The agent's long coat flaps in the nonexistent indoor breeze, the cold rain pounding a constant drum against the window, in time with his rapid heartbeat. He shouldn't be here.
His contact emerges from the pooling darkness, so terribly familiar. Their associate hovers close behind.
The dark circles under his narrowed eyes are hard won, the product of years of effort and dedication, permanent creases that will never buff out. A testament to many long and lonely hours hunched over a corner-desk, dissecting a corpse, and nursing a bottle. He didn't get where he is by being trusting.
"This wasn't the deal."
He is a damned good cop.
"We changed our minds."
But being a good cop is like being a snowball in Hell. They never last that long.
He can only squeeze one shot off before they're on him, expert chokehold around his neck, bringing him gently to the floor as his vision narrows and throat closes. He fumbles for his trinkets and relics, radio and gun, anything to get him out of one last jam, but an iron-shod boot steps on his hand, crushing it. He attempts to utter alien syllables, to usher in one final spell to bring them to their knees, but a meaty hand clocks him in the head, ending the foul curse.
He lets out a strangled, sputtering laugh, blood coating his teeth. "You fucking idiot. I know who you are. If you kill me, I swear I'll hunt you in the next life and bring you down to Hell with me."
A faint smile plays upon the cloaked figure's lips, as they lean over to whisper into his ear, and presses something searing against his skin. "Manus mortua non tenet."
There is a yawning emptiness inside him. A gnawing expanse of a void as an integral part of his being is torn from him like so much cheap fabric. He hears a scream. He thinks its his own.
He hears the faint breaking of glass and the whistling of wind, distant as if down an echoing tunnel. The last thing he feels is the rain on his face and a brief sense of weightlessness.
The necromancer is dead before he hits the ground. His badge lays in the gutter beside him, raindrop tears beading upon the golden Eye of Providence.
Three Portlands, Outside of Real Space, 10:13, 2016
It had been a calm January morning in the Three Portlands Police Precinct, and Officer Sinclair had intended it to stay that way, as was his preference. While sure, there were the prerequisite death-threats and muggings that come with being a cop in Three Portlands, the pay was good and the pension plan was better than most, more than making up for Sinclair's monthly glazier bill and his growing brick collection. Unfortunately, a guy got chucked out of a high-rise the night before, and a skeleton with a badge was currently looming over his desk about it, which made it difficult for the morning to stay calm.
The skeleton spoke again, somehow coaxing a voice out of a larynx that wasn't quite there. "FBI-UIU. Here to see the body."
While the UIU had jurisdiction over all felonies that took place within city limits, the morgue was still firmly in the hands of TPPD, due to a mixture of the typical anti-authoritarian rebelliousness and independence streak found in most Portlanders (reasonable) and a widespread belief that the UIU harvested organs from anahuman corpses in order to keep their Atlantean overlords in the highest levels of government youthful (unreasonable). As such, there was much calm discussion1 over the level of access TPPD is required to give UIU over the morgue. As the corpse in question belonged to a UIU agent, and the requesting agent was themselves a corpse,2 in this moment Officer Sinclair chose not to relitigate that calm discussion.
"Sure, sure. I'll just make sure they're ready for you downstairs." Sinclair picked up the phone and speed-dialed the coroner. The phone rang for what seemed an interminably long time. "You're from Irkalla, right? I know a buddy who has a great-aunt down there."
Those black eye-sockets bored into Sinclair's fleshy counterparts. If the UIU agent had lips Sinclair was sure he would have grimaced. "Illinois."
There was a moment of strangled silence — one could hear the garrote wire tighten —before the line to the coroner finally connected. There was a quick back-and-forth of muttering. "He's ready for you."
"Quinn. They're ready for us."
Special Agent Quinn Law, Federal Necromancer exhaled a mix of steam and smoke as she enjoyed the last bit of nicotine in the January chill before dropping the cigarette and stubbing it out with her boot. The phlanges in her right hand throbbed with a dull pain, a constant reminder that the hand wasn't the true original. Cloned flesh and bone didn't seem to always take right, and often ached when it shouldn't. Maybe it was due to an innate imposter syndrome, the hand knowing it was only a replacement, and probably worse than the original, too. Or maybe it was just the cold weather, Quinn wasn't sure. Stem cells were known to be temperamental at times, so perhaps it was both.
Quinn turned to face Cristobal holding the door open for her, the woman that got him killed in the first place. "Alright, let's see what they're up to now."
