"Are you okay?" Kieran asked.

"No," I said, honestly. "Eolande is up," I felt a tug on the strand that bound her to me. Apparently the connection went both ways. "And she's coming."

"Maybe you should have stayed outside," the professor said to Kieran.

"Too late now," he grimaced.

"It'll be okay," I said, squaring my shoulders. "I'll just go in and give my orders," before she kills me, I finished in my head. There was no way I was saying that out loud. Bad for morale and all that tripe. Mostly, I just didn't want to face the thought and saying it would bring it into focus. It's always easier to ignore things that go unsaid. Easier to pretend they aren't real.

"Before she tries to strangle you again," the professor said.

"Yeah," I gritted my teeth. "Thanks."

"We're right here," Kieran said, standing behind me, "if you need us."

"Thanks," I said it genuinely the second time. "Let's get on with this." Deep breath. Shoulders squared. Ethereal threads binding the dead to me in place. I marched towards the centre of the graveyard. Back to the hill top. Back to Eolande's grave. On the bright side, things couldn't possibly get any worse. Could they?

As soon as the thought crossed my mind, I regretted it. You know how in movies, whenever a person says that things can't get any worse they always do? I was really hoping that that was just a lame cinematic cliché.

I came across a dead man, wandering around near a crypt.

"Hi there," I said, trying to sound cheerful.

"Hi," he said, smiling at me. It was the kind of uncertain smile you give when you're hoping someone is going to explain that something really bad isn't actually happening. Hopeful and scared, all in the same brief twitch of muscle. "Where are we?" he asked.

"Um," I glanced at the crypt. I hated it when people didn't get that they were dead.

"Are you sure he's..." I watched Kieran visibly struggle to find the right words. Eventually he settled on, "one of them?"

I looked back at the man outside the crypt. I felt the thin streak of power between us, so I knew he wasn't one of the living. But you wouldn't be able to tell that just by looking. He wasn't half decayed, or walking around like some mindless brain eating zombie. Real zombies just weren't like that. I really hated Hollywood sometimes.

"Yeah," I said. "You should go back," I told the man, "you know, to where you've come from."

"That's it?" the professor asked, clearly disappointed. "Where's the ceremony?"

"What do you want me to do?" I asked. "Throw holy water on him?"

"I'm sorry," the dead man said, politely, "but I'm not exactly sure where I come from, you see? I've been walking around in circles, trying to figure it out, but..." he shrugged, lamely. "I don't suppose you know where I'm supposed to be?"

I shook my head.

"Maybe, if you tell us your name," Kieran said, "we could find where you should be."

"Okay," the dead man said. He opened his mouth to answer but no sound came out. He tried again, to no avail. He tilted his head, puzzled, and looked at me. "I'm afraid I cannot remember it right now." He ran his fingers through his hair. "I'm sure I'll think of it in a moment." He frowned, as though that would make him think of it sooner. "Just give me a moment."

I was getting a headache. One of those really bad ones that start as a throbbing in the temples before mutating into a pounding sensation behind the eyes. Like someone's throwing a rave in your skull but they forgot to invite you, or never liked you to begin with. That made more sense.

"What am I going to do?" I asked, rubbing my forehead. I wasn't really expecting an answer. The more I thought of it though, the more I realized how badly I needed one. I repeated the question, looking at the professor this time. I enunciated each word, carefully. "What am I going to do?"

I stood in the darkness, in a foreign land, surrounded by the reanimated dead, with two people who weren't human and who I'd only known for a few hours, with a zombie faerie princess who wanted to murder me coming ever closer, with thousands of the dead needing me to put them back, and no clue how I was going to do it. It suddenly seemed too much for me.

I just wanted it to be over.

"How much do you care about your dead?" I asked.

"Why?"

"I was just wondering if it would be a massive faux pas to let them drop where they stand."

"You mean like you did with," Kieran pulled a face, "my mother?" I nodded. "That," he said, slowly, thoughtfully, "could be messy." Of all the words I was expecting him to choose, that was the least likely. Actually, messy hadn't even made it to the shortlist. Horrible, unthinkable, inhumane, maybe even disgusting.

"It would be inadvisable," the professor said. "They'd still need to be put back in their graves, right?"

"Yeah," I remembered stumbling over Eolande's bones.

"That could be difficult," Kieran said, "without any distinguishing features."

"Not to mention traumatic," the professor said, "for whoever has to clean up."

"I'm sorry," the dead man interrupted, "I'm not entirely sure what's going on here, but it kind of sounds like you're talking about killing a lot of people, yeah?" he frowned at us. "And you're biggest concern is who's going to clean up?" He gave me a look which felt like it translated as 'Bad necromancer,' but, since he seemed to think we were murderers rather than just trying to put things right, it probably meant something more like, 'Bad assassins. Aren't you house broken? Clean up your own mess.'

