Necromancy Read online

  “I’ll verify whether Matylda has any knowledge when our meeting concludes.”

  Suddenly suspicious, Lizzie asked, “What have you been doing with her while we’re sorting out her problem?”

  “Her problem?” Harrington raised an eyebrow. “Is that what we’re calling an acute case of zombie-ism?” She scowled, and he said, “Calm yourself. She offered to relay what knowledge she could recall of the library books. She’s been working with Pilar to make notes for the librarian.”

  She couldn’t help noticing he didn’t mention Emme, which worried her.

  Lizzie really liked Emme. She’d dedicated significant energy and time to cataloguing the contents of the library and was passionate about the books. Once they managed to pull the library safely through Elin’s zombie outbreak crisis, Lizzie would really like to see Emme on the other side of it.

  “Ewan has no knowledge of wellsprings, and his people haven’t detected the magic to this point. He’s relying on us to track and cap its magic.”

  “I guess that means we’re headed back to the dead bug room.”

  Harrington inclined his head. “Yes, though I thought you might like to finish your breakfast first. You seem more than usually distracted by hunger.”

  Then he looked at her. For a while.

  She chewed and swallowed the last of her English muffin. “What?”

  “Is there something you’d like to share?”

  Annoying, obnoxious man. Why couldn’t he say what he meant?

  She finished her tea, but the brief hesitation didn’t work to make her less snappish. “I don’t know what you mean. If you have a problem, then ask already.”

  He cleared his throat delicately. “Your temper is shorter, your appetite greater… You’ve been engaged a few months, mated longer.”

  She still wasn’t getting it. But then suddenly she was, and she laughed. “I’m tired because I’ve been traveling. I’m hungry because I stress-eat. I am not cooking up a wolf pup in my womb.”

  Pregnant? No way. They took precautions, so there was no way she was knocked up.

  Wait—was there?

  There was that one time…

  Harrington stood abruptly and cupped her elbow. “You’ve gone completely white. Are you sure you’re well?”

  She stared at him as she did a little mental math. “Oh, shit.”

  Harrington sighed. “You’re pregnant.”

  She denied it immediately. Because she didn’t know she was. She suspected. Suspecting wasn’t knowing. And no way in hell was anyone getting that information before John.

  She must have broadcast her thoughts, because Harrington settled down in the chair next to her and very quietly, very calmly said, “We’ll call Frank in for a quick examination. He can…” He gestured to her midsection.

  Since when was Harrington so squeamish? Didn’t the man have kids of his own? Maybe he didn’t. She glanced at his ring finger, which was bare. She’d always assumed there was a Mrs. Harrington waiting somewhere in the rolling green hills of England, safe from all the magical baddies and the near-world-ending drama.

  “The exam won’t take but a moment,” Harrington said, pulling her from her musings of a wholly imagined Mrs. Harrington.

  “No.”

  “No?” His reaction floored her. He looked nervous.

  “No. The answer won’t change our plans.” She lifted her chin. “And you will not be the first person outside of myself and my doctor to find out I’m pregnant.”

  Harrington tugged at the collar of his shirt, and she had to fight to keep her jaw from dropping. The man was ruffled. Harrington, ruffled. Ever-cool, dispassionate Harrington. He hadn’t been anything like this when Kenna had caught the pregnancy bug.

  Not that Lizzie had. Because she didn’t know—wouldn’t know—until after the zombies were squashed and Elin was locked up in nymph-proof cuffs.

  John wasn’t her only concern. She had very mixed thoughts about having a child so soon in her relationship. But a child, John’s child… She was suddenly giddy. She had to swallow a sob; the good—no, the best—kind of tears were imminent. Happiness descended in a wave, and she was overcome with how much she wanted John’s child.

  Even if it was a little soon. Even if the timing could be better. Even if she had serious concerns about pregnancy and bad-guy-ass-kicking existing within overlapping moments of her life.

  But she hadn’t lied to Harrington. Her theoretical pregnancy aside, the situation remained otherwise unchanged. Reanimation was still happening—per Harrington over morning tea, the dragons had wrangled both a cat and a bird overnight—and Kenna’s mom still needed rescuing, and therefore Harrington’s (IPPC’s) clout.

