Raising his gaze, he found Felipe watching him with a concerned frown. “I concede that that could be a possibility. I just wish I could tell if this is a prank or something nefarious. Leaving his body in Green-Wood could have been a coincidence, but—”
“That would be a mighty big coincidence. At best, we’re looking at some medical students who need to be threatened with desecration charges. At worst, murder. Do you think it’s still possible to wake him up?”
Oliver sighed. “I don’t know. He’s less than freshly dead but not that far gone, so I’m not certain how coherent he’ll be. If he was an unclaimed body turned anatomy lesson or if he was liberated from the city morgue, I don’t know how much help the information he gives will be. I sent a note over to the local medical examiners and teaching hospitals to see if anyone is missing a corpse, but no one has gotten back to me yet.”
“What’s the harm in trying? If we can get him to talk, maybe we can find out where he was last. That might at least narrow down where we need to look.”
Shutting his eyes, Oliver resisted the urge to rub the bridge of his nose. Even though he was a necromancer, he hated waking the dead. He didn’t relish his powers, though it helped in investigations where no more could be gleaned from the body alone. The problem was that since he accidentally reanimated Felipe, he now had to manage two tethers when he awoke the dead. While he no longer passed out or felt like his heart was going to beat out of his chest, there was the constant fear that one day he would tether someone else and somehow cut Felipe loose instead. The thought constricted his ribs with panic as he met his lover’s rich brown eyes. If Felipe died again, there would be no bringing him back a second time. The image of Felipe lying lifeless flashed across his vision. He couldn’t live with himself if he killed him.
“Oliver?”
“Yeah, we can try.”
After they rolled Mr. Judd onto his back, Oliver pulled the sheet up to the dead man’s armpits and washed his hands in the sink. If Judd awoke and was more with it than Oliver anticipated, he didn’t want him to notice the gaping hole in his chest. Oliver thanked Felipe as he brought him his stool to sit on. It was easier to juggle the two tethers if he didn’t have to focus on balancing the energy running between the three of them, asking questions,andnot tipping over at the same time. At least Felipe was more than happy to handle the lion’s share of interrogations. When Felipe stood with his hands on Oliver’s shoulders, Oliver slowed his breathing and focused on the weight of the tether. The invisible string wrapped around his heart, twining through his ribs to find Felipe’s heart on the other end, forever tying them together. As he quieted his heartbeat, he felt Felipe’s fall into rhythm with him until they beat as one. With each breath, he let the magic ebb and flow between his fingers, steady as a metronome. Finally, he reached for Herman Judd.
Oliver called to the final flurry of sparks coursing through the man’s brain, to the cells slowly dying in his bones unaware of their fate, to the organisms that called his body home. But his magic didn’t even reach for him. Oliver frowned. It was like there was nothing for it to catch onto. Awakening the dead tended to work better when they were fresh and whole, but Judd’s decomposition had been slowed by the removal of his blood and organs. The missing organs could have been a problem, but surely, that wouldn’t have been enough to remove his tether completely. Oliver had reanimated corpses far more mangled than Mr. Judd. Quieting his mind, he tried again to ground himself in what remained of the dead man’s flesh, but nothing happened. He felt inert, like how a body felt after the tether snapped.
“Is something wrong?” Felipe asked over his shoulder.
“I’m not sure. It doesn’t seem to be working. He might be too far gone, but... this feels different. Let me try one more thing.”
This time Oliver reached out for the man’s bones instead. Even covered in flesh or having been reanimated by someone else before, his bones still should have heeded his call, but when he reached for them, they didn’t budge. It was like he couldn’t feel them. Cold panic flooded Oliver’s chest before he could stop it. He rubbed his palms across his thighs and rocked back once before he caught himself. It was as if his powers had disappeared, but that couldn’t be. Felipe was fine, and he had reanimated other people after Felipe without any problems. Standing up, Oliver reached for the articulated skeleton in the far corner. The skeleton swung on its stand, lurching in a danse macabre before Oliver released it. It wasn’t his powers then; it was Herman Judd.
“Oliver, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know. My powers don’t work on him. I’ve never had this happen before.”
