Ward Against Death Read Free Page A

work long enough to figure out what was happening. Everything grew distant, her vision dimmed, but the noises outside the sewer grew clearer, as if she were shaking herself out of her body.
    More barks, even closer. The necromancer jumped. She sensed more shivers wash over her, but couldn’t feel them. She had shaken too far out of herself.
    He scooped her into his arms, stepped into the shadows, and pressed his forehead to hers, somehow drawing her back into her body with the touch of his flesh against hers. She became aware of the pressure of his arms against her back and legs.
    “Tell me what to do,” he said.
    “What?” Her lips felt heavy, swollen.
    “If you don’t tell me where to go, we’re caught.”
    “Follow this to the end, then take the next three lefts.”
    He glanced up, and she began to drift away again. Scrunching up his face, he stepped into the center of the sewer pipe. If she didn’t feel so strange, she’d have laughed. What was a little sewage compared to your life?
    She shivered and drifted toward... toward what? A nothingness, a black and empty abyss void of light and warmth. There was no sewer, no necromancer, no body, and no Goddess. Where was the eternal love? The embrace of forgiveness from the Mother of All?
    A sliver of light far, far away caught her attention, but when she turned to it, it was gone. The Goddess didn’t want her.
    She gasped.
    Her fingers and toes were numb as if they had fallen asleep, and she couldn’t see the circle of light from the access pipe. In fact, she didn’t know where she was. The necromancer, his face streaked with muck, leaned over her.
    “I’d give you a minute but I don’t think we have the time.” He wiped a filth-covered hand across his forehead, leaving another streak.
    She sat up and blood rushed to her hands and feet, setting them on fire with pins-and-needles. “We have to get away from my father’s house.”
    He pursed his lips as if he wanted to say something, but thought silence the better option.
    “What?”
    “We are away from your father’s house.”
    She glanced past his shoulder. Behind him the wall sloped, creating a small arch above their heads, and to her right lay a three-foot drop into the ancient sewer pipe. They were in a workman’s alcove, a place for the city’s maintenance staff to take a break or a meal, if they could stomach anything while surrounded by sewage.
    “How?”
    “Your fifteen minutes were up.”
    “My...?” They had just been in the sewer on her father’s property. Where were they now?
    The stinging in her hands and feet subsided. She must have passed out. The memory of the shivers sent an involuntary one down her spine.
    “My fifteen minutes were up?”
    “Yes, now—”
    “So, I was dead?” It was true. A chill seeped into her gut. Whoever wrote that note had lied. She didn’t have a week. She had nothing. Except this strange young man who had woken her a second time. “Why?”
    The necromancer looked confused and ridiculous, with his short, wild hair and mud-streaked face.
    “Why did you bring me back?” she asked again.
    “Look. Your family is still after us and I’m sure I didn’t get that far. ” He scrambled to the edge of the alcove.
    “You could have left me for dead.” Which meant escape was no longer an option. She had nothing to live for, since she wasn’t alive.
    “You only have another fifteen minutes. We need to get to a place where I can get the components for the Jam de’U.”
    She grabbed his arm. “Why?”
    “I don’t know how to get out of here.” He looked exhausted and worried and she couldn’t sense any insincerity in him.
    Which didn’t mean she trusted him. It could mean he was an amazing actor. If she didn’t need him to keep her alive—well, perhaps not alive exactly, but animated long enough for revenge—she’d leave him.
    He stared back at her with innocent, puppy dog eyes.
    They were not going to work. “First, we need to find an access