  “I think we’ve had enough distraction for the morning.” Lizzie pushed her chair away from the table. “Time to use some creative magic to find that wellspring and shut off the tap.”

  She’d swear she heard Harrington groan when she mentioned creative magic. She smiled.

  She might have been hesitant to get creative when she and Pilar had been taking stock earlier, but plain Jane sensing wards had accelerated the effects of the book.

  They needed to find and cap the wellspring, so they had to do something innovative. And, really, how much worse could they make it?

  9

  Lizzie liked to think of herself as a glass-half-full kind of person. Right now, she was feeling awfully close to half-empty instead.

  She was already tired, and she’d woken up less than hour ago. She’d passed on the coffee she wanted to grab on the way out of the dining room, in case… Well, just in case. Not like she’d been doing research on how knocked up ladies were supposed to eat or drink, but Kenna had limited her caffeine consumption as soon as she’d started accidentally lighting fires and discovered she had a bun in the oven.

  Lizzie swallowed back a yawn as she made her way down the steps to the basement. If she wasn’t pregnant, then she’d have Frank check for anything else that might cause exhaustion, food cravings, and excessive sentimentality.

  Anything besides not getting enough sleep and trying to save her corner of the world. But that stuff wasn’t really new to her.

  Harrington paused at the bottom of the stairs and looked up at her. “You’re certain you don’t want—”

  “If you ask me about seeing Frank one more time, I will suffocate you.” He’d already mentioned it four times. Four refusals later, and she was ready to commit a little violence. “Or maybe I’ll just shove you into a nearby wall. I hear neither is pleasant, and I’m handy at both.”

  Pilar planned to meet Harrington and Lizzie outside the room where the book was stored. Lizzie only hoped her friend and mentor wouldn’t go quite so cuckoo as Harrington. Better yet, that she’d never know, because maybe Harrington would keep his mouth shut.

  “Frank?” Pilar called out from the basement. “Lizzie, why do you need to see Frank?”

  Just Lizzie’s luck that Pilar had beat them downstairs. As soon as she turned the corner, she saw Pilar’s concerned face. “I’m fine, which is why I don’t need to see Frank. Harrington is being an old man.”

  Pilar pinched her lips together. “Not that it’s polite to ask, but aren’t you in your forties, Harrington?”

  “It’s a figure of speech,” Lizzie said. Her exasperation made her tone of sharper than she’d intended. “Will you two give me a break? My…situation is none of your business, Harrington. And you”—she pointed a finger at Pilar—“don’t encourage him.”

  Pilar gave her a curious look, then her mouth opened slightly. “You’re finally pregnant, aren’t you?”

  “Finally?” Lizzie glared—at Pilar, at Harrington, at the closed door behind which the evil book lurked. “I’d ask what the hell that means, but we have other concerns at the moment. Do either one of you lunatics have a plan?”

  Harrington and Pilar shared a commiserating look.

  “No plan?” Lizzie asked. “All righty, then. I’ll have a stab.”

&nbsp
; And before either of the raging idiots next to her could complain, she opened the door to reveal the necromancy book.

  Dead bugs buzzed around her face, crawled on the floor, and in general annoyed her about as much as her well-meaning boss and mentor.

  She turned her ire toward the black book on the pedestal. Next, she started to think in exactly the way that made Harrington and Pilar twitch: out of the box.

  She cast a wider net this time with her ward, one that encompassed the entire room. And she didn’t work through the steps of magic—one, two, and three—fluidly. No, she let her freak flag fly, and she ripped the magic from her body and flung it across the room.

  It spread in a wide swath, lighting up the room with shiny sparkles—and also capturing all of the flying bugs in its net.

  Literally capturing them. They hung suspended in midair, shining with varying degrees of brightness.

  Unlike the sensing ward Lizzie had cast on the Lycan, the bugs didn’t show any outward signs of distress. They formed a shiny grid of magic secondary to the ward Lizzie cast.