The buzzing of fluorescents came as a comfort to Quinn. The sights and sounds of a morgue meant that she was in her element, the sterile smell of antiseptic and the sweet smell of human rot alongside the harsh lights and the flat colors of the walls balanced and made a fruity bouquet for her senses, allowing her to focus, a special kind of blandness that made important details pop and become as clear as crystal. Her eyes fell upon the corpse, stripped bare and naked upon the wheeled table. She winced. The man was a fellow necromancer, the class above her in Quantico, but still. He had been a colleague, a fellow master of the dark arts, and now he was just bloody meat on the slab. Have to put it out of one's mind, the distinction between living and dead, friend and corpse. He's just an object now, he's just a piece of meat. Time to get to work.
"Special Agent Jacques Stretcher. French-Canadian-American. Ex-military, some light consulting work with a Pentagram taskforce by the looks of it. Was the lead necromancer for the Three Ports Field Office, aged forty-one- scratch that, forty-two as of yesterday."
Quinn snapped her blue gloves on and as a test waved her hand over Stretcher's body. Nothing. "Hell of a birthday present, being splattered over the sidewalk of Anderson Plaza. Terminal impact as the cause of death?"
Irregular Agent Cristobal Gonzalez flipped through the files, paper sliding over his bone-smooth fingertips. "Hardly. According to this his heart had stopped a couple minutes prior to the fall. Cold before he hit the ground."
Quinn gently lifted Stretcher's skull off the metal table, examining the blood-smeared backside, convex-turned concave from the force of kissing concrete at forty-nine feet per second. "Any indicators of foul play?"
"Well, being in Anderson Plaza, the window he went through was made of bullet-proof glass."
"Yeah, I'm seeing the ligature marks on his throat now. Smelling gunpowder and brimstone. Was he in a mage duel?"
"The office he was thrown from showed no signs of a struggle, barring the broken glass. No one on the street at the time reported hearing or seeing anything suspicious before the fall."
"How many bullets did he fire?"
"According to the report, his gun's magazine was only missing one bullet."
"Was a quick fight then. Someone took him by surprise. Stretcher was a good shot, but he was real shit at evocation, if I remember correctly."
Quinn gently placed the head down and examined the rest of the body. Stretcher sported the trademarks of a ritualist: inked sigils and wards covering his body, burnt fingertips from caustic catalysts and components, a softer body than was required for evocation work. This wasn't a man that shot lightning bolts out of his hands or engaged in lengthy psychic duels, this was a theoretician. He was one to have a plastic binder of prepped ritual magic, to have enchanted artifacts for every scenario filling his pockets, to take hours to make the most optimized spell circle. In all, Jacques was a typical necromancer, just like Quinn. She took a closer look at his chest.
"Did the autopsy say anything about a brand?"
Above the heart, what must have been a puckered pink in life was now dark gray against Stretcher's dead flesh. "Yeah, either immediately pre- or post-mortem. We think its a calling card, possibly paranatural. We'll know for sure if the killer strikes again."
"That's a comforting thought." Quinn stepped back. One more time, she waved her hand in the air above the body. Again, nothing. She concentrated and Opened her eyes, inspecting the body with true-sight. Not black, gray, or white. No sounds of colors, either, just an empty whispering darkness. "Huh. Well, I can't do ask him about it, there's no ghost."
Cristobal shifted, the shadows on his brow making it almost seem like he was squinting. "What do you mean? Psychopomp got to him first?"
The necromancer blinked away her Eye and breathed, false colors fading and wriggling ambient spirits fading from view as she dropped the true-sight. "Possible, but psychopomps and demons are messy eaters. There could be… leftovers. Shreds of spiritual residue and such. No, there is no spirit at all. It's empty in there, no remnant EVE, no personality matrix or imprint. Of course, being a necromancer he might have had prior engagements, a phylactery, Oneiroic wetware running a personal Tartarean Realm, maybe even a demonic pact, but… all of those would leave some traces behind, the tiniest bit of evidence. Here, it's like he wasn't even murdered at all. Natural causes."
"Exorcism, maybe? Someone took his ghost with them before they chucked him out the window?"
"That would be smart of them. Would explain the difference between his death and the fall. They were making sure he wouldn't squeal. Security footage?"
Cristobal's bones made a dull rattling sound as he shrugged. It's Anderson, was the commonly understood meaning, and went unspoken. "We're working on a warrant for it."
"Fingerprints, DNA, fibers, anything?"
"Nope. As clean as a whistle."
Quinn sighed, and massaged her temples with her wrist. "Any good news?"
