The Necromancer ✓

Chapter Seven

Jack took me home that night. I got the impression that letting me go home wasn't in the original plan, but I was so worn out from the cemetery that I don't think I could have handled being around any more people. Kieran had to half carry me out of the graveyard. My eyes kept itching, and I could feel tears struggling to escape my eyes but I wasn't letting them fall. I'd made enough of a mess, made myself look weak and incapable. I wasn't going to cry. If I couldn't help that though, I wasn't going to let anyone see me do it.

I pulled my hair out of its bun, letting the straggling curls fall around my face. Jack put his arms around me, placing his giant hand over the back of my head. His palm cupped from the nape of my neck to the crown of my head as he cradled me against his chest. Actually, it was probably closer to the top of his abdomen than the bottom of his chest, that I rested my forehead against, but the height difference was embarrassing enough that I was trying not to think about it.

"I'll see you later?" Kieran asked, his voice spinning around me in the darkness. I didn't have time to answer before we were falling.

It was less dizzying the second time. It still had a kind of sickening lurch, like when an elevator stops suddenly and you feel your stomach drop. Only it started with that feeling, like falling inwards, and stretched it until we were falling out again. The metaphysical equivalent of being turned inside out.

I wondered if we left a popping noise behind us, as the air was sucked into our absence, or if that was just the kind of thing they'd put in the movies so the audience knew it was magic and not just a scene transition. I didn't think I was going to find the answer to that, so I let the thought go.

I stepped away from Jack. We were standing in my kitchen. My wonderful kitchen. My very own kitchen. I looked up at the ceiling above my island bench - mine - and wondered what it would take to get a skylight put in, so I could grow my own herbs there, like Catriona did. Given that we were in a two storey house, I thought it would be a lot more complicated than Cat's had been.

Filled with dizzy relief at being home again, I turned the kettle on. I was almost overwhelmed by the rush of proud possession that filled me as I looked around my kitchen. That was literally the first time I felt like I was home. It's amazing what being somewhere totally foreign can do for your perspective on things.

"I should go," Jack said, awkwardly. He looked even bigger, standing in my kitchen, than he had towering over me in the open fields.

"Don't," I said, getting a cup out for him as well. "Sit down, have a cup of tea."

"I don't really drink tea," he said, pulling out a chair. "Do you have coffee?"

"Um..." I looked in the cupboard. I had a vague memory of Cat saying that I had to be stocked for unexpected visitors. Of course, the way she said it made it sound more ritualistic than that, but she'd given me a small basket, tied with a green ribbon, filled with things I'd never use. I dragged the basket out of the cupboard and put it on the bench. I found a jar of instant cinnamon coffee, with a gold foil twist lid. It looked expensive. More the kind of thing that caters to a niche market than the kind of thing you keep in your cupboard 'just in case.'

I frowned at the jar. What was Catriona thinking when she bought this?

"Cinnamon?" Jack asked, smiling his biggest, toothiest grin. If he didn't have such adorable dimples, a smile that wide might have looked predatory on a man his size.

"Yeah," I said, surprised, "is that okay?"

"That," Jack said, pointing at the jar in my hand, "is literally my favorite type of coffee, this side of the Ethersphere."