I positioned myself five feet away and held my crossbow to his head. Some part of me itched to pull the trigger. Necromancer, kidnapping and killing people by the dozen. It should have been clearcut, entirely justified. And I realized that for possibly the first time in my life, I was tired of granularity.

Focusing on the minutia, the complexity and imperfect lines that compose a person, was always how I’d managed to stop myself from doing something stupid in the past. And whether it was due to exhaustion, or frustration at my recent circumstances, I was tired of looking for reasons to hold myself back.

I wanted Miles’ necromancer who lived in the sewer, worshiping demons and spreading preschooler pâté over tiny pieces of toast.

I wanted simple.

And life so rarely was. It was entirely possible he was what he presented himself to be. But serial killers—the smart ones, at least—can be charismatic. So charismatic that, despite the malignancy of their crimes, we can be fascinated by them. People obsess over their pathology, dissect their motives and formative psychology. Consume an endless selection of books, and movies, and miniseries centered around the worst criminals outside of third world warlords and first world politicians.

There was enough wrong here that I wasn’t willing to trust my first impression. His companion—the shadow monster—had tried to kill me. Even though I knew summons weren’t perfectly controllable, it was hard to imagine the attempt would have happened with zero input from him.

Hating myself for it, I switched titles to

A tidal wave of anxiety washed over me, so strongly I nearly staggered. Residual fear from the ambush, the close encounter with Roderick’s lodge, and whatever was happening with Ellison ran rampant. The fear slowly changed to something else that anchored me in the moment. It wasn’t pure focus, as it was with Rather it was deeper, more primal. The desire to rend niceties and facade alike until the ugly, true face of everything was clear to see.

Details from the last few minutes came into focus. Frown lines in the doctor’s forehead became more pronounced. He spoke with a nearly imperceptible micro-stutter, hunched over slightly. His eyes were haunted, not by what he’d done, but by what he’d done it for.

Paper residue on the stethoscope. Plenty of it. There were stickers there once, but he scratched them off. Pediatrics. Not a doctor. Overinflated sense of self, so not a nurse either. Physician’s Assistant, or some other analogue. He was barely hanging on before the dome came down. Something personal he couldn’t shake, or an illness, or both. Only, it wasn’t the dome that pushed him over. That happened after.

“How many have you killed?” My voice was emotionless, like it belonged to someone else. I caught my finger tightening on the trigger and loosened it. But only slightly. Miles’ warning was still at the forefront of my mind.

The necromancer’s mouth tightened. “Pull the trigger if you have to. Otherwise, I’m injecting him now.” He turned back to the patient, raising the needle.

It’s adrenaline. 95, 96 percent chance. Whoever the User on the table is doesn’t matter. The necromancer doesn’t know him, either. It’s less about reducing harm, more about being able to tell himself he did everything he could and using that assertion to cope. Still, on some level he’s using this to evade the question, even though he knows he’ll have to answer eventually. Irrational. Emotional. Dangerous.

I watched as he plunged the needle into the man’s chest. The necromancer wasn’t new to the medical field. He didn’t panic, or even frown, as he went through the process of attempting to revive the man on the table.

”Miles is trying to reach you by speaking directly to the knife.” Talia’s mental voice held a touch of derision.

”Voice and text communication aren’t working?” I asked.

”Considering what just happened, he wanted to avoid disabling his feat if it meant giving the necromancer a chance to call for help.” Talia said.

”Reasonable. Shadow monster stop chasing?”

”For now. We’re pinned down in the north hallway. Miles found the lux in a storage unit. He wants to make sure you’re not in peril before he begins to extract it. Are you in peril?”

I closed my eyes, considering my next move carefully. If I brought Miles in on this, it was obvious what his vote would be. He’d made it clear. And it was probably the right call, I just wasn’t comfortable making it without more information. But letting him extract the lux solo was also a considerable risk.

”I’m fine for the moment. How much is there?” I asked.

