***AWAKE***

I can’t believe I got away with that, Tom thought, shaking his head. Who carries around bear spray!? Tom had also learned that Jacob had a ‘dodging the cops’ kit in the back of his truck.

I guess that makes sense, given Jacob’s favorite pastime. Tom had waited uncomfortably outside the truck while his work friend got ‘recharged’ before he’d driven them home.

Tom really couldn’t complain, though. Jacob had basically single-handedly pulled his ass out of the fire. Tom had practiced the dig often enough, but he’d completely neglected what might happen if he got unlucky.

I need to practice running from the cops in my dreams, too…and maybe start carrying some bear spray. Jacob did have a few useful things for Tom to learn.

Tom slipped his key in the front door and stepped inside, a weight rolling off his shoulders once he got past that intangible barrier that marked the place as his home. Now it was four o‘clock in the morning, and everyone in the creaking old house was asleep…except for Tom and Carol.

Perfect.

Carol was on the couch, watching reality TV, Ellie was in baby-prison, and Tom had the ring in his pocket. Now all he needed to do was stop her from killing anybody, and everything would be hunky-dory.

Heart hammering in his chest, Tom crept up behind Carol, who was chuckling as two women got into a catfight while cheating towards the camera.

Tom slipped Lily’s ring onto his little finger.

And then his guts caught fire. A burning, tearing sensation filled his entire being, while every muscle in his body cramped simultaneously.

Tom collapsed onto his side, the pain of falling a brief footnote compared to what felt like being burned alive from the inside.

“Nice try, Tom.” Carol’s voice came from the other side of the couch moments before her predatory eyes emerged from above the upholstery, looking down at his twitching form on the floor. “They didn’t warn you about that in the book, did they?”

Tom wasn’t paying attention to her. He was trying to make his muscles move even the tiniest bit, straining through the full-body cramps to reach for the ring around his pinky finger.

“You know, this is why most soulmongers start with a familiar, or a couple animated skeletons,” she said matter-of-factly, resting her forearms on the back of the couch as she gloated. “Far easier on the soul to gradually work your way up to the more powerful Outsiders. I guess that’s what you get when all you have is book-learning. Leaves holes in your understanding. Not that I fault you for that. Your peasant ignorance and frightening lack of ambition are both results of your upbringing in this exceptionally bland world.”

Tom’s temples pounded as he struggled to breathe.

“Wow, you’re looking pretty red there, Tom. Let me explain what’s happening to you right now… You see, every individual soul has something called a Murzholt index, which is the measure by which they…hmmm… You know, I think I’ll have to dumb this down for you. Allow me to couch what you’re feeling right now in a metaphor you’re capable of following.

“In the context of my incredibly accurate metaphor for what you just attempted, you’re a slutty veterinarian, I’m a horse, and your soul is your asshole. You feel me? Of course you do.

“Basically, you dropped your scrubs, bent over and invited me in, but your flimsy, untrained asshole isn’t nearly stretchy enough to accommodate my horsey girth, so that burning sensation you’re feeling right now is some light tearing going on deep inside you. The good news is that if there’s anything that the earth adage ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ applies to, it’s your asshole. Metaphorically.”

She glanced off to the side and waved a hand. “I mean, why would it apply to anything else? Scars permanently limit range of motion and organ damage doesn’t just go away, so how else could that saying possibly be true?”

“You…” Tom gritted through his clenched jaw, “...suck.”

“Interesting, isn’t it? Souls can be damaged, but they can’t be destroyed. Ain’t that a paradox? Any damage you do to a soul will simply make it more robust when it reconstitutes. Of course, you do enough damage to someone’s soul, their physical form will perish, so that kinda makes the strengthening aspect a moot point.”

“Protect my family…over…book!” Tom said with the last of the air in his lungs, his vision slowly blackening from the corners inward.

“Aaand…there.” Carol reached down and slipped the woman’s-size ring off his pinky finger. “Maximum soul stretching, minimum death. You’re welcome.”

Tom heaved in a grateful gasp of oxygen, his slowly-tunneling vision coming back, with stars flashing in the corners of his vision from oxygen deprivation. Deep inside though, he felt an ache, like something was out of place inside him.

“Did it work?” Tom asked between desperate gulps of air.

“You never told me to tell you,” Carol said. “Maybe you should go open the book, just to test it.” She gave him her white-toothed grin.

“Give me the ring back,” Tom said, holding out his hand.

“Nah, you never told me to do that, either,” she said, tucking the rune-covered band into the breast pocket of her flannel shirt. “If you want it back, you’re going to have to get strong enough to take it from me. Then I’ll know you can handle it.”

Without another word, Carol flipped over and settled deep into the couch, watching reality TV. The volume was turned way down because his grandparents were sleeping.

Son of a bitch.

Tom couldn’t test whether or not his command had worked until he went to sleep tomorrow night to relive tomorrow morning, so tonight he had to find another way to occupy his time.

He wasn’t sure if Carol was trying to give him pointers or just making fun of him, but she had given him an actionable piece of information.

Animated skeletons are a beginner move.

I’m a beginner.

