“Kari!”

Noah’s face lit up with recognition once the light had faded away enough for him to see properly.

That’s the thing about the people I revived, they always seem to recognize me, know my name, and believe that we’ve always known each other. Sometimes they think they’re my little sister, or my uncle, or my cousin. This isn’t what usually happens when a necromancer raises a zombie, it’s just a weird quirk of my magic.

I seriously have no idea why.

Looking into Noah’s cheerful face, he really wasn’t anything like my other zombies. I mean, sure everyone looks a little rough around the edges when they’re first zombified by some hack, but when I wipe the crappy necromancy spells off of them and re-raise them, they usually look pretty normal. I kind of thought the same would happen for Noah. But weirdly enough, though he looked young, his hair was still snowy white. Did he bleach his hair before he died? And his eyes were still red. They didn’t have the milky haze of rot anymore, but they were definitely still red. Now they were clear and deep like polished rubies.

Wow, they were actually really pretty.

Noah’s face, no longer slack with death, was pretty high up on the hotness scale too. He definitely didn’t have a manly man look, he was more of a pretty boy, but I didn’t mind that.

“Hey Noah, how are you feeling?”

I gave him a soft punch to the shoulder. I had no clue who he thought he was to me, so I wasn’t sure how to act around him. He might think he knew me, but to me he was still a complete stranger, and I wasn’t the social type.

“Okay I guess. W-what’s going on here?”

He was looking around the busy crime scene with giant shocked bunny eyes.

“Did something bad happen?”

Mm, damn, where to start?

“Um weeeeeell.”

He squeezed some dirty water out of the hem of his T shirt.

“And why am I so soggy?”

Yeah, that’s totally my fault.

“Hey, you Volka?”

A red faced, balding guy in plain clothes came striding out of the crowd of uniformed police. I guess he was the detective in charge.

“Is that thing ready for questioning?”

He waved a hand in Noah’s direction, indicating what “that thing” he meant.

“Questioning? Why am I being questioned?”

Noah turned his shocked bunny eyes to me.

“It’s okay, you’re not in any trouble. Just answer the cop’s questions as best as you can remember. It’s okay if you can’t remember something, just stay calm and answer honestly. Then we can talk afterwards. Okay?”

I patted Noah on the arm and hoped I sounded reassuring.

“Come on you two.”

The detective tipped his head in the direction he wanted us to follow, before walking away.

I didn’t bother taking even a step after the detective.

“Us two? Why do I need to come?”

When the red faced detective turned around to stare at me, his eyes bulged out a little.

“Well, we need you to give that thing orders, don’t we?”

I slowly shook my head from side to side.

“Orders? I can’t give him any orders.”

The detective came storming back over to me.

“What? What the hell are you talking about?”

Jeez, where the hell was Kristy? Didn’t she tell this dude anything about me?

Of course, looking around she was nowhere to be seen.

“Why would you need to give me orders?”

Noah turned his shocked bunny eyes to me again.

Poor guy just came back from the dead, like two seconds ago, and all this idiot cop was doing was confusing the poor kid.

I sighed and rolled my eyes.

“No one needs to give you orders. You’re fine. Just ignore this dude, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Noah didn’t look that reassured from my words. Can’t say I blamed him.

“If you’re not giving this thing orders, than who’s controlling it, huh? You explain that to me.”

The detective’s voice was getting louder and he kept jabbing his finger in my face as he talked.

Uhg.

Maybe I should just call Detective Sweeney, and have him deal with this guy? No, that would take too long, and Noah would just get more and more confused in the mean time.

(sigh)

“Who controls him? No one. He controls himself. I only raise cogi-libre. Once they’re raised I have no control over them what so ever. They are their own person. So maybe he’ll cooperate with you, maybe he won’t, but there’s nothing I can do about it at this point.”

The detective silently glared down at me for a really long moment.

Having a dude that was over a foot taller than me and more than triple my weight glaring at me like he’d love to beat me to death with a rock, was just soooo much fun. Seriously, could this day get any better?

Noah chimed in, thankfully breaking the detective’s very unpleasant concentration.

“Y-you know, you don’t have to worry about me. I’ll totally cooperate with the police. You can ask me any questions you want.”

The detective reluctantly pealed his eyes off of me and turned to Noah.

“Well then, let’s get this shit show on the road.”

The detective slowly started backing up, keeping his eyes on Noah.

“Does it understand, Come?”

He was waving his hand at Noah like he was trying to coax a small child to follow him.

“Uh, yeah, I understand.”

Noah gave me a confused look over his shoulder as he disappeared into the crowd of police.

I tried to give him a reassuring smile and a thumbs up.

Yeah, I kind of sucked at this helping-people-through-hard-times thing.

