“Careful!” Catherine snapped, stumbling as I pulled her after me. She squeezed her eyes shut. “Oh, my head. What the hell did you do to me?”
“You’ll be fine soon, but the headache lingers. It’s significantly better than you deserve.”
Catherine glared at me. “You don’t know me.”
“I know you nearly got a young man killed just because he helped karma along a few steps. And you drained the life force out of two young women who were foolish enough to think it was worth it to get revenge.”
“Their life force will return,” Catherine insisted. “It heals.”
“A truth that might as well be a lie.” I tugged on her bound hands, making her stumble again. “Did you warn them about the ennui? The depression, the loss of interest in things that used to matter? Did you warn them about the risk of drug use? Of suicide? All the things a person can do when their life force is depleted and they can’t feel life the way they used to?”
Catherine sneered. “If they can’t handle a few rough weeks, then it’s just culling the herd.”
I pulled her toward a tree root sticking out of the ground, letting her trip over it. She tumbled forward and hit her knees, hard.
“Let me go,” Catherine snarled.
“Attempted murder will be the first charge the Vanguard lays against you,” I said coldly. “And if I have anything to say about it, that will be the first charge of many. No one likes an evil necromancer.”
“The zombie wouldn’t have killed the boy,” Catherine muttered, wincing as if the sound of her own voice made her headache worse. “I just wanted to scare him and get it recorded for my clients.”
“If that were true, you’d have sent them what you had,” I said grimly. “The fact that you didn’t send it means either you weren’trecording the scared part—because you were waiting for something worse—or you did record the scared part but didn’t send it because they were expecting a murder. Not to mention, you left without laying the zombie back. It could have killed any number of people, wandering around free like that.”
The corner of Catherine’s mouth twitched. “Well, you have to admit, if one gives up part of their life force for revenge, they want something that will last. Something…traumatic.”
“You—”
I stopped talking, almost tripping over my own feet as the little voice in my head that had been too quiet for me to hear before was suddenly mind-numbingly loud.
“I’m on temporary hiatus pending my testimony at a trial.”
“I caught one of my cohorts siphoning life force from people and using it to raise the dead.”
“There’s a theory that if you use someone else’s life force instead of your own, you’ll live longer.”
“I could raise a zombie for you. But I’m not sure you’d want me to.”
“What if you didn’t approve of the way I did it?”
“What if you reported me to the authorities? Tattled to the Vanguard?”
“It’s a trap for Poppy,” I whispered.
Catherine smiled.
Panic sent a surge of adrenaline through my system, and I hurled Catherine onto the ground near a gnarled old tree. She managed to catch herself before she hit her head, but I was already calling my magic, my mouth filling with energy that thickened to a glue-like consistency.
Catherine opened her mouth to say something, but I didn’t give her the chance.
I spit on her.
The magic left my mouth and grew thicker and larger as it flew at Catherine, fat strings of gooey dark blue slime that struck her and pinned her to the tree and the ground in a net of tacky, stretchy bonds. Catherine hissed and tried to free herself, but I didn’t stay to watch. The spell would hold, and the more she struggled, the more trapped she would become.
“Peasblossom!” I called out.
“Over here!”
I followed the pixie’s voice, running as fast as I could. I wasn’t a young witch, nor was I a particularly physically fit witch, so when I finally got to the graveyard where Poppy was standing, I was out of breath, my chest hurt, and I had a stitch in my side.
