At night, the top of Arthur’s Seat was a wind-whipped peak of isolation, largely swathed in darkness, deep pits of shadow disguising abrupt drops and quick, messy deaths. The sparkling lights of the city glimmered far below like crushed jewels, encircling the ancient volcano in a mirage of fire. His eyes teared up in the cold and a shiver overtook him as the wind mercilessly swiped over the jagged hills.

Demarcus was going to straight up murder the jerk-off asshole fuck face who summoned him from his toasty bed for whatever new age wishy washy ritual he needed help with. Demarcus had a postbox these days, he even had a cell phone and an e-mail address. Seriously, there were better ways to request a necromancer’s presence.

The fuck face in question was on the very top of Arthur’s Seat - or as close as he could get without falling off. A circle of candles surrounded him, the flames as white as moonlight, standing still and bright even in the torrential wind. Fuck face danced around the circle of lights like he was five shots of cheap vodka in and the DJ had just put on his favorite song. Seriously, this was what he was dragged out of bed for?

“Oi, fuck face! You called?”

Demarcus marched up to the circle of candles and grabbed his arm, shaking him a little. Fuck face was a classic caricature of a wizard wannabe. He wore voluminous robes that had probably been his grandmother’s curtains at one point; silver streamers were liberally braided through the strands of his long scraggly beard; and a very pointy hat, that must have come from a Halloween shop, was cocked jauntily on his head.

“You came!” the man crowed, “Not even a necromancer such as yourself could resist the ancient summoning ritual of bone and blood--”

“Yeah, yeah. Look, it’s late. What the hell do you want? And for future reference, I have a phone. Next time, call and set up an appointment.”

He looked thrown for just a second, like he thought necromancers were only contactable by outdated, inefficient rituals cooked up by over-dramatic sorcerers from 500 BC. With great inner fortitude, fuck face ignored all that and gestured to the sky with his index finger.

“Necromancer! I have summoned you. I have bound you to my service with the traditional, most noble ritual of bone and blood. You will help me in my greatest quest tonight - help me siphon power from the very--”

“Is that a body?” he interrupted, interest peaked for the first time that night.

Fuck face deflated, “What?”

Demarcus stepped around him and peered into the center of the candle circle. What he thought at first was a lump of dirty laundry was in fact a lump of dirty laundry, but there was a person inside all those clothes and blankets. The lump of laundry moved, moaned, and a trickle of blood seeped from a fold of linen and trickled across to the edge of the circle.

“Didn’t you read my resume? Or look through my website? I don’t do torture. I don’t do sacrifices. If you want me to summon an evil spirit, that’s one thing, but I stopped indiscriminately murdering people in like, the sixteenth century,” Demarcus said, rounding on fuck face.

“But I - the summoning ritual?”

“Look, all it does is summon me. Some asshole created the spell ages ago and now every jumped-up yuppie like you thinks they can just drag me to whatever lame ritual you want and force me to give you infernal power from the pits of hell. That’s not how this works. I don’t have to do anything. I can walk away anytime I want. In fact!”

He stepped into the circle, not really scared by whatever spell fuck face had set-up, as chances were Demarcus could brush it off. Nothing happened to him or to the pile of laundry, so he picked up the poor man, hitched him over a shoulder, and kicked over a candle or two on his way out.

“Wait!” fuck face cried, eyes wild, and possibly a little wet with tears, “you can’t just do that! It took me ages to track him down - you’re infringing upon another practitioner's right to - you stop! Stop right now!”

Fuck face chased him down the slopes…or tried to anyway. Demarcus, as a necromancer and purveyor of the Moste Black Magick™, was one with the darkness. He disappeared into shadow and reappeared in the cozy confines of his vault.

So, great, he had a person in his possession. Now what?