Triss steered the four wheel drive around bends with the utmost precision. She didn’t let her mind wander. Didn’t think about what she might find when she got back. She focused on one thing only, at least she did until after one particular corner, something unnaturally shiny in the forest drew her eye.

She slammed on the brakes and put the car into reverse.

Drawn to the light, Triss cut the engine and got out of the car.

She walked though the dark woods, too tired to be afraid. She’d spent all she had over the last several hours. Now only a smatter of curiosity remained. Curiosity and a desire to find her brother, whatever state he may be in.

As she got closer, she realised the gleam she’d seen was from the moonlight reflecting off the top-most window of a dark wooden house.

Sweeping up the front steps she found the door wide open.

It was here that she slowed. Something told her she should move quietly.

She pushed her way inside, and was immediately hit by the stench of something she had gotten progressively familiar with over the last few hours. Blood.

She made her way into what looked like a living room. Moonlight outlined a body on the floor.

Triss flicked the light switch, and wished she hadn’t.

The body belonged to Kevin, not that she would have known that, if it weren’t for the fact that she recognised his clothing.

His head had been blown off, and not in a clean way at all. Given the gun in his hands, it looked like he’d done it himself.

She switched the light off and immediately decided that was worse than seeing it now that she knew it was there. She flicked the switch back on.

She studied him a moment longer, then she left him alone to explore the rest of the house.

The place was filled with photographs of a much younger smiling Kevin and his grandma. Evidentially, they’d been very close. It was overall a very tidy house, the only room that looked lived in at all was the study. There, Triss found stacks of papers and notebooks, one of which looked like a feeding log containing dates and names. Triss recognised a couple of them. Divers who had disappeared. Thought lost in the ocean or on some other continent. The shelves were packed with books on blood magic, titles such as ‘Necromancy for Novices,’ ‘How to Tame Your Ghoul,’ and ‘Howard Finn’s 5th Edition: An exploration of Focuses and Efficient Sacrifice Selection.’

She found no one else in the rest of the main house. Now, only the basement remained unexplored.

She opened the door into darkness and the slight smell of mildew. A flight of stairs led downward. There was no light switch on the inside or outside. It must be at the bottom. Briefly she wondered what she might find in Kevin’s basement.

She made her way down the stairs, breath by steady breath. The stairs creaked underfoot.

Finally her foot touched down on something that felt more solid. Concrete maybe?

She fumbled about in the dark. Her fingers found cobwebs.

She took a few steps forward, away from the stairs, but there was still nothing on the wall. Perhaps it was a hanging switch?

She backtracked to the base of the stairs. A glance back up to the light of the hallway almost made her want to run back up, slam the door shut and never look back. Thoughts of Nico, alone in that dark underwater tunnel pushed her forward.

Her hand flailed above her.

Finally, her fingers touched something that felt like a light switch. She yanked it down.

The room was immediately filled with light.

“Bingo,” she announced.

Stacked in the corner of the room were several more gas tanks.

She ignored the large empty cage that sat in the other corner. She didn’t want to know what it was for.

It took Triss three more dives before she managed to free Nico’s body from the hole. She tried every delicate method she could think of at first, but eventually she conceded that there was really only one way she was getting him out. She used her telekinesis. She managed to dislodge both of his arms from their sockets in the process and cause a massive silt cloud to form. She waited it out, his body only inches away and leaking body fluids that mixed with the settling sediment. Then she attached a spare BCD and tank, and together they started the long journey toward the surface. His deformed arms dangled behind his body at an odd angle.

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She didn’t take her eyes off him throughout her entire ascent and decompression. She kept trying to wrap her mind around what had happened. Something that was very difficult when one had not slept or eaten in several hours.

His spare tanks had been gone, taken. That much she knew. Triss had seen Odessa lose her tanks but she’d hoped, given her free-diving skills, that the girl had made it to the surface. It would have been difficult yes, but not impossible. Until now, Triss has just assumed that’s what had happened. She had imagined that Odessa had gone up on the air in her lungs alone, breathing out correctly, grabbed the spare tanks and then immediately gone back down to decompress, just like Triss had done. But evidentially that wasn’t the case. Those had been Nico’s tanks she’d taken. Triss knew that now. If Triss had been more rested she might have understood, might have considered that there had been no other option, especially for a human, but right now, as she watched her brother’s lifeless body floating beside her, all she could think about was how Odessa had taken his air for herself.