If my head didn't hurt so much, I might have laughed. Then again, given the situation, I probably wouldn't have. I rubbed my eyes. They felt dry and grainy.

"I really don't know what else to do," I said, feeling a note of hysteria steal into my voice. "I'm so tired."

Part of me didn't want to admit how worn out I was. You weren't supposed to break down in the middle of things. You were supposed to be strong and reliable. You were supposed to keep going until you'd got the job done. It didn't matter afterwards, if you broke down. So long as you got the assignment in on time, passed a test, got your license.

It wasn't supposed to matter how hard things were at the time. How much it hurt to be left alone... I'd been telling myself that for years. It was okay that my parents left me, that I wasn't like everyone else, it was okay; I could still function.

I remember thinking that if learnt how to control the metaphysical stuff, my parents would want me back. That if I could pretend to be normal, I could be loved. I think a part of me was still holding out for that. A small part, a tiny, hidden, buried to the core part of me. Even when my parents died, I held on to that hope. Just keep trying, eventually, you'll get things under control.

I guess I thought that if I got a handle on things, I would get my childhood back somehow, that I'd be protected, cared for. If I could just be strong enough, I could be normal and then I wouldn't have to be strong anymore.

I'd been waiting, all my life, to get to the point where it would be safe for me to give in. Now, probably the most dangerous time in my life, I realized it was never going to happen. It was all on me. There was never going to come a time when I could give in, lie down, and have someone else take care of me. So, why should I have to deal with other people's problems, on top of my own?

"I didn't cause this mess," I reminded the professor.

"I don't know what you think I can do," he said.

I stared at him, suddenly hating him more than I'd ever hated anyone in my life. It just wasn't fair. I didn't care how childish that sounded; it wasn't fair and the professor was not doing enough. He'd screwed this whole thing up and I shouldn't have to fix things for him.

I lunged at him, putting my hands out to shove him to the ground. I didn't care that he was old, or that he should have been a mythical being, I wanted to inflict real, physical pain on him. I had a feeling that it would, in some small way, make up for the pain inside me. My hands slammed into his chest. Then something else slammed into my back and we went down.

I landed, hard, on top of the professor. I tried to push myself up, but whatever had landed on my back wasn't letting me go. I felt long, slender legs wrap around my hips and thin fingers clasp around my neck. The professor looked up in horror.

"Kieran," he screamed, and, for a second I thought he was screaming at the person strangling me. I thought that it was Kieran's hands wrapped around my neck, but then he was in front of me and he was trying to pry the fingers apart.

I heard a woman's laugh, right next to my ear. It was Eolande, it had to be. Kieran's eyes were wide and panic-stricken as he tried to drag his demonic mother off me. I didn't wait to see if he had the strength to save me. I didn't wait for anything. I reached into the center of my being, felt the ethereal threads that bound the dead to me, and did exactly what I did before.

I yanked on them. I felt that piece of me which was coiled up in every dead thing in the cemetery, and I ripped it out of them. Eolande collapsed on top of me. Her body broke, falling around the professor and me. I stood up, slowly, wiping at the residue that Eolande's decayed body had coated me in.

I looked down at the professor, lying on the ground, with Kieran kneeling above him. Kieran was still holding one of Eolande's fingers. He dropped it, hastily and it bounced off the professor's forehead.

"You," I said, pointing down at the professor. "You can clean this up."

"I don't have any powers over the dead," the professor whined.

"Don't worry about that," I snapped. "I'm not asking you to do anything metaphysical. I've handled that mess."

"You mean?" Kieran asked. I glanced at where the polite dead man had been standing. He was coiled on the ground now.

"I thought we decided not to do that," the professor said.

"No," I practically spat the word at him. "You. You decided I wouldn't do that. Just like you decided that I needed your help with Eolande. Just like you smashed my shields and brought all of these people out of their graves."

"It was your power that did that," he argued.

I felt my eyes narrow, glaring down at him. He didn't seem to understand the sheer amount of disdain I had for him at the moment. Kieran, at least, moved back, out of my way, distancing himself from the professor.

"My power let them come back," I said, "but you're the one who dragged my energies out of my control and scattered them across the graveyard. You did that, not me. As far as I can see," and I looked around the cemetery, literally checking as far as I could see. Scanning the mounds of flesh, the tombstones, the statues and the crypts, really taking in the distance covered by this... I didn't know what else to call it; "this mess, is all on you."

"But your power -" I cut the professor off, mid-sentence.

