Raw and unedited for your (early) reading pleasure, an excerpt from Necromancy, Lost Library #5! Currently on preorder through Nook and Kobo, and soon through iBooks and Amazon.
***Snip begins***
What was that saying about cake and eating it? It had never made sense to Lizzie. Of course if you had cake, you’d want to eat it. It was cake.
But right now, she got it. Today, in this moment, it was crystal, freaking clear.
She’d made a trade.
Her special talents were to be applied to a particular problem, and in exchange, her boss Harrington would apply his special talents to her best friend Kenna’s problem.
At the time it had seemed reasonable. Okay…not reasonable, but it had been her and Kenna’s only option. Kenna’s mom Gwen—a truly badass and admirable lady—had been kidnapped. Harrington had agreed to exert what influence he could to resolve the situation.
And all she had to do was solve a little problem for the Inter-Pack policing Cooperative.
Since IPPC was her sometimes employer and she loved Gwen like a mother, there hadn’t been any debate at all. She’d said, “Yes.”
She’d done it willingly and without complaint.
“You sorry, bastard! Die. Die, you sonofabitch!” Her throat burned from screaming.
Maybe she should take it down a notch.
Nah. She was having a few regrets about that hastily struck deal, and screaming her freaking lungs out was a great tension reliever. Which reminded her of the other kind of tension releasing she wouldn’t be getting any time soon, because her fiancé was stuck in Texas. While she screamed bloody murder in a small room in the basement of an old house in Prague, John was kicking wolf butt and making sure the Pack minded their pack Ps and Qs.
She could be oversimplifying the job of Alpha, but she was also cranky. She hated wasps, and the nasty dead-and-alive-again creatures were currently dive-bombing her. “I am going to smear your innards across the wall, you flying menace!”
And this is where the cake and the eating of cake came in. She was realizing she wanted her cake (Harrington’s help) and the eating of it (a really easy, quickly-resolved IPPC job, preferably with John nearby to help.) An impossibility.
“Lizzie, yelling won’t help.” Pillar’s exasperated voice echoed in the barren chamber.
“It makes me feel better.” And eased her frustration ever so slightly. Lizzie knew that an easy job for IPPC didn’t exist—not when Harrington was involved—hence her frustration and the cake-eating imagery. Also, she was hungry. “Die, you flying little shits. Die!” Yelling was definitely helping.
“Honey, I think we can safely assume these things aren’t dying any time soon.” Pillar directed her light toward the latest victim of Lizzie’s rampage.
It had been a beetle, until she’d smashed it. Was still a beetle. A squashed zombie version of its former self, but a beetle nonetheless.
“We’ve squished them, flattened them, and beaten them.” Lizzie winced at the whiny turn her voice had taken. She cleared her throat, which made her it ache all the more, and said in a more normal voice, “They should be dead a few times over.”
“Will you finally fess up and agree that the zombie apocalypse is upon us?” Pilar asked.
The way she said “zombie apocalypse” in her precise and only slightly accented voice reminded Lizzie more of cute get-togethers with matching linens and scones than the end of the world as they knew it.
She flicked a desiccated, unidentifiable bug away with her toe and swatted away yet another fly. The thing only had one wing. How could it even fly? “The bug-zombie apocalypse. Bugpocalypse. It just didn’t seem like a thing.”
“It’s a thing.” Pillar swung her flashlight around the enclosed chamber, hitting on a number of flying insects and several of the crawling variety, all in various stages of decomposition—or regeneration, depending on one’s point of view.
“Yeah, you’ve convinced me. It’s a thing.” Lizzie flicked her flashlight beam along the lines marked on the wooden floors. They moved out in concentric circles from a point in the middle of the room. Each line represented the passage of six hours.
Why six? She didn’t know. What she did know was that bugpocalypse was spreading. That was the purpose of the circles, to track the spread of the necromantic magic. Someone—not Pillar, perhaps Harrington himself?—had come up with the fabulous idea of seeding the room with the corpses of dead insects. And no, they weren’t being murdered for that purpose. There were plenty of the naturally occurring variety lying about.
Even though they were bugs, it still seemed cruel. Or so Lizzie had thought before they’d started to crawl on her, fly into her hair, and generally make aggressive nuisances of themselves. Then it had become all about killing the little buggers.
A shiver crawled up her spine. She’d likely have nightmares about undead bugs for days.
Her beam traveled over the smallest circle and then further to the podium in the center of it. An old book rested on the flat surface. Black, leather bound, plain. Nothing special, other than its age and the magic it contained.
“Tell me who thought it was a good idea to poke around inside a book on necromancy?” Lizzie asked. She knew the answer, because who else could it be?
“Harrington approved it, but—and I know you won’t believe this—it wasn’t Harrington pushing for the work on that book. It was one of the transcribers.”
“Oh.” She pushed away the prick of guilt she felt. Harrington usually was the culprit when it came to increasing IPPC’s power.
“She was convinced there was no danger,” Pillar said, “and there wasn’t initially. She worked on it for several days without incident.”
“What changed?”
Pillar sighed. “Nothing that we know of. One moment she was unlocking some text, and the next we had bugs coming back to life. And before you ask, the text was some simple biographical data, not a ward-trap.”
Lizzie nodded. She’d worked with spelled books enough at this point to know that the record keeper working on the transcription would have felt the magical rush if she’d sprung a trap. “I’d like to talk to her. Can you set up an interview?”
“Not possible. That particular record keeper is taking a lengthy vacation, from which she will return to another posting.”
“Harrington’s doing?” And that was the second time she’d leaped to a negative conclusionabout Harrington. Kenna’s dislike of the man might be wearing off on her.
“More a requirement for her continued mental well-being. She wasn’t handling the situation very well.” Pillar clicked her flashlight off. “You ready to get out of here? This place makes my skin crawl, and I’m almost certain a bug will fly up my nose any second.”
“That, or we could get stung by a zombie wasp.” Lizzie held her flashlight under her chin. “Would that turn us into zombies?”
“Bite your tongue.”
Lizzie grinned at her friend and mentor. Bad as zombie bugs were, they’d distracted her from the more personal catastrophe that was currently unfolding. The grin slipped away as the full weight of Gwen’s kidnapping settled on her again. “Let’s get out of here. I’ve seen enough to be convinced, and I need to check on Kenna.”
“You don’t want to examine the book?” Pillar asked.
“And risk triggering an even worse event than bugpocalypse? No, thank you.” Lizzie stomach grumbled. “Pillar, how do you feel about cake?”
***End snip***
Keep an eye out for more from Necromancy! And if you haven’t given the Lost Library series a try yet, you can grab the first book in the series for free on most ebook retailers.