It didn’t take long for the detective to get done with his questioning. Maybe just twenty minutes of me loitering around on the edges of the crime scene and trying to not look like a vagrant. It’s not like I was picking through the trashcans or anything, but plenty of cops gave me some less than friendly looks in the mean time.

“Oy, Volka, get your ass over here!”

The detective was waving his hand at me like he had to hurry to go pee or something.

“Yeah, what?”

I took my time sauntering over to the detective.

“Okay, we got all the information we’re going to get. You can shut him down now.”

I raised my eyebrows at the detective.

“Shut him down?”

“Yeah, you know. Turn him off. Put him to sleep. Whatever it is you people do.”

The detective was flailing his arm in Noah’s general direction. Noah was a few paces away, still sitting on the bumper of a cop car, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, looking like a post horror movie victim.

“You mean kill him? As an officer of the law, should you be saying stuff like that?”

The detective put his hands on his hips and scowled at me.

“The kid is already a corpse, all I’m saying is to put him back.”

See, this is another reason why I only take cases that Detective Sweeney call me in for. So I don’t have to deal with stupid shit like this.

“No, he was a corpse. You wanted me to raise him. And I did that. So, now he’s basically just like a regular person. If I took away his life, that would be murder.”

I made sure to talk extra slow so even this idiot could understand me. Did this dude already forget the cogi-libre conversation we just had a few minutes ago?

“Yeah, well, we don’t need him anymore, so you do whatever the hell it is you’re going to do with him.”

After the idiot detective was done yelling at me for not wanting to kill someone, he stormed off to probably pick on someone else that was smaller than him.

Yeah, I kind of expected things to go this way.

“Hey Kari, you okay?”

When I wasn’t looking, Noah had snuck up on me. Hopefully he didn’t hear too much of that conversation.

“Um, yeah, totally okay.”

Noah tilted his head to one side and was playing with a strand of his dirty hair that was getting fluffier and fluffier as it dried.

“So, what’s going on? The police had some kind of weird questions for me.”

I chewed on my lip a little.

“Um, yeah, we need to talk. Come on, you should probably sit down for this.”

I walked him back to the cop car bumper that he had been perched on just a few minutes ago. Grabbing his shoulders, I pushed him back down into his seat, and gave them a few friendly pats.

Gods, I hope this went well.

“Noah, I have a little tiny bit of bad news for you, but I also have a whole lot of really good news for you too.”

Noah cautiously nodded his head at me.

“Um, okay.”

I took a deep breath in and then let it out slowly, just how my therapist taught me.

“Let’s start with the bad news.”

Noah leaned forward expectantly.

“I usually like starting with the good news.”

Uhg, I hadn’t even started and he was already being difficult.

“No, no, this will really make a lot more sense if you hear the bad news first.”

Noah seemed to droop a little in disappointment.

“Well, okay.”

Yeah, I should just say it and see how it goes from there.

“Okay, well, the bad news is . . . you’re kind of dead.”

“Really? I don’t feel dead?”

Noah placed a palm to his forehead as if he was checking for a fever.

“No, trust me, you’re definitely dead.”

He seemed to slump in his seat even more.

“Oh . . . Well, I wasn’t expecting that.”

Uh oh, things were starting to turn south quick.

“B-but don’t worry. I totally fixed all that!”

“You fixed my death?”

“Yeah, I’m a necromancer, and I fixed you so now you’re only a little bit dead.”

Noah repeated me, looking even more confused.

“A little bit dead.”

I nodded nervously.

“Y-yeah, you’re actually really lucky. I’m one of the top necromancers in the city, and when I raise the dead, you get the premium package!”

Noah’s eyes lit up a little.

“Premium package?”

Good, things were starting to go well. Now to get to the good news.

“Yeah, as my zombie, though you’ll need my magic to constantly maintain you, it’s not so bad. Not only do you get free will to do whatever you want, you also get all sorts of perks like being strong enough to lift a car, an-and auto-healing.”

Noah was nodding enthusiastically.

“Oh, that sounds nice.”

Wow this was going a lot better than I thought it would. If only all of my zombies had taken the news so well.

“And that’s not all!”

I was totally starting to get into the infomercial mood.

Noah gasped excitedly.

“There’s more?”

He seriously made the best audience.

I gave him a nod.

“Yeah, you get to stick around for as long as I’m alive, so you get not one, not two, but three hundred extra years on top of a standard human life span! I hope you like living, because you’re going to get a whole lot of it!”

“Ooooo!”

Noah was clapping for my finale’.

Seriously this was the easiest bad news talk I’d ever had.

Noah shivered a little. Though his chin was trembling a little bit, his bright smile never wavered.

I gave his ugly gray emergency blanket covered shoulder a little tug.

“Uh, yeah. How about we find some dry clothes for you?”

Noah shivered as he climbed to his feet.

“Yeah, that sounds good.”