag read Dr. Baines. “Miss Blevins needs to rest, sir.”
“She’s resting. Last nap she’s ever gonna take. She’s already dead, or close enough,” Ezra replied quietly. Dr. Baines gasped in outrage, but Ezra stopped listening, turning his full attention to Monica.
Lilith jumped from his arms and landed on the bed, eyeing Monica curiously, sniffing along her arm.
His familiar’s physical senses were better than his, and through their bond he was able to take advantage of that fact—he got a hint of sweaty terror and an acrid, feverish emotion that Lilith greatly disliked.
She sneezed delicately and sat primly on the edge of the bed, tail wrapped around her paws.
Monica Blevins’ soul was still in her body, though it wouldn’t be for much longer. It was slipping free from its anchors even as he watched, his affinity letting him see the process of her dying right in front of him. What living energies she had were slowly converting to death magics.
She would be dead within the hour. Ezra pulled back, shutting down most of his inner vision so he could focus. He looked up and saw everyone watching him with varying degrees of confusion and anger on their faces, though the Major wasn’t showing anything on her face.
Ezra faced the medical wizard. “Does Monica have a DNR or living will?”
She shook her head. “She’s only twenty-three. Most people don’t have one at this age.”
“Her next of kin?”
“Her mother was notified and is making arrangements to get here, but it’s difficult.” Simmons butted in, sounding almost regretful but falling flat.
“What do her brain scans say?” Ezra asked after a long moment of thinking.
Dr. Baines relaxed a bit. “Her brain scans are normal. No physical brain damage.”
“You’ve tried waking her, I’m assuming?”
“Yes. She hasn’t responded to any of the protocols we have in place for patients in this state. I’ve even tried the spells we use for comatose patients, but it’s like her mind isn’t there. Usually when an aura is damaged so severely it’s a struggle to keep a person asleep, not…this.”
“Her soul’s about to slip free at any moment.”
Consternation crossed the medical wizard’s face, along with a growing realization.
Ezra nodded once, jaw tight, when he saw that she understood what he wasn’t saying.
“You can see it leaving,” the medical wizard breathed out, a bit disbelieving.
She sucked in a sharp breath. “I thought you were just a fire mage.”
Most medical practitioners were fine-tuned to see and interpret other people’s auras, giving them insight into the affinities and general condition of the person they were looking at.
She saw his fire affinity, as it was the more prevalent of the two.
His second affinity was just as strong as his affinity for fire, but he didn’t use it as often, and it wasn’t the one he reached for first, making it something most practitioners rarely saw.
“Dual affinities are rare, but this one comes in handy for more than clout,” Ezra paused, looking down at Monica’s small, frail body, seemingly already dead despite the heart beating and the lungs drawing air. “I’m no expert, but I’ll see what I can do.”
“What’s going on?” Simmons demanded loudly, but they both ignored him.
“Do it,” Dr. Baines ordered. “It can’t hurt.”
“She may not agree if she ever wakes up,” Ezra murmured, but he looked around and grabbed a stool from nearby and dragged it over to the bed. He sat and breathed in deeply, settling his nerves and gathering his focus. “Her aura is still blasted apart. I can’t fix that.”
“We can get her the help she needs for her aura, but we can’t help the dead,” the medical wizard stressed urgently. “Do it.”
Ezra reached out, and Lilith jumped onto his lap, so he wrapped his arms around her as she sat tall on his thighs. She helped him focus when he was doing a complicated bit of magic.
And using his death affinity for something so difficult took every scrap of focus he could muster, especially for what he was about to attempt.
For thousands of years, practitioners had grown into their affinities, a type of magic that came to them as naturally as taking their first breath—fire, water, air, earth, and a few more obscure affinities, the rarest of which was death magic.
Only fifteen known necromancers, those who had an affinity for death magics, existed in the world.
Many of them were quite famous—or infamous, rather—and were often seen as intimidating and untrustworthy, both fearsome and deadly.
Necromancers throughout history raised undead armies, unleashed plagues on the world, ended reigns of monarchs, and commanded legions of zombies or formidable liches.
They could recall the souls of the deceased and bind them to their undead bodies, preserved as revenants, chained to the will of the necromancer forever, or raise zombies from the grave or battlefield, increasing the ranks of their armies.
Necromancers were both envied and feared, and myriad spells that were the purview of necromancers were outlawed throughout the world as a result.
Ezra was at the very bottom of the rankings for necromancers—he wasn’t much of one at all, to the point that most people didn’t even know he had the death affinity.
Most assumed he was a fire mage, and that was it.
He liked it that way, too—the additional prejudice against necromancers could be inconvenient in his line of work.
He did speculate that he was the unofficial sixteenth necromancer in the world, unless there were more coming into their affinities that he hadn’t heard of yet.
The rarest of necromancer abilities—the most meticulous and delicate, taking more focus than disarming a dirty bomb locked inside a cursed porcelain doll—was the ability to convert death magics generated in the last moments of life and use that to heal the body of that which killed it and return the nearly departed soul to its renewed, living body.
It could only be done before the soul crossed the veil, sometimes known as the sacred threshold, to the Other Side—the unknowable abyss to which all souls ventured after death, barring those few unlucky enough to remain behind as ghosts.
Once across that threshold, the only way to return a departed soul to a body was as a revenant, and while they were considered one of the sentient undead, the body was without the perks given to those other sentient undead peoples—like vampires.
Revenants were merely mortal souls stuck inside a human corpse frozen at varying degrees of decomposition.