”Twenty-five, give or take.”

I breathed out slowly. It was hard to say with the variable value, but that might be enough to fill the receptacle.

”Talia. Worst-case scenario, could you take him down?”

There was a hesitation before she answered. “If he betrays us and attempts to steal the lux for himself?”

”Yes.”

”I am… uncertain if I could neutralize him completely. He’s one of the most capable Users we’ve worked with and likely has many abilities yet to reveal. Transporting this much lux is awkward, however, and I’m reasonably certain if I acted at an ideal moment, I could do enough damage to ensure that he failed.”

”Don’t hesitate. If you get a bad vibe, or feel like there’s even the slightest chance he might inventory the knife? Hit him hard."

There was another long pause. ”You’re comfortable giving me this much autonomy on something so critical?”

”We’ve already been over this. I trust your judgment. Speak to him with suggestion, tell him I’m safe but trapped for the moment. Then tell him I said to get the lux and get out.”

”Very well. Be safe, Matthias.”

”You too.”

On some level, I registered that it was the first time Talia had used my name.

I returned my attention to the necromancer. He was bent over the hospital bed, hands gripping the railing hard enough that his weathered knuckles were white. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

“Quite the performance. Seeing as how your experimentation was the cause of his death in the first place,” I prodded, despite knowing from that none of this was an act.

“Eleven.” The necromancer whispered.

“Come again?”

“Benjamin Hudson, Abigail Wallace, Evan Robinson, Emma Wright, Ramon Weaver, Alan Copeland, Denzel Price, Oscar Davidson, Isabella Bates, Zoe Weber…” The necromancer extended a hand to the man on the table. “And Hayden Greer. The names of the eleven people I’ve killed. Only three of them were productive. The rest died in vain. Pointlessly.”

Didn’t hesitate or stumble once until he got to the end. He’s memorized their names. Guilt or self-flagellation. Probably both.

The necromancer looked me straight in the face, then reached up slowly. I tensed, relaxing only when his fingers clasped around his black-patterned tie and began to undo the knot, folding it gently and placing it on the counter. “A gift from my daughter. I’d rather leave it intact, if it’s all the same to you.”

Did he intend to fight? My instincts and title said no, but I’d been wrong before.

“Still think you’re getting out of this?”

The necromancer shook his head. “On the contrary. The people funding this operation will keep doing so, on a smaller scale. If you spare me, I can tell you beyond all certainty I’m not going to stop. I’m incapable of it.”

I cocked my head. “Because you enjoy it.”

“No.” Again, the refusal was as clear as it was definitive.

Self-hatred. Pure as driven snow.

A stony smile played across my lips. “You’re giving me as little information as possible on purpose. Because you don’t want me to empathize. You don’t want to get out of this. You’re in too deep, and a bolt to the head is your way out.”

“Why muddle what should be definitive?” He asked, unknowingly echoing my earlier sentiments. “By any and all definitions of the word, I’m a murderer. I have every intention of doing it again. Ending me would spare dozens, maybe hundreds. Pulling the trigger would make you a hero.”

I shrugged. “Potentially. But I don’t care about that. Being a hero. What I want is information. Intel on what you intended to do here, and as many details on the organization behind you as possible. Give me that, and maybe I’ll grant your request. What were you doing, here?”

The necromancer bit his lip. Something dangerous slipped into his expression. For one tense moment, I wondered if he might rush me. Try to force me to kill him.

Then the dangerous gleam faded. He sagged, and sat on the rolling stool next to the table. “It’s… a harvesting operation. Nothing more. I stop their hearts as painlessly as possible, then check them for cores. If there’s no core, I try to bring them back.”

“Hence the low bodycount,” I said. When he looked at me, horrified, I added, “relatively speaking. Why are the cores so important?”

The necromancer shifted uncomfortably. “From what I’ve been told, the other classes can kill monsters and gain significant experience from quests. It’s easy enough to accumulate power without coming into conflict with other Users.”