  “What in the holy hell is that?” Harrington asked.

  Lizzie examined the varying shades and brightness of the grid formed by the glowing bug bodies. They looked like an incomprehensible mishmash of lights, but then she blinked. In that brief moment when her eyes first opened and before she’d fully focused, she saw the pattern.

  “Oh. My. God.” Lizzie traced a pattern in the air with her finger. “It’s a path.”

  “More like a stream,” Harrington replied as he dodged and weaved through the frozen bugs, following the brightest of them.

  “Lizzie,” Pilar said tentatively. “How did you freeze the bugs?”

  “I’m haven’t a clue.” Lizzie thought back to her formation of intent, but it was fuzzy. She’d rushed through the familiar steps so quickly, and she’d been so peeved—angry, really—that she hadn’t clearly formed her intent. Except that wasn’t how magic worked. If any of the three pieces failed—the magical power, the clearly expressed intent, or the will to implement—then no ward was cast, no distance faded, no magic happened.

  Which meant she’d formulated a plan of attack for her ward somewhere in the depths of her mind. She poked and prodded but found only a tangle of unpleasant emotions: frustration with Harrington for his persistent and unwanted concern, annoyance that her mentor and friend had expected her to get the baby bug well before she’d given it much thought herself, and a terrible loneliness that only John could fill.

  John—his absence was the real problem. She wanted her damn mate. She wanted to know if she was pregnant, but not without him by her side, holding her hand.

  She wanted Elin and her petty, vicious, self-centered play for power squashed like one of the frozen, glowing bugs she couldn’t take her eyes off.

  She tapped one of the bugs with the tip of her finger, and it fell to the ground.

  “Lizzie!” Pilar cried.

  Harrington’s groan of frustration made Lizzie feel perversely satisfied. “Can you not play with the bugs until we sort out how stable this ward is?”

  Hands on her hips, Lizzie remarked on what was now obvious: “I don’t see a change. What about y’all?”

  Neither of her partners in crime replied. Their silence spoke volumes, though, and she decided sorting out the kind of magic she’d conjured up before she tinkered with it wasn’t a terrible idea.

  If her memory failed to yield results, then perhaps her eyes would do a better job. Or simply the feel of the thing. Working magic was part skill (gained through training and experience) and part intuition.

  She put a pin in the question of her pregnancy, opened her eyes, and let herself feel the magic.

  A handful of heartbeats passed, and then she felt it. The cool whisper of wind on her cheek. No… The cool slide of water around her body.

  “Whoa. I can feel it.” Harrington retained an air of equanimity most of the time, so seeing him surprised was a treat. “Like a pleasantly warm spring.”

  “It figures the British guy thinks it’s warm.” Lizzie closed her eyes and let herself float with the gentle current. Not literally—her feet were moving—but it felt like floating.

  “I’m following you lunatics, because we can only go so far in an enclosed room,” Pilar said as she trailed behind. “But Lizzie’s right. It’s the temperature of the Caribbean on a warm fall day. Not cold, just cool enough to be refreshing.”

  Lizzie stopped in the corner of the room, her retinue close behind. She tapped the wall. “The main library is on the other side, right?”

  “Yes,” Pilar and Harrington said simultaneously.

  Lizzie grasped their hands and, without asking permission—she really was channeling Kenna these days—she faded to the other side.

  Pilar’s eyes rounded when she saw where they’d landed, namely the other side of a very solid wall.

  Harrington was more vocal. He spat out a few curses, then said, “You do need me alive. If I’m dead, I can’t help Kenna or Gwen.”

  “Please. You look fine to me.” Fading disoriented the uninitiated, and it was incredibly bad manners to cart someone around magically without permission, but they were on the clock. Lizzie dropped their hands before addressing the more pressing question. “Any thoughts on how we turn off the tap? Or do we need to find the source to do that?”

  She hoped not, because the wellspring could be buried in solid rock or dirt or—

  “Oh, I don’t think you’ll have much luck deciphering either of those riddles.”

  Elin.

