Total pages in book: 142
Estimated words: 134898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 674(@200wpm)___ 540(@250wpm)___ 450(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 134898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 674(@200wpm)___ 540(@250wpm)___ 450(@300wpm)
“But then when I used a dowsing rod again, it led me to another dead person, and I worried that I was doing something wrong.” She paces faster, as if moving quickly can somehow straighten her thoughts. “And then I started to hear them.”
“Hear who?”
“The dead.” She wrings her hands again, staring at the floor as she paces. “At first I thought I was imagining things, that the voices that whispered whenever I passed the graveyard were in my mind. That I was imagining someone calling my name when I was cleaning, only to find out that they’d died yesterday.”
Gwenna turns and faces me.
“A few weeks before recruitment day, I found a dead man in the alley. Or rather…I didn’t find him. He led me to him. I heard him talking. He was frantic. Nothing he said made sense, but he was babbling on and on, and I could hear him no matter where I went in the building, but I couldn’t find him inside. I concentrated, and I got an image of the alley behind the house, where the well was located. I followed the voice and I found…the body. A young man. A repeater.” She bites her lip. “That was the first body.”
“First body,” I echo, not sure what to think of this barrage of information.
She twists her hands frantically and pauses in her pacing to gaze at me. “The second body was the day I pretended to be Sarya.”
I inhale sharply.
“My mother had always said that if you were in pain from a burn on the hand, you should hit your knee with a wooden spoon. It sounds silly, but it distracts you from the other pain. And when I was cleaning windows in the hospital, this dead man kept babbling at me and making my skin crawl. I knew he was in the alley, but I also knew I couldn’t say anything. How would that look if I just up and kept pointing out men with their throats cut? They’d suspect me. So I tried to work through it, to no avail. I told myself I needed a distraction.”
I rub my mouth. “And so you fucked me?”
“Sex is wonderfully distracting,” Gwenna says in a wistful tone. “And it helped me focus enough that I could finish work. And you were nice and attractive, and I thought, What harm could it do? And I had fun. So aye, I fucked you to distract myself and then ran away as fast as I could to escape the dead man’s thoughts. That’s how I knew about the artifact in the tunnel. The dead pointed me there. And that’s how I felt…Hemmen.”
Her hand goes to her throat, and she rubs it.
“So that’s everything,” she says in a faint voice. “Sparrow did some research, and she says she thinks I’m what was called a necromancer. They were mancers that spoke to the dead.”
Her gaze rests on me, and it’s obvious she’s waiting for me to react.
I rub my muzzle, thinking. I don’t know what to make of the story she’s just told me. “You mean to tell me that you’ve been feeling the dead talking to you? That’s your secret?” When she nods, I add, “And that’s why you wanted me to touch you down in the tunnels?”
“I needed a distraction. There’s so many dead down there, it gets overwhelming.” She hugs her arms around herself.
“And seducing me is your best way to get distracted,” I say flatly.
Gwenna flinches. “You don’t believe me.”
“I just wonder at the convenience of it all.”
“Oh yes, highly convenient,” she says sarcastically. “Let me panic every time I step into the Everbelow, that’ll really advance my career as an artificer. Oh, and while I’m at it, why don’t I find the most fertile bull I can and demand that he have sex with me. That’ll sure show him.”
My mouth twitches despite myself. “Excellent point.”
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe I just mucking like you, you bloody idiot?”
I smile even broader. “Maybe you do. Maybe it makes us both fools.”
“So do you believe me now?” Her expression is worried but hopeful. “Or do you really think I’m some murdering mastermind that could truly have had Hemmen killed?”
“I don’t know what to think. Is there any way to prove what you’re claiming?”
She throws her hands up, exasperated. “Want to murder someone and have me quiz them?”
I think of poor, unfortunate Hemmen, dead in the alley. “There’s been enough death, I think.”
“On that, we both agree.” Her face crumples. She moves to the table and sits at one of the chairs, covering her face with her hands. “Just…tell me what you’re going to do with me, all right? All I ask is that if I’m killed for being a mancer, make it quick.”
She’s serious. She truly thinks that she’s going to be killed for claiming to be a mancer of some kind. One that talks to the dead. I eye her small, sad form as she sits at the table, and mentally go through all the things she’s told me.