"My power isn't here anymore. You can clean up whenever you're ready," and I started walking towards the exit, where I'd left Jack.

Kieran caught up with me before I hit the edge of the circle.

"Wasn't that a bit harsh?" he asked. I shot him a glare. He held his hands up, palm facing me, the same way people do on TV to show that they're unarmed.

"This whole night has been harsh," I said, stopping near the edge of the cemetery.

"I'm sorry," he said, his voice gentle in suddenly still and quiet night. I suppose it's hard to feel the silence of a night when you're yelling into it.

"It's not your fault," I tried to shrug it off. I think that sympathy would have broken me completely right then. I needed to hang on to my anger. I needed to wrap it around me, tight. I needed to dive into it and coat myself in anger. My anger had to be like Teflon, right then.

I couldn't handle anything more building up on me.

"But it is," Kieran ducked his head, to look me in the eye. "I'm the one who asked Jack about a necromancer."

"I know," I said. I walked over to the nearest tombstone and sat down, leaning my back against it. I wouldn't have done it under normal circumstances, but I was so incredibly tired, I just couldn't stand up any longer. Plus, I figured it didn't count as disrespect since there wasn't anybody underneath it.

"You know?" Kieran asked, joining me.

"Yeah," I pulled my knees up to my chest and rested my arms across them. "The professor told me."

"We really didn't know you were so young," Kieran frowned. "Jack said you had your own house."

I nodded. "My parents died."

"I'm sorry," Kieran said.

"Don't be," I said, "my mother still lives there."

"Huh?"

"Necromancer, remember?" I raised my hand. "Her ghost refuses to leave."

"That must be," he paused, searching for the right word, "difficult."

"She's not that bad," I said, glancing back in the direction of his mother's corpse.

"She wasn't always like that," he said. "Murderous, I mean. She was always power hungry."

Kieran's eyes seemed to grow even darker, as he spoke, so it was like looking into the darkest of all possible nights when I glanced at his eyes.

"I used to think that there was some kind of mistake. Like maybe Zephan was actually her son and I was just," he shrugged, "someone else."

"She looked like you," I said. His head snapped up, to look at me. "I mean, when she wasn't trying to kill me."

"You seem pretty calm about that," Kieran said.

"Only because I'm in shock," I said, only realizing the truth of that statement after I said it. A cold chill stole up my spine and I shivered. Kieran put his arm around me, awkwardly. I huddled into the warmth of his body. It felt so good to be held. So warm. I rested my head against his shoulder and sighed.

Tears pricked at the back of my eyes. I turned my face further against him, burying it into the shallow curve of his chest, pressing my face into the warm softness of his silk shirt. I didn't want him to see if the tears started falling. He started rubbing his thumb up and down my arm, caressing me through my shirt in slow, gentle circles.

"What do you think Professor Vonnegut's doing?" Kieran asked.

"I don't care," I whispered, breathing in the warm, masculine scent of him. He smelled like old leather and sandalwood, and something else that I wasn't entirely sure I'd smelled before but was really good. It was nice in a kind of comforting way, like eating freshly baked cookies with a cold glass of milk was good.

"We should probably go back to the castle."

"Yeah," I agreed, but didn't move. In my defense, neither did he. We just sat together in the darkened cemetery for a while, leaning into each other's warmth. I didn't feel like crying so much anymore, so that was a good sign, but I still didn't think I was capable of peeling myself away from Kieran's body.

I felt him lean into me. His breath tickled across the back of my neck.

I had a sudden dizzying desire to turn my head up to his and kiss him. I imagined our lips merging, the taste of his breath across the back of my tongue as I breathed into him. I wanted to feel the softness of his skin pressed against mine. I imagined his gentle heat infusing me with the same unique comfort his hand gave my arm.

I wanted more. I wanted all of him.

I wanted to breathe him in, to drink him down.

I didn't.

But sometimes, looking back, I wonder if it would have changed anything. If I had turned, if I had pressed my lips to his, would things have ended differently. Instead of giving birth to bloodshed and destruction, could I have nurtured passion? Could I have been loved? I wonder if, with the beginnings of a relationship between us, would he have been able to do what he did? Would love have made a difference? Was it even possible?

I know it sounds kind of silly, reading all that possibility into a kiss that didn't even happen, but that's human nature, isn't it? We ask ourselves, over and over, what might have been, and in the process we lose ourselves... but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I don't know anything about human nature. Just because I hold the power of living death, doesn't mean I know anything more than anyone else, does it?

Of course, for all I know, everybody spends their time thinking things like that, when it's dark and they're lying in bed, alone.

I don't know.

Nobody says what they're thinking.

Even the dead have secrets.

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Hey, all!

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