I put a sign up on campus, advertising a room because I needed the money to pay for textbooks, and no one wants to hire someone who reeks of death. Unfortunately, antidiscrimination laws don't cover necromancers. I was flooded with requests to see the room though, and that's how I met Tyler. A third year journalism student who came to my house on a Thursday afternoon.

"What's upstairs?" the scrawny man-boy asked, staring up towards my room. He had a bag slung over one shoulder and leaned casually against the living room wall. He already looked more at home here than I felt. I suppose, as a prospective roommate that shouldn't have been a bad thing but it was a little unnerving. What was wrong with me that I didn't feel at home in my own house?

I glanced at my mother's ghost, lounging on the stairs. She kept looking Tyler up and down. Sizing him up. "Don't call me Ty", he'd said when he introduced himself. Like I'd had any intentions of doing so.

"Just my room." I was trying to be friendly but it came out sounding blunt.

"Do you have a lock on your door?" Tyler asked, curiously.

"Why?"

He shrugged. "Might make you feel more comfortable."

"Oh my god, he's a rapist," my mother said in an exaggerated whisper. Like he'd hear her anyway. I didn't look at my mother. I guess Tyler thought my discomfort was due to him. It seemed like a terribly normal idea, given the circumstances.

I smiled. "When would you like to move in?"

"Tomorrow okay?"

I looked back at my mother before answering. "Perfect."

"She doesn't like you much." As though sensing we were talking about her, my mother appears behind Tyler.

"That's not entirely true," she says, crossing her arms and leaning against the bench. "He's growing on me. Like a tumor."

"Okay," I say. "She took an immediate dislike to you but she's warmed up a bit since then. Actually, her reaction to you is the reason I gave you the room in the first place. You know," I look at Mum when I say this, "to piss her off."

"And here I was thinking it was my winning personality," Tyler said.

"Yeah, right."

"So, you can raise animals from the dead and talk to ghosts. Anything else I need to know?"

"Um..." I'm not sure how to say this, exactly. Bluntly? "I can raise people from the dead, too."

The first time I did it, it was as much of a surprise to me as anyone else. Catriona didn't tell me that we could raise humans. I might have gone my entire life not knowing, if it hadn't been for my lack of control. My only excuse for losing control is that I was emotionally unstable.

I was on the ferry, going home from school when I realized my father had died. I was leaning against the safety rail. Sea-spray was flying into my face and the wind was dragging my hair out of its restraints but I didn't care. It had been a long day. I was pretty sure that I'd failed my math test, even though I'd spent every night of the past month studying for it. I needed the wind to snatch my stress away. I needed the chill air of the ocean to clear the numbers out of my brain, where they'd stacked up on top of each other and collapsed into a jumble of senseless expressions.

Then I saw my father.

I suppose you'd expect some Touched by an Angel, or Ghost Whisperer crap, if someone told you that. It's not like they show it in the movies, or on TV. There is no heavenly glow, no warming of the heart. There's the pain. The dull ache at the bottom of your chest that makes you realize that everything that's gone between you will never be resolved. He won't be able to make up for throwing me away, for treating me like a broken thing, for dumping me on Catriona to fix. He was never going to find out that I was different, rather than broken.

He was just a wisp. A grey, fleeting moment, suspended across the surf. He didn't reach out to me. No tears ran down his cheek. He didn't offer any last words of wisdom, or comfort. He didn't even stay long enough to shoot me a parting nod. That was my father. That's how he died.

People say things like this all the time, don't they; 'he died the same way that he lived.' Usually about someone who died doing something that they loved. I guess it's supposed to be comforting. The thought holds no comfort for me.

He did die the same way that he lived. Just like when he gave me to Cat. He was there one moment. Then he was gone. Without a word. He rejected me in life and he rejected me in death. That's what it means to die the same way you live, and everybody does it. Death changes nothing. Not really. Unless you count the fact that that was the last time he was ever going to reject me. Ever. He wasn't the kind of man who was going to hang around as a ghost, pretending he had unfinished business.

It was finished. I only wished I could say that with some sense of relief, instead of being filled with disappointment.

Catriona was waiting for me on the jetty.

"What are you doing here?" I asked, surprised to see her.

"Did you see him?" she asked, frowning. I nodded. "I'm sorry," she said, wrapping her arms around me. I could feel tears running down her cheek, soaking into my shoulder. I patted her on the back and let her cry on me.

