Chapter 9
He really hated these fucking cases. The hit-and-runs. Hated every fucking thing about them. Hated the fact that this goddamn case had him fucking paranoid to shit. Worried about Taavi, even though nobody could tell he was a shifter just by looking at him.
The fucking fact that Raj was losing his goddamn shit wasn’t helping.
He resented a bit the fact that Raj was worried about Rayn, for fuck’s sake.
Not because of that, exactly, but the kid was going to be fine.
For one thing, he wasn’t a Nid. For another, Raj wasn’t giving him even remotely enough credit for self-preservation.
The kid had lived through a hell of a lot scarier shit than this.
And, if he had to, he could probably give a hit-and-run driver a fucking heart attack if anyone tried to run him down.
Alright there, sport? Archie asked me, and I twitched, causing the ghost to cackle, although I was actually rather pleased I hadn’t jumped more or let out any sort of shriek. I’d let myself get sucked into Hart’s thoughts, mostly because I’d wanted to know more about what Raj was thinking.
I shot a glare in Archie’s direction. Perfectly fine, thank you, I replied, irritated.
Don’t get yer knickers in a twist, he told me, floating over to hover in front of my desk.
I deliberately and slowly set the pencil down, meeting his transparent gaze in silence.
He got uncomfortable first. Most people did. Thought we might try some practice today, he offered. Seein’ as it’s fairly quiet.
It was quiet because Ward, Mason, and Beck were trying to keep their schedules as close to calm as possible on the days that we didn’t have major events to conduct séances for, mostly to preserve Beck’s and Ward’s energy levels, and Mason’s, my, and Violette’s sanity levels.
Mason was in his office catching up on paperwork, but Ward was coming in late and Beck had taken the day off.
Since, as far as I knew, nobody else had been hit and murdered with a car, that left me with very little to do, since I’d already done and triple-checked the inventory stock for the rest of the month and into November. I might as well take the dead man up on his offer.
Alright, Archie. I tried to sound a bit more enthusiastic than I felt. What do you want me to start with?
“Rayn?” Mason’s voice echoed down the hall, sounding… I wasn’t sure. Worried? Upset?
“Yes?” I called back, my fingers stilling on the keyboard. I’d been working on a paper, having spent two hours working with Archie until he’d decided I’d probably had enough and ordered me to go have lunch. I’d eaten half my homemade turkey, mustard, pickle, and swiss sandwich as I worked.
“Are you the reason there is a rat in here?”
“A rat?” I got up, heading for Mason’s office. I stopped dead in the doorway when I saw it.
It was, indeed, a rat.
It was also very obviously dead.
And still moving.
“Oh, shit,” I hissed.
“Is that… yours?” Mason asked, again, his voice tight.
I couldn’t stop staring at the rat, which was cleaning its undead little whiskers in the middle of the dog bed that Alma, Mason’s dog, sometimes used. “I… don’t know,” I replied, my own shaky. “How—how would I tell?”
“Not sure,” came the response, although his voice was becoming less tense. “Try… calling it?”
“Calling it?” I repeated, struggling to figure out how I would go about doing that. Was I supposed to give it a name? Treat it like a cat or dog?
“Summoning it, more likely,” Mason clarified, pushing himself to standing, his big green hands on the top of the desk. He was still looking at the rat, but he seemed to have regained control over himself.
I hadn’t. Was the rat my fault? I certainly hadn’t intended to… resurrect anything. The most complicated thing Archie’d had me attempt was being able to tell if something dead was in the room. A few spiders, a house fly, a bunch of fruit flies. I hadn’t noticed any rats.
But if it hadn’t been me, then who?
“How—how do you summon a rat?” I asked Mason.
“Not a clue,” came his response. “I think by trying to… think really hard about drawing it to you. Trying to will it—the way you might wish for someone to do something.”
I focused on the rat, trying to imagine it looking at me.
And then I sucked in a sharp breath when it did.
“You want it to do that?” Mason asked me.
I nodded, my hands shaking, my stomach churning with a combination of awe and terror.
“You okay?” the big orc asked me.
“I don’t know,” I whispered back.
“You want to tell me what you were trying to do?” he asked.
“This morning,” I told him. “Archie told me to find all the dead things in the building.”
“And you found a rat.”
“I didn’t,” I replied. “Spiders, bugs, flies, but no. No rats. Or mice. Or squirrels. Or anything big.”
Mason let out a thoughtful hum. “So where did you come from, then?” he asked, looking at the rat, which was watching me intently.
“You don’t seem concerned,” I said to Mason.
He snorted. “I’m not, since it seems to have been your doing. Now, if it had come from someone else, then I’d be worried.”
