Raise the Dead Read online

  I closed my eyes and shook my head, unable to hold back the incredulous laugh that bubbled up in my throat. "Of course they did. Neither one of them would see anything wrong with a surprise like this."

  When I opened my eyes once again, Mal was studying me with utter wariness. "So this wasn't a good surprise, huh?"

  "How would you feel if I showed up on your doorstep one day and announced that I'd moved in next door? Without mentioning it to you?"

  "I'd probably wonder why you didn't just move in with me?"

  And the hits just kept coming tonight.

  "What?" I knew I was gaping at him, but I couldn't stop myself. Move in? We'd essentially started dating a month ago and we hadn't even had sex yet. Moving in together was definitely way down the road. Way, way down the road.

  Mal laughed. "Why do you look so shocked? I've told you more than once that I miss seeing you every day. But I also knew that the reaction you're having now would be the exact one I would get, so I did the next best thing."

  My heart was racing now, more so than it had been when I was getting ready. "Wow. Okay, that's a lot of information to process."

  "Can I come in?" Mal asked.

  "You probably should," I replied.

  He grinned at me as he came through the door and stopped right in front of me. "These are for you." As he handed me the flowers, he leaned down and kissed me. Somehow it was both sweet and sultry.

  My heart was no longer speeding along. Instead, it was pounding like a bass drum. I could hear the hard, steady thump in my ears.

  Wait, I was irritated. Wasn't I?

  Yes, yes I was. The man had bought a house. And not just any house, but the one right next door to mine. All of that with the intention of being closer to me. Why that didn't send me screaming for the hills, I didn't know.

  "Thank you for the flowers," I said solemnly. "But we still have to discuss this house issue."

  His smile widened. "Of course we do. And I think we definitely need to set some ground rules. Like no sneaking into my room at night or putting on sexy little striptease shows in your bedroom window."

  My face flushed hotly. "It's not me I'm worried about."

  Mal put his arm around me and guided me into the living room. "Yeah, we'll have to tell Stony and Blaine that they can't come over any time they want to raid your fridge. Otherwise, you'll have no food in the house and two smelly guys sprawled out on your couch."

  I suppressed a shudder because he wasn't wrong. Stony, Blaine, and Mal had lived with me for a short time last month and it wasn't an experience I wanted to repeat unless it was absolutely necessary. At least on the road I had my own room and my own space.

  "No, I mean we have to talk about the fact that you didn't tell something important, Mal. That wasn't cool. I get that it's your life, your money, your house, but it's a decision you made that will affect me in the long run. But you didn't consult me about it. That's not how I want my boyfriend to treat me."

  The corner of his mouth tilted up. "I'm your boyfriend?" he asked.

  I smacked him lightly on the shoulder. "Focus on the issue, please."

  His face grew serious. "You're right. This does affect you and I should have talked to you about it before I did it. It won't happen again." He paused when Stony yelped in the kitchen.

  "Watch the hands, Teri!" Stony hollered. "The goods are delicate."

  I sucked in a deep breath and rolled my eyes. God, why couldn't Teri ever keep her hands to herself? If she kept this up there was no way that Stony and Blaine would be over here very often because of her tendency to grope them.

  Hmmmm. Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing after all.

  Mal shifted and wrapped his arms around me, bringing my attention back to him. "Is my apology accepted?"

  Of course it was, but I couldn't resist giving him a hard time. "Oh, there was an I'm sorry in there?"

  He smiled. "No, but I am sorry."

  I reciprocated his embrace, maneuvering the bouquet around him awkwardly. "Then apology accepted."

  "Now, wanna go eat dinner and watch a movie?"

  "Yes, but first let's make sure that Stony understands that he can't eat me out of house and home and he has to replace everything he eats."

  Mal laughed. "That could be a lot."

  I sighed, resigned to coming back to an empty fridge. Well, at least all my nearly expired stuff would be gone without me having to throw it away.

  As Mal shifted his hold on me so that he had one hand on the small of my back, he said, "So, we've established that you can't sneak through my window but you haven't told me your rules."

