* * *

  No more doctors, no more tests. No more nightmares, being pests. Look, a rhyme! Too bad that last part wasn’t true. A sixteen-year-old runaway, what a wonderful cliché. But you can’t outrun the dead.

  Madeline had no idea what this place had once been. Some kind of factory, maybe a warehouse. It was a whole lot of nothing now. Run down, half caved in, filled with mold, rats and cockroaches. Her new pets. Fortunately, her petite frame fit perfectly on this broken desk. Broken, just like her.

  She had so many new friends now; they just refused to keep coming. They clung, and pleaded, and sobbed, and babbled. Most wore their wounds like badges of honor. Gunshots, car accidents, slit wrists, seven story falls. No cancer or heart attacks for her. The bloodier the better. And it gushed, dripped and ran everywhere.

  Madeline hadn’t eaten in three days. Eating was difficult when you were a sixteen-year-old runaway lunatic. She lay on top of the desk, staring at the ceiling, and waited to join the dead shuffling around her.

  She spent so much time ignoring them, it took her a moment to realize they had been worked up into a frenzy. Most were trying to flee, but some were cowering around her, begging her for protection. Madeline just stared at this new turn in her madness. Then a man in an expensive suit stormed into the room.

  He ripped through them, literally, the motion of his hands tearing the essence of the ghosts to shreds. Two he gripped and drew to his face, their substance growing denser as he sucked them down. Like inhaling smoke, he devoured them, then a third, and a fourth. In under a minute, he had obliterated over a dozen of the dead that had failed to flee.

  Madeline just gaped at him, terrified. He returned her gaze, a look somewhere between disgust and amusement. Almost as if he was trying to make a decision.

  Finally, he sighed. “Get up. If I’m going to be bothered teaching you anything, it won’t be in this shithole.”

  Madeline didn’t move as he made his way back to the door.

  “Are you coming or not?” he asked.

  “Who are you?”

  He snorted, something akin to a laugh. “My name’s Jacob Cavallaro and I’m a necromancer. Just like you, Madeline.”

  * * *

  “So he’s buried?”

  “He’s buried,” replied Cavallaro. “And tonight, when there’s finally no one around, I can get what I need at my leisure.”

  Cavallaro spun the Escalade out into traffic and headed back towards the hotel. The rain had let up some, but the day was still wet and dreary. Everything seemed muted a slight gray. A series of strip malls, fast food joints and big box stores rolled past them outside the window. A group of young people, undaunted by the weather, skateboarded in the parking lot of an abandoned furniture emporium.

  “What are you smiling about?” Cavallaro asked.

  “I don’t know. This place, I guess.”

  “Dear god, why?”

  Madeline shrugged. “It reminds me of home.”

  “Home is an executive suite in a five star hotel,” he replied with a sneer.

  She didn’t bother responding. Cavallaro hadn’t had anything resembling a home or family in a very long time. Once she had come to understand her powers and had them under control, she thought about trying to reconnect with her parents. Cavallaro had strongly advised against it, but she decided she had to at least see them. It had been years, and while she knew she had aged into her early twenties, she hadn’t been prepared to see how old her mother and father had become. How old they looked. After spying on them for an entire day, she left without saying a word. What answers could she possibly give them?

  Not just her parents, but anyone. How could she tell anyone what she and Cavallaro were? How could she ever explain what they did? How they did it?

  “How do you know he didn’t have a partner? Someone to move the money for him?’ Madeline asked, speaking of the recently deceased.

  “A man like that? No, he died trying to hide his misdeeds. On Wall Street, ten million is nothing, but here in Podunk? He had it stashed, waiting for the IRS mess to blow over. And the anxiety gave him a stroke. Bad for the IRS, good for me.”

  Me. Not us. Never us. Cavallaro had read about the situation in a trade journal while they were in Chicago. He found it, so that made it his. Sometimes Madeline wondered exactly what he thought of her. Definitely not as a partner. Still a protégé? Could he even muster up enough human feelings to call her a friend?

