Kiss of the Necromancer (Memento Mori 1)

“Not always. And when he does, it’s…not to be cruel. It’s a mercy. I don’t know how to describe it.” She stared down at the unopened bag of cookies in her lap. “In each of the memories where I die, it’s like something terrible is wrong. Something I would do anything to make go away. And then he makes it go away. The only way I think he knows how.”

Reaching out, she picked up her Manhattan and downed it with a cough. She held up the empty glass to a stewardess. “If you don’t mind.”

She was shaking. She had never come out and said that before. She knew it—somewhere, deep down inside, she knew why Gideon had ended her life all those times. Because sometimes death was the better alternative to living.

Sometimes murder wasn’t wrong.

“I’m so sorry, Marguerite.” Rinaldo leaned back in his chair with a deep, heavy sigh. “Do you know what it is that drives you to that?”

“No. No clue. I don’t know how he’s involved or why.” She opened the bag of cookies in her lap, crinkling the plastic.

Something rustled in her hood, squirming around at the sound. Her eyes went wide. Oh, shit! Algernon!

Ally sat back, alarmed by her sudden look of shock. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong—just—please—uh—don’t—freak out—or shoot him—” She reached for the undead rat as it poked his head out of her hoodie, scrambling onto her shoulder and sticking his bony nose and two whiskers out of her hair to sniff.

She caught the rat in both hands and cupped him into her lap, hiding him against her hoodie. The rat wriggled and reached a bony hand through the gap in her fingers toward the open bag of cookies. He let out a squeak as he did.

“Oh, my.” Ally blinked. “Is that…rat…dead?”

“He’s my friend.” She insisted. “He’s harmless. And Gideon can track me anyway, so it doesn’t matter, and he’s—”

“Stop, stop.” Ally waved her hands with a chuckle. “It’s all right. You don’t need to hide him. At least not here on the plane. When we land, you might want to put him in something with a zipper, however. I’m not sure how the rest of the Order might take to him. But we’re all right here. And the stewardesses have certainly seen weirder, flying with us.”

Maggie relaxed her hands and let Algernon reach into the bag of mini-cookies and pull one out. He shoved it into his face, breaking it into two pieces to chew it down. The two pieces immediately fell out of the hole in his desiccated stomach. He picked them up, entirely unfazed by the uselessness of the action, and repeated it.

The cookies fell out of him again, this time in just slightly more broken up pieces.

Maggie let out a long sigh as she looked down at the rat as he blissfully ate and re-ate the cookies. It was both cute and exceedingly uncomfortable to watch. This probably means I have a half-chewed French fry in my hood. “My life is fucked up.”

Ally chuckled. “Yours isn’t the only one.”

When she looked up at the blonde sister, she jerked in surprise. The woman’s eyes had changed. They were…black. Entirely black, from lid to lid, with red irises. “Holy sh—”

The other woman blinked, and as she did, her eyes had returned to normal. “Not holy, I’m afraid. The other direction is where I call home.”

“You’re a—” She shook her head then pointed dumbly at the cross the woman wore. “But—you’re a—”

Ally sat back with a shrug and glanced over the table at Rinaldo. “Everybody’s always so caught up on the church thing. Never surprised that a demon is in a wheelchair.”

Rinaldo shook his head. “You really need to be more careful, Ally. Flashing your kinship like that is going to give someone a heart attack someday.”

“I wanted to show her that we can be trusted.” Ally argued back.

“You really think she’d trust a demon over a priest?” He rolled his eyes. “She’s cynical, but she’s not that bad.”

“No, but I think she’d trust someone else in a precarious position like hers. I wanted to show her she wasn’t alone.”

“Wait. Whoa. What?” Maggie waved her hands in the air in front of her. “Stop, stop, stop. Everybody stop. First—demons are real?”

“And so is much more than that. Vampires, werewolves, and weirder.” Rinaldo sighed, still disappointed. “Ally.”

“I trust her. Don’t you?” The apparently-secretly-a-demoness folded her arms across her chest. When he didn’t immediately answer, it was her turn to be disappointed. “Really, Rin?”

“Stop!” Maggie shouted. She petted Algernon, who was still contentedly turning a mini cookie into crumbs. “Who do you two really work for, then?”

“The Vatican.”