There was a shuffling of papers as Cris opened a slim file. "Stretcher was one of the leads on an uptick of talking animal deaths in Jurassic District and on Deer Campus. He filed a preliminary report on it just two days ago."
"Let me guess. None of the animals had ghosts, either."
"No, they did. The report included a nekyia interview with a couple dead foxes. So couldn't be that."
Quinn's head panged with a sharp pinch, a reminder of her nicotine craving. God, she could go for a smoke. Someone murders a UIU agent, a necromancer of that, tosses them out a window, and there's no trace of spiritual turmoil? "The fact that he didn't produce a spirit is troubling in and of itself. He was a mage, they produce ghosts like Harvard produces sociopaths. Now he's just… meat. That's not normal for a wizard. They don't do death quietly."
Cristobal clicked his teeth together, lost in thought for a moment. "I mean, the meat still has memories in it, right? Nerve connections and things. Couldn't you just, I don't know, wake him up? Manually?"
Quinn went to speak, then paused. Cristobal was new to the world of the paranormal, just coming up on two years now, after his multiple deaths3 and quick induction into the UIU, but he was learning the ropes surprisingly quick. The fact he had to learn them at all was a point of shame for Quinn, so she quickly turned her mind to other matters, musing to herself. "Wouldn't exactly be your standard nekyia, but that could do. The freezer here is the entropy-manipulator type, so the nerve damage shouldn't be too terrible. It's only the back of his head that was severely injured, right? Short-term memory is stored in the pre-frontal cortex, so that should be fine…"
Quinn stripped the gloves from her hands and put them in the biohazard disposal bin. The work she had in mind required her not to wear gloves. "How much leeway do we have with his body?"
"He's an organ donor, if that's what you mean."
"Good enough for me. Put him back in the freezer while I work on this, wouldn't do to have him wake up with hypoxia."
Victor Franckenstein was not a necromancer. However, he was a scientist and occultist, and a damn good one at that. In the 19th century Franckenstein promulgated a new theory that shook the thaumaturgical community to its very foundations, called "recycling". Why go through all the difficult work of creating a Construct, or manufacturing a golem, or formulating an entire DNA strand, when evolution already did the QA testing for a product that you can just use for yourself and turn into something new? Of course, this version of recycling resulted in a few angry mobs at the time, and was eventually hijacked by the Nazis during the 7th Occult War, so it fell by the wayside for all but hobbyists,4 but the principle itself was sound.
The main issue was that the reanimation process tended to reset the brain back to factory settings. A combination of the chemicals injected into the body and the high voltage seared pre-existing nerve connection meant that the body brought back to life was tabula rasa, oftentimes just functioning off of base instincts. This meant an aspiring mad scientist had to lock their creation down for several months until they were able to teach it basic English. However, with new breakthroughs in science and medicine, Quinn was sure that it would work just fine this time. Hopefully.
"What did the SAC say?"
"'Are you insane?'"
"Yes, and what did he say after that?"
"He said 'fine, I'm not the one writing the report or informing his spouse.'"
"Works for me."
The fact that they had to avoid hypoxia and further nerve damage meant that their options were limited in terms of laboratory settings, so they had to settle for just commandeering the morgue, just adding more fuel for that calm discussion.
The flesh they had access to was in a rough state as-is, as the man had bounced after impact, shattering his pelvis, much of his spine, his skull, and caused severe internal hemorrhaging. His aorta had a large tear, and many of his organs had already been removed by the coroner, and he would also be blind due to the crushed optic nerve and visual cortex. Anything they create from Stretcher's body was not long for this world.
Quinn arranged some chemicals that she requisitioned from the crime lab on the floor and started mixing in a large bowl. "Outlets are 120 volt, yeah?"
"Where the hell did you get a male-male extension cord?"
She lit the bunsen burner and boiled the concoction. "People sell the darndest things in Three Portlands, don't they?"
"Bet the fire marshal is real happy about that."
The chemical compound started to glow virulently green. "The private fire services here love the business, it's job security."
"Doesn't this bring back memories of Peoria?"
Quinn extracted the fluid with a syringe, words in an alien script scribbled with felt pen on the side, and tried to find Stretcher's jugular. "Us on the floor in the middle of a morgue dissecting a humanoid? Yeah, I'm starting to see a pattern forming."
"Never knew morgues got so busy."
