"If I have to sit through one more meeting, I'll die," I told Edmond, and everybody laughed except the office manager. But I didn't die. It was Edmond who died; of all the nice things he'd done for me, that was the one I appreciated.

I didn't know what it was at first, just that something breathed a wave of strength into me. I felt happy, giddy, almost manic, and when I looked around the table Edmond's slumped figure shone to me the way he never had when he was alive. As I watched, the sparkles went away; the man next to me turned towards me, looked where I was looking.

"My God!" he said. "Edmond -- call the ambulance, Elaine. Get a sorcerer." I did, but I knew it was too late. Edmond had left the meeting.

I'd known I had a talent ever since the tests the year before, in my senior year of school; I'd been playing around with witchcraft and enchantment, but light magic had never given me this kind of rush.

***

I took my license through the College of Sorcery at the Royal Academy, and I was a free-lance Necromancer by the year I was twenty-five, part-time Crown Prosecutor's Assistant. I liked funky keyboard, music with a beat. I liked smoky nightclubs and making my own money on my own schedule; I wore stockings of real silk and made them mend themselves under the table whenever a moth died in the candleflame, and danced them into holes again when the lights got low and the music hot. I swung with high rollers in low joints. I was a career girl.

Maybe midnight, the CP's office would call me at one of the bars. All the waiters knew to bring the phone right out to the table where everyone could see me take the call. A floater, they'd say, or a body in some back alley. I was cool. Got to go, boys; just one more whiskey, down like medicine. The boys get quiet, except one or two rowdies -- hey honey, take me along, whatta way to go -- and then a moth flies into the flame and they all shut down, hear the sizzle.

Coroner's basement is white and steel, but dark all the same. He keeps a cage of rats down there. Take out the bloodstones, hold them over the cage to see which one sings for its supper. Pull out the rat, kill it with one quick whirl onto the table-edge. The bloodstone fills up with you and you can feel your power pushing at the port it makes, eager to get out of you and work magic on the world.

Just looking at the body is like waiting for sex, but don't touch it now. No matter how good you feel now, running the dead body and your own can kill you -- you have to wait, to draw the pentacle that keeps out the other things that'll want the body once they see it move. You have to recite the charms and sprinkle the powders. You have to light the hand of glory and burn the mandrake root over it, the plant that can give its own motion to the body as it twists and squeals, and then you can touch.

You take hold of the real world when you touch a body; put everything out of your mind except what you feel under your hands, because this is as close to touching the truth as you'll ever get. It opens its eyes, it looks at you without judging. It doesn't size you up, scope you out, plan how to manage you. You can put everything you have into a body. Let all the guards down, let the power flow out of you as easy as it came in; the eyes see what you really are but they don't care. The ears hear your questions and another dead hooker gives her testimony, so much better than a live woman's, protecting nobody.

What I liked was taking bodies into court. The defendant's face when he sees her, cleaned up dead, when he hears the voice without outrage or fear. The one that was supposed to feel the hurts and burns doesn't cry now, looks at him with nothing in her eyes. That's what I like to see, when they get small and know they're the only ones left who care about their rage and fever. I look at them cold, make sure they see me turn away.

***

I knew it was trouble when the boys went quiet on me in spring-- one, two bars in a row. "Lookin' for you," was the mutter, backing away from the table. Looking where? Every club on my list, and me following behind looking for him, afraid of nothing except that empty table. Smoky in the quietest bar, slow music, not in any back room or booth but at the bar itself, polished wood and crystal all around him.

He was a sexy man, Cleophilus Eleuthra. Oh, a sexy man, a single man, a rich man, he knew how to live, though the rumors about him were bad. But the rumors about me were bad, as well.