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  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One – Talia

  Chapter Two – Janos

  Chapter Three – Talia

  Chapter Four – Janos

  Chapter Five – Talia

  Chapter Six – Janos

  Chapter Seven – Talia

  Chapter Eight – Janos

  Chapter Nine – Talia

  Chapter Ten – Janos

  Chapter Eleven – Talia

  For the next book in the series: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Z8HVS6S

  Talia’s Bodyguard

  Bodyguards of Samhain

  Book 1

  By: Lisa Daniels

  Prologue

  The first time Janos saw a necromancer was when he was twelve. They were part of the investigation team, trying to figure out what had happened to his mother—who had killed her, along with the others in the night club. Mother always went out on the weekends to bars, sometimes with his father, sometimes without.

  To see it on the news, that the Rings Club had been attacked, details withheld, made a rock drop in his stomach. His appetite dried up, with his father’s, and he remembered the frantic phone calls to his mother’s phone, only to always reach voicemail. It remained a simple message, because his mother had never bothered with changing the setting.

  “This man will help us,” his father had said, pointing at the dark-robed figure in the morgue. The family was required to be there, to sign away their consent and to watch the proceedings. Sometimes, if the dead proved a troublesome soul, the presence of their family helped calm them. He was told all this, but he didn’t quite comprehend the whole meaning behind it.

  Right until, through the glass, he saw the necromancer place hands over the white cloth that covered his mother’s body, and a blue light flicker.

  Whatever rose up from the table, it wasn’t his mother. His brief flush of joy transmuted into horror when the corpse with the burned face turned to face the necromancer and attempted to strangle him with stiff fingers. There were shouts, screams—then his father hurried into the room, ushered by the police, and the vengeful corpse calmed, sparing the necromancer who had dared raise her.

  His desire to speak to his mother one last time vanished.

  He didn’t want to speak to that.

  Stomach churning like butter, Janos fled the station, ignoring the cries of the police, the image of that corpse etched into his mind. Instead of hazel eyes, it had burning blue ones. Instead of delicate pink flesh, it had mottled black and burned skin, and no hair to speak of. And he knew for certain that whatever had entered that corpse didn’t want to stay in it.

  When they asked Janos again the next day if he would be present for another interrogation, he refused.

  Chapter One – Talia

  She didn’t want the protection, but her father insisted.

  “I’m about to strike a deal,” he’d said. “One that will create many an enemy, and make us even more of a target than before.”

  Being the blood of a family with magic others considered cursed did tend to put said family on the shit list of a lot of other families. Three hundred years ago, they would have been hunting Talia’s kind down and burning them at the stake. Thirty years in the past, they’d only just decriminalized her brand of magic in the country, but memories ran long, and only a few places upon the entire planet afforded such legality.

  “Do you have to, Father?” Talia had asked in return. They already had so much going for them: a sweet house in the bowels of the Babbling Brook street, in the small and unassuming town of Lasthearth. The town hovered near the border of Georgia, and magical users such as herself enjoyed the various freedoms her state offered, in stark contrast to Georgia, which distrusted the magic so much that they had gunmen patrolling the borders to stop their “evil” invading and harming the good citizens. “Can’t we just stay here, live a quiet life? Does it always have to be about chasing ambitions?”

  Though she didn’t want a quiet life. She just wanted the spotlight to be off her long enough to dash off when her university years ended. She “lacked” the ambition of her parents and older sister (according to them), but she had plenty of longing for a different life. Taking part in excavations, using her magic to contact the oldest, most venerable souls.

  There was too much vitriol when it came to her magic. She could barely make a single comment online nowadays without someone ranting against the evils of her kind. But she wasn’t a kind, or a beast, or anything like that at all. Just a human with something others did not bother to understand, or ever want to.

  Magic is only as evil as its user, her grandmother once told her, years before her passing. If the soul is waded in sin, it won’t matter how good the magic is. The sinner will always find a way to use it wrong.

