Chapter 4 #4
I sighed. Nevermind, I told both of them. I’m not going to do it right now, anyway. I was tired and… I wasn’t sure what else I was, but it wasn’t something I was enjoying.
Hey, sport, nobody’s tryin’ to make you start today, Archie said, his voice placating. You’ve got more than enough on your plate for anybody’s business, anyway.
I wasn’t sure whether that was yet another dig at my incapability or whether it was Archie trying to be understanding. I wasn’t terribly good at reading the living, and I also knew that Archie probably wasn’t very good at being supportive, either. So I quashed down my irritation and simply nodded.
Thank you. I hoped I managed to come off as polite rather than abrupt.
Sure, sport, came the ghost’s response. You just let me know when you want to start. He cackled, back to his usual self. Not like I’m going anywhere.
Unable to sleep and too restless to remain still in bed—although I knew that would ultimately be better for me than the pacing to which I’d ultimately resorted—I padded through the small apartment, moving in and out of the bands of light cast across the walls and floors by the streetlamps outside.
Raj had called to cancel, apologizing for whatever it was the FBI needed him to do instead, which meant I was alone with my thoughts, and they kept jumping back and forth between the case and the fact that I’d told Archie I wanted to learn necromancy.
I hadn’t stopped to actually think about whether or not I actually wanted to learn necromancy when I’d impulsively replied to the ghost’s habitual offer. But since I hadn’t started yet, I was thinking about it now.
I knew Mason and Ward didn’t approve of necromancy, although I wasn’t completely sure why.
Everything I’d ever seen about necromancy seemed to link it with evil, but I didn’t think that was why my bosses didn’t approve of it.
If they’d thought so, they wouldn’t have allowed Archie to even make the offer—and they probably wouldn’t have let him stay at Beyond the Veil.
What I should have done was ask why they didn’t approve of it.
Ward had told me he didn’t like it, but he’d also told me that it was my business whether or not I wanted to learn it from Archie.
I didn’t know what to do with that—generally speaking, I tended to agree with most of the things Ward approved or didn’t approve of, but he hadn’t really given me much explanation for his distaste for necromancy.
Neither, for that matter, had Mason, and Mason generally very much liked explaining things.
This left me uncertain of what I should—or shouldn’t—do.
I also knew that my magic and Archie’s wouldn’t be the same—that a death witch and a necromantic warlock would necessarily relate to magic differently, because witch magic and warlock magic weren’t the same.
And that meant that whatever lessons Archie might give me might go awry—things might not work or, worse, they might do something dramatically unexpected.
It was the second of those that worried me now, in the darkness of the night. I was fully prepared for failure—I’d experienced more than my fair share of that while struggling to make my psychic abilities do what I wanted them to. But how did you prepare for the unpredictability of magic?
Every lesson I’d struggled to learn, whether on my own or from Mason or Ward or Sylvia, had been about control.
Controlling when my psychic abilities would or wouldn’t trigger.
Controlling my death magic so that I wouldn’t kill people or animals.
Controlling my emotions so that they didn’t trigger some sort of magical outburst.
Necromancy wasn’t going to be about control in the same way. It wasn’t going to be about blocking my magic, but channeling it, transforming it, choosing when to unleash it.
I could kill with my magic. I knew that.
I had done it. But that was like letting go of everything, all at once, and allowing my fear or rage to pour out in the direction I wanted it to go.
Usually. I grimaced. I didn’t like that Garraway had been able to deflect my magic.
I didn’t like that it hadn’t killed him, and I didn’t like that it had killed Mulrooney, instead.
It wasn’t that I felt a particular level of guilt about Mulrooney being dead—he’d kidnapped me and clearly had no qualms about beating me or killing me—it was that I hadn’t chosen to kill him, and yet he’d ended up dead as a result of my magic, anyway.
It was that unpredictability that had me the most concerned.
I knew that I could keep my magic under control as long as I kept it fully under control.
The same thing had been true of my psychic abilities.
As long as I didn’t use them—as long as the walls were firmly mortared in place—it was fine.
It was when I started trying to work with those abilities that they became chaotic.
And I was very afraid the same thing was going to happen again.
This time, with death magic.
When the consequences could be so much more serious.