  I gave him some serious side-eye. "I draw the line at you climbing up the side of my house to my window. My father doesn't live here so you can knock on the door like an adult. Though I wouldn't object to a sexy striptease if you feel so inclined." He laughed again and I waited a beat before I stated, "Though I wouldn't be the only one enjoying the view. Teri would probably provide lots of interesting commentary."

  That stopped his chuckles. "Shit. I didn't think of that."

  It was my turn to laugh.

  Chapter Two

  After Stony's surprise appearance last night, the evening hadn't gone as planned. Big surprise.

  Instead of a romantic dinner, movie, and maybe some making out, Mal and I ended up with Stony as a third wheel when he declared the contents of my fridge insufficient to sustain him. Of course where Stony went, Teri decided to join in. No romance could survive such an onslaught so the mood had died a swift and brutal death.

  I would have liked nothing better than to spend this evening alone with Mal but I'd made other plans last week and I couldn't cancel them. Not without pissing off a very powerful witch. So, here I was, standing in the middle of the cemetery, trying to learn how to control my magic. Yep, my life was so glamorous and exciting. Cemeteries, dirt, and a witch that bossed me around.

  "Control yourself, Zoe. I can tell you're not focused."

  I wanted to glare at Angie as she barked out yet another command. A bead of sweat rolled down the side of my face and my head ached fiercely.

  Who knew that not raising the dead would be so damned hard?

  As a necromancer, my power was stronger at night. Just entering a graveyard after sunset was usually enough to make bodies shift in the ground. As the moon rose, so did my magic until my mere presence was enough to bring any corpses in my vicinity to the surface. I didn't understand why and, honestly, I was afraid to ask Angie when she was in this sort of mood.

  As soon as I entered the cemetery tonight, I could feel every single body beneath the earth. They weren't inert to me as they would be to everyone else. I could feel them reaching out to me, thirsty for what I could give them. For a taste of the life they'd once had.

  My mind snapped back to the problem at hand when the dirt to my right shifted and I felt the body there moving, struggling to break free from the ground's embrace. Dammit, I had to master this.

  "Zoe!" Angie barked again.

  Gritting my teeth, I focused on the energy surrounding me. I could feel it flowing from my body into the dirt at my feet. Breathing deeply, I pulled it back and held it. I could feel the pressure building inside me, higher and higher. The power was so strong that it literally hurt to keep my grip on it. This was agony. My body was splitting apart.

  The grave to my right stopped moving as the body within it settled back into place. I exhaled in a long, slow hiss. I hadn't realized I'd been holding my breath. The pain eased back enough that I could think.

  "Good," Angie commented. I could hear her footsteps as she came up behind me. "Your control is improving each time."

  "It hurts," I whispered, my voice hoarse. "I don't know how much longer I can hold on."

  She stopped and stood silently behind me for a moment. A subtle nudge at my magic nearly made me lose control, but it backed off quickly.

  "Dear God," she murmured. "Okay, we need to find a way for you to release the magic." She hesitate
d. "Instead of letting it flow into the ground, do you think you can direct it upward? Away from the graves?"

  I blew out a long breath. "I can try. I have to do something or I'm going to explode." I gritted my teeth.

  "Just breathe slowly and let it out in a steady, small stream," she instructed. "Not too much or you'll—"

  The power in my grasp bucked and thrashed as if it were a living entity fighting my control. My vision flashed, the world growing dimmer, but I could see ghostly white light hovering above the ground near each headstone. A tremor ran through every grave, the bodies beneath shifting, reaching for the surface. For just another breath. Another tiny moment of life. I couldn't take my time. I had to expel the power now or I would have over a hundred zombies on my hands.

  The magic blasted out of me and into the sky with so much force that it nearly knocked me on my ass. Dust rose from the ground as the blowback slammed down on me, surrounding us both in a cloud. My hair lifted and my feet rose an inch off the ground.

  I cried out as I hovered a bit higher. Vertigo assailed me, making my head ache even more.

