Gil shook her head. “I’m not having this conversation.”
“You hang with vampires, you sought out a necromancer, and you study topics that could get you a death sentence—because, I know, any book containing a spell to capture a Last Breath in it is on more than just the banned reading list. You’re a natural-born necromancer.”
“I said I wasn’t having this conversation.” Gil tugged at her coat sleeves, but the movements were more violent than her normal twitchy actions. “Can’t you just do the job we paid you for?”
“I’m getting to it.” He set the skull on the ground.
Summoning a long blade from thin air, Avin used the point to draw a circle around the skull. Outside the circle he drew several twisting symbols. I was surprised Gil wasn’t taking notes. After tugging on her sleeves a couple more times, she finally caved, pulled out a scroll, and started scribbling.
“See, you’re fascinated. You can’t help it,” Avin said, vanishing the blade again.
“She does that all the time.” I said, leaning against a statue. “Gil’s a natural-born scholar.”
She gave me a death glare, and I frowned. What’d I say?
“I was just trying to help,” I muttered under my breath.
Louder I asked, “How long is this ritual?”
Both mages ignored me. Avin summoned four candles and placed them around the circle he’d drawn. A flick of his wrist and small flames consumed the candle wicks. I couldn’t see what he placed between the skull’s teeth, but with another flick of his wrist, spicy smelling smoke rolled out of the skull’s empty eye sockets and mouth.
“Come here,” he said without looking up from his work.
“Tonight you babes will be playing the connection between the living and the dead.”
Uh… I didn’t like the sound of that. Still, cooperation would get me back to Death’s Angel faster.
I trudged over as Avin summoned his knife from the void, again. He pressed the tip of the blade into Gil’s index finger, and she flinched but let him coax blood from the wound onto the knife. He then anointed the skull with the blood before moving to me. He lifted the blade to my finger the same way he had for Gil, but as the metal touched my skin, a stinging chill that had nothing to do with magic shot through my flesh.
I jerked back. “That’s a silver knife.”
“It’s a ceremonial tool.”
He reached for my hand again and I shook my head. I might not be able to shift anymore, but my silver allergy persisted. “Use a different knife.”
“I don’t have one. Now give me your hand, it will only hurt for a moment.”
I glanced over my shoulder, hoping Gil would help, but she was busy jotting something in her scroll—probably about me, the lab rat. Holding out my hand again, I squeezed my eyes shut as the knife bit into my flesh. At the touch of silver, first my finger, then my entire hand went numb. The drop of blood from my finger fell on the skull’s forehead, and I felt the pulse of magic in Avin’s circle. Hugging my numb hand to my chest, I retreated to the company of a stone angel.
Avin sat down cross-legged in front of the skull and bowed his head. His voice lifted in a low, sing-song chant, the words foreign but commanding. The candlelight flickered. Once.
Twice. Then the smoke stopped billowing out of the skull and, twisting in midair, it turned and flowed downward back into the sockets.
Avin opened his eyes.
A scream issued from the skull.
“Kill you!” the skull shrieked, enunciating surprisingly well for something with no lips. “I’ll kill you. You can’t kill me this time.”
I gasped. I recognized the voice. “Bryant?”
In life, Bryant had been an average-Joe human until he was tagged by Tyler. A hyena spirit took up residence inside his body, breaking his mind and sense of self, and, under the tutelage of Tyler, he’d turned into a vicious predator. Human turned shapeshifter in the hands of a psycho? Not a good combo.
I frowned at Gil. “It’s Bryant’s skull?”
“Obviously. The other rogue ended up a pancake on the sidewalk. I couldn’t salvage anything from him.”
The skull turned on its base so the smoke-filled sockets glared at me.
“Monster,” Bryant’s skull yelled. “Monster! Kill her!” Then it gave out a blood-curdling howl. Apparently he and the hyena were still bound together—and just as insane—in death. It made me wonder anew what had happened to my cat-self after I became a vampire.
“Shuddup. You’re a talking skull.” Avin rapped the skull on its cranium. “This thing wasn’t human. What did you have me bring back?”
“Rogue shape-shifter,” I said, staring at the angry skull.
Bryant’s skull went on shrieking. Nights ago, when Gil had mentioned she was working on a way for us to question the dead rogue about his accomplices, I’d thought she’d meant Tyler, not Bryant. Two rogues had gone on a killing spree, but only one of them, Tyler, had been tagged directly by me. I’d stopped them both, but the monster I’d accidentally created when I defended myself with my claws had been Tyler, the one to tag Bryant. Tyler would have been far more useful.