  It didn’t matter.

  * * *

  Controlling them came easy, once she realized she could do it. It was nothing to banish them, to send them away. No more nightmares hovering over her. That was the best part. She felt bad about making them do things, especially menial tasks she could easily accomplish herself. She refused to “kill” them and continued to balk at eating them. That’s where Cavallaro put his foot down.

  Turned out Jacob Cavallaro was born in 1932. Now, so many years later, he still appeared to be in his late thirties. This he directly attributed to the eating of ghosts. Not only had it allowed him to age at an incredibly slow pace, but he had survived being shot on seven different occasions, stabbed four times and nearly hanged once.

  With his personality, Madeline wasn’t surprised.

  Cavallaro teased her about her reluctance to eat. He also taunted her about other things lurking out there in the night other than necromancers. In those early days, he loved to frighten her by spinning tales of vampires, wendigo and werewolves. He tried to convince her that while these creatures were wary of their kind, a kind that casually shattered the wall between the living and the dead, those creatures wouldn’t hesitate to prey upon one as weak as her. Still, Madeline wouldn’t feed.

  Finally, one morning in Tampa, as Madeline was doing her hair in the mirror, she heard him enter her hotel room with bagels and coffee. She turned to find a knife plunged into her stomach. Now it was feed or die.

  So she did, three of them, as she lay there in a bloody mess on the bathroom tile. She tried to apologize to them, but she could barely speak. And when it was done, not even a scratch remained on her.

  She still had not met any vampires, wendigo or werewolves.

  * * *

  A hot shower helped.

  They had hours before they were to go back out again, and Madeline wanted some semblance of comfort. The heat from the water, instead of reinvigorating her, relaxed her. She wondered why she wasn’t more nervous.

  Drying off, she used the towel to wipe the mirror. A pale face with large dark eyes and long black locks peered back. At twenty-four and only five-foot-two, a quick change of clothes and makeup could allow her to pass for older or younger. Cavallaro had made her utilize this on numerous occasions. Obtaining keys and passcodes, learning building layouts and personnel counts, she mastered this skill to gain a variety of information and bypass security. And then they waited.

  Waited for a celebutante heiress to overdose. For a renowned surgeon to lose his battle with cancer. For a scandal-ridden senator to hang himself. For a CEO to have an “accidental” wreck in her limo. They waited, and then Cavallaro swooped in and tortured secrets out of them. Money, money, money. Those Brooks Brothers suits weren’t cheap.

  He had amassed millions in his decades doing this. He had spent just as much. A lavish lifestyle built on fortunes stolen from the dead.

  Madeline stared at her muddy Gucci heels and knew she was just as guilty.

  * * *

  It was her nineteenth birthday, but she hadn’t said anything to him. He wouldn’t have cared. Still, the noise in the adjoining suite was getting to be too much. She was trying to concentrate. She had almost focused enough will into Brock to allow him to pick up the plastic cup.

  Brock was terrified, even though she promised she wouldn’t eat him. She had eaten before, yes, numerous times, but only when necessary. This didn’t seem to reassure the sad-eyed young man who drooled blood from the corners of his mouth. Ignoring his terror, she asked him to try the cup again.

  Unless a ghost gathered up enough energy on its own, usually through malevolent intent, they were incorporeal and couldn’t affect the material world. A necromancer, however, could focus his or her own energy and lend it to a ghost, allow it to do minor tasks. Madeline was still having some difficulty mastering this.

  Get the cup, get the cup, get the cup, getthecup.

  Another loud moan from the adjoining suite broke her concentration.

  “Damn it!” screamed Madeline.

  A bang, a swear, and Cavallaro came through the door with a sheet wrapped around his waist.

  “What’s your problem?” he asked.

  “I’m trying to practice and you’re shaking the walls with a hooker.”

  He looked back and forth between her and Brock.

  “Well, practice harder then,” he said. “I don’t care.”