Shaking out his hands, Oliver stalked to the far end of the room and back in time with his breath, not meeting Felipe’s eye. There were two hypotheses, and he didn’t like either. Mr. Judd had either been reanimated before or he was a necromancer. Oliver didn’t think reanimation by another necromancer would affect bonemancing, so that left only one possibility. Returning to the autopsy table, Oliver stared down at Herman Judd. He looked like any ordinary man he would pass on the street or see carousing with his friends at the bar after work. There was nothing obviously special about him, nothing that would have told Oliver they shared a power so few did. Oliver had gone thirty-six years without ever coming across another necromancer, and the first time he did, the man was dead and a graverobber. It wasn’t fair.
“I think— I think Mr. Judd was a necromancer.”
“How do you know?”
It was something his grandmother said years ago when he mentioned wishing he could speak to his mother. He was barely more than a child, a foolhardy boy who just discovered he could reanimate dead fish or make bones in the forest dance and anything seemed possible.Maybe one day, I can find my mother and ask her questions about my powers. She would know. His nana had given him a kind but pitying look as she gently swept the hair from his forehead.Once a— once someone like you or your mother dies, you can’t bring them back. It doesn’t work. What had shattered his dreams for closure became a comfort. He kept his rules for reanimation and tried to be ethical in how he treated the dead, but at least those who would ill-use the dead had no dominion over him.
Swallowing hard, he realized he must have gone silent. Felipe didn’t know about his family or his sordid past, and he didn’t want to go into it now, not when Agatha and Louisa had been so welcoming to him.
“Necromancers can’t be brought back from the dead. You wouldn’t want a whole string of us reanimating each other,” he said, forcing a smile that tasted sour on his lips. “Some people think it’s because we’re soulless.”
“You know that isn’t true,” Felipe said softly as his hand closed around Oliver’s side with a comforting squeeze. Sighing, Felipe rested his head against Oliver’s shoulder. “I think we’ve done enough work for one day. If Mr. Judd isn’t giving up his secrets, then anything else we might do today we would be better off doing tomorrow when we’re fresher. I found his mother’s address in his file; she might know what he was up to before his death.”
Oliver glanced at the clock near the door. “It’s only a quarter to four.”
“It will still take you time to clean up and put everything away, and by then, it will be at least four-thirty, and that’s far too late to do interviews. While you clean up, I’ll arrange to have dinner sent down. How does that sound?”
“All right.”
Kissing his cheek, Felipe gave Oliver a tired smile before slipping out of the lab. The silence hung heavily as Oliver rolled Herman Judd over to the mortuary cabinet on the far wall. He had been like any other body that came into the morgue, a puzzle to pieced together, until suddenly he was so much more. Oliver’s hand stilled on the handle. After reanimating Felipe, Oliver always hoped one day he might meet another necromancer he could learn from, someone who might know more about the body than him or how their powers worked, someone who wouldn’t be abashed by what he had read in the library’s special collections, who saw necromancy as something that could help people.
Instead, he got a man who probably abused the dead. Oliver didn’t want to make assumptions, but robbing graves by manipulating corpses was hardly an imaginative leap. Perhaps, someone had decided to get back at Mr. Judd for what he had done, or he had run afoul of someone who thought necromancers didn’t deserve to live, or maybe he had died a mundane death alone and forgotten.
Oliver shut the drawer and reached for the hose to rinse the laboratory table. The last of the grave dirt and fluids swirled down the drain, but Oliver’s thoughts remained on Herman Judd. Oliver didn’t want to have anything in common with someone like that, yet he wondered what Judd’s life had been like or if his powers were similar to his own. Could he bonemance or reanimate or was there another style of necromancy he didn’t know about?
What galled him most was that Judd didn’t look like death warmed over like he did; he didn’t look the part of a necromancer. A little part of Oliver had hoped other necromancers might look like him, that one day he might be able to look across the road and recognize a kindred spirit. But no, any queerness was his own. Beating back the bitter thoughts, Oliver poured the bleach mixture onto the table and told himself the tightness in his throat was from the chemicals and nothing more.