I frowned. “Why?”
“Because if it wasn’t you or Jackson—and I’d be worried if it were Jackson because I’d want to know what he was up to—then I’d really need to be concerned.”
“You wouldn’t assume Archie?” I asked.
Mason snorted. “You’d think so, except ghosts can’t raise the dead.”
I frowned at him. “Why not? Sylvia can set candles on fire, so why couldn’t Archie raise the dead?”
Mason grinned. “Because death magic requires life force,” he replied. “You can use other kinds of magic—so Sylvia can use her elemental magic on anything dead or alive, but Archie would have to borrow life from the living to be able to do anything necromantic.”
“And he couldn’t do that?” I asked.
“He might be able to, but I don’t think he would,” Mason replied. “And he wouldn’t be able to use it to raise a rat, even if he did.”
“But if he drew life energy from the living, then why couldn’t he use it on something else dead?” I asked.
Mason shrugged. “I don’t make the rules,” he replied. “But all the texts seem to agree that resurrection can only be performed by the living. Archie could probably do some damage if he borrowed life magic or, worse, if he possessed someone, but he still wouldn’t be able to perform a resurrection.”
I pondered this with a thoughtful hum of my own. The rat went back to cleaning its face. “So how do I—” I wasn’t sure how exactly to finish that statement. Un-resurrect?
“Release it back to rest?” Mason asked.
“Yes.” That sounded like a very polite way to put it. “Release it.” I looked back at the rat, which looked fairly content with its undead rat existence. “Is it?” I asked, then.
“Is what?” Mason asked.
“Releasing it,” I said. “It seems happy enough.”
Mason looked down at the rat, which had moved on to cleaning its tail. I blinked. I could see gaps in the pink skin of the tail, with bits of whitish bone showing through.
“It does, doesn’t it?” he sounded confused.
“Shouldn’t it be?” I asked, a little worried. A confused Mason was pretty rare.
“Honestly, no idea. I have very limited experience with resurrected animals, and the last one I encountered was… definitely not content.”
“Oh.”
We both stared at the rat, which circled twice, then curled up and lay down in the middle of the dog bed.
“What do I do?” I asked him, not taking my eyes off the rat.
“Well.” He took a deep breath, the let it out. “Decide if you’re going to name him and keep him, or I can try to talk you through how to… send him back.”
I named him Victor.
Archie had, to borrow a phrase from Hart, absolutely lost his shit.
Because I hadn’t just raised a little rat corpse.
I’d raised Victor. And yes, I’m aware that the name I’d bestowed on the little undead rat wasn’t his actual name.
If rats gave each other names, I’d certainly never have figured out what it was, although I’d spent the last several hours very much thinking about how animals’ minds must work—including far too much time on websites that took various opinions on questions of animal feelings and awareness.
Archie’s problem was that Victor was making autonomous decisions.
Apparently, when you raised a corpse, it was supposed to jerkily find the necromancer who raised it and then wait in a kind of stasis for that necromancer to command it.
It was not supposed to find an office and proceed to groom itself the way it might if it were an actual, living rat.
Archie’s freak-out had brought both Ward and Sylvia into the room—Mason was already there, watching Victor-the-undead-rat stretch, then circle and lay back down again, closing his one remaining cloudy eye.
“Um,” Ward said, staring down at the rat.
“This is fascinating,” Sylvia pronounced, and got closer to Victor to examine him.
“It’s not fascinatin’!” Archie yelped. “It’s unnatural!”
“It’s necromancy,” Mason pointed out. “Which, depending on your view, is either unnatural anyway, or natural because magic is natural.” The big orc shrugged. “Either way, while an undead rat is certainly unusual, it doesn’t seem to be particularly hostile or… corrupt.”
Archie glared at me. “It’s got its soul,” he snapped. “Which I told you not to do.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose!” I protested. “I didn’t sense a dead rat, I didn’t try to raise a dead rat, and I definitely didn’t try to put a rat-soul back into said dead rat!”
“It doesn’t have any of the black that I saw with Picton or Fitzwilliam,” Ward remarked, staring at Victor. “It’s red, mostly.”
I looked down at the rat, frowning. “He’s brownish grey,” I said.
“His magic,” Ward clarified. I had momentarily forgotten that, when he wanted, my boss could see magic. “Or, more accurately, your magic that’s reanimating him.”
Archie’s brow furrowed, and he stared harder at the rat. “I’ll be fuckin’ damned,” he breathed.
“About what?” Mason asked him.
“It doesn’t have any corruption,” he said softly, floating closer.
Sylvia stuck out a finger and made as though she were going to put it through Victor—except she made contact, and he squeaked.