Chapter 9 #3
“What would you do if he did?” he asked, still watching Victor.
“Release him back into death,” I replied, my voice quiet because I found myself feeling oddly protective of the tiny undead rodent.
“You don’t want to do that?” Raj asked, turning his attention from Victor to me.
I grimaced. “I—I feel responsible for him, I suppose,” I admitted. “It’s my fault he’s… reanimated, so now I have to take care of him. Make sure he’s not unhappy.”
“How do you tell if a rat is unhappy?” Raj asked. He looked back over at Victor. “And do living rats and undead rats react the same way to unhappiness?” He grimaced. “Is he even… the same rat he was when he was alive?”
I turned to look at him. “How would I know?” I asked him.
He stuck his hands in his pockets. “You’re the necromancer,” he replied, once more studying Victor. “Are people the same if you resurrect them?”
I swallowed. “No, they aren’t,” I answered him.
“At least according to both Mason and Archie. They’re…
more complicated.” I didn’t correct his assumption that I was a necromancer.
I still didn’t fully understand what Mason had been saying about me actually being a life-caster rather than a death witch.
After all, the first magic I’d ever done had been to kill my uncle.
One would assume—as I had—that meant I was a death witch.
“What does that mean?” he asked. “‘More complicated’?”
“I’m honestly not sure,” I admitted. “But they were both pretty adamant that I shouldn’t do it, especially not until I figure out what I actually did.”
“But resurrecting rats is okay?”
“I didn’t mean to resurrect Victor,” I told him, feeling my cheeks flush. “I just… feel bad about making him dead-dead again, since he seems pretty content being undead.”
Raj drew in another long breath. “I—feel like this requires more research into the mental state of the resurrected,” he said. “Because I’d like to know what they think about it.”
“I don’t think a rat can tell us that,” I said softly, although it was a good question. “But Mason thinks I might not be a death witch.”
“Doesn’t raising the dead make you a necromancer?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No. Necromancers are warlocks. It’s a different kind of magic. I’m a witch.” I grimaced. “Just… apparently not a death witch.”
“You raised a rat from the dead,” Raj said, sounding surprised. “How are you not a death witch?”
I toyed with the hem on my shirt. “He thinks I might be a life-caster,” I explained. “But that because of… everything, I had to learn the other side of it, death magic, in order to survive.”
Raj appeared to think about that. “How would we know?” he asked.
“Mason is going to work on that,” I replied.
Raj nodded. “Okay,” he said. His stomach growled. Then he looked back down at Victor and scrunched up his nose. “Can we go out for dinner?” he asked.
I sighed, pushing fried rice around on my plate with a fork.
Part of me wanted to have the manual dexterity to eat with chopsticks—like Raj could—but I felt like the frustration of failure while hungry probably wasn’t something I needed to add to my life at that particular moment.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I told Raj, who had just brought up the impending trial at which we would both be expected to testify.
He echoed my sigh, although instead of using his fork, Raj used his long fingers to grasp a piece of shrimp with the long bamboo sticks, making it look easy. “You’re not ever going to want to talk about it,” he replied, his voice soft. “But we need to.”
I grimaced, but said nothing, pushing a few peas and a tiny carrot cube with the tines of my fork.
“It goes to court in January,” Raj said softly. “Three months from now.”
I sighed again. “Yes, I know.”
“You have to be prepared,” he said, echoing what Ward had said to me a few weeks ago.
I sighed again. “Prepared for what?” I asked, knowing I sounded annoyed. “The truth doesn’t change as time passes.”
“It’s not the truth you need to be prepared for,” Raj replied, and his tone was worrisome. “It’s the fact that Garraway is going to have a lawyer who is going to try to make you contradict yourself.”
I frowned. “The truth can’t contradict itself.”
“The job of Garraway’s lawyer is to confuse you, make you say things that seem to be answering the question, then twisting them around and using them to make you sound like a liar.”
I scowled into my rice, shoving it around some more. “Why? Why would they do that?”
He put a hand over one of mine, stilling the motion of the fork.
“Because his job is to defend his client. And the only way he can do that is to confuse the jury about what happened.” He squeezed my hand gently.
“Rayn,” he said softly, and I looked up at him.
“You know you’re not very good at understanding what people are saying when they’re not being direct.
” He sounded apologetic, and while it stung, I recognized that he was right.
“I’m not going to learn how to do that in a few months,” I said softly.
“I know,” he replied, squeezing my hand again. “But we can practice.”
I frowned again. “Practice?”
He nodded. “The prosecutor will work with you, ask you questions so that you get a sense for what it will be like.”
I sighed heavily. “They’re not going to have me testify at all after that,” I said.
Raj’s lips pressed together. “You’ll have to,” he said, his voice serious. “Because the defense will call you.”
“Why?” I demanded.
“Because they know your history,” he said grimly. “And they’ll do everything they can to exploit it. To show the jury that you’re…” He trailed off.
“I’m what?” I asked, although I thought I knew. Mentally unbalanced. Out of control. A danger to himself and others. The same reasons my parents had given for having me committed to Tranquil Brook in the first place.
“Confused,” Raj replied. Except I knew that even if that’s what he said, it wasn’t what he was thinking. Because Raj isn’t a fool. He knew very well that my family’s history would be immediately relevant to any attempt to discredit my testimony. He just didn’t want to hurt my feelings.
I was used to my feelings being hurt—well, being disregarded, anyway. “By making me look crazy,” I said to Raj, stabbing a piece of breaded chicken smothered in sweet and sour sauce.
“I—”
“I’m not stupid, Raj,” I said, wincing a little when even I could hear the annoyance in my voice.
The slight smile he made was apologetic. “Yes,” he confirmed, sounding resigned. “The lawyer will try to make the jury think you’re crazy.”
I nodded. “Because I am,” I said.
Raj sat up abruptly, putting his hands on the table, the bamboo chopsticks clattering slightly on the edge of his plate. “You are not,” he almost snapped.
I blinked, startled. “I am,” I replied, more surprised than defensive.
It wasn’t like I particularly wanted to be mentally unstable or ill.
But I had insomnia, nightmares, occasional night terrors, and what my psychiatrist called ‘undiagnosed neurodivergence.’ In other words, there was something wrong with me, but nobody had put a name on it yet.
“Rayn.” Now he sounded angry. “You are not crazy.”
I met his golden-brown gaze steadily. “Then what am I?” I asked him. “Because I’m not normal.”
“Normal is overrated,” he retorted. “You’re you.”
I made a face. I knew full well that it was a vaguely polite way of agreeing that I wasn’t normal without actually saying that there was something wrong with me.
Raj put one of his hands over mine. “Rayn.” He repeated my name.
“You are not crazy. You might not think the same way I do, or the same way Ward does, or Mason or Hart—well,” His lips quirked.
“Nobody actually thinks like Hart but Hart,” he remarked.
“But the point is, you think like you, because only you have been through your life.”
“That’s just another way of saying I can’t help being crazy,” I told him.
He leaned forward, cupping my face in both his hands. “You are not. Crazy.”
I sighed. “I’m not normal, either,” I replied softly. “I’m never going to be, and I’m okay with that.” I studied the stubborn set of his jaw. “Are you?”
His brow furrowed. “You’re not crazy,” he repeated yet again, as though there were some sort of power to the words that he could invoke just by repeating them. “You might not be whatever so-called normal is either, but there’s nothing wrong with what you are.”
“Except when I have to testify at a trial,” I pointed out.
There were easily a dozen other situations I could think of in which the way I understood and related to the world wasn’t exactly deemed appropriate, but I didn’t think pointing them out to Raj was going to be a terribly productive way to continue the evening.
He sighed, then let his hands fall from my cheeks. “It wouldn’t matter if you were normal in every way,” he replied quietly. “The lawyer would do everything possible to make you seem unreliable or confused or out to be a liar. It’s just that… with your history, that’s how they’ll do it.”
I thought about this. I supposed it made sense, if your job was to defend your client from prosecution and you lacked any moral concern about the repercussions for anyone else.
“I understand,” I told him. “I just—don’t know what you want me to do about it.
” I picked up my fork again, knowing it was important to keep eating, even though I wasn’t feeling particularly hungry any longer.
I was the opposite of an emotional eater. When I felt anxious or unhappy, I tended to ignore food, although I knew that wasn’t a particularly healthy way to relate to diet or nutrition. So I took up a forkful of rice and put it into my mouth, even though I wasn’t interested in eating it.
“I—” Raj paused. “I just don’t want to see you hurt,” he said, his tone falling off as he spoke. I looked back up at him, finding his expression troubled, although I couldn’t tell if he was upset, angry, or something else.
“I’m used to people thinking I’m crazy,” I told him. “It won’t hurt me.”