  Her father had crinkled his blue eyes in apparent agony from her question. “No, sweet thing,” he said. She might have been twenty, but to him, she’d always be a child. “It won’t be possible. The non-magic humans grow bolder every day. They seek to strengthen the embargo they hold against our great nation. They continue to swipe magical babes from their cradles, and even within, we have hate preachers condemning us, as they always have. I must take my council seat—I must show the good we do. And it won’t do to have you unprotected.”

  “I can protect myself.” Talia set her jaw in a stubborn line. Her father knew exactly what she meant, and he shook his furred dark head in disapproval.

  “I’d rather not incite any more suspicion against us than we already do. Better for people to see you have a living guard.”

  “He’ll be at my university. He’ll sit in my lectures. I already have a hard enough time making friends without some bald-headed muscle glaring at everyone from the sidelines like he wants to eat them. Or she,” Talia added, imagining a seven-foot-tall Valkyrie guarding her from trouble. Growing up, she’d wanted to be a Valkyrie at one point. She used to strap on fake armor and run around, pretending to hack at demons.

  “I’d rather you endured that… than died,” her father said in a rather delicate tone, and that had been the end of the matter. Talia fumed within. She knew no matter her feelings, she’d have to accept some kind of protection. But she could still vent, at least. Moodily, she imagined returning to Rosewood University on Monday. Two more days of freedom, and then her shadow would attach itself to her, screaming out to everyone within eyeshot that she was a very important person.

  Hells, she’d even managed to slither through her first two years without anyone finding out what sort of magic she practiced, but the moment her father accepted his new position, that secret would hurtle itself out of the bag.

  To calm herself, she threaded her way out of the house and into the back yard. High, green hedges interwoven with wired fencing concealed the entire property from view. Ivy grew up the sides of one wall, fanning out beneath her bedroom window, adding an ancient, natural splendor to the building. In one tiny section of the garden was a makeshift cemetery, ringed off by white picket fencing that reached Talia’s knees, with little markers inside that indicated the animals long dead, their bones moldering in the ground. All the soil was fresh and upturned, as if each grave had been freshly robbed.

  Talia settled herself by the grave marker of Willow and closed her eyes, letting her magical senses stretch out
to the Other Side. They had all sorts of names for it. Beyond the veil. Purgatory. The realm of the dead, Samhain’s beard. She preferred Other Side, because it felt like a mirror to the world she existed in. Where everything was almost perfect, yet not quite alive.

  The first layer was safest to sift through, as it contained the gentlest, most willing spirits the dead had to offer. She found Willow there, fumbling over that familiar soul, caressing it, sensing that Willow wouldn’t mind a Command. Not that the spirits had much of a choice, once she unleashed her words. They never did.

  “Rise once more, little one,” she said, and Willow’s spirit fled eagerly into the remains of her body. A bony, glowing blue paw stuck out of the soil, and within seconds, an entire cat skeleton had wriggled out of the dirt. Willow in life had been a beautiful tabby, with bright green, inquisitive eyes.

  Willow in death, forced back into her remains, was a skeleton with a ghostly outline of her living body and ice-blue eyes glowing in their sockets instead of the vibrant green they had once been.

  To an outsider, this resurrection was monstrous, unholy, reeking of so much sin that they might choke on it. To Talia, this was simply Willow, the cat that had been with her since birth, and died only two years before. The ghostly cat awaited orders, though she felt Willow’s mind clawing out to her, wanting contact. So she gave the order to give affection, and the little bag of bones eagerly crawled onto her lap.

  Smiling, a little sad, Talia stroked Willow’s spine, feeling both the impression of the bones and the flicker of the spiritual body that rounded out where there should have been flesh. She felt the press of other beloved pets from the Other Side as well; sometimes she raised more than one body at once, but today, she just wanted Willow.

  The bone cat lifted its glowing blue sockets to regard her, and meowed. Since there was no voice box to issue the sound anymore, the meow reverberated from the Other Side instead, giving it a hollow, echoing sound.

