Pushing my way through the lobby doors of the therapists office, I stepped out onto the cracked sidewalk in front of the mental health clinic and back out into a beautiful spring day. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, gentle breeze was playing with the stray ends of my hair, and I felt like a part of my soul had been sucked out.

My parents were gone, well and truly gone this time, and for the first time in eight years I was completely alone.

The cheery weather was living proof that Mother Nature didn’t give a rat’s ass what kind of day you were having and just did whatever the hell she felt like.

As I plodded along the inner city sidewalk, I didn’t really have any idea where I was going or why. I just wanted someplace quiet. There was an ugly little park a few blocks away, and I turned towards that. The lawn was mostly worn down to dirt patches with a few islands of grass. The bushes were over grown and kind of still dead from winter. The trashcan in one corner was over flowing, and little snowdrifts of used needles left by passing junkies had piled up around every nook and cranny. I plonked myself down on the lone grimy bench caked in graffiti. It wasn’t a nice place to sit, but it was under a shady tree, and it was quiet here. That was as good as I was going to get. I leaned my head ‘til it rested on the back of the nasty bench, and stared up at the sky.

A part of me hoped that I could maybe still see Mom and Dad floating upwards, but no, they were long gone. And they weren’t headed to the sky anyway.

A crow landed in the tree over my head, and it made soft croaking sounds as it looked down and tilted it’s head at me.

It better not be thinking of pooping on me.

I don’t know how long I sat there, a while I guess. And yeah, I cried some more. Thankfully, I didn’t get pooped on.

Once my eyes felt too tapped out to drip anymore, I pulled my flip phone out of my pocket.

Yes, I still use a flip phone. The pop-tart shaped phones are expensive, okay? I just use the cheapest one I could get. It’s better than nothing.

I texted Jiro the quick message:

“GB2M+D” (Good bye to Mom and Dad)

I didn’t need to spell it out for him, he would know what it meant.

As soon as I snapped my phone shut and went to return it to my pocket, it chirped at me, letting me know that someone was calling.

Seriously, Jiro. I don’t want to talk about it right now.

I pressed a side button to decline the call without actually opening the phone.

My hand only got half way to my pocket this time, before the phone was ringing again.

No Jiro, I don’t want to stop by your restaurant for a hug and some cannoli.

Well . . . Actually that sounds pretty good.

Hmm, maybe later, but not right now.

I declined the call again.

Right now I just wanted some quiet time to be alone.

And the phone rang, again.

Jiro, seriously!

I flipped open my phone to snap at him, but the caller ID number on the teeny little screen wasn’t familiar.

Huh? Who the hell is this?

I answered this random phone call the same way I answer most phone calls.

“What?” I asked through gritted teeth.

“Kari~!” wailed a sniffley female voice over the phone, “I need help~!

I recognized that sniffley voice.

“Uhg,”

It was Magic Police Officer Kristy Goodwin. She was the go-to necromancer for the Mors Bay Police Department. Kristy was usually the first to be called in whenever nefarious magic users did bad guy things with dead bodies.

And she was kind of an idiot.

I was unfortunate enough to meet Kristy at a magic users convention a couple years ago.

Yes, magic users have conventions. And we aren’t even sexist any more. Guy magic users are totally allowed to attend. And wearing pink floofy skirted magic girl outfits and toting around star tipped wands are not mandatory anymore, though they are highly encouraged.

I had been giving a talk about magic users in the police force at the convention. Kristy had happened to watch that talk I was giving. She had been blown away by the fact that I was the youngest person giving a talk (by like, decades) and I’d already been working with the police department for like six years at that point. She had just finished her required magic users basic training, and I was a seasoned professional magic user, yet I was still four years younger than her. She had instantly decided, completely on her own, that I was the coolest of cool, and her new best friend.

Yay.

(sigh)

“This better be good, ‘cause I’m so not in the mood.”

“Kari! It’s really bad!”

Damn it! What did I just say about it better being good?

She sniffled some more over the phone.

“I-I just can’t make it work right. An-and I can’t break the spell!”

As far as necromancers go, Kristy was pretty wimpy, so it wasn’t surprising that she couldn’t break another’s necromancy spell. To break a spell, you had to have stronger magic than the original magic user that cast the spell.

