This chapter contains mature and violent content, and references to animal harm.

S̶l̶i̶a̶ ̶A̶l̶s̶i̶ ̶L̶i̶s̶a̶

The world spun. I was tumbling, topsy-turvy, head over heels into the blizzard. Trees and graves and buildings and the clouds above all mashed together in one, swirling, white, mess.

Fuck.

I was going to puke.

The side of my face was both hot and cold. Freezing and fiery. Sore. So, so, so damn sore. I blinked. Saw only snow. White and gray and a pink blur moving towards me. But my vision was cloudy. Fuzzy. I was having a hard time opening my left eye.

Something warm and sticky—blood. My blood. It sizzled and trickled down the side of my face. Stinging and leaking into my swollen eye.

A blunt ringing pounded in my left ear, nearly drowning out Rosemond's lilting voice.

"Oh, bugger," she grumbled. I yelped as a sharp pain tore at the back of my skull. "Hadn't meant to knock you that hard."

She yanked on my hair. Nausea roiled in my stomach. Lurched up into my throat. Hot as acid. I swallowed it back.

I kicked, of course. Frantically. Tried to stand. My anklet was hot. But my feet were cold. All four (four?) of them lashing out in front of me. I'd lost my slippers. My ass was growing colder and damper too, and my scalp burned as Rosemond dragged my ass through the graveyard.

Managed to hook one foot around a headstone. Tried to push off it. To hoist myself to my stupid feet. But my frozen toes only slipped off. Though I saw the smear of red my blood left on the stone, I didn't feel the cut. It, the blood, flowed down the face of the stone and into the snow.

This was it. This was how I finally kicked it. I was a goner now. The smoking blood that leaked from my face and feet left a winding trail over the snowy graves. Yeah, fine. Just toss me in one of those. That was Rosie's MO, yeah?

With Greg, I tried to say, throw me in with Greg. But my voice only came as a hoarse gurgle. I coughed. Blood sprayed Rosemond's hem.

"Eck. Keep that in your mouth for now, will you?"

Suddenly, I was thrown against cold stone. Pain rocketed up through my knees and elbow. I dry heaved onto the floor of the mausoleum. Tried to push myself up. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck everything hurt and spun and I so freaking dizzy my fingertips felt numb.

Rosemond pinched my jaw in her hand. She yanked my chin to one side and slapped my back. "Cough here."

I gagged. Couldn't help it. I hocked up another wash of bright blood and splattered her bones. Her real bones. Flecks of my blood decorated her radius and rib cage.

She clicked her tongue. "Yeah, that's not enough, is it?"

The ringing in my ear had dulled. Faint enough to finally let a few coherent thoughts cut through the haze in my brain.

"Suck ass," I groaned, kind of relieved that at least some words were finding their way out my mouth. "Bitch."

Using both her palms, Rosemond swiped my forehead, grinning down at me like a proud mother. Which looked bizarre on the face of a twenty-year-old barista with a dumbass shag cut. I swatted at her arms, but my vision was still swirling. She took a tiny step back and I missed. Crumpled against myself on the cold floor.

"I do everything myself," she sighed.

As she did, Rosemond took the pools of blood in her hands and wiped them across the foreheads of her own skull and Mrs. Cabroni. The latter shrieked and tried to wiggle away. Failed, of course. The ropes pinned her tightly in place. Rosemond pursed her lips into a gentle shush.

"I took those books out the library. Stupidly easy to do in broad daylight, honestly, it's like you creatures pretend the waking world doesn't exist."

Satisfied with her blood anointing, she brushed her hands on her dress. "Your spell ingredients, took those too. Thanks for ignoring my message, by the way. Wound up having to tag along with bloody Kyle," she pitched her voice into a nasally whine to pronounce his name, "all night because you blew me off. Bugger didn't trust me with the keys to your place or something. Oh, and you know what else I took?"

Rosemond snatched my hair again. I hissed at the pain, but at least my stomach seemed to settle. My dry heaves had slowed to nothing, and the nausea was receding into a manageable stomach-ache.

"That waitress's teeth," she whispered in my ear. "She recognized the girl. Wouldn't stop pestering me with 'eeeeww, Lily, what happened, some people are here looking for you, ahhh' so, obviously," Rosemond made a clicking noise with her tongue and a shooing motion with her free hand in front of my face. Which, hey, although the edges were a bit hazy, it was just one hand.

