Ace tried to pinpoint the kind of creature Grey was, if he was Fae at all. The twigs in his hair and leaves in his dress suggested a peaceful nature-type faery, but nothing about his manner reinforced so. From her studies, she knew forest faeries to be mindful and gentle. Grey’s rough handshake, his cold gaze and demanding voice contradicted everything she suspected.

Still, there were all kinds of faeries. And in this new hybrid world, there were also all kinds of rebels. Which is what she finally decided Grey was: a rebel against his kind. That didn’t make him harmful.

She spent the morning in her fungus garden, harvesting supplies with Half-Smile there for emotional support. He lay on the courtyard floor under the direct noon sun, basking like it was a beach.

“Four limbs,” Ace called to him. “You have four limbs and they’re all useless.”

“Grarf,” he replied, never changing his position.

Ace could swear that he understood almost every interaction they had.

Just then, an incessant rapping on the door filled the House. Half-Smile, awake and alert, fell back into the shadows.

Someone’s voice called out, muffled through the walls. Ace’s heart pounded. The knocking didn’t stop. Whoever this was, they were in extreme urgency.

The visitor was a casually dressed woman, red in the face with tears. Ace recognised the look instantly: grief.

“My son,” said the woman. “My son!”

Ace instinctively opened the door wider. “Please, come in.”

“No, you – I need your – I need to –”

“ – hire me?”

The woman shook her head feverishly and looked down at her feet, apparently embarrassed to be needing the work of a Necromancer. First timers always were, in Ace’s experience.

“I’ll just get my supplies,” Ace said.

Half-Smile was still hiding in shadow. Ace could only tell he was listening by the sound of the floorboards creaking. She packed her satchel with everything she required – her books, a vial of the Elixir of Cordyceps, and gloves for extreme cases.

“I’ll be back,” she whispered over her shoulder. “Stay here.”

She hoped Half-Smile would get the idea.

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Outside, Ace took a moment to gather herself, before laying out the rules to her new client. “There’s some things we have to get through first.”

The woman gripped Ace’s hand. “I have money, I’ll pay you anything. Name your price. Just bring him back.”

“It’s not just that,” Ace said. She placed a gentle hand on the woman’s whitened knuckles, assuring her. “You need to be honest with me. There are laws to Necromancy. If you moved the body – or if he died from a natural cause –”

“Listen to me,” her voice was trembling. “My son was murdered.”

There’s nothing I can do about that, Ace thought. But she refrained from voicing herself. She simply let the woman nudge her along to the scene.

The boy lay on the floor of the arcade’s backroom, face down, in a growing puddle of his own blood. The room was a small monotone thing, the ceiling hung low, and the light bulbs were so dim they threatened to die out. A cell phone with a cracked screen lied next to the subject. A name tag with the word ‘Shane’ lay next it, half submerged in the blood.

Nothing had been moved, that was evident enough. Ace got to work.

The Bone Tablet – almost completely flushed out from resurrecting the cat – felt like a feather in her hand. Just this one more, alright? Please work.

She cleaned the surface. Retrieved the pen. Dipped the nib in ink. All in careful motions, no matter how many times she had done this. The subject’s mother watched in mute curiosity. Curiosity or apprehension.

Ace was thinking about how similar those two emotions were as she wrote down the subject’s name. S-H-A-N-E.

The bone pulsed with energy in her palm. Electricity charged the air in the small room they were in, clearing the Stench of Death and replacing it with a new sense: resurrection. Nature knew it; and in this damp little backroom nature did not escape. The music of the arcade continued along somewhere behind the door. The light overhead didn’t once flicker. Nothing changed. But to this boy and his mother, everything changed.

Shane first sucked in a sharp audible breath, and then opened his eyes. Ace was already rounding up her things. She felt the Bone Tablet simmer a few dribbling sparks of power before she buttoned her satchel over it.

“What happened?” The boy was disoriented, blinking, tugging on his hair, testing out his limbs and ligaments. He felt the floor around him, where his blood still stained the tiles. “I died.”

He looked up directly at Ace as he said this. She was familiar with this expression, a result of experiencing the most bizarre dream.

She held out her hand to him to help him stand. He gripped it, touching her skin with uttermost trust, outstandingly unlike other alive beings. Shane was now a resurrected semblance of a human. Not entirely what he had been – with the slightest alterations to his genetic makeup – but something akin to a human being nonetheless.

“Your mother hired me,” Ace said. She put the vial of the Elixir in his hands. “Drink a teaspoon of this at least once a day.”

He wrapped his still cold fingers around it. “Thank you.”

“And leave that undisturbed,” Ace referred to the mushroom stalk that had sprouted like an island in the pool of blood.

Shane was looking at his mother; she stood transfixed and motionless in the corner of the room, clutching herself. Disbelief played in her eyes, and a rumble of various other emotions that Ace was not qualified to unpack.

“I’ll be leaving now,” said Ace. “If you need anything more, my house is open.”

She left the noisy arcade then, not knowing whether she would get payment, and not knowing how to ask for such a thing in this delicate situation. The old Bone Tablet, though alarmingly diminished in its power, felt like an anchor in her satchel.