I drove Cat's Ute home, with my scooter in the back tray. Catriona stared out the window, watching the trees rushing by outside. She didn't say anything when I took the S bends at 70 - the recommended speed was 50km/h, but she usually made me slow to 40, because I was still, technically, on my learners permit - so I knew she was taking it pretty hard.

"How long do you think it will be," she asked, without looking at me, "before your mother contacts us?"

"Don't call her that," I said.

"Karlotta," she corrected herself.

"I don't know," I said, returning to the actual speed limit. "I honestly don't know." We drove in silence for a while. Catriona hadn't even plugged her iPod in, which was usually the first thing she did when she got in the car, blasting out tunes that had had their heyday before she was even born. Bob Marley, John Lennon, Bob Dylan... she said that nobody made music like they used to. She's the only person I've ever met who says that Yoko Ono is the best thing that ever happened to the Beatles, because it got Lennon out of plain pop and into something revolutionary. Everyone else seems to think she was the worst thing that could have happened, but that's Catriona for you.

"She might not even know yet," Cat said, still talking about my mother. I hated that I still thought of her like that, in my own head. "Do you think I should call her?"

"Do you think she'd answer?" I asked, remembering the countless messages Catriona had left on her machine; the bi-monthly reports on my development that she'd never failed to give and which had never been answered with anything other than a check. Catriona didn't answer my question. Her silence was an answer in itself.

Karlotta never called. In the end, she told us about my father's death in a letter. We got it three days after his funeral. Catriona was the one who opened it. A single sheet of paper in the envelope. She read it, scrunched it up in a ball, threw it in the bin, and left the house swearing. She didn't take the Ute. From the direction she was walking in, I was pretty sure she went to the pub.

I fished the letter out of the waste. I spent about five minutes smoothing the creases on the back of the letter before I got up the courage to turn it over and read it. It didn't say much. Just,

Catriona,

Matthew has died.

I didn't think it wise for Laurel to attend the funeral.

I hope you understand.

Karlotta Tierney

Nothing more. She hoped we understood. She didn't think it wise. Wise? What kind of wisdom keeps a person away from a funeral?

What did she think would happen if I went?

I suddenly felt like I couldn't breathe, like there wasn't enough air in the house. I was suffocating. I had to get out of there.

I got on my scooter and rode off into the sunset. Literally. The sun was setting across the bay and I rode towards Dunwich. I wasn't really thinking about where I was going, just that I had to go somewhere. I guess my body was used to taking me to Dunwich to catch the ferry to school, so it took me there then.

The sun seemed to take forever to go down. Orange lances of sunlight fell across the road, like paper streamers, caught on the late afternoon mist in its inconstant grasp. I drove through the streams of light, feeling like I was riding through lines of cool fire, mist clinging to my hair where it flew out from my helmet.

By the time I got to Dunwich my hair was damp and my cheeks felt frozen from the wind. I tried not to shiver as I parked next to the cemetery. The cemetery was directly across the road from the ferry's moorings so I suppose people could make a real day of visiting the dead, if they wanted to.

It was a nice cemetery, as far as cemeteries go. There were a few trees lining the edge of the area, exposed stones, and green clinging to every available surface. If you were writing about it biologically you could say it was a place full of dead fauna and teeming with the life of flora. Poetically, I suppose you'd call that irony.

I sat down at the edge of the cemetery, on the tumbling remains of a drywall, and looked out across the glassy darkness of the water. From a distance, the surface of the water looked clear and calm, but up close tiny ripples shifted across its surface. The water in the bay was grey and murky, as though it were constantly on the verge of turbulence, even if it could never make the decision to follow through with the action.

I felt so angry. I could feel the tension turning over in the pit of my stomach. My hands were shaking. I gripped the edge of the stone I was sitting on, feeling the edge of some moss crumble beneath my fingers.

I hated her so much. The rejection was so much more painful the second time because I hadn't done anything to provoke it. When she sent me to Catriona's, even though it hurt, I could kind of understand. But not even inviting me to my father's funeral, I couldn't understand that. I had things under control now, I wasn't a total freak of nature. And if I was a freak, at least I was a controlled freak.

And I didn't even see what her problem was. It wasn't like she'd be burying him in a pet cemetery or anything. I wouldn't be able to fuck things up for her, even if I'd wanted to. The only reason I could think of that she hadn't told us when the funeral was, was because she just didn't want to see me.