The sun was rising by the time Triss pulled Nico’s body out on to the grass. He didn’t look much like her brother anymore. His skin was already considerably puffy looking.

She resisted the urge to vomit. It wasn’t like there was anything in her stomach at this point anyway. She took several deep breaths are regretted that. The stench was even worse than it had been last night. She could see it more clearly now as well. The warms rays of the sun contrasted heavily with the blood-soaked earth that surrounded her.

Triss stood in the middle of it. She’d never felt so alone in her life.

Another wretched breath of the stinking air and she decided whatever she did next, she couldn’t stay here. But nor would she leave her brother behind. They’d never managed to get her father’s body out of the cave he had died in. Too dangerous they’d said. He’d been sealed in there along with the people he’d gone in to rescue. Too many accidents, the authorities had said. Triss felt like she’d failed him. Well, she wasn’t going to fail Nico.

She lifted his body into the backseat of the four wheel drive, and started off down the hill.

She reached the point in the road where the house was. She could see the turn off now, just up ahead, obviously not heavily used in some time. But it had been once. She took a sharp left down it and found her way blocked once more by a giant log.

With the flick of her hand she threw the entire log off the road.

She immediately found her vision blurring. It had been too much magic. She needed to rest and to sleep. To regain her energy, but she couldn’t, not until she fixed things.

She had a plan now. She hadn’t realised at first, not until she reached the turn-off in the road, but this plan had started forming long before that, back when she’d been in Kevin’s study, when she’d seen his books.

She left Nico in the car while she went back inside and straight up the stairs to the study. She understood what Kevin had done now, what must have happened. She also understood that maybe it hadn’t worked quite right but maybe among his notes there was an answer, and even if there wasn’t, she had met Hoots. She had talked to her, and with the exception of the last few encounters, the woman had seemed very normal, had seemed like a sane person. If Triss could do the same with Nico, then the rest didn’t matter. She could figure that out later. Triss knew about zombies, and what a failed necromancy created. People who would later revert into flesh-hungry monsters. But what she had seen in Kevin’s notes had given her hope that perhaps the zombie state wasn’t a permanent one, that perhaps it was just temporary. Hoots hadn’t been like any zombie Triss had ever seen.

She started with the book titled ‘Necromancy for Novices.’ She skipped past several warnings until she found the instructions. They were surprisingly simple. Unsurprisingly, the spell required a sacrifice. This was blood magic after all. But that wasn’t as difficult as it might initially appear because she already had a second dead body. Surely Kevin counted? The blood didn’t have to be spilt on the spot right? And he’d looked reasonably fresh.

All the other ingredients Triss needed were in the study.

She pulled Nico into the house. She had to stop and sit on the couch for several minutes to get her breath back. Her head was still spinning and she would need some energy for this spell. She scoured the kitchen for food and forced herself to take some time to eat something and sit for a little bit. Sleep however, would have to wait. She wasn’t going to let herself rest until she had Nico back. She was afraid if she stopped now then she wouldn’t want to continue once she woke.

Even in her sleep-deprived state Triss understood the dangers of what she was doing. But she could not stop. And she wasn’t an idiot. She would take precautions.

Once more she moved Nico’s body. Hopefully, this time for the last time. She moved Kevin’s too, leaving a red smear along the polished wooden floor, all the way down into the basement.

She thought she understood now what the cage was for. At first she’d thought it had been for his string of sacrifices, the people he’d fed to her. But that didn’t make sense, because she’d hunted in the cave. No, this cage had been for her, likely after she’d first been brought back.

Triss put Nico’s body inside and locked the bolt shut. She laid Kevin’s remains nearby.

Using a rubber spatula she’d found in the kitchen, and the blood from Kevin’s smashed in head, Triss painted elegant marks on the concrete. Swirls of carefully dictated circles and triangles.

Faintly, she could see that someone had painted similar ones before, many years ago.

Her muscles cried out for rest but still she pushed on. She would see her brother again, even if it killed her. And once she had him back, once she knew he was okay, she would find Odessa, and she would make her regret ever taking those tanks.

Finally the spell was ready.

Triss had but to say a few words. The script was in an ancient tongue, but Triss had been in class that day. She pronounced it flawlessly.

As the last word left her mouth, she watched as Kevin’s body crumbled into ash, and swirl of wind swept the basement.

The lights went out.

And somewhere in the darkness an almost familiar voice whispered her name,

“Trissss...”