Home > How to Claim an Undead Soul (The Beginner's Guide to Necromancy #2)(2)

How to Claim an Undead Soul (The Beginner's Guide to Necromancy #2)(2)
Author: Hailey Edwards

“Do you mind?” He palmed a bag of sliced artisan bread on the counter and passed it to me. “The toaster smoked the first time, but I cleaned out the dust. Maybe open the window just in case?”

The toaster had been cocooned inside a knitted cozy. Dust shouldn’t have been an issue. But if he was paying me a kindness by offering a breath of fresh air to clear my head, I wasn’t about to complain.

The window required a hard jiggle before it raised, but that first gasp of night air paid off my sweat equity in full. As my lungs expanded, the tightness in my chest from talking about the dream lessened. But it refused to budge all the way now that I was paying it attention, so I shifted my focus elsewhere.

The same breeze tangling my hair rustled the lush ivy climbing wild over the eastern wall. I ought to thin it. I needed to trim back the roses too. The peonies wilted on their stems, their heads in need of cutting. So much had gone undone during my absence, and I’d done nothing to rectify the situation. As much as it pained me to admit, the garden was looking shabby.

Maud would have a conniption fit if she was here to see this.

A pinching sensation in my chest warned me away from those thoughts. They hurt too much to examine this early, so I asked Linus for a distraction. “Who taught you how to cook?”

“Books. Food Network. YouTube.” He checked a saucepan full of simmering water and bobbing eggs. “Our old cook, Louie, used to let me help him prepare breakfast on the weekends. I figured it was a skill I should learn for when I moved out on my own.”

“You have a driver. You didn’t want a cook too?” He could certainly afford both.

With reluctance, I abandoned my view and the nascent dream of hiring a gardener to whip the property back into shape while I started on the toast.

One of my duties as Dame Woolworth would be rebuilding my household from the ground up, but that could wait until I decided what staff I wanted on the grounds with me and how often. Until I figured that out, I was fine being on my own.

“I don’t have a driver. I borrowed Mother’s.” He passed me a glass butter dish and a dull knife. “I don’t need a cook. I can fend for myself or order takeout. Atlanta has everything I could want.”

The knife clattered from my hand onto the counter. “You live in Atlanta?”

He must have heard the shock in my voice that his mother let him that far out from under her thumb.

“Yes.” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “I teach at Strophalos University, among other things.”

Knock me over with a feather.

Linus was actually qualified for this job? I’d assumed his mother had palmed her most loyal pawn off on me to act as her spy while training me in advanced resuscitation theory. She couldn’t very well auction my services to the highest bidder then sit back and hope for the best. Not when clients would expect a one hundred percent success rate as a return on their investment. But this? He was a bona fide teacher from a prestigious university who could offer me the education Maud had denied me. That didn’t make his apron strings any shorter, but it did make him crashing in my carriage house that much more appealing.

“What about your classes?” Selfishly, I had only considered how the Grande Dame’s proclamation affected me. I had dismissed Linus as a throwaway heir, one of his mother’s yes-men, and that had been shallow of me. At least this was all to my benefit. He had nothing to gain by helping me except his mother’s favor. As her only son, he must be drowning in that. “How long will you stay?”

“I’m on sabbatical.” He plated the sausage, grits, and soft-boiled eggs. After I added a few pieces of buttered toast to his burden, he carried it all to the table. “I can stay for a year before I have to file more paperwork. I won’t know if that will be necessary until after we start your training.”

“What about your home?” I rinsed out my glass then poured milk for each of us since that had been his breakfast beverage of choice for as long as I could remember. “What about your friends?”

“The loft will still be there when I return.” He carried two pressed napkins to the table and placed them at our settings. We both stood there, looking at one another. “Thanks to modern technology, my colleagues are never more than a call, text, video chat, or DM away.”

I startled when he crossed to me, but all he did was pull out a chair and wait for me to sit. I did, and then I returned the favor. The table was small, meant for two even though it had four places, and I stretched out my leg to push his seat back with my toes.

“Thank you.” He let me take a few bites before starting on his own meal, but he didn’t have much of an appetite. “There are seconds if you’d like more.”

A flush I blamed on the steam rising from my plate pinked my cheeks. “Are my table manners that bad?”

