Necromancy Page 4

  Lizzie noted her own shaking hands. She was more accustomed than Kenna to the adrenaline ride of living in the magic-using community, and she was struggling.

  Another of Ewan’s security men came through the door and made a final pass of the courtyard. Not a bad idea, considering the book’s reach had extended this far. Maybe they could catch the next zombified creature before it got the jump on one of them. Lizzie didn’t doubt that there would be another.

  She watched with a keen eye, ready to…help? Flee in the opposite direction? Make sure Kenna was nowhere near so she wouldn’t light another creature on fire? She wasn’t sure, and she didn’t find out. The courtyard was clear.

  As the guard passed by Kenna, she emerged from her stupor and called out frantically, “Where’s Max? Where did you take him?”

  “Infirmary.” He gave her a critical look. “Where you should be headed. First floor. Second floor, American. Do you need help?”

  Kenna shook her head, but Lizzie said, “Yes, she needs help. I’ll take her.” She carefully placed an arm around Kenna’s shoulders, trying not to startle her. “You’re in shock. That’s why everything seems so strange and you’re having a hard time thinking straight.” And why Max had been carted away without her even realizing it.

  Kenna nodded, but her face still had the same blank look.

  Gently guiding her into the house and down the hall, Lizzie gave Kenna just enough information to answer her most immediate questions but skipped the gory details and minimized what was looking to be much more than just bugpocalypse.

  For the next half-hour, Lizzie made certain Kenna and Max were recovering—assisted by some healer magic, naturally.

  But then everything post-crisis-related was handled and she had a moment to think.

  Relief. That was what hit her first. Knee-wobbling, head-swimming relief. Max and Kenna would be fine. Kenna’s baby, also fine. And no other dead-and-alive-again creatures had cropped up.

  That they knew of.

  Yet.

  There would be more zombies. How could there not? The book hadn’t been stopped. Just because they couldn’t see its nasty magical tendrils reaching out and flipping undead switches willy-nilly didn’t mean it wasn’t happening.

  Which was when the fear and frustration struck. What would be next? How would they stop it? What if it was something worse than a Lycan? Something stronger than a handful of dragons? Something Ewan and his men couldn’t subdue?

  Yeah, that needed to not happen. Which meant Lizzie needed to get off her butt and sort this problem out. She didn’t have time to dither. Because zombies. Because Gwen.

  And, dammit, she missed John.

  She retrieved her phone from her back pocket and checked for messages.

  Nothing from John. She couldn’t blame him. He was busy sorting out their lives—their future—and that required an investment of time and focused attention on the Texas pack.

  And she’d heard nothing from Ewan. Either their wolf’s zombified state had persisted further than a quick spin around the block, or Ewan had been caught in an awkward situation.

  According to Max’s recounting of events as he’d been stitched up, the wolf had re-formed from buried skeletal remains. She didn’t even want to know the particulars of how a Lycan ended up buried in the library’s private courtyard. Harrington was no idiot, so Lizzie knew the body predated IPPC’s occupancy of the building. That wasn’t the pressing question, however.

  If the necromantic magic faded, Ewan would be left with the remains of the Lycan. Which meant he was either carting around a very large, very angry wild animal in the back of his vehicle or a pile of bones. Neither would look particularly good during a traffic stop.

  She smacked her head. “Please, please let the dragons carting the demented, undead wolf not be stopped by the local police.”

  She added one more “please” for good measure, and then she waited.

  5

  Lizzie’s patience diminished proportionately to the quantity of caffeine she consumed. Since she’d consumed several cups, waiting for Ewan, Tavish, and their new pet to return was excruciating.

  Time to head to the kitchen for a proper meal. Bacon made everything better.

  She was only feet away from the answer to her culinary prayers when the troublesome awareness of her location resurfaced. She was in Prague, and as awesome as fried strips of pork fat were, not every country appreciated its genius.

  Imagine her surprise when she strolled into the kitchen to find that they’d stocked American bacon—just for her.

  “Harrington?” she asked.

  The chef smiled and then busied himself preparing the BLT she’d requested. “No. A Mr. Braxton had a package delivered special for you.”

  John. Her heart did a little rat-a-tat-tat. She loved that guy. He was considerate in all the little ways, if arranging for a specialty meat delivery was little. He also knew she could get a little cranky when she was hungry, and that she did love her bacon.

  “I’ll make a tray for you? Or would you prefer to eat in the dining room?”

  Lizzie took that to mean “get out of my kitchen, crazy fried-fat-eating lady.” She thanked him and agreed that a tray would be great. She edged around the corner in an attempt to remove herself from the chef’s domain—he was fulfilling her bizarre American food request, after all—and planted herself against the hallway wall.

  She pulled her phone out and checked she hadn’t missed an update. Kenna was passed out and recovering from her ordeal for the moment but was supposed to text when she woke. And Ewan—well, Lizzie still wasn’t entirely certain he hadn’t been locked up for crimes against wildlife.

  Her phone pinged with a text. Ewan. She hoped for good news as she opened the text.

  No, we have not been stopped by the authorities. How foolish do you think us?

  She’d been a little impatient, so she might have texted a few less-than-probable scenarios as she’d waited to hear from them. His fault for taking so long to get back to her. Despite his snarky tone, she was thankful Ewan hadn’t been forced to explain the reason he was carting an oversized wolf around the good people of Prague.

  Her phone pinged again with a second message.

  The Lycan remains undead.

  Well, hell. She quickly replied asking how far they’d driven.

  As she waited for a reply, she couldn’t help pondering the stash of equipment a dragon might have handy in his SUV.

  Lizzie snorted. Knowing how prepared Lycan were, it wouldn’t surprise her if dragons were the same and Ewan had a tarp or three stashed in his vehicle. Much as the two groups hated to admit it, they had a lot in common.

  Too far.

  Too far—what did that even mean? She called Ewan, but it rolled to voicemail immediately. Looked like she was out of the loop until Ewan deigned to fill her in.

  To be fair, if he had any useful information, she was sure he’d share it. But that didn’t help her frustration. And she was hungry, dammit.

  Except her empty stomach wasn’t the real issue. No, the real issue was Gwen.

  Lizzie had been trying to juggle the undead problem and Gwen’s kidnapping, but all she’d managed was to deal with a few dead bugs, make a few more undead bugs (oops), put out a fire that never should have started in the first place, and flit between Kenna and Harrington hoping for some more information.

  Splitting her attention had accomplished less than nothing. Not only had she made no headway on either crisis, but her priorities felt all sorts of jumbled up.

  Her heart was with Kenna and Gwen. But to help Gwen, Lizzie had to help Harrington. And to help Harrington, she had to figure out how to kill some undead stuff—not just bugs, apparently—and keep the wicked book from the super-secret library room from spreading its nasty undead magic.

  Soulless zombies acting only on instinct were bad news. Making sure they didn’t start cruising around town, thereby risking a reveal scare and injuring people, was an important task. P
eople, possibly many people, might die if she didn’t find an off switch for the necromancy book. Unfortunately, the importance of the task didn’t change where her heart lay.

  She wanted to hunt down some nasty Coven of Light witches and rescue Gwen.

  And now Lizzie was thinking like a psychotic toddler. Mean and lacking in impulse control.

  One rampaging zombie Lycan in wolf form could easily kill a dozen people. And what if a dragon corpse was stashed within the book’s zapping range? Or something else equally dangerous?

  She rubbed her eyes. Not shockingly, they were dry and gritty. Moral support, that was what she needed right now. And some sleep, but she’d have to make do with a pep talk.

  She pulled her phone out and called John.

  “Hey, you okay?” His deep voice hit her in all the right spots. No, not the pervy ones. She was too keyed up for that. It calmed her agitated nerves and soothed her aching heart. She knew she’d been missing him, but she hadn’t realized quite how much.

  “I am now.”

  “What’s going on?” He sounded casual enough, but she knew what was going through that wolfy head of his. He wanted to be with her—that was a given—but if she let on how conflicted and stressed and over-caffeinated she was, he’d only feel worse about not being here. If he knew she was struggling, the distance between them and the commitments that kept him in Texas would twist him up in knots.

  He’d want to be here to make everything better, or at least hold her if he couldn’t, and since she wanted those things too, she’d have to be extra careful.

  Striving for a light tone, she said, “I can’t just call because I miss you?”

  His rumbling laughter might have hit her in those other right spots. If she wasn’t completely focused on her case. Which she was. Totally.

  His laughter died, and, in an intimate tone, he said, “Missing you, too.” He cleared his throat. “Now, why are you really calling?”

  “Moral conundrum.”

  “Okay. I’ll give it my best shot.”

  They didn’t always see eye to eye on moral questions. Lizzie tended to be a rule follower, and John…wasn’t.

  As the Alpha of the Texas Pack, he followed Lycan laws—the ones he had to—but Lizzie had been raised in the human world with human laws, and John was much less likely to be compliant with human laws that conflicted with his moral code.

  None of that really mattered, though, because John got her—intimately, deeply, on all levels.

  “Two trains, two tracks, both racing toward a collision but in opposite directions from one another. You can prevent one crash, maybe, but probably not both. One train has a single passenger, someone who’s important to you. The other train has several passengers, but they’re all strangers.” Lizzie considered the IPPC staff, all in close proximity to the book and not planning to evacuate anytime soon, and all an incredible group of dedicated and gifted individuals. “Scratch that. The second train’s passengers are greater in number and definitely really cool people.”

  “Your equation’s left out a few of the variables.”

  She shrugged, then realized he couldn’t see her. “Yeah, but I think you get the major issues.”

  “Of course. And if you’re going to ask what I’d do? If the coven had you, there’s nothing that would keep me from getting you back. No pack business, no secondary crisis.” He sighed. “But you’re not me, and that wouldn’t necessarily be your right decision.”

  True, she wasn’t him, but they weren’t so different.

  In her heart of hearts, she knew if John had been the one captured, nothing could keep her away. Not a commitment to Harrington or IPPC, not the low probability of a successful outcome, not even hell’s hounds nipping at her feet.

  Yeah, she’d be super dead if John was being held captive.

  Then again, there was always Kenna and the pack. They’d do their best to make sure Lizzie didn’t jump off a cliff without a parachute.

  A frustrated groan slipped past her lips, and immediately she regretted it. The distance between them was the knife, and she shouldn’t twist it.

  A rumbling on the opposite end of the line answered. “I hate that I can’t be there.”

  “I know.” Regret chewed at her stomach—or maybe that was plain old hunger. Where the hell was that BLT? She shook her head. “When I called, I mostly just wanted to hear your voice. I’ve got this under control. Really.”

  “Uh-huh.” His voice lowered to a rough whisper. “I love you. Keep yourself safe.”

  “Yeah, back at you, Fluffy.”

  She hung up on his sharp bark of laughter.

  6

  Lizzie got her BLT.

  It was perfect: crisply fried bacon offset by a flavorful heirloom tomato and fresh, leafy lettuce with just a dab of mayo, all between two thick slices of freshly baked bread.

  And she even had the dining area to herself, so she could enjoy it in blissful, crisis-free silence.

  Naturally, Ewan texted just as she sank her teeth into the nearly orgasmic first bite of that oh-so-perfect culinary work of art.

  She chewed as she read his text.

  Just pulled up. No joy with the wolf.

  That dragon knew how to spoil a good sandwich. She’d have to finish in three minutes or less. That was how long it would take Ewan to get into the house and crash her meal.

  She tried for proactive and replied by text between bites: Where am I meeting you?

  But he was fleeter of foot than she’d credited him with. He walked into the dining room and replied, “Here.”

  A girl had to eat. She took another bite and stared at him, waiting for the recap.

  “I’ve got my men securing the Lycan in one of the basement additions.”

  She kept chewing and raised her eyebrows.

  Ewan, clever man, got the hint. He sat down across from her. “We drove the perimeter of the city and saw no change. Since we don’t have a secure offsite location to store him—”

  “To gauge how long it would take for his battery to die.” She eyed the fizzy water the kitchen staff had provided and shrugged. She chugged half the glass. She wouldn’t mention the fact that the basement was less than ideal for so many reasons. Ewan knew that, so it had to be the least of all evils.

  “Right, if the magic even works that way. For all we know, there’s some form of inertia that comes into play. Once these dead creatures are reanimated, they could stay that way until something flips the off switch.”

  “You really think that’s a possibility?” It was a much more disturbing one than the previous hypotheses: a magical battery that exhausted itself, or a specific geographic reach for the book. At least their previous theories meant the creatures would self-terminate. At some as-yet-to-be-discovered point, but still, there was an end in sight.

  “I don’t know. I need you to have a look at him. Now that we’ve verified we don’t have an easy way to shut him down, we’re going to use him as a test subject.”

  The last bite of her sandwich stuck in her throat. She chugged the remainder of her water, but it didn’t help. He just had to go and ruin her meal by mentioning torture. Testing, torture…tomato, tomahto.

  She cleared her throat. “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.” She swallowed past the thickening lump of guilt. “He was alive once. For all we know, he could still have family and friends.”

  Okay, that wasn’t very likely, but it just seemed wrong to use a Lycan as a lab rat.

  Ewan crossed his arms. It made him look buff (which he was) and intimidating (which he also was, to some people). But she was an Alpha’s mate. That crap didn’t work on her.

  She crossed her arms and met him frown for frown. “Experimentation on a creature that’s just one step shy of alive exceeds my ethical boundaries.”

  “One step shy?” He quirked an eyebrow. “Unlike Matylda, this Lycan has no soul. He’s an empty vessel, pulled from one moment to the next by nothing more than the basest of his instincts.”
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  A shiver crawled up her spine. Was that what a ghost was? A person’s soul? She’d never thought about ghosts in those terms. Didn’t want to think about them that way.

  And she really didn’t want to think about the shell of her body cruising around without her most important parts—the parts that made her human, the parts that made her a unique individual.

  “If you’re done?” Ewan indicated the plate she’d practically licked clean.

  She shoved her chair away from the table but stopped at the side table for coffee before following him down the hall to the basement stairs. Thank goodness for to-go cups, or she’d probably have skipped it—and she really needed that boost about now.

  The idea of using the captured Lycan as nothing more than a guinea pig made her stomach do flips. Caffeine wouldn’t help, but she needed the biggest of all pick-me-ups right now.

  It was some small consolation that the Lycan was trapped in its wolf form. Bad enough to magically poke and prod a wolf that was so much more than a wolf. If their test subject had a human face, she really didn’t think she could do it.

  “Wait a second.” She stopped so suddenly on the basement stairs that she splattered coffee on her shirt. “Why aren’t we using the bugs?”

  Ewan didn’t pretend to understand. He shook his head and gave her the look. The one that men the world over had mastered. It was about as clear as if he’d said, “What the hell are you smoking, little woman?”

  Then Ewan’s eyes crinkled, and he said, “I would never say such a thing. And you should think more quietly.”

  “Crap.” She’d forgotten about dragons’ telepathy trick. And this wasn’t the first time she’d been told she thought louder than a cheerleader screaming through a bullhorn. “Anyway—bugs? Can’t we use them as test subjects? They don’t even come close to showing up on my ethical radar, wrong though that may be.”

  “Won’t work, not unless you’re familiar with bug language and behavior.” He gestured for her to precede him down the last few steps.