  10

  IPPC is under attack, and they send for you.” Elin’s scathing comment and all of her attention were directed at Lizzie. “You’re nothing.”

  Lizzie found the fresh-faced, rosy-cheeked, blonde Elin downright disturbing.

  Maybe it was the discordant contrast between the light tones of the teenage girl whose body had been usurped and the vile words escaping her mouth?

  As Lizzie scrambled for something to say—now would be a great time to pick the evil bad guy’s brain—she was sidetracked by a flash of movement in her peripheral vision.

  Harrington’s body made a dull thud as he slammed into the wall next to her. He fell forward in a heap before she could catch him.

  Who was she kidding? Catch him? She hadn’t seen it coming or even understood what had happened, not until Elin said, “Uh, uh, uh. No calling the dragons for reinforcements, Mr. Bossman.”

  Elin lifted her hand and slowly closed her fist.

  A choking noise emerged from Harrington’s doubled-over figure. Elin was squeezing the life from him.

  Shit. Lizzie better jump-start her brain cells fast.

  She said the first thing that popped in her head. “What brought you out of hiding? The dragons had you on the run, so something must have changed.”

  Elin giggled. It seemed the idea that she was hiding from anyone, dragon clan or otherwise, was funny to her. Fine with Lizzie, since Elin had stopped squeezing the life from Harrington.

  Distract, maybe that was the key. Get her talking, and she wouldn’t be so eager to thwack the three of them against any available hard surface or choke them…or kill them in any fashion and have them join the undead army she was building.

  That lit a fire under Lizzie’s ass, and she started talking, letting anything that popped into her head pass through her lips.

  “How’d you get on the possession life track, Elin? Can I call you Elin? Or do you prefer your nymph name?”

  “Elin is just fine. And I like not dying—how about you?”

  Flawed plan, very flawed plan, Lizzie realized as Elin pointed a finger at her heart. A piercing pain stole her breath and tears welled in her eyes.

  There was a time not so long ago when a viable plan would have popped into Lizzie’s head. Hadn’t she read somewhere that pregnant women could be forgetful? She pounded the wall with her fist. Not only was she likely knocked up, but her brain cells were on a temporary hiatus un
til her (theoretical) baby was fully cooked.

  The pain faded, but only because she was getting lightheaded. Oh, Lord. She really needed to get her shit together. To reel in the crazy and get herself sorted. John would never forgive her if she got killed. And she’d never forgive herself. For all she knew, her spirit would get stuck in the library like Matylda’s, and then she’d have decades, centuries, to feel guilty.

  Amidst the baby bomb, the ancient madwoman threat, John, Harrington, Pilar, and several tangents related to each, her focus managed to flit through an improbable number of topics. Finally, it skittered by one helpful thought: shield.

  Whether it would work against whatever magic Elin was using, Lizzie didn’t know. She didn’t give a flying fuck. It was her only option.

  Lizzie yanked her magic and flung. Like before, when she’d chucked her magic in a fit of pique, there were no steps. It was all instinct, and she really hoped somewhere in that process she’d hit on all the required parts.

  She did. Oh, boy, did she.

  The shield she’d hastily cast tingled and sparked as it settled across all three of them. Her brain was pretty awesome on autopilot; it even remembered to protect her friends.

  A familiar scent wafted in the air, distracting her from her newfound speed-casting talent. If her imagination hadn’t been running mad and her brain wasn’t on the fritz, she’d have sworn she smelled John.

  “You bitch,” Elin snarled.

  She flung a ball of fire—a freaking ball of fire—at Lizzie, but the shield held. In fact, it flared even brighter.

  Lizzie could feel Harrington’s magic poking at the shield. “You’ve tapped into the wellspring.”

  “Um, no,” Lizzie said. “I don’t know how to do that.”

  “Lizzie,” Pilar said, “you did. And you better figure out how you did, because my shield didn’t hold against Elin’s hybrid magic.”

  Of course Pilar and Harrington had been protecting themselves and each other. Lizzie had been the only one having a meltdown. If this was pregnancy brain, she didn’t want it. Wow, that moved from theoretical to probable awfully fast in her head.