One too many frozen dinners had left me ravenous for a home-cooked meal, and this one was excellent.

“No.” He bit the edge off his toast, chewed methodically, and had trouble swallowing even that one small bite. “I just don’t want the food to go to waste.”

The first helping vanished before I registered its taste, and I heaped a second plate high with leftovers. He watched me eat, his fascination making me slow the fork-to-mouth action. I demolished the sausage before the awkward scrape of my silverware drove me to conversation.

“The night I helped unbreak your nose—” after Woolly had slammed her front door in his face to bar his entrance, “—you told me we would address my magic, but I skipped class the next day.” And the six days that followed. “Can we do a makeup lesson?”

“Of course.” He sipped his milk, but the level remained unchanged. “What would you like to know?”

The desperate edge in my voice shamed me. “Will I ever get it back?”

“You still have your magic, Grier.” He set down his glass then watched until the ripples stilled. “The drugs and disuse have stunted it, but it’s like a muscle. The more you practice, the more you learn, the stronger you’ll grow.”

Torn between disappointment that it wasn’t a quick fix and relief it was repairable at all, I nodded.

“Now.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Time for a pop quiz.”

The milk in my mouth soured. “I heard you should wait thirty minutes after eating before taking a test.”

The look he shot me confirmed his professorial status. It said he’d heard every excuse in the book at least three times, and hearing them a fourth wouldn’t do me any good. I sat up straighter while he cleared the table and hoped I didn’t make a total fool of myself.

“We’ll start off easy with a review of material you should have covered with Maud and go from there.” He placed a thin stack of graph paper in front of me then passed me a pen, the plain, black-ink kind. Not one of his modified ones. “Draw me four basic defense sigils for a home.”

For a home. Those three words cemented his promise to help me restore the wards around Woolworth House, and I sat a little straighter in my chair.

Despite the wording of his request, sigils didn’t fall into animate and inanimate categories. They were singular, and it was up to the practitioner to modify them based on their application.

“Here goes nothing.” Summoning the designs from my rusty memory, I worked to get the fine details correct as I blocked each one out in its own grid. The pen was slippery in my hand when I finished. “There you go.”

He slid on a pair of black-frame glasses that made the blue of his eyes that much darker then lifted the paper.

The silence while he graded my work left me bouncing my leg under the table.

“Explain each of these.” He placed the paper back in front of me and tapped the largest one. “Start here.”

“This one protects against attacks both physical and magical.” I pointed out the next with the pen cap. “This one is for strength. It’s a combination that boosts the power of any other sigil.” The next was a nifty modification to the one I had used during my escape from Volkov. “This is an obfuscation sigil. It doesn’t disguise a home as much as it makes the residence so uninteresting no one notices it. Or, if they do, they don’t remember it for long.” The last was a staple in my arsenal. “This one is for healing. It can’t fix a cracked foundation or physical damage, but it can bolster failing wards until repairs can be done.”

Poor Woolly was covered in them.

“Interesting.”

I set the pen down before my sweaty grip sent it flying. “What does that mean?”

“Your technique is superb. You were trained with a brush, and some students can’t divorce the sensation from one medium to the next, but I don’t see any reason why we can’t proceed with an altered pen like the one you used to heal my nose. Unless you have a personal preference?”

“Having a pen like yours might come in handy.” For homework, it would mean less drying time for my notes too. “You once mentioned using a brush for resuscitations and other ritualistic work. I think that would be my choice too.” He hadn’t stopped staring at that paper. “What did I do wrong?”

“The sigils you’re using, the way you’re drawing them, is nonstandard. I don’t recognize the style at all, even though I can read it well enough to tell what it does.” He braced his palm on the table, tracing the curves with his fingertip. “It’s not wrong. It’s personalized in a way you don’t typically see in fledgling necromancers. It’s like a signature. Are all your sigils drawn this way?”

“I…guess?” I rubbed my thumb over the tabletop. “I copied them down the way Maud taught me.”

“Maud didn’t teach you this.” He canted his head toward me. “Has anyone else seen your work?”

“Amelie and Boaz.” I had no other necromancer friends, no High Society friends at all.

“They would have no reason to recognize the symbols, correct?”

   
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