  “Yes, I know,” Talia told her dead cat. “I should get another. It’s not healthy to want to visit the dead and keep bringing them back. But you’re just waiting there. Your little soul’s so close—how can I not see you?”

  Willow offered nothing more than a meow, though Talia thought she detected a note of pity in it. She’d had quite enough pity from herself, without her own cat adding to the mix. She entertained, briefly, the idea of bringing Willow into university. Having the little cat slumber at her desk as she listened to lectures, while her classmates ogled her in a vast array of emotions. Jake probably would be impressed, same with Nadine, but Elorie would hiss something about it being unnatural. She wasn’t as open-minded as she claimed.

  I have nothing against necromancers, but… Talia pinched her lips together. As for displaying this power in the street—she’d done it once, as a child. Sad that the car-hit pigeon she’d attempted to rescue had died, she brought it back so that it could go and rejoin its family. The result was that hundreds of birds had taken to the skies to flee their former companion, and strangers in the street spat at her, and smashed their boots upon her bird until she released its soul, crying and sobbing until the snot ran into her mouth, before her father and sister had intervened.

  They had the Talk shortly after that. Don’t let others see the power. Don’t attract any more attention than necessary.

  All she wanted was to give that bird another chance at life. It was a hard pill to swallow, to understand that necromancy didn’t offer that. Not really.

  Just a small version of what life once was—bound in servitude to the one in charge of their immortal soul.

  “In the past,” her father had said, “necromancers did truly wicked things.”

  She’d studied that in her history lessons, too. How powerful necromancers raised the dead, regardless of which side of the war they’d been on, and set them noiselessly to cut down foes. How the Great King Norwik of Ireland four hundred years past had turned out to be a dead body for all those years, his face hidden behind a mask, his master a man with dark ambition. The dark deeds of her magic were splattered across the pages of history.

  That kind of knowledge did things to people, she surmised. It crushed them, or made them believe they were worth nothing more than sinners.

  She continued to stroke her ghostly purring cat, her back turned to the gardener pottering around, keeping the grass mown and the bushes trimmed. The fencing didn’t conceal much—only the hedges did. But generally, they employed people who didn’t bat an eyelid whenever any of the Grieve family made a little trip to the pet cemetery. Pets were safe things to raise by necromantic standards. Their love was simple and strong. It was the humans that provided a little more complications.

  Footsteps from behind didn’t draw Talia’s attention enough to look. She was too busy petting Willow, absorbed in the strange, ghostly purring the dead cat gave. Talia’s magic tended to drain out about an hour after she’d summoned a pet, and needed around a day to recharge, but it did mean she could visit Willow at least once a day and treasure that little time spent.

  A shadow cast over her, and she turned her gaze to face a stranger. Her heart gave a chaotic leap, though Willow continued to purr in her lap, obeying the primary directive of give affection.

  The man who towered above regarded her with hateful yellow eyes, his hands formed into fists, his nostrils flared as if he’d scented something rancid.

  “You are Talia Grieve, yes?” His voice was deep, almost guttural, with a slight accent denoting him as a citizen of another city.

  “Yes,” she said cautiously, wondering if she should have lied instead. Self-consciously, she gripped tighter onto Willow and issued a silent command. Protect me if he attacks.

  The cat’s purring abruptly stopped, and Willow’s baleful eyes fixed on the stranger.

  “I’m Janos Hunter,” the man said, barely fighting back scorn in his tone. “And I’m the one assigned to protect you.” He attempted a bow, but it was stiff and half-hearted.

  Talia gave a rather nervous laugh. Protect her? He looked ready to kill her. He was six feet of steel, raven dark hair, and cold yellow eyes. Any thought of being able to socialize effectively in university died with the remainder of her hopes.

  Chapter Two – Janos

  Assigned to a necromancer. Out of all the people he had to guard, this was his fate. It’s a good job, his father had said. We’re getting triple the pay we normally do, he’d said.

  No fucking wonder, if his duty was to safeguard a necromancