Chapter Thirty-Six
THIRTY-SIX
The basement is … a basement. I don’t know what else to say. The ceiling is low enough that I need to duck, and poor Rufus has to walk crouched over. It’s one massive space with stone and wood pillars. What matters are two things.
One, the basement is empty, with none of those pillars wide enough to hide anyone.
Two, the floor is dirt.
“Theory supported,” I say, kicking at the packed soil. “Someone’s buried down here.”
“Look for an area where it’s been disturbed and packed,” Rufus says.
“Have some experience burying bodies in shallow graves?”
He jabs a finger at me. “Watch yourself, lass. What do you take me for? A weak human who can’t dig a full six feet down?”
Ann shakes her head, and I light a couple of balls and send them out so we can widen our search.
I head off to the left, and I get about ten steps before finding a section of the floor that looks darker than the rest. I maneuver down with my light ball and confirm that this ground has been disturbed—dug up and then repacked.
I’m opening my mouth to speak when Ann whispers, “Here.”
Rufus and I converge on her and find the same thing—a dark oblong patch.
“Um, I found the same thing over there,” I say, pointing.
“And I think I found one there,” Rufus says. “I was just about to take a closer look.”
“That isn’t good,” I say.
“They might not be graves,” Ann says. “The soil could just be discolored.”
Rufus and I exchange a look but say nothing. Ann says she’ll see what she can do. Rufus figures out which of the three patches seems the most recent. As she lowers herself beside it, I whisper, “Wait! Don’t you need supplies of some sort?”
She frowns up at me. “No. Why?”
“That’s how I’ve seen it done.”
“I’ve never used anything. This is how my grandmother taught me. There’s a churchyard near Trevelyan, and we’d go there for lessons.”
Necromancers don’t need rituals or supplies to see spirits that walk the earth. But summoning the dead requires objects. Yet Ann’s confusion was genuine, as if she’d never heard of a necromancer needing supplies.
Has she ever made contact on her own before? I can’t imagine Silas let her slip off to that churchyard for practice after he relegated her to the basement.
I will have faith. And if she can’t do it, that’s not her fault—
“No,” she says sharply. “I’m sorry for the intrusion, but I really need to speak to you.”
I blink. She’s addressing thin air, which seems as if it’d be a ghost, but she only just began summoning. She can’t possibly—
“I don’t want to force you to stay,” she says. “But I will if I need to. I’ll offer a boon, though, for your cooperation. Is there a message you’d like passed along?”
A pause, and then, “Fine, forget the boon. There are others here who’ll answer—”
Pause.
“All right,” she says. “Thank you. I’ll keep this short. You can see my companions. I’m going to be relaying your words to them, as they are not—”
Pause.
“Ah.” She looks at Rufus. “He says he knows you. It seems you threw him into the Thames?”
“You’ll have to be more specific,” Rufus says.
“It was the middle of winter.”
“Mmm, still going to need more.”
Ann rolls her eyes. “He was trying to … Oh.” She glances at Rufus. “He got too close to Bishop and Julius, I think. He says he wanted to get a look at the Danvers boys.”
Rufus snorts. “No, he wanted to see if he could get close enough to hurt one of them. Repayment for a scar left by their grandfather.”
“On his cheek?” Ann motions along her own.
“Yep, that’s him. Don’t know his name. Didn’t bother to ask.”
Ann has indeed summoned the ghost of the man buried here. She did it in minutes, with no ritual supplies.
Just how powerful is she?
And, does she realize she’s powerful? I don’t think so. The only supernatural community she’s had is the werewolf Pack. I’m not sure whether she’s known a necromancer outside her own family.
“He says he wouldn’t have hurt the boys. Just given them a little of what … Monty gave to him. Monty? Oh, yes, it’s Montague, isn’t it?”
She continues without waiting for Rufus’s response, knowing that any response he gives won’t exactly encourage the fellow to keep talking.
This wolf had wanted to scar Bishop or Julius—when they were children—in revenge for what their grandfather did.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised to find him buried under this basement floor.
“How did you end up here?” Ann asks. Then she pauses and says, “Murdered by that bastard upstairs.” Ann glances at us. “I’m relaying his words exactly. The profanity is his.”
“I figured that,” I say with a smile. “Continue, please.”
She does, continuing to relay everything the ghost is saying, and it’s like seeing someone play two roles in a stage production. Odd at first, but soon I can imagine the man’s words coming from him instead.
“Can you be more specific?” she says. “Who killed you?”
“How the fuck should I know?” he replies through Ann. “He got me from behind. I just know that bastard ordered it.”
“What bastard is that?”
“Figure it out.”
“Doyle?”
“Doyle doesn’t have the balls to do this.
That’s the problem. That’s always been the problem.
He’s being fucked over by that bastard, and he’s too stupid to realize it.
I’m older than these other pups, so I figured it out, and I hoped I’d get a little bonus for keeping my mouth shut. Instead, I wound up here.”
“When you say Doyle is being ‘fucked over’…”
“Look at this place. It’s a shithole. We bust our asses to make money, while Doyle keeps waving a dream of the promised land.
A proper house. A proper Pack. We should have had it years ago.
You know why we haven’t? Because Doyle isn’t in charge of the money, and he’s too stupid to realize most of it is vanishing into someone else’s pocket. ”
“Jesse,” I murmur. “Doyle said Jesse is in charge of the money. He made a joke that he has no head for figures, so Jesse looks after it.” I look at the patch of air Ann has been addressing. “That’s who you mean. That’s who ordered your death. Jesse.”
“Look at you,” the wolf says. “A female with a half a brain in her head. I’m done here. Give me my boon.”
I’d be inclined to refuse, but if a necromancer hopes to continue summoning spirits, she must have a reputation for fair dealing.
It turns out he does want a message sent, which is the usual request. He has a mother in America, and he wants her to know he’s dead.
Ann agrees and takes the information and then releases him.
After that, Ann moves to the next most recent mound.
The wolf she summons here is far less belligerent.
He doesn’t need a boon. He just wants to tell his story, how he was lured into the Cambrian Pack and then murdered.
Why was he murdered? He’s not even sure.
He thinks it was because he was getting close to Hanora, but all he knows is that he was murdered while out alone one night.
He’s young—eighteen—and the whole experience has just left him confused. Lured into a Pack, trying to figure out whether he wanted to stay, falling for one of the girls, and then dead barely more than a month after he arrived.
The third wolf is a swirling cyclone of rage, nearly incoherent with it, according to Ann.
He came from the Caledonian Pack, and like the last one, he’d been lured with promises.
In his case, he’s very clear those promises were fantasies.
They’d wanted him because he had influence in the Caledonians and could bring others, but he himself was, as he put it, “too smart for their liking.”
When he saw that their promises weren’t going to be met, he challenged Doyle, who seemed confused, wanting to know what he’d been promised and by whom, and Doyle swore to sort it out and begged for time, saying he’d speak to Jesse. That night, the wolf went to bed and never woke up.
When Ann asks who made the promises, it turns out to be the first ghost we spoke to. He’d been a recruiter. And the wolf that one answered to?
Jesse.
We don’t raise any more dead after that. There seem to be two more, but their graves are old, and Ann says they’ll be more difficult to contact.
It doesn’t matter. We have what we need.
Once back with Julius and Bishop, we talk less than one might expect.
Even with the privacy spells, too much conversation seems unsafe, and there isn’t much to say beyond the basics.
Jesse is recruiting young wolves—not to grow as a Pack but to grow as a workforce that ultimately lines his own pockets.
While there will certainly be wolves here who are happy enough, that’s because they believe the dream they’ve been sold. Work hard, and someday, you’ll be part of a Pack to rival the Albions, with a fancy house and easier jobs.
My impression is that Doyle is the one selling the dream. Because he believes it.
Bishop is a leader with vision. A leader who sees what could be and has the wits and cunning to achieve it. Doyle has the vision, but he lacks what it takes to see it through, and he relies on his second-in-command, his old friend from the American Pack.
It’s clear from our conversations that Doyle is in awe of Jesse’s intellect. He’s been happy to turn over all the finances and the Pack management to him, because he trusts him. That was his first mistake.
What matters most for us is how the Albions play into this.
Did Jesse want Bishop dead? If so, to what end?
Or did he want Bishop humiliated? To prove Doyle can’t trust Bishop if he breaks his vows—like his wedding one—so readily. Better to send Bishop and the Albions away, letting Jesse keep doing whatever he likes with the Cambrians.
Bishop is going to need to sleep on this and make decisions tomorrow.
We’re in bed. Rufus and Julius have both moved into Ann’s bedchamber, and under other circumstances, I might have joked about that.
But tonight they’re there to guard her and one another, as well as being only a connecting door away from Bishop and me.
I’ve also warded both hall doors and all our windows.
We won’t stay in this house another night—we’ll need to make an excuse to Doyle tomorrow—but we can’t leave now.
I don’t think we’re in danger tonight. The possibility of anyone getting to Bishop has passed.
Rufus still insists on staying up to guard us as we sleep, and Julius plans to take a shift later.
It’s only once everything is calm that I see the scratches on Bishop’s neck and one wrist. I have a moment of alarm before he assures me they’re from the hunt.
The neck scratch from Rufus, inflicted in a bit of roughhousing.
The wrist one from…? Well, he doesn’t remember exactly.
I cast healing spells as I remove his shirt and wipe off the dirt and find more shallow scrapes.
I work in silence, gently washing with the damp cloth and whispering spells.
He doesn’t need the healing. The marks will be gone in a couple of days.
I don’t care. I clean where there is no dirt to clean, and I heal where there is no injury to heal.
It’s time to be with him, in quiet connection, as the house falls silent around us.
I’m wiping the damp cloth along his arm when he tucks a lock of fallen hair behind my ear.
He’s taken out the pins already, piled them neatly on the table, every movement as slow and deliberate as my own.
When he tucks that lock back, I look at him and his fingers move to my chin, tilting it up in a kiss.
A short kiss at first, but then a longer one, as gentle as his touch, and he pulls me into his arms.
Bishop undresses me slowly as we kiss, and when we slide into the bed, the pace never changes.
Unhurried. Deliberate. Gentle. There’s no rising tide of lust that needs to be sated.
We’re both too tired and shaken for that, mired in worries and thoughts and fears of what is to come, the grief that we haven’t found the allies we hoped for.
We kiss and we touch, fingers stroking and making no effort to go anyplace in particular, and it is like drifting along in the gentlest current in a warm river. Every touch feels like a gift, something neither of us expected tonight and all the more precious for it.
That touching and kissing is enough to have our soft sighs and moans sharpening, and then I’m under him and he’s in me, and he takes it just as slow as we kiss and whisper words of love and of promise, that we can get through this together, that I’m here, at his side and at his back, and that he’s at mine, always together, always looking out for one another.
Even our climax is quiet and yet so exquisite, exactly the release we both needed, and he’s still inside me when we drift off to sleep.