A wimp couldn’t break a master’s spell, it was as simple as that.

I guess I was the only necromancer she knew that wasn’t super wimpy. I did work with the police department from time to time. It’s just that Detective Sweeney usually called me if there was a case that needed me. It’s weird that he didn’t call, yet Kristy did. Seriously, if she needed back up, why didn’t they just call one of the many witches on the police force? I mean, a witch couldn’t touch a necromancy spell, but they were such generalists, they could probably support Kristy so maybe she could just do it herself.

Seriously, what kind of mess was this, that I needed to be called in?

You see, there are three types of magic users: the mages, the witches, and the mancers. Each groups’ magic discipline could work to complement each other, but they could never overlap or be combined. So a witch can’t touch a mancer’s spell, a mancer can’t mess with a mage’s runes. Like that.

The witches are probably the most common of all the magic users. They’re the generalists of the magic user world. They have magic inside them and use it to make spells and potions to help with a bunch of stuff, from lighting fires to curing an itchy rash, and they use magic stones to power bigger spells. They can do a little bit of everything, but they’re not great at anything.

Next up is the mages. These guys are like the super nerds of the magic user world. Ya know that one guy in your high school class that just looooooooved math. He was like a super mathlete or some shit, and everyone else would be falling asleep during math class but he was totally into it? Yeah, I bet he was secretly a mage. With mages, they make and use magical artifacts and runes, but they don’t actually have any magic themselves. Magically speaking, mages are no different from the rest of the 70% of the population that aren’t magic users. The only reason they can even see and manipulate magic is because their brains are like super bendy and it just allows them to understand magic. Of course, you’re never going to see or talk to a mage just walking down the street. Those guys are always using their skills on stuff like space travel, or making speedy trains go speedier, or like making runes so airplanes fly and stuff. Ya know, not normal, everyday kinds of magic.

And last of all is mancers. Mancers are like the exact opposite of witches, we are super specialists. We have just one kind of magic and that’s it. But we do it very, very well. Mancers like pyromancers, ventimancer, and necromancers, all use their spirit to reach out and touch the world around them, and create something that wasn’t there before. Pyromancers, of course can make fire from their spirit, just like ventimancers can make wind, but necromancers are a bit different. We can reach our spirits out into the world and grab other spirits that are no longer attached to the physical world, and that’s when things get real fun.

Kristy texted me the address and thankfully it wasn’t too far away. That’s what’s nice about high crime cities, you never have to go too far to find a dead body. This particular unfortunate incident was a convenient twenty minute bus ride to a sketchy downtown alley.

Of course, I couldn’t get all that close to where the crime actually took place, there was way too many cops loitering around for any outsider to wander in. I couldn’t even turn the corner to see what was in the alley.

“Hey, hey! No vagrants in here, this is a crime scene. Come on, you have to panhandle someplace else.”

A uniformed officer waved his arms to shoo me away.

Yeah, I was kind of used to that reaction by now.

Maybe it was because I was skinny, with messy, lanky hair? Maybe it was because I never wore make-up? Maybe the dude was just prejudice?

I pulled my dad’s tattered coat that was five sizes too big, tighter around me, the same coat I had been wearing for the past eight years, and considered just leaving.

Yes, I still wear my dead parents’ clothes.

Healing is a process, okay.

I’m working on it.

I managed to take one step in the right direction to walk away.

“Kari! Kari! Where are you going?”

Kristy came scurrying out of the mob of police at high speeds. Though she was hustling her butt, she still managed to look cute and dainty, hopping around the ground littered with evidence tags. Her floofy platinum blonde hair bounced with every step and her big blue eyes were wide with excitement as she bolted towards me. Twenty-four years old and she still had so much enthusiasm.

Uhg.

She looked like a magic girl anime character that had aged out of the hero team.

“No, no, she’s with me!”

I guess she had seen the cop try to shoo me away.

She hooked my arm with her’s before I could get away, and dragged me into the chaos of the crime scene.

“Shisho! Shisho! Thank you for helping me!”

“I’m not your shisho, you’re older than me.”

I tried to shake her loose from my arm, but it didn’t seem to be working.

“Senpai, I knew I could count on you!”

“Not your senpai either, you’re still older than me.”