She'd thrown me away and she didn't want me back. Not for anything. I folded over, pressing my forehead against my knees, and cried. I felt like something in my chest was going to explode, it hurt so much. All the years I'd spent at Catriona's, I'd been tamping down the pain of rejection, bottling it up... it all came pouring out that night.

Actually, that's not true. It didn't come pouring out. That implies that I let it go. That it rushed out into the cool night air and was gone forever. That by crying, I somehow managed to release the pain and it was gone. That's not what happened. They were just tears. Just broken sobs. When I was done crying, nothing had changed, except that my throat hurt, my eyes stung and I was tired.

I was so tired, I wanted to fall asleep and never wake up.

I did fall asleep. But instead of joining the dead, the dead joined me.

"Hello?" someone whispered in the darkness. The sun had finished setting and the street lights didn't reach into the corner of the cemetery that I'd curled up in. I sat up, straining my eyes to see.

"Yeah," I said, questioningly. I'd done it by accident again, so I didn't realize, at first, what he was. He was just a hulking shape in the darkness, with a voice that was surprisingly deep, but still youthful.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"I could ask you the same question," I said, standing up. My muscles protested the movement. Sleeping on the ground had made them stiff and sore, and the cold night air hadn't helped with either situation.

"You could," he agreed, "but you probably wouldn't get a satisfying answer."

"How come?" I asked. It didn't strike me as strange at the time, but my curiosity far outweighed any sense of danger I might have had, talking to a stranger in a cemetery at night. That alone should have clued me in to the fact that he wasn't normal. The living had always unsettled me more than the dead.

"I don't really know is all," he shrugged. "Last I remember I was carving it up and then..." he shook his head, "nothing."

"Oh," I said, realization dawning. "What's your name?"

"James," he said, "what's yours?"

"Laurel," I said, ignoring the hand that he extended. I'm sure there's a folk myth about that somewhere; never shake hands with the dead. "Are you tired, James?"

"Yeah, I am a bit," he said, "how'd you know?"

"I've heard surfing can be exhausting," I said. Especially if you ended up surfing straight into a rock and cracked your head open. Then you needed the eternal sleep. James Haversham had been in the papers a couple of months ago.

"Yeah," he said.

"Maybe you should lie down," I suggested, scanning the tombstones to find where he was meant to be. Thankfully, my eyes had adjusted to the minimal light in the cemetery enough to just make out the name James under a carved, Celtic cross. "Come over here," I gestured. James lay down on top of his grave and folded his hands over his chest.

"This is pretty comfy," he said, as though I'd gotten him to lie down underneath a tree on the beach, instead of his own grave. I'd have found it creepy if he were truly alive. The fact that he was comfortable with the natural order of things was good though, it made the next part easier.

"James Montgomery Haversham," I said, feeling the connection between us, "return to the place you've come from this night." I watched him close his eyes and sigh his last breath. Then the grave opened up beneath him, and welcomed him in its cold embrace. "Return to your natural place." I felt the connection between us fade away. I felt it die. The natural balance was restored and I was left alone. Again.

"You can raise people from the dead?" Tyler repeated.

"Not permanently, but yeah... I can raise people from the dead and the Fae, apparently." I added, as an afterthought, "If they haven't been cremated."

"The what?"

"Well, um, fairies and stuff," I said. "They're real too."

"No way." He shook his head in disbelief.

"I only found out about them recently, but I swear they are as real as either of us."

"How?"

"I was hired by them," I said, "to sort out a political thing."

Which is where Jack comes in. Nice enough guy, I guess, if a little sarcastic. I found him sitting on my bed, waiting for me to come home.

"Laurel Tierney, I presume," he said, casually making my stuffed panda try to eat my plush seal. Sexually. Both toys were embarrassingly still nightly companions, protecting me from bad dreams.

"Who the fuck are you?" I said, justifiably angry at the intrusion.

"The name's Jack," he said, getting up from my bed and taking a bow. "Supreme court representative, brilliant researcher, beloved diplomat, skilled lover," he winked at me, "Fae."

"Who introduces themselves in list form?" I asked, surprised to hear the words out loud. I'd intended to keep my musings more or less to myself. Of course, given the fact that a man claiming to be an faerie or elf or something had broken into my house and violated my stuffed toys, I forgave myself.