Some were as untouched by death as a second past their last heartbeat, and others could be skeletons with crackling ligaments shambling about a dusty old castle, eyes aglow with an anchored soul.
Ezra had no desire to create and own a revenant, so he set aside as much of his trepidation as he could and opened his other sight as wide as possible.
He could see everything, including the death energies that poured off Monica in an encompassing mist of deep crimson.
Every necromancer saw death magics as a different color, though most saw some variety of green or blue.
Ezra, blessed with a dual affinity, saw death magics as a deep red, mostly a vibrant, dark crimson, like heart’s blood from a mortal wound.
She was minutes from death, and he hoped she was close enough for the death magics to be at its peak—the literal last second of life before death came was the best time to try it. And the most unforgiving.
Machines monitoring her vitals began to chime strident warnings, and a wisp of light and energy slid free from her body, almost too faint to see. Her soul, leaving her mortal body behind.
He reached out mentally, his awareness expanding, and the mortal world faded and fell away.
He gathered the death magics flooding the space around the bed, and then he sent his mind outward, past the top layer of reality, forging the magics into a whip of energy that he sent shooting out into the darkness, corralling a single bright spot of light.
Ezra expanded that whipcord into a fuller, more stable grasp, and then he tugged.
Her soul gleamed in the darkness, harnessed with a net of crimson energies, and Ezra yanked hard, pulling the soul back toward the body it was trying to escape. The darkness ahead was complete, an abyss, one he only saw if he did something so foolish as to try to stop the inevitable.
Everyone died eventually. Humans, at least. And Monica Blevins was entirely human.
A part of him was aware of the effort it took to yank a departing soul back into its body, sweat running down his temples and back, muscles quivering.
It was all mental and spiritual, though—he rarely did such intuitive and instinctual magics, using his death affinity like this.
He wasn’t as efficient as some other necromancers he could name.
In fact, this was only the second time he’d ever used his necromancy to keep a mortal from dying, and it was far harder than he was expecting.
Hecate help him, but he refused to fail.
The metaphysical snap when he succeeded in anchoring her soul back in her body almost knocked him off the stool.
Lilith dug her claws into his thighs, forcing him to gather himself and finish the process.
He did what he could for her condition—he sealed the raw edges of her aura, stopping the escape of her life energies into the ambient magical fields, but he could not regrow what had been destroyed.
That came from her alone and wasn’t something that could be magicked back into existence.
She would get it back on her own time, merely by living.
Slow going, but it was the only option as far as Ezra was aware.
Lilith mreowed at him and head-butted his chin, paws on his chest as she coaxed his mind back to the surface. He withdrew his awareness and closed his inner vision, hugging Lilith with shaking arms. He opened his eyes, blinking away sweat, his vision a bit blurred at the edges. “It’s done.”
His voice was rough and scratchy, but Dr. Baines heard him, darting forward to check Monica’s vitals, the machines’ beeping falling back into steadier rhythms, evening out.
She pulled a pen light from her jacket pocket and checked Monica’s eyes, and when she pulled back an eyelid, Monica moaned and tried to pull away from the light.
“Monica, can you hear me?” Dr. Baines asked intently. “You’re safe now; you’re in the hospital.”
Monica gasped, back arching her off the bed a few inches, before collapsing again. She tried looking around, but she was clearly weak and exhausted. She rolled her head to the side, her dull eyes staring at Ezra like she could see through him. He leaned forward, catching her gaze.
“Monica, what was in the chest?” he asked softly. She blinked, and he could almost feel her confusion.
“She’s only just woken up after nearly dying!” Dr. Simmons burst out, and Major Grendel grabbed him by the arm and yanked him away.
“Get answers, Redmayne,” the major ordered before towing Dr. Simmons from the hospital tent.
“Monica…” Ezra tried again.
“The chest…” she gasped out, interrupting him. Her eyes went wide with fear. “A skull.”
“A skull?” He let Lilith down on the floor and reached out, taking a chance and grabbing the closest hand to him and squeezing. “What did it look like?”
Skulls as cursed objects were common. Right up there with heirloom jewelry and blood-mine diamonds.
Monica groaned, pale and limp, and one of the machines began screaming. Her dull brown eyes locked with his. “Not human, etched in blue fire. Cleaved at the crown by a deep blow. Eyes that glowed. So cold. Very cold.”
“That’s enough,” Dr. Baines ordered, coming around the bed and pushing Ezra back. “You’ll have exhausted yourself for nothing if she starts to decline again.”
Monica went limp, and the machines calmed down. She was asleep, and thankfully not dying this time.
Ezra clapped for Lilith, and she leapt into his arms. He turned away from the bed, leaving Monica to the tender mercies of the medical wizard.
He found an audience behind him, Dr. Myers and Major Grendel having returned from removing Simmons.
Both watched him, along with various members of MERS, all of them eyeing him with varying degrees of disbelief and caution.
“You heard?” he asked Grendel as he worked his way down the aisle between the beds.
“I did,” she bit out. “Good work, Redmayne.”
“Another day’s work,” Ezra sighed out. “I got a bunk in this complex?”
“Sergeant, show Sorcerer Redmayne to his tent.” A young woman in a MERS uniform jumped to and gestured at him, and he followed her out into the darkness.
Past the tent flap, Ezra looked up at the sky, the clouds overhead pierced by lightning with thunder rumbling in the distance.
Blue lightning.
“A skull etched in blue flame,” he said softly to himself, pondering. “Interesting.”
Sleep first, then he’d worry about saving the world.