  Madeline just stared at him.

  “What?”

  “I’m just surprised that you never…”

  “Never what?”

  “I’m surprised you never tried to get me in bed,” she finished.

  Cavallaro walked over to her and looked her up and down. Appraisingly, obviously undressing her with his eyes, making it apparent that he liked what he saw. Then he raised her chin, locking their stares.

  “Have you ever heard the expression, ‘don’t shit where you eat,’ Madeline?”

  Madeline nodded.

  Cavallaro walked back to his suite, slamming the door behind him.

  * * *

  Any comfort from the shower had been short lived.

  At least this time she dressed more sensibly for the weather. A heavier, waterproof coat, thick black jeans and boots. Sensibility did not apply to Cavallaro, still decked out in similar attire as before. The rain had slowed to a drizzle but it was still cold, wet and irritating.

  Cavallaro gestured dismissively at the ghost who had once been a middle-aged mom. It walked over to the gate and plunged its hands into the lock mechanism. Her hands shook—almost vibrating—as they were diffused through the lock, a look of sheer anguish on the ghost’s face. It tried to pull its hands out but Cavallaro kept them fixed in place. Suddenly, the lock gave way and the ghost fell back. Everything below its wrists, her wrists, was in wispy tatters. Streams of shattered ethereal smoke, her spiritual cohesion breaking down. She looked at Cavallaro with eyes that would have produced tears if possible, eyes that questioned the need for her suffering.

  In three steps, Cavallaro condensed her with a motion of his hand, drew her in and drank her down. Without hesitation or doubt. Without regard to whom she may have once been.

  They had been in many graveyards before. This one really wasn’t any different from the rest, although Madeline didn’t recall ever being in one quite so muddy. The excessive rain had started to drain a brown sludge down from the slopping hills onto the wide brick pathways. It was a mess, and she found herself grateful for her choice of boots. Cavallaro swore the whole time he made his way through, almost falling twice.

  The gravesite of the recently deceased Thomas J. Newmare was a giant puddle. Most of the dirt had been washed away, leaving a depression in the ground of at least a foot. Only so many inches of wet earth lay between them and his casket. Not that such a distance mattered to Cavallaro. It could have been miles, but the first resurrection was more easily accomplished with closer proximity.

  “What a monumental pain in my ass,” he said as he removed his leather gloves, preferring bare hands for this ritual.

  Madeline watched as he stood before the grave, arms out in front of him. Palms up with his fingers clenched as though he was gripping large swathes of cloth, he started to raise them. The tension in his fingers grew visibly as his arms rose higher, and she could see him grinding his teeth. Fighting against the natural order, he raised his arms yet higher, his grip stronger. With a roar, his hands flew up into the air.

  And Thomas J. Newmare stood upon his grave, looking both dead and bewildered.

  “What… Where am I?” he asked.

  “You’re dead, Thomas,” Cavallaro replied. “But I have questions for you.”

  “I don’t…I don’t understand.”

  The necromancer sighed, reached out and twisted his hand. The dead man doubled over in pain. With a flick of the wrist the pain subsided.

  “Thomas, you’re going to answer my questions, or I’m going to cause you agonies more excruciating than you ever knew existed in life. Do you understand?”

  The ghost stared at Cavallaro, a look in his eyes that was almost impossible to define. Then Thomas turned to look at Madeline. She returned his gaze for only a moment and then looked away.

  “What the hell do you want to know?” Thomas asked.

  * * *

  The picnic table sat back from the others, discreetly hidden among the tall pine trees, far enough away from the jogging path. Madeline wondered how many couples had found their way here. How many couples had quietly made love on this bench only fifty feet away from people walking their dogs or going on a morning run? Madeline wondered if she’d ever get a chance to experience something like that.

  “Most of what you’ve said is true,” the Confederate soldier said.

  “Wonderful,” Madeline said.

