The Necromancer ✓

Chapter Two

I put a sign up on campus, advertising a room because I needed the money to pay for textbooks, and no one wants to hire someone who reeks of death. Unfortunately, antidiscrimination laws don't cover necromancers. I was flooded with requests to see the room though, and that's how I met Tyler. A third year journalism student who came to my house on a Thursday afternoon.

"What's upstairs?" the scrawny man-boy asked, staring up towards my room. He had a bag slung over one shoulder and leaned casually against the living room wall. He already looked more at home here than I felt. I suppose, as a prospective roommate that shouldn't have been a bad thing but it was a little unnerving. What was wrong with me that I didn't feel at home in my own house?

I glanced at my mother's ghost, lounging on the stairs. She kept looking Tyler up and down. Sizing him up. "Don't call me Ty", he'd said when he introduced himself. Like I'd had any intentions of doing so.

"Just my room." I was trying to be friendly but it came out sounding blunt.

"Do you have a lock on your door?" Tyler asked, curiously.

"Why?"

He shrugged. "Might make you feel more comfortable."

"Oh my god, he's a rapist," my mother said in an exaggerated whisper. Like he'd hear her anyway. I didn't look at my mother. I guess Tyler thought my discomfort was due to him. It seemed like a terribly normal idea, given the circumstances.

I smiled. "When would you like to move in?"

"Tomorrow okay?"

I looked back at my mother before answering. "Perfect."

"She doesn't like you much." As though sensing we were talking about her, my mother appears behind Tyler.

"That's not entirely true," she says, crossing her arms and leaning against the bench. "He's growing on me. Like a tumor."

"Okay," I say. "She took an immediate dislike to you but she's warmed up a bit since then. Actually, her reaction to you is the reason I gave you the room in the first place. You know," I look at Mum when I say this, "to piss her off."

"And here I was thinking it was my winning personality," Tyler said.

"Yeah, right."

"So, you can raise animals from the dead and talk to ghosts. Anything else I need to know?"

"Um..." I'm not sure how to say this, exactly. Bluntly? "I can raise people from the dead, too."

The first time I did it, it was as much of a surprise to me as anyone else. Catriona didn't tell me that we could raise humans. I might have gone my entire life not knowing, if it hadn't been for my lack of control. My only excuse for losing control is that I was emotionally unstable.

I was on the ferry, going home from school when I realized my father had died. I was leaning against the safety rail. Sea-spray was flying into my face and the wind was dragging my hair out of its restraints but I didn't care. It had been a long day. I was pretty sure that I'd failed my math test, even though I'd spent every night of the past month studying for it. I needed the wind to snatch my stress away. I needed the chill air of the ocean to clear the numbers out of my brain, where they'd stacked up on top of each other and collapsed into a jumble of senseless expressions.

Then I saw my father.

I suppose you'd expect some Touched by an Angel, or Ghost Whisperer crap, if someone told you that. It's not like they show it in the movies, or on TV. There is no heavenly glow, no warming of the heart. There's the pain. The dull ache at the bottom of your chest that makes you realize that everything that's gone between you will never be resolved. He won't be able to make up for throwing me away, for treating me like a broken thing, for dumping me on Catriona to fix. He was never going to find out that I was different, rather than broken.