"I mean, I needed the teeth regardless. You know, right?" she dropped my hair but didn't let me go, picking my arm right back up again. A sharp prick—a blade? Point of her stake? No clue—stabbed my thumb hard enough to draw blood. "Took hair from that boy in the house the other night. That one was trickier. My husband's rebound harlot interrupted me. Had to shut her up, naturally. Oh, what else... hmm."

Crystal balls. She was still monologuing.

As she twisted my arm, something toppled out of my sleeve, and plinked onto the stone floor. "Is that my bloody finger? I've been looking for this! Ha!"

She arranged the distal phalanx of her littlest finger with the other remains of her hand on the slab.

"Sit up, will you."

Rosemond coaxed me back against one of the slabs and hooked my hand through Mrs. Cabroni's. I could feel that her thumb had already been cut. Rosemond smashed our wounds together till our blood mingled. Tried to pull away, of course, but my arms were still so heavy and I was so tired. Bitch noticed and pulled a loose bit of rope around my wrist, tying me to the werewolf.

Mrs. Cabroni sobbed.

Rosemond repeated the motion with my other arm, this time anchoring me to her bones. "And after all that, I still couldn't get it to work. Followed the instructions to the letter. Well, least the bits of it I could read. How the bloody devil is anyone supposed to affix Teeth of the Accursed to their own gums anyway? And what counts as accursed?"

Instinctively, I tongued the gold-plated molars in the back of my mouth. They weren't mine when they'd been capped with the gold. Pretty sure the poor bastard whose skull I ripped them from wasn't alive when the whole thing had been gold dipped at all (be a heck of a way to go). Kind of amazing, the stuff teenagers with access to their parents' credit cards can nab off eBay.

"Hey, hey, I need you focused now!"

My head tilted up. She'd scooped her finger under my chin. For moment, behind Lily's round face and dark features, I thought I could see a glimmer of the woman underneath. Flaming red hair. Pale skin with a hawk like face. Gray and hateful eyes glaring down at me.

I arched my back. It was sore. My head fucking throbbed. But that pins and needles numbness pricking at my limbs was wearing off. I could flex my ankle at least—hot metal sure helped to thaw me out.

"Come on, spill me some trade secrets," Rosemond pouted. "What's it take to be a necromancer?"

I didn't learn necromancy from books. Well, not entirely from books. But mine were of the family heirlooms grimoire variety, not borderline textbooks. Somebody, somewhere in my bloodline, had put in a lot of effort into mastering this whole master of the undead thing, and then thoroughly hiding it from future generations. Maybe I was just genetically predisposed and highly motivated (Rosemond, that bitch, wasn't wrong that love made you kind of stupid. Any kind of love).

Or, you know, maybe I wasn't as fucking stupid as everyone takes me for.

"A strong stomach," I ground out.

"Cute," Rosemond smirked. She poked the point of her shovel into my ribs. "Do the bloody spell, yeah? Wake me up in my own, renewed, body. Nice and fresh! Then you and the vampire get to walk out at sundown."

Shook my head.

Outside our little cave the snow was falling in heavy clumps. The brightness of the sky, even behind the clouds, stung my already throbbing eyes. I blinked. Shit. White blanketed the ground. Even my stream of blood was fading. I couldn't distinguish which of the many broken gravestones and abused bushes Greg was under. The snow was burying him too. Maybe it'd protect him from the sun, but not forever if nobody found him. I needed to dig him out. Or, fuck it, make sure the Magistrate dug him out.

Where the fuck were those jerkoffs, anyway? Taking a donut and potion break? The one time I wanted to see the law and it was late. Typical.

Rosemond groaned. "Right. Thinking time's up."

She flipped over her shovel and curled a hand around the wood, just above the sharpened blade. It gleamed with remnants of both mine and Grumpkin's blood. Holding it in her fist, Rosemond swiped the metal edge against Mrs. Cabroni's throat.

The werewolf choked. Eyes went wide. Body thrashed. Red blood bubbled up like a cauldron from her opened neck. She gripped my hand bound to hers tight. My fingers cracked. The cut wasn't deep, at least, not deep enough that she'd bled out in mere seconds, but it still wasn't good. Clearly, Rosemond knew her anatomy.

"Best hurry up before she snuffs it, or, uh," Rosemond did a little shimmy, and skipped out into the yard. Faded fabric swished behind her as she waltzed with her shovel. "Or this yard will be your lover's final resting place!"