The necromancer simultaneously stabbed the neck of the corpse with the glowing syringe and the prongs of the electrical cord, the other end plugged into a nearby outlet. "People die every day. As Adam begotten, put breath in this stone!" Her Enochian is fingernails on chalkboard and steel on glass, her crooked hand motions cutting the air with profane symbols. <Zadzaczadlin gedotbar gigipah patralx!>
There was a buzz and a flickering of lights as 120 volts at 15 amps surged through the corpse of what was once Jacques Stretcher, the chemicals carving an electrolyte5 channel through the jugular for the electricity to flow: over the heart and around spinal cord, stimulated nerves and pulling muscles. Her words and symbology were root code for the brain-stem, her guttural phrases intoning the dark magic of reanimation and reawakening. Half-lyzed and decaying cells were knitted back together with magic and catalyst, undoing entropy and sparking electrical activity in nerves long dead. The diaphragm of the meat that once was Stretcher spasmed and the larynx made unnatural sounds and its eyes — blind and severed from the brain — rolled.
Cristobal took a step back. "First day back in Portlands, and you're reanimating the guy you replaced."
"Yeah, well I have a good reason for it. God the state he's in… if I got here earlier I could have done more."
"How was the move?" Cristobal was clearly just trying to fill the dead air with questions, to pointedly ignore the corpse writhing on the table. Quinn indulged him.
"Had to move Eva and Violet with me, can't afford two apartments."
"Oh, yeah? How are they?"
"They're fine. How are you and yours?"
Cristobal looked away, looked away from Quinn and the seizing corpse. "We are managing." The witch-light deep in the recesses of his eyes seemed to flicker and the corpse-wax holding his bones together seemed to harden.
There was a sharp intake of ragged breath, and the moaning of the wind sounded through the morgue. "M-ma-manussss…"
Quinn looked down at her creation, struggling to be reborn. "It's alive."
"Man-an-manuss…"
"Shit, it's alive."
The corpse's muscles clenched and heart beat and brain buzzed and eyes widened, the lights were on but nobody was home, patient zero of the philosophical zombie apocalypse, shrieking through shattered teeth and spine-pierced vocal cords. "MANUS MORTUA NON TENET!"
"Oh God, restrain it restrain it restrain it!"
Too late, the Stretcher-creature choked on green blood and fell from the slab, screaming the whole way down, writhing as its broken pelvis and legs hit the floor. Its broken spine was misshappen and twisted, prevented it from laying flat on its back. The plug popped out sparking and bloody. "MANUS MORTUA NON TENET! MANUS MORTUA NON TENET!"
"Sir, I am with the UIU, please sir calm down! We would like to talk-"
The blind abomination found the wall with grasping, crooked hands and pulled itself close, dug its long fingernails into drywall and pounded its cracked skull against it, leaving bloody craters in its wake. MORTUA NON TENET!"
"Fuck, we need to-"
"Grab its shoulders, grab its shoulders-"
The Stretcher-creature snapped at a questing hand with its flapping jaw, teeth jagged and skewed. "MORTUI MORI POSSUNT! MANUS MORTUA NON TENET!"
It let out a deafening screech, then, one that pierced eardrums and broke glass. Cristobal was unmoved and sat on top of the Stretcher-creature, holding it down. His bones were stained with red, spattered blood. There was a cavalcade of footsteps as several 3PPD officers burst into the office, staring at the mess of the morgue and the abomination they've created.
Quinn stood and took charge, hooking a thumb at the reanimated Stretcher-creature behind and beneath her. "Call in some back up, we need to take him into custody."
Quinn and Cristobal stood outside the 3PPD precinct, outside the morgue from which they were now banned. They watched as the Stretcher-creature, sedated and bound, was gently placed in a UIU rickshaw, windows tinted black. People passing on the street didn't even spare a glance at the horror show, just another ghoul taken in by the feds. Quinn puffed on her cigarette, her right hand twitching and throbbing. "That didn't go like I hoped."
Cristobal didn't rise to take the bait, daubing away the blood on his cheekbone with a handkerchief. "Was that Latin he was speaking back there? 'Mortus,' 'mortis,' that's 'death,' right? or 'dead?'"
Quinn slowly exhaled, the cold air chilling her mouth. "Manus mortua non tenet, Mortui mori possunt. 'The hands of the dead do not control us, for even the dead may die.'"
"You know what that means?"
Quinn Law, Federal Necromancer, takes a long drag of her cigarette.
"Not a damn clue."
Mortmains, a spin-off collective from the radical anti-supernatural SAPPHIRE terrorist organization, which focuses on the necromantic arts. Religious radicals, anti-thiests,
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