“Necro doesn’t work that way.”

“No.” He shook his head. “We have quests, but the rewards are limited. Almost all our experience is derived from manipulating and consuming cores.”

“So, what? You just decided, hey, I need more power, guess I’ll just kill people?”

A dark chuckle escaped from the necromancer’s lips. “Please. Everyone loves to poke fun of the Hippocratic oath, but there’s more than a few of us that take it seriously. I took one look at the skill tree and swore to never touch it.”

He’s dancing around the truth. Push harder.

I held out a hand to the body on the table. “Yet, here we are. Doesn’t look like it stuck.”

“You should really just kill me.” He leaned forward on the stool, his head down.

“I’m considering it. But first, you have to tell me why.”

His gaze was fixed on the floor. “I wasn’t the only one who became a User after the asteroid hit.”

The first puzzle piece fell into place, followed by the speculative ghost of a half-dozen others. I closed my eyes. “Your daughter did, too.”

That dark chuckle filled the room. It was a manic sound, filled with madness. “God, she was always too smart for her own good. She had all these ideas about how to profit from her ability. A few days after the meteor hit, they found us.”

“They?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you who they are, or we’re they’re at. They put every one of us—“

“—Under a geas.” I finished.

His dead eyes lit up, slightly. “You’ve encountered them before.”

“Tell me what happened,” I said, my stomach twisting.

The necromancer’s voice took on a broken monotone. “They were straightforward at first. But when my daughter couldn’t give them what they wanted, things took a turn. They took us into separate rooms. She tried to escape, and they killed her in the process.”

“Why would you work with someone who killed your daughter?”

Instead of responding, the necromancer reached towards his side. As didn’t give me a warning, I saw no reason to stop him. He withdrew a small pearlescent orb and held it out to me.

I reached out to take it, only to find his fingers locked around it, gaze still pointed at the ground.

“If that’s what I think it is, I’d never take it from you. Let me see it. Please.” My voice was gentler than before, even as anger boiled within me.

Fuck.

“That’s hers. My daughter’s. After… she died. They let me see the body. I was in shock, completely broken. Then someone came in to speak with me.” The way he said “someone,” seemed to indicate he knew and actively hated the person, but couldn’t speak the name. “He seemed genuinely apologetic. Maybe that’s a strange thing to say about a man who tortured you and your only family, but somehow, he did. He said it was an accident. That she’d tried to run, and the guard who killed her was no longer with the guild.” The necromancer sobbed once, then hardened, his eyes flaring with hatred. “I’d let it slip a while ago what I was. Maybe that makes me a coward, but I was so convinced that if I could just offer them something equally valuable as a merchant…”

“They’d take you instead.” I offered, filling in the rest of the blanks with damning clarity. The man he’d spoken to had to be the same gray-haired suit I’d negotiated with in the tunnel.

“I already gave him all the information I had about my class. At a low-level, it seemed practically useless. Summoning ghosts that faded away after minutes. Farthest I could see up the skill-tree, it led to eventually upgrading to reanimated bodies that were nothing more than shells. Everything after it was question marks. Which is uncommon, apparently. And this man claimed to have knowledge of what presided at the top of the tree.”

Gray-hair deserved a special place in hell.

“And what was that?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

The necromancer rested his chin on his hands. “True resurrection. The ability to fully restore a deceased User from their core. I was a fool. A desperate and grieving one, but a fool nonetheless. I realized too late that there was no way he could know that. But after making that connection, the idea itself was just as insidious. Even if he was lying, wouldn’t it make sense? That someone with a mastery of life and death could eventually fully restore a User? So… I kept going. And going. And now I’m here.”

I absorbed everything slowly. The necromancer had no way of knowing how drastically he’d just turned my world upside down. Still, I needed to be certain. One last piece to confirm the horrible theory in my head.

“What’s your daughter’s name?”