***DREAM***

“Holy shit, this chick is persistent!” Jacob shouted, glancing over his shoulder as Carol slowly gained on them in her stolen garbage truck, diesel engine roaring. The whole scenario had a Terminator vibe to it.

“Yep,” Tom replied, despite trying his best to shut out all the distractions as he flipped through the chapter on basic bindings. Animating a skeleton was a beginner move because skeletons were very receptive to soul pulses, and the Outsiders summoned to pilot aforementioned skeletons were so weak that they didn’t even have physical form.

Binding these weaklings to your will didn’t take any kind of crutch or tool like Lily’s ring, either. All one had to do was ‘circulate the pulses from the engine through the caster’s soul, then out into the spell formation.’

If you did that, it would establish a link between you and the Outsider piloting the bones, allowing you to control them. If you simply touched the storage device to the spell, the skeleton would then be uncontrolled, guarding the soul pulse container with greedy enthusiasm until it was destroyed. This was a common tactic for some soulmongers to protect their castles, apparently, as it didn’t require the soul monger to use their precious soul capacity to bind weak creatures whose only purpose was to stand around and guard a point.

I cannot picture myself as the owner of a castle. Okay, maybe I can.

Anyway, let’s see. Skeletons are good for beginners, low cost, low drain on your soul capacity, so you can create and control a bunch at once. Weak compared to most monsters and experienced fighters. Have been used for agriculture by more civic-minded soul mongers. Their intelligence is that of an average adult human.

Agriculture? That’d be a pretty sweet way of profiting off his undead servants, should he choose to create some.

Tom frowned. He wasn’t a landowner, though, and he couldn’t exactly allow people to witness a skeleton weeding his farm.

What if I put a twenty-first century spin on it? And where the hell would I get a skeleton?

Tom glanced up and noticed Jacob putting more distance between themselves and Carol, weaving through traffic with their lighter vehicle.

It doesn’t say what size the skeleton has to be, just the bigger the skeleton, the more expensive it is to maintain, but the stronger it is, physically. That gives me an idea…

If the inverse was true, it might be dirt cheap to animate a rat-sized skeleton for extended periods of time. And significantly less illegal.

Now, in whatever feudal society spawned this book, the only way a man could make a living was likely by breaking his back, but in today’s modern society, there were plenty of ways a man of average intelligence could make legal tender without having to move more than his fingers.

Not that I’d ever considered any of them. Tom didn’t have the vast amounts of free time you needed to be a writer, nor the natural charisma to be a YouTuber. And he’d be damned if he got roped into the hell of moderating content for a couple bucks an hour.

There were a few ways to make money online that involved sitting in front of the monitor and judging whether or not something broke the terms of service for an absolute pittance. AI was probably going to take over that job in half a decade or so, but right now, there was crazy demand for menial slave labor online that was smart enough to solve CAPTCHAs.

I wonder…

Tom was seriously pondering this angle when Jacob gave a strangled scream moments before the garbage truck knocked them violently off the road.

Ack! Naturally, Tom wasn’t wearing his seatbelt and smashed through the windshield, catapulted a dozen yards forward, his graceful moment of weightlessness interrupted by a street sign.

With the last of his fading consciousness, Tom flipped Carol’s approaching demon-form off.

I win, bitch. You can’t touch me.

***AWAKE***

“Tom! Cops are here to talk to you!” Gramma’s voice carried layers of disappointment that snapped Tom’s eyes open, and launched him out of his bed before he’d gained full consciousness, dodging around Carol looming over him menacingly. He’d gotten used to that already.

“Why the hell are the cops here!?” Tom demanded, shoving his legs in his jeans. He already had a couple ideas why they might be here, but his brain was still rebooting.

“You don’t think it has anything to do with all the grave robbing you did last night?” Carol asked, brow cocked.

“Ah, you were following me,” he muttered. That explained why she was so quick to track him down when he’d opened the book while he was dreaming. Also why she was unsurprised by the appearance of Lily’s ring the night before.

“I can’t punish you for reading the book in your sleep, since you’re not technically opening it, but loopholes infuriate me.” She shrugged. “Maybe a little light surveillance was in order.”

“THOMAS ARRAN GRAVES!”

Tom snapped to attention, throwing a stained t-shirt on and stumbling out into the living room.

Tom put a studied sleepy expression on. It wasn’t too hard when he’d only gotten—he glanced at the living room clock—four hours of sleep. It was currently one o’clock in the afternoon, and there was a cop sitting in the guest chair. That was never good.

The cop was white, about the same height as Tom, with three times as much muscle, ruddy cheeks with cold grey eyes.

Stamped from the same mold, indeed, Tom’s sleep-deprived brain thought before he shook it away.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Graves. I’m sorry about the inconvenient timing. Your grandmother explained that you work the night shift.”

“What do you need?” Tom said, smothering a yawn and stumbling into the living room, sitting on the chair across from the officer. “I hope it’s not about the seatbelt ticket. That’s in the mail.”

“No. I’m sorry to break this to you like this, but Lily Smith’s grave was robbed last night.”

Tom knew the words were coming, but they still made his ass clench around the upholstery.