  “No, I don’t think you understand. The dead haven’t experienced a plague among our kind of this magnitude in a millennium. His name is known among us all as a bane, as a curse. Beyond the fact he’s just a bastard, his utter disregard for the dead marks him as our greatest threat.”

  Madeline glanced at the soldier sitting beside her. “You have other threats?”

  “Don’t worry about that for the moment. If you can’t destroy Cavallaro, you need to get away from him. Now.”

  “And do what? Go where?” Madeline asked as she watched a young mother push a stroller through the Georgia State Park. “He saved me. I’ve been with him since I was sixteen. I don’t know anything else.”

  The ghost sighed and took off his hat. “Have you ever asked yourself why he saved you?”

  Madeline just blinked at him. The reasons hadn’t ever really crossed her mind.

  “Someone like that doesn’t care about a protégé or an heir. He was a protégé once. One of two. He was found just like you were. The older necromancer already had an apprentice, but he took on a second. Then twenty years later, Cavallaro killed them both.”

  “Why?”

  “Same reason he killed another necromancer in Europe about ten years ago. The ghost of a necromancer is the most powerful. Tastes the best. Why do you think he’s so adamant about you feeding? He’s trying to ‘fatten you up.’ It’s all he cares about.”

  Madeline sat back on the bench, stunned. She didn’t want to believe it, but a part of her knew it was true. Cavallaro never cared about her, never saw her as anything but a means to an end. But to be killed and eaten?

  “I’m not powerful enough to take him on,” she whispered.

  “I know.”

  Madeline chuckled. “I wish I had some of those vampires or werewolves—or whatever—to call on.”

  The ghost didn’t respond, silently pulling on his beard as he peered out through the pine trees.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Remember those ‘other threats’ I told you not to worry about?”

  * * *

  While the rock quarry wasn’t large—only a few miles wide—it was old and desolate. At one time roughly shaped like a rectangle, the layered cuts had eroded away along with their angles, and the pit now resembled something more like an uneven oval. Miles from the outskirts of town, forest lined three sides of the pit, the trees rising high above the jagged rock walls of the excavated quarry. One could have easily dropped a four-story building into the quarry itself, walked out upon its roof, and seen straight across to the tufts of grass shooting out from the rim. Instead of buildings, however, there were mounds of discarded dirt and rock. Mostly aggregates with some chunks of slate mixed in, the quarry had been mined down to these last four mounds and left abandoned.

  According to Thomas J. Newmare, he knew of this place because it had belonged to his uncle. It was the last thing he screamed before Cavallaro devoured him.

  There was a small, one-room shack made of rotting wood that had once served as an office. After driving through the quarry to ensure they were alone, Cavallaro parked up front by the shack. Newmare confessed that he had buried the money in a briefcase behind it, a location Cavallaro had not been pleased about. Stepping from the vehicle into the rain, he summoned a half-dozen ghosts and commanded them to start digging.

  Madeline watched the dead work, against their will, slaves for the necromancer. Suffer unto death, suffer thereafter. You could die twice at the hands of someone like him. Someone like them.

  “So this is it, huh?” she asked.

  “What?” he barked back.

  “We run around the world, scamming cash off the recently dead, using ghosts as our flunkies until we decided to snack on them? This is our life?”

  “Yes, and it’s a damn good life. What else do you want? What else do you expect?”

  Madeline said nothing, only watched the ghosts struggle with the hard packed earth. Cavallaro had lent them enough energy to dig with their bare hands in the ground, mud caking between their fingers. None of them had enough strength to flee, let alone fight back, never to fight back.

  “So when were you going to do it?” she asked, watching the hole grow deeper.

  “What are you talking about?” he snapped,

  “Kill me. Kill me and eat my ghost. When would I have been strong enough?”

  Cavallaro went very quiet and very still.

  “Tomorrow? Next year? Ten years?”

  “I haven’t decided,” he said. “I wanted you powerful, but not too powerful, of course. But you’ve been taking your sweet time with feeding, so probably sooner than later just so I won’t have to deal with you anymore.”