"Fuck you!" I screamed and pulled and writhed and yanked at the knots she bound around my wrists. "Your dress is ugly!"

"Fix my body!" she sang out, frolicking in the snow like she just heard the hills come alive with the sound of fucking music (oh, hey, guess my brain fog was letting up a bit). "Wake me up in it!"

Mrs. Cabroni was kicking and pulling and trying so, so, so hard to scream, even though no sound would come out beyond her strangled gasps for air.

"Hey, shhh, shh, it's okay," I croaked. She thrashed her head side to side. Blood whipped against the walls. And my face. Heal, heal, heal, she wasn't healing. Shit. We were too far away from the next full moon. Her body might as well have been mortal. "Stop! Please. You'll bleed too fast. Stay calm."

She didn't.

But, like, fair.

Watching the poor woman struggle not to die in her binds made me think of drowning cats. Holding them under till their little paws stopped twitching. Watching those tiny bubbles float up from their mouths. Trying, experimenting, failing to revive them when my blood wasn't enough. Or I mistranslated a spell. Or I simply needed to suck on some dead asshole's gold teeth first.

I remembered the first time it worked. The first time I was able to focus, to channel my will across the veil and take those shadows and their energy and feel it, really feel it, as my magic finally took hold and I revived my first corpse.

The snowfall had buried Grumpkin by now too.

Rosemond was whistling. Fucking whistling. She kept that stake raised above her head like a harpoon as she traversed the snow-covered graves. Clearly, she also seemed to have forgotten where she misplaced my vampire's corpse.

She was going to kill him.

Kill us all.

Greg. Grumpkin. Greg. Mrs. Cabroni. Greg. They were going to die, and stay dead, and I was just sitting there, doing nothing about it when I had the entire Netherworld's worth of necrotic energy at my bloody fingertips.

Screw books.

This formerly reformed necromancer preferred to free style.

I sucked in breath. The air was sharp and cold and made my lungs feel brittle. I coughed. Tightened my grip on both the bones and Mrs. Cabroni. Rosie the Ratchet was watching, after all.

Closed my eyes. Pictured my door. Trusty old door.

And I didn't reach for it.

Instead, of all the things my busted my brain could conjure in that moment, as both the world and Mrs. Cabroni's blood flow seemed to slow, was the dumb way Greg looked up at me from between my legs. Cheeks smeared with blood. Eyes glowing brightly. Fangs poking out over his lips as he gave me that stupid, adorable, so handsomely lopsided grin. Boy made a joke about pairing my blood with cheese, like, come on, how fucking cute was that?

He loved me.

"I feel like I'm falling in love with you—stop doing that!"

"Wake up," I said.

Rosemond giggled. "That's a good girl!"

"Like, a hot fudge sundae melting on your tongue on a summer night, good."

"Wake up. Wake up."

An itch formed in the crook of my arm. Right under Greg's Band-Aid. The cut I had fed him from was scabbed over. There was no need for the bandage anymore, beyond me apparently being a sentimental sap. But just then, as the snow and the shadows of the Netherworld seemed to blend under my eyelids, my blood sizzled. It rose up, fast and hot, breaking open the scab. A warm rivulet seeped out from beneath the bandage.

"I never asked for this curse. If I'd had the choice, I'd have preferred to stay dead."

When it hit the cool air, my blood snapped taunt. A pressure, heavy and warm and anchoring, pulled against my arm like a cord. Up it trailed the sensation of a phantom kiss. Lips lingering, tingling, on my skin, trailing a pleasant path up to my neck.

"Well, if it isn't my lucky penny."

I sat up straight. Sucked in a deep breath. Wrapped my arm around that imaginary cord and pulled.

"Wake. Up."

Cord snapped.

The sudden release of pressure flung me back against the slab. Bones cracked, but not mine. The arm of Rosemond's shoddy skeleton crumpled and shattered, untethering me from her.

"Oooh looky here what I found!" sang the other Rosemond, the one hijacking Lily Perez's body.

Right before she screamed.

I opened my eyes.

And saw Greg.

Greg was up. He was awake. Snow dusted his hair and shoulders. There was a tear through his shirt from the stake. But he was whole. He wasn't set aflame by the sun. Greg was standing. His arms were locked around Rosemond. Blue eyes glowing and focused on me, holding my gaze my gaze like it belonged to him.

And he was fangs deep into that undead hussy's stolen neck.

Kinky.