The Necromancer ✓

Chapter Ten

I'm sure I looked ridiculous, lugging a huge book around a ballroom, but Zephan wasn't letting me go anywhere and I don't think I would have trusted anyone enough to keep the book for me.

"Have you read it?" I asked Zephan.

"Yes," he said, "and I'm sure Kieran has."

"Eolande said she knew a necromancer," I said, remembering the woman's apparent nostalgia. "Who was he?"

"That," he said, smiling as though I'd asked something amusing, "is a question you'll have to ask my cousin."

Something told me that would be an awkward conversation. Kieran didn't seem like the type to reminisce about his mother. And I doubted he'd want to talk about her much to me, given that my neck still held the bruises from her earlier assault. I raised a hand, self-consciously to my throat. The shirt Jack had given me had a high collar, but this dress seemed to only skim the edge of the bruised area.

"Are you okay?" Zephan asked, his eyes clinging to where my fingertips brushed against my bruised flesh. He reached his hand out to me throat, skimming his fingertips against mine to stroke the side of my neck. "Does it hurt?"

"Only when I swallow," I said. His fingers lingered against me. "Or when I touch it." I looked at him pointedly. He withdrew his hand slowly, turning the gesture into a hovering caress.

I'm ashamed to admit that the gesture endeared him to me. I'd been living my entire life as a social outcast. Even during peak hour, when the train was packed so tightly you could scarcely breathe for lack of room, people still flinched away from me. Perfect strangers knew that there was something wrong with me, something unnatural, and they moved around me as though even the most fleeting of contact was abhorrent to them. I'd grown used to being treated like that.

So, when Zephan touched me, not just a passing contact, unavoidable because of forced proximity, but an actual caress, I couldn't treat it as though it were nothing. It was contact. If not human contact, at least it was some form of physical touch, a touch which had been sadly lacking in my life.

People talk about love and affection, about intimacy and friendship, as though it's something that takes place entirely in the mind; or if they're of a slightly more romantic disposition, they talk about the heart and soul. I don't think that's so. I'd certainly felt the lack of all those things and, while my heart ached for understanding and my mind felt keenly the absence of companionship, it was my skin that let me know I was truly alone. Like Rogue, from the X-men, I was alone from the skin all the way down, rather than the other way around.

The fact that Zephan not only actively reached out to touch me, but seemed reluctant to stop, was more important to me than he'll ever know. Even Kieran had only touched me through fabric. I wondered how he'd react to the soft press of my body, skin against skin.

I blushed, glancing up at Zephan. I had that awful, gut wrenching moment you get when you realize that your thoughts might be entirely too apparent in your expression. Thankfully, he wasn't looking at me.

"Would you like a drink?" he asked, raising his hand at a passing waiter. I use the term waiter, loosely, of course. The passing servant was wearing a deeply hooded black cloak, over their black suit, and I wondered if it was compulsory for servants to wear the hood.

"Non-alcoholic," I said, quickly.

"I'll have uiske beatha," Zephan said to the man in the cloak. The man was only slightly shorter than me and I began to see why the Fae had had a hard time accepting that I was a necromancer. My body bore a closer resemblance to a brownie, it seemed. "And a..." Zephan raised a questioning brow at me.