She trailed off.
“What did you do?”Sophie said, grinning.
“How do you know I did anything?”Jen demanded.
“I know you.”
Jen sighed.“It wasn’t my fault.If they’d left me alone, I would have had their answer in a minute.I’d figured out which screen it was on, but they were pulling on me, and it wasn’t fair!All the others had been given a couple of minutes each and allowed to touch the head.But I couldn’t reach that high, and I’d been given no time at all, and—it wasn’t fair!And, I mean, I don’t think I actually told him to do anything—”
“Him being the dead body?”I clarified.
“Uh huh.”
“Oh, shit,” Sophie said.
“But maybe I did, or maybe he just interpreted my thoughts of ‘get off me’ at the mages as ‘getthemoff me,’ and, well, he was a war mage, too…”
“Damn,” I put in.
“What?”Sophie looked between us.“He was dead.What could he do?”
“There’s sometimes enough magic left in a body for one final spell, even after death,” Jen said, confirming my fears.“And I guess he’d had a spell all teed up, maybe for whatever fight he’d been in, because suddenly everything was on fire.And I was being dragged away, and the mages were cursing and shooting spells at the zombie, but those don’t work so well on dead bodies—”
“Oh, my God!”Sophie laughed.
“It wasn’t funny!They transferred me to Rockwood immediately after that—”
“The high-level facility where we met,” Sophie explained to me.
“—and didn’t even let me go home first, but that’s how I learned I could do it.I don’t think anybody realized.Probably just thought I’d animated the corpse, but at nine, being able to make a functional zombie was still considered over the line.”
“You think?”Sophie said.
“But it worked again the other night.”
“What did?”I asked, having lost the thread of the conversation.
“I saw into the dead man’s mind, only… I don’t know what I saw.”Jen pulled on a stubborn tangle hard enough to make my eyes water.“At first, it was alright.I could see the potion seller, or rather, his hands, working on labels for a rack of bottles.He was calm, with wards set up to alert him if anyone approached.”
“Tartarus can be a dangerous place,” I agreed.
“Yeah, but nothing triggered.He got no warning at all.One minute, everything was fine, and he was labeling the latest shipment from one of the dealers he worked with.And the next, the room went dark, and it felt… cold.Not chilly but penetrating, Arctic-like cold, and he spun around and…”
“And what?”Kimmie said.
“And nothing.One second, he was alive, and the next, he was gone, as if someone had just sucked the life right out of him.It was creepy.”
“Says the necromancer,” Sophie said, prompting Jen to throw one of the chair’s pillows at her.
I frowned, running through the list of possible causes, but none fit.
Some spells could kill that fast, but how to hit him without tripping any alarms?For his wards to be any good, they must have been pretty far down the main passage outside, to give him time to escape if something triggered.So the spell bolts would have had to come down the hall, make a 90-degree turn into the small crack leading to the shop, traverse it without hitting any protrusions in the wall, and then explode on target.
And magical bolts didn’t curve around corners, any more than bullets did.
A potion, then?Had something in his shipment been adulterated?Because if you wanted to kill a potion maker, that would seem the easy way to do it.
Except I could still see that body on the floor, and he hadn’t been poisoned, he’d had his heart torn out!