Still, the two rogues had traveled and killed together for several months. Bryant could know something important.
If the skull would just stop bellowing long enough for us to question it.
“Can’t you make it stop screaming?” I asked, pressing my hands over my ears, which did little to dampen my hypersensitive hearing.
Avin hit the skull again, but it kept howling. “You neglected to mention you killed this dude-thing.”
“I didn’t think that was an important detail,” Gil said, shuffling her feet. The skull turned to yell at her again. She ignored it. “Can we question him now?”
Avin shrugged. “Knock yourself out. Don’t know how helpful he’ll be. Spirits don’t tend to like the people who sent them to the incorporeal world.”
“But you can make him answer. I’ve read that a necromancer should be able to control a rampaging spirit.”
“‘Course I can. For a price.”
“We don’t have anything more to offer—”
Avin interrupted her, “I want to test your aptitude for necromancy, and if what I suspect is true, I want to train you to use your potential. That’s it. That’s my price.”
Gil’s lips parted as her jaw fell crooked. She glanced my way, her eyes a little too wide. I shrugged. It wouldn’t be the first thing she’d done that went against Sabin’s laws.
“Okay,” she nodded, and I couldn’t tell if I heard fear or excitement in her voice. Probably both.
Avin closed his eyes again. Bryant suddenly stopped yelling obscenities at us and contented himself to hiss quietly between his teeth.
Without opening his eyes, Avin said, “Try your questions now.”
Gil leaned toward the skull. “How many humans were tagged and became shifters?” she asked. The skull hissed at her. She repeated her question.
“Just me,” the skull finally said. “Me and Tyler, monsters, partying all the way to hell.”
“He’s lying.” Gil’s expression scrunched up, her lips twisting. “I thought he wasn’t supposed to be able to lie.”
Avin raised an eyebrow, eyes still closed. “He can’t lie.”
“He has to be lying.”
I waved a hand. “Uh…” I happened to have it on good authority that Bryant’s skull wasn’t lying—I’d seen inside his mind before he died.
But, while I was willing to cooperate with Gil’s whole, Kitais- my-lab-rat thing, telling Gil I had bits and pieces of two homicidal rogues traipsing through my head wasn’t something I was ready to share. Not yet, at least. Maybe not ever.
“Gil, he’s not lying,” I said, pushing away from the angel statue and creeping closer to the skull. The chill of Avin’s magic crawled over my skin as I approached his circle.
“Bryant wasn’t one of the attackers from the street. He was tagged by Tyler.”
Gil’s brows knit together as she digested this. “By the other rogue? I got the wrong skull?”
“Bryant might still know something. What about any other ‘monsters?’” I asked him. “Did you see any others? Did Tyler ever mention any?”
“You!” Bryant’s skull yelled. “You’re a monster. Monster.”
Not helpful.
Gil huffed. “Did Tyler ever mention family? Friends?” she asked. “His last name?”
The skull managed to look contemplative. “No.”
“Did Tyler tell you how he became a shifter?”
I knew intimately how Tyler had been tagged, but maybe, if he’d told the story to Bryant, he’d mentioned the names of his companions that night.
The skull’s bony jaw clicked. “Yeah, he said the devil called his name and gave him the power.”
The devil? Right. This was going nowhere. I bit my lip and tried to examine the memories I’d siphoned from Tyler.
He’d been thinking about killing when we’d fought and I bit him and dived into his mind. In particular, he’d been thinking about killing me, but the thought had opened paths to memories of his other kills. In my mind’s eye, flesh parted, screams echoed, and the taste of raw meat, of human meat, filled my mouth. So many women. Even the ones who hadn’t survived were familiar to my mind’s eye now.
But I didn’t need to see his victims. I needed his companions. I found a memory of myself through his eyes, of the night I’d inadvertently tagged him. His companions’ faces floated into view, but no names. I could only focus on the memories I’d taken from his mind before his death.
I had enough of his sadistic memories to supply a lifetime of nightmares, but not enough to find the other men who’d jumped me. I’d defended myself, but in the process, I’d accidentally tagged Tyler. And possibly his friends. Thinking of the attack brought the memories full circle, filling me with what he’d planned to do to me, what he’d wanted. Screams ripped through my mind again, and I shivered, shoving the memories back in the dark hole I’d made for them.