"If you ask me," Jack said, though I hadn't really intended it to be a question, "not enough people do." He bounced up and down on the spot, excitedly. He was acting way too much like a five year old for a 6'5" foot tall blond man with pointed ears and covered in tattoos.

"Can I do yours?" he didn't wait for me to give my consent before launching into a list of my qualities. "Laurel Tierney," he said, giving another half bow. "Animation student, orphan, resident of this dry and god-forgotten country, landlady," he paused, looked at me critically for a moment. "Would you like to wink here, or can I?" he asked.

"Go ahead," I gestured for him to continue. I suppose I should have felt more threatened by Jack, under the circumstances, but something about him put me immediately at ease. If I'm being honest with myself, it might have been the dimples.

Jack gave an over dramatized wink, uncannily reminiscent of Shirley Temple. "Necromancer," he whispered.

I felt the blood drain from my face. "I don't know what you're talking about," I said, my voice completely devoid of emotion.

"Sure you don't," Jack said, "you just happened to be totally okay with the huge crazy man who broke in, until he mentioned the word necromancer. And the fact that you're freaked out now means what, exactly? Indigestion?" He raised an eyebrow at me. "Look, do you really want to waste time arguing about who is or isn't what species?"

He lay back down on my bed and picked up Amanda. Amanda the panda, that is. And yes, I do know how incredibly lame that is but I was only eight when I got her and I'm not going to change her name just because I've put on a couple of years.

"I'm human," I said, glaring down at Jack. Damn it, I thought, watching him lounge on my bed, why does everyone look more comfortable in this house than I do?

"Sure you are," Jack snickered, "and I found two leprechauns humping under my shoe yesterday. They were so embarrassed about it that they gave me all of their buried treasure and then, just to top things off, they gave me a wee bottle of Febreeze to get the smell of sex out of my boot."

"Could happen to anyone," I muttered, trying to out-sarcasm Jack. That was my mistake.

"Oh yeah," he rolled his eyes, "and then their pet cat came out of the woodworks and started shitting butterflies."

"Look," I said, realizing this could go on forever. "What do you want?"

"You're not going to fight me about my being an elf?" he sulked. "That's the best part of human relations."

"Hah," I pointed at Jack, "you just called me human."

"Accident," Jack growled.

"Whatever," I said, grinning.

I hadn't felt so good about bantering with anyone in... well, forever, actually. After years of hiding, it was such a relief to talk to someone who knew what I was.

Even if he was crazy.

Actually, it was probably better if he was certifiably insane. Then no one would believe him even if he did rat me out to the general public. I felt like victory dancing. "So, what do you want, Elf-boy?" I smirked, picturing him prancing about with Orlando Bloom. My mental pictures looked more like a drag version of Peter Pan than the Lord of the Rings but that just made it funnier.

Jack was so Tinkerbelle.

"Got a dead guy for you, Lady Death," Jack said, getting back up from my bed. He walked towards me slowly, his face suddenly very serious. He almost looked dangerous. "Hope you're up to waking him." He was standing right in front of me, so close that a deep breath would have made our chests touch. Well, my chest, his abdomen. Then he wrapped his arms around me and the world vanished.

I was falling through darkness so thick, it tugged at my hair on the way down. Then I was standing still. I pushed Jack away from me. My stomach lurched at the sudden motion. I turned away from Jack and vomited in the garden.

"What the fuck did you do?" I asked, wiping my mouth. I looked around the garden we were standing in. It looked like a botanical garden on acid. Every color seemed amplified to its full potential. No softly sunburnt browns intruded on the green of this landscape. Wherever we were, it definitely wasn't in my room. It didn't even look like we were still in Brisbane.

Jack grinned and pulled a necklace over his head. He tossed it to me. I didn't catch it. But I didn't fall into my own vomit either so I still counted it as a point for me. I pulled the necklace out of the hedge it had landed on and held it up. A smoky amber medallion hung from a thickly coiled gold chain. The stone surprised me. It was exactly the same color as my aura.

"That," Jack said, pointing to the medallion, "is a transporter. Think of it as your passport to another world."

"Okay," I said, stuffing it into my pocket.

"Actually," he looked slightly uncomfortable, "it would save a lot of trouble if you just wore it. Keep it visible."

"What kind of trouble?"

"Oh nothing much," he waved his hand airily, "just customs stuff." I might have believed him if he hadn't watched me so carefully while I put the medallion on. The intensity of his stare made it clear just how important keeping the medallion visible was. What it didn't tell me was why.