Excerpt
It wasn't so bad living next door to a notorious necromancer, most of the time. The cottage came dirt-cheap for me and my father because of the location. Of course, the locals all whispered and shook their heads when they saw our wagon, piled high with luggage, rolling through their town along the way. A few kindly souls even ventured out to warn us, that first day, in case we'd somehow mistaken that black monstrosity of a castle down the road for a mere eccentric's folly.
Once they'd accepted that they couldn't talk us out of moving in, though, they left us alone, shaking their heads even more dolefully—but moving quickly, too, to get safely behind their high town walls before darkness arrived. That was when the great doors of the castle would open wide to let the bats and the hellhounds and the undead minions stream out unchecked.
Luckily, I've never cared to go rambling at night. I have better things to do when the sun goes down, mostly involving small tools, a set of good gas lamps, and my own private workshop. I'm only too happy not to have any shock-able neighbors peering in through the windows as I do them.
In my new home, iron horseshoes planted three feet from the windows kept the undead minions and so forth at bay, leaving me to putter away, safely undisturbed, for the first three and a half months after moving in. Dad worked happily through his latest puzzle book, and the seasons shifted from summer to autumn outside the iron-laced windows of our cottage.
But some things can't be ignored after all…and when I stepped out of the cottage one morning to find a moaning, human-shaped creature lying on the grass beyond our horseshoes, his horribly mismatched legs separated and twitching on the ground beside him, I realized I couldn't ignore our sinister neighbor any longer.
"Oh, for goodness' sake!" Hissing with frustration, I turned and stomped back inside, forgetting all about the nice hike down to the swamp that I had planned to get my ideas moving for the day.
Dad was still sitting at the kitchen table, working out a particularly tricky acrostic. He didn't look up as I passed him the first time, but when I came stomping back out of my workshop and started back towards the front door, carrying a clanking bag of tools by my side, he raised his eyebrows. "Working in the sunshine for once, Mia?"
"Not by choice." I sighed.
By rights, I knew I ought to go hammer on the gates of that ugly castle until some responsible party came out to take care of the problem for me…but whoever had created that poor creature had nothing responsible about them.
"Shh," I whispered as I knelt down by him. His bleary eyes blinked helplessly up at me, yellowed and watery from the too-bright sun. His sickly-white skin was already starting to burn. "I'll take care of this," I promised him as I took out my sharpest knife, "and you'll feel much better soon."
I'd never leave a creature helpless and vulnerable on my own property, and there wasn't a single craftswoman's instinct in my body that would allow him to leave as mangled as he had arrived.
It took ages to get the measurements exactly right, what with all the distracting twitching. I wasn't used to sealing together that kind of meaty matter, either. Once I was finally finished, though, he stood firmly on two feet once more, and if those feet didn't match, well, at least the legs above them did. Now that they were evenly sized, he wouldn't trip over them anymore, and my stitches—with a bit of extra help—were tight enough that even if something else made him stumble, they wouldn't come loose and leave him helpless again.
By then, the exposed skin on his face and hands was peeling terribly, but he still shuffled eagerly before me, pawing at my hands and grunting as I put my tools away.
"Yes, well…" I patted his arm, forcibly resisting the impulse to check the stitching in his throat as well. "It was nothing. Really. Just go home now before you burn any worse, and don't let anyone stitch you up so badly ever again."
That was that, as far as I was concerned…but I should have known better from the start.
Wicked necromancers aren't known for leaving mysteries alone.
An hour later, I had just returned from my invigorating hike down to the swamp and had a whole new pack of ideas all jostling for position in my head. I was busy scribbling notes as I heated a kettle on the stove when a sudden clatter sounded at the kitchen window and made me start.
Outrageously, when I looked up, I found that a sharp-eyed crow had bypassed every one of my protections just by tossing a hard pebble at the iron-framed glass above my mostly-ignored little window box. The moment the creature caught my eye, it opened its beak to let a piece of paper flutter to the ground just beyond my buried horseshoes.
Rude!
I pointed forcefully at the ugly scratch that it had left on our nice thick windowpane.
The crow flapped its wings and cawed even more forcefully back at me, kicking one clawed foot towards its waiting message.
Enough! I abandoned my kettle for the privacy of my own workshop. I'd dealt with more than enough of my neighbor's intrusions for one day.
