“Of course you are,” Roger said. “I told you, necromancers don’t just deal with dead bodies. We’re like any group—we specialize. And my specialty was always ghosts. You get that from me.”
“I don’t have to be a necromancer to talk to ghosts,” I pointed out. “Clairvoyants do that all the time.”
“But they don’t carry one around with them, do they? They don’t donate energy to make said ghost more mobile. They don’t essentially make a servant out of him, have him run their errands and spy on their enemies and do a little mental snooping, if they think it’s warranted.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, because this was kind of relevant right now. “I haven’t spent a lot of time around true clairvoyants—”
“Well, if you had, you might have noticed that they weren’t being followed around by a wad of ghosts.”
I smiled suddenly, because he sounded so serious. And with those glasses . . . “Is that the proper term?”
“What?”
“A murder of crows, a gaggle of geese, a wad of ghosts . . .”
He put down his instruments in order to look at me disapprovingly. “You can joke all you like, but it’s true. Clairvoyants talk to ghosts. What you do goes far beyond that. But, of course, that couldn’t possibly be necromancy, which only deals with rotten flesh and oozing bodies and . . . well, whatever else the Circle can dream up to keep the public so scared of us that they lock us away.”
“You’re locked away because so many of you go bad,” Jonas said, from the doorway.
Roger sighed. “You again. I thought you’d gone out to play in the rain.”
Jonas opened his mouth, but I got there first. “You have to admit, a lot of necromancers do end up working for the dark.”
“Well, of course they do.” Roger looked surprised. “What else is open to them?”
“You found work with Tony—”
“Yes, and it’s been such fun.”
“And there are plenty of freelance necromancers—”
“Patching up vampire boo-boos, what more could a man ask for?”
“—and you have magic. You could—”
“You have magic. You wouldn’t be able to do much in our world without it. But where does it go, hmm?”
“Go?”
“What is it used for?” he asked. “Magic isn’t just this lump of power, is it? A reserve to be employed any way you wish. That would be like saying that any human could play the piano beautifully just because he has fingers!”
“Well, of course people have different talents—”
“Yes, and what they can do is largely limited by those gifts. Look at me. When I was a boy, I wanted to be a war mage—”
Jonas made a strangled sound and Roger shot him a glance. “Oh yes, laugh all you like, but the fact remains that I had the power to do it. I was strong enough.” He turned his attention back to me. “They make you do these tests, you know, when you come in, to measure your magic. To see if you’ve got what it takes. If you don’t generate enough, there’s no need to go any further, because you won’t be able to cast the kind of spells you’d have to learn anyway.”
I nodded.
“Well, I passed. I passed all of them,” Roger told me proudly. “There were three of us, from my old neighborhood, and we all tried out at the same time. We’d played war mages growing up, and the idea that it could become a reality . . . it seemed like a dream. But only one of us made it, and it wasn’t me.”
“But you just said—”
“That I was strong enough. My body generates enough magic. But the path my magic chose to take was one of the unauthorized ones. In other words, I had the potential to be a great necromancer, but not much of anything else. And there’s no academy of necromancy, is there? I had all this power, but nowhere to use it.”
“So you became a dark mage,” Jonas said, crossing his arms.
Roger glanced at him. “No, although that’s how the dark gets plenty of its followers, let me tell you. The Circle practically slaps a bow on their heads as they shove them out the door!”
Jonas started to say something, but I cut him off. “So what did you do?”
Roger waved a hand at his collection. “What you see. I became the magical version of a garbage man, someone to defuse old charms before they blow up in someone’s face. The same sort of job a scrim gets,” he added, talking about magical humans who produce very little magic. They were considered handicapped, although some of the ones I’d met seemed to be doing okay.
“It’s an honorable profession,” Jonas said stiffly.
“Says the man who never had to do it,” Roger returned acidly. “It pays well, yes, because of the danger, so most scrims don’t care. But I did—yet had no chance of ever moving on to anything better. Do you have any idea how that rankles? How disgusted it makes you with the whole system, which seems designed specifically to ruin your life?”
I thought of Johanna, and wondered if that was how she’d felt. Because, according to Lizzie, the Pythian Court had had its very own necromancer, long before I showed up. And one who specialized in ghosts, at that.
I didn’t know why it had surprised me. I knew there were other necromancers around, even those with the much less common specialty of ghost-whispering—my own father was proof of that. Yet it had, just as it had surprised Lizzie, who had slowly put the pieces together.
Along with a plan to profit from them.
At first she’d intended to rat out Johanna, hoping to get her spot as acolyte. But that was before Jo offered to show her the Badlands, and how, if you stayed close enough to the time barrier, you could spy on people without actually being at the party yourself. It was how Lizzie had waylaid me, the second I returned from an earlier trip to Wales. I’d wondered how she’d stepped out of nowhere at just the right moment; I hadn’t realized, it was more like nowhen.
Thanks to Lizzie, I’d figured out a few other things, too. Like how an acolyte could travel fifteen hundred years into the past without needing the Tears of Apollo. Because, when you step out of time, it loses its hold on you, doesn’t it?
Like it loses the ability to determine when you’ll step back in.
Lizzie hadn’t told me that; Lizzie didn’t know. But I knew what I’d seen, on that brief trip with Billy Joe. How, when we got close to the time barrier, the location had stayed the same, but centuries had passed in seconds. And I was betting that a ghost whisperer with a good mind and a tenuous grip on the Pythian power might also figure out another way to travel through time.
And to bring back a god, when acolytes with more traditional magic had failed.
“So you decided to join the Guild,” Jonas was saying. “To wipe out history, erase countless lives, and remake it in your favor. But no, that isn’t dark!”
“It also isn’t true, and I wasn’t talking to you!”
“You weren’t a member of the Guild?” I asked.
Roger looked uncomfortable. “It’s . . . not in the way you think. Something happened and . . . afterward, there wasn’t much choice anymore.”
“There are always choices,” Jonas said. “You made the wrong ones. Don’t try to excuse them now.”
“I wouldn’t waste my time trying to excuse anything to you!”