She hauled me through the mess of evidence tags and yellow police tape. We dodged around dozens of busy cops doing busy things. I tripped over some trash as I was dragged along.

“So it’s just an easy wipe, right?”

Most necromancers could do a spell wipe in a few minutes. All that was needed was a stronger mancer than the one that had originally cast the spell. It’s literally just showing up, wiping away the spell of the other necromancer, and then stepping back so someone else could clean up the mess and collect the evidence. It’s super easy, even Kristy should have been able to do it. That’s why she was called in for most necromancy issues the police found, because most police work was just wipe jobs. Maybe if it was a difficult one, it would take her like an hour or two, but she should have been able to do it. For me it would take like, maybe a half a second.

Kristy stopped and smiled at me.

“Um, no.”

I tilted my head at her.

“What do you mean, no?”

Kristy coyly nibbled on her fingertips.

“We kind of need to talk to him. There’s some really weird stuff about this case, and we need some questions answered.”

I raised my eyebrows at her.

She tried to make her big blue eyes as innocent as possible.

I scowled back at her.

“You know what you’re asking for, right?”

She pressed her palms together as if in prayer.

“Please, shisho.”

Oh my gods, why today of all days?

So that’s why Kristy called me, it wasn’t just that the wipe was too high powered for her, it was that she couldn’t do the job at all. They didn’t just want to make a zombie stop moving. They needed it conscious enough to answer questions, so that meant raising a pretty high level zombie. As far as I know, Kristy has never raised anything before. I’m not sure she even can. So one way or the other someone more powerful than her would have to be called in.

She guided me to the mouth of the alley where crime had taken place. Before we even got there, I could hear a weird, repeating sound.

What was that?

Turning a sharp corner we finally got a look at the alley, it was dank and trash filled with a mysteriously soggy bottom, like most inner city alleys. What made this one special was the “Splat, splat” sounds of wet meat pounding against wet meat, over and over again. The red arches of blood painted across the walls that boxed in the alley. Oh, and the lumps of flesh and bone thrown all around, most alleys don’t have that either.

There was a zombie standing in the middle of the alley. It was a small zombie, no bigger than me, with white messy hair and wearing a blood splattered plain white T shirt with the collar all stretched out. His hands were caked in semi-dried blood clear up to his elbows. His expressionless, slack face stared at nothing as he beat his one hand into what was left of a human rib cage that he was holding onto with the other hand.

Me being a well seasoned necromancer that has worked with the police for over eight years now, I took in this scene just as you might expect. My eyes zipped straight up to stare at the sky, I turned on my heels, and walked in the opposite direction.

Nope, nope, nope! There’s no way in hell I’m going in there!

Okay, this is why Detective Sweeney didn’t call me. He knows I don’t do gore.

Nice, solid dead bodies, I’m fine with. But once their innards became their outtards, I was out!

Nope, nope, nope! I’m out of here!

Kristy voice was a little panicked as she grabbed my arm again to slowdown my retreat.

“Kari, Kari, where are you going?!”

My head shaking "No" was a little hyper.

“M-mm, I’m not doing this!”

Kristy’s plea was more of a whine, as she tried to drag me back in the direction of that hellscape.

“B-but, I can’t do it on my own!”

I bugged my eyes out at her.

“No.”

I shook my head very clearly from side to side with each word.

“I.”

“Can.”

“Not.”

“Do.”

“This.”

Kristy pouted her lower lip out.

“Why not?”

Did she not notice all the blood?

(sigh)

Kristy didn’t know my history the way Detective Sweeney did, so I guess to her it was a reasonable question. I mean, we were necromancers, death and gore was kind of our thing.

“I don’t do bloody stuff.”

She seemed to be genuinely shocked. Her little pink mouth formed a perfect “O” shape as she stared at me, bug-eyed.

“Really?!”

There was more wet, squelching sounds coming from the alley we were a few steps away from. Just far enough away that thankfully I couldn’t see what they were.

A police officer nearby turned pale.

“Hey, Goodwin! Are you going to do something about this guy?”

The magical police officer whined and tugged me in the direction of the gore fest.

“Kari~!”

I froze up, not allowing myself to be dragged back just yet.

“Okay, wait. I said wait, damn it! Here’s what we’re going to do.”