Kiss of the Necromancer (Memento Mori 1)

15

She woke up with a start.

Jerking upright, she pulled in a hiss through her nose. Her sheets were pooled around her nightgown. Waiting, her heart pounding, she tried to remember what had woken her.

And then came the sound again.

Screaming.

Fear replaced her adrenaline as she stood from the bed, her nightgown reaching to her ankles. Pulling on her housecoat, she padded out the door, her hands trembling. Dr. Raithe’s door was thrown wide open.

“Doctor?” she whispered through the door, but he wasn’t inside. Then came the sound again. A man’s scream.

Dread welled inside her, tangling with her fear as she crept down the hall and to the main stairwell. As she approached, she could see furniture tipped over. The front door was open, but the doorknob was missing—a perfect round hole where it should have been.

There was blood on the carpet. The scream came again. She could hear voices, gruff and hard. The sound of an impact—like a fist meeting flesh. She should run out the door. She should flee and save herself.

But if it was the doctor who was being hurt…he had saved her from bedlam. From the endless hours of torture that threatened to ruin what little she had left of her mind. It was the least she could do to try to help him in return.

She would fail.

But she had to try.

As she reached the bottom of the stairs, she scooped up a heavy silver candlestick from a table and inched her way down the hall, her bare feet sinking into the thick carpet runner.

It was in the main parlor that she found the source of the screams. Her heart lodged in her throat. Her fear was confirmed.

There, tied to a chair in the center of the room, was the doctor, and he wasn’t alone. Two men stood to either side, dressed in the black garb of priests. One held up a thick, gilt book in his hands, and was speaking quietly in Latin. He gestured in the air in front of him, a rosary hanging from his fingers. The second man clutched a long, dangerous knife that dripped blood onto the carpet beneath him.

Gideon’s head was tilted back, a red welt forming on his chin where one of the men must have punched him. His shirt was ripped open, and his chest was covered in blood. Too much blood. It pooled around his feet. He should by all accounts be dead—not grinning in defiance up at the second man.

Silver eyes flicked to her, and his defiance faltered for a second, switching to fear before he hid it quickly behind a mask of pain. “You should be running,” he said to the man with the Bible, who still chanted a Latin incantation. “Your order has overstepped.”

“Be silent, monster.” The second man dug a knife deep into Gideon’s chest and began to cut upward. Gideon screamed in pain as more blood gushed from the wound. He growled and dropped his head, thrashing against the restraints as the man with the knife cut deeper and deeper.

Like he was after something.

Marguerite put her hand over her mouth in horror. She didn’t know if she wished to scream or faint. Or be ill.

Gideon lifted his head just enough to look at her, his gaze hidden from the others under his hair. “You should be running. You should be hiding. It will take much more than this to kill me. I will find you. This pain is only temporary.”

He was talking to her, not to them. She swallowed thickly, nodded to him, and turned from the scene. It wasn’t until she had found a dark corner of the attic to wedge herself, as small as possible against the rafters, her knees tucked up to her chin, that she realized she was crying. There was a window next to her where she could see the street below. A carriage was waiting for them, the horses impatiently stomping their feet, irritated to be out at such a late hour.

She could also escape out the window and onto the roof if she needed to. She hoped she wouldn’t—the steep pitch of the slate tiles would be slippery. But falling to her death might be a better way to die than at the hands of the murderous priests below.

She shuddered as an unwelcome memory washed over her—the image of falling from a cliff, the rocks below waiting with cruel and outstretched arms. “Not now,” she hissed at herself between her teeth, smacking the heel of her hand into her temple. “Not now…”

The minutes ticked on like years. She couldn’t hear anything of what was happening below. But after what seemed like an eternity, the two men left the house and climbed into the carriage. One was carrying something in a jar. But Gideon was not with them.

Was he dead?

No one could survive what she saw happen. It was impossible. Tears flowed down her cheeks, unchecked and renewed, as she realized what she would inevitably have to do. Tend to his corpse and alert the authorities. They would not believe two strange men in the garb of priests stole into his home in the night and murdered him.

She was a lunatic. She would be labeled as the culprit without question. She would hang from a noose in the courtyard of the jail within a month. But he had saved her from the torture of the institutions. She owed him her life.

It was only right that she would die with him.

The door to the attic swung open. She jolted in fear. Was there a third man? It was possible—she had only seen the two, but she certainly had not searched the house.