  Bright light surrounded me and I could feel the remnants of the magic reaching for the dead. I reached out and seized it, my mind seeing it with so much clarity that I could swear the energy was visible.

  Somewhere deep inside me, a void appeared, like a door flung open. I funneled the power into that place and commanded the door to shut. When it closed, the light around me dimmed and my feet dropped back to the ground.

  I wasn't prepared for the sudden fall and stumbled, nearly losing my balance.

  Two strong hands caught me and I looked over to see Angie staring at me with a mix of irritation and awe. Somehow she'd made it across the ten feet that had separated us in just a blink.

  "What happened to releasing it in a slow, steady stream?" she asked.

  I straightened and brushed my tangled hair away from my face. "I tried, Angie. I really did, but it just...it was like it leaped out of my hands. All I could do was choose the direction it traveled."

  She nodded, her hands knocking dust off her clothing. "I understand."

  I frowned at her. "You do?"

  "Oh, yeah. That was more power than I've ever seen from a single witch before. Anyone else would have—" She cut herself off. "Well, let's just say the results wouldn't have been pretty."

  I swallowed hard. "I don't think I want to know."

  "I think it's time to leave," she said. "And you can tell me what you did at the end. I felt...something. I've never experienced anything like it. It was as if you sucked all the air out of my lungs."

  I twisted fully toward her. "What?" Then my eyes caught sight of the grave behind her. "Oh, my God."

  Angie whirled around and stared. "Goddess protect us," she whispered. She took her phone out of her pocket and used it as a flashlight.

  In the pool of light surrounding us, every flower and blade of grass was withered and brown, crumbling as the gentle night breeze rustled by. We slowly turned. Within three feet of where I'd been standing, everything was dead. The grass, bouquets of flowers on graves, even small bushes, they were all wilted and lifeless.

  "What in the hell did I do?" I asked. My voice was little more than a whisper.

  Angie shut off the flashlight and grabbed my arm. "We need to go. Right now."

  Numb and nauseated, I nodded and let her lead me to the car. She didn't say anything else as she shoved me into the passenger seat and slammed the door.

  Once she was around the car and in the driver seat, she started the vehicle with a vicious twist of her wrist and spun the tires as she sped out of the gravel parking lot.

  We were both silent on the drive back to my house. I wondered if it was possible to freeze from the inside out. My skin felt as fragile as thin ice and I shivered in the passenger seat.

  I couldn't stand the quiet any longer.

  "Angie, what happened?" I whispered.

  The steering wheel creaked as she tightened her grip on it. "I'm not one-hundred percent certain but I have an idea. It's something I should have expected considering your abilities."

  When she didn't continue, I straightened in the seat. "What do you mean?"

  She glanced at me. "You're a necromancer, so you have power over the dead, right? But there are legends of some necromancers with so much magic that they could affect life and death. They could pull life from any living thing. Sometimes it enhanced their power and there are other stories of their ability to infuse it into the dead. It's more than reanimation. These beings weren't zombies. They were literally living and breathing as if they hadn't died in the first place. There were very few of them, but they were sought out and destroyed hundreds of years ago."

  "Destroyed?" I asked, my mind refusing to comprehend her words.

  "Many witches, especially those of an old school of thought, believe that no one should have power over life and death on that scale. No one except the goddess and god. There has been some speculation that vampire mythology started because of people like you. You are more than a necromancer. More than a witch. You are something that can't be classified and that frightens people."

  My body shuddered at her words. "What am I going to do?"

  Angie glanced at me and even in the dim light from the dash I could still see the worry in her eyes. "You're going to live your life as you have been, calling yourself a medium. This is a secret you have to keep. You can't tell anyone. No one can know but us."

  "Is there someone we can talk to? Someone we can ask about my abilities and how to control them?"

  Angie shook her head vehemently. "No. I mean it, Zoe. You can't tell anyone. You can't even tell Jonelle or Malachi. It's too dangerous."

  I stared at her with wide eyes. "Why would it be dangerous for them? You don't think I'll...hurt them, do you?"

  Her mouth clamped together tightly and I could see her jaw flexing as she clenched it.

  "Angie, tell me!" I demanded.

  "Some of those witches I mentioned? The ones who believe no human should be allowed power over life and death. They would hunt you down and kill you. Anyone who knew would become a target because this knowledge is usually secret among our kind. Only the most powerful of us know about people like you."

  "They would kill me?" Just for having magic that I hadn't asked for? Magic that made my life hell most of the time?

  She glanced at me as she pulled up to a stop sign. "Yes. They would. Or at the very least they would want to strip you of your powers." She paused. "And that would likely lead to your death anyway. Your magic is a part of your blood, your very soul. It's extremely likely that you would not survive the spell required to strip it from you. Jonelle and Mal would become collateral damage. If they tried to protect you, well..." she trailed off but my own active imagination supplied the rest.

  I couldn't breathe. My chest wouldn't expand as I tried to suck in air and I was overwhelmed by a strange sensation that was both hot and cold, as though boiling water carried chunks of ice through my veins. God, I was going to vomit.

  "Breathe, Zoe. Take a slow breath."

  I heard Angie's voice vaguely, but I knew I had to do what she said. If I didn't, I was going to pass out.

  I choked as I sucked in a lungful of air and coughed several times. A few moments later, my chest and abdomen relaxed and I was able to pull more oxygen into my airways.

  Just as I was calming down enough to speak again, Teri popped into my peripheral vision on the backseat. I had completely forgotten about her. When we'd first discovered that Teri was tethered to me, she was able to travel around a hundred yards away from me. With practice and time, Teri was able to extend her range to a quarter-mile, so she tended to roam when the opportunity presented itself.

  "Dammit, Zoe. You left me. Don't you know how horrible it feels to be dragged along behind a moving vehicle?"

  I jumped at her sudden appearance but didn't speak. I needed to focus on breathing because little black dots were dancing at the
edge of my vision. I couldn't afford to pass out. I had to remain conscious. I wasn't sure what would happen if I passed out, but a gut deep instinct told me it would be bad.

  "What's wrong with her, Angie?" Teri asked.

  Unlike most people, Angie could hear Teri due to a charm she created for that specific purpose. She intended to show Jonelle how to make one as soon as my best friend's skills were up to snuff. I wasn't sure that was such a great idea considering the things that Teri sometimes said about Jonelle, but neither of them seemed too concerned.

  "Something really bad," Angie muttered absently.

  "Shit, why does she always seem to find trouble?" Teri replied.

  "What am I going to do, Angie?" I asked again, gasping as the blackness receded from my vision.

  She slowed the vehicle as we approached the Kenna city limits. "Nothing. You're not going to tell anyone and you're not going to do anything out of the ordinary either. I'll do some...discreet research and figure out how best to handle this. In the meantime, it's best if we don't talk for a bit. That burst of power will have drawn attention from witches anywhere in the DFW area."

  "It was that big?" I asked.

  "If your magic was visible, they would have been able to see it from space," Angie answered, her tone matter-of-fact.

  I shivered again, remembering the way my skin felt as though it were peeling off my body. "So they're going to come for me?" I asked.

  How would I protect myself? How would I protect the people I loved?

  "No, because I'm going to provide the distraction. No one in the coven knows that I'm training you, Zoe. And only a couple of the witches have met Jonelle, but they only know of you as a medium and her friend."

  For the first time since I met her, I felt a thrill of fear toward the witch. Despite the fact that she'd helped me so far, I didn't know Angie that well. She could decide it was better to kill me rather than risk...whatever it was the risk would be if she left me alive.

  Angie pulled up in front of my house and put the car in park. She turned toward me, her expression grave. "I know you're afraid, Zoe, but I gave my word I would help you and I fully intend to do that." Her eyes were piercing as she studied me. "And don't fear me. You are far too special to allow anyone to harm you and I consider it my job to see to your protection."