A cool smile bent his mouth as he let me escape. “I will see you again.”
“I’ll talk to my boss about removing your house from the tour.” I stumbled toward the scattered group waiting on the corner, impatience and curiosity mingling on their faces. “I don’t want to disturb you.”
“You do not disturb me.” His nostrils flared one last time. “Good night…”
The single, damning word tumbled past my lips without consulting my brain. “Grier.”
“Grier,” he repeated, possessing my name as if I had given it to him for safekeeping.
Sneakers glued to the sidewalk, I stood there while he let himself through the gate then disappeared inside his house. Only when the front door closed did the others rejoin me.
Smoothing my skirts, I faced them with a pasted-on smile meant to reassure. “Now if you’ll all follow me…”
I set off at breakneck speed to the next destination, desperate to put distance between Volkov and me.
The rest of the night passed in a different kind of blur. When I reached The Point of Hey You Made It Back, I collected my tips, waved off my group, and made a beeline for HQ. I was counting on Amelie’s teensy obsession with the new guide, who was about as theatrical as a moth-eaten curtain, to delay her.
Sure enough, I found her all but swooning over his historically inaccurate retelling of one of my favorite ghost stories.
“Come on.” I hooked my arm through hers on my way past and hauled her into the parlor where the female Haints changed. “We need to talk.”
She stumbled after me. “Boaz made me promise—”
“This is not about that.” Though that talk was coming. “I saw something tonight.”
“Based on your reviews on Yelp, I’d say you make sure you see something every night.” She disentangled from me and started unpinning her hair from its elaborate twist. “Not that I’m jealous or anything. Except I am. Totally. My skin is green under this dress.”
Envy was a sore topic between Amelie and me, always had been, so I pretended not to hear. “I’m serious.”
“Okay.” Her fingers hesitated before she unspooled her first curl. “What happened?”
“I met Danill Volkov.”
She barked out an incredulous laugh. “Wait. You’re serious?” She bared her teeth and tapped her canines. “Like an honest-to-God Volkov? A descendant of the guy who built the crazypants murder house?”
I bobbed my head like a juicy apple floating in a water-filled barrel.
“Wow.” She leaned her hip against the sink. “Did he speak? Or did he just glare from the porch and shake his cane at the kids on his lawn?”
“Oh yeah. He spoke all right.” Recalling all the things he’d said, the heat of his breath on my skin, raised gooseflesh. “He’s not grandpa material either. He’s mid-twenties or early thirties. At least that’s how he appears.”
Clapping her hands together, she squealed, “Tell me everything.”
I repeated him word for word and watched her eyebrows ratchet higher and higher toward her hairline.
“You didn’t give him your last name?” She smacked her forehead with the heel of her palm, illustrating where I had picked up the habit. “Or your phone number?” She bit her bottom lip. “Maybe you should have given him your number if he’s that hot.”
“Best-case scenario is he’s a vampire. Necromancers are like catnip to them.” And Volkov had already pawed me once tonight. “The options get worse from there.”
The undead came in several flavors, and I wasn’t about to taste Volkov to determine his. He struck me as the kind of guy who bit back. Hard. Vamps were common in necromantic society. Not unexpected since they were our creations. Not to mention our bread-and-butter. But there were vampires, and then there were vampires. I got the feeling he fell into the latter category.
Your basic undead are created when a necromancer tethers a human soul with very, very deep pockets to its body after death. Those vampires are classified as resurrections, humans resuscitated by necromantic magic, and they rise as the undead with a thirst for human blood. They come equipped with a lure, a sensuous magnetism, that helps them ensnare prey. But only the oldest among them are a threat to necromancers. We have a natural immunity to them. So, pretty classic by horror-movie standards.
Those don’t last forever, and most go insane and have to be put down before the half-century mark.
Then you’ve got the Last Seeds. Turns out sperm can stay alive inside a dead man’s body for up to thirty-six hours. Freezing the swimmers doesn’t work. Magic and medicine don’t always see eye to eye on such matters. But that still gives resurrected vamps plenty of time to knock up willing surrogates (or human partners) for the purpose of creating offspring. For a fee, of course. A steep one. Last Seeds are just that—a male vampire’s last drops of humanity preserved for all eternity in his child. They’re also so rare and so cosseted by their vampire clans as to be fabled.
Last Seeds are immortal from birth and stop aging in their thirties. The Society allows them to live because in addition to being rare, they’re also sterile, making their population even easier to control. Otherwise, there’s no way those High Society stuffed-shirts would allow the Last Seeds and their irresistible lures to traipse around ensnaring necros willy-nilly, as I suspected Volkov had done to me.
Stashed in the bottom drawer are ghosts, ghouls and wraiths, byproducts of violent deaths, resuscitations gone wrong, and dark magic used to take lives.
The creation of psychopomps were a specialization as well. I won’t even lie. Necros who focus on pets make all the money. We’ve all seen people carrying teeny-tiny toy dogs around in designer purses. Offer a rich owner the chance to give Mr. Fluffy Lumpkins a second leash on life and cha-ching.
Even the fae deigned to bargain with us for the lives of their most beloved companions.
I got hot flashes just thinking about all that cold, hard cash.
Despite all appearances to the contrary, necromancy was a lucrative field, regardless of your specialty. Practitioners made bank, but skilled assistants, those without criminal records, earned more than I would see in a human lifetime.
How the mighty have fallen.
“I’m kidding, Grier. Sheesh. Give me some credit. I might be Low Society, but I’m not human.” Her sobering words brought my attention swinging back to her. “Volkov would have recognized your last name.”
Maud had been famous in her own right. Me? I was more infamous. Not quite the same thing.
“You were smart to protect yourself. We have no idea how the Society as a whole, let alone the Undead Coalition, will react to the news of your release once it trickles down.” She worked three more bobby pins loose from her hair. “Boaz will start knocking heads together if any of the factions take exception to your pardon, and that will get messy fast.” She winked. “And that’s not counting what I’ll do.”
The cold fingers of dread traced a line down my spine. “Amelie, you can’t—”
“I’m not afraid of the Society, and they don’t even know I exist. I’m too far below their notice.” Bitterness tinged her voice. The title of assistant might have stung my pride, but she burned for even that much respect among our peers. “Can you imagine if they did try to silence me?”
Actually, I could. Easily. After all, they’d done a bang-up job of muzzling me.
“Rumor has it that poor Amelie Pritchard took on a ruthless secret society and was silenced for her daring.” She strode toward one of the dressing booths and pushed aside the curtain as though she were opening a door. “Amelie was shoved down three flights of stairs by Matilda Bolivar at Sorrel-Weed House while leading a tour, and now she haunts this very house. It’s said that only people she once guided can see her, and that she awaits them to join her as she tours the afterlife.”
I cracked up at her ridiculousness. “You’re horrible.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is hilarious. You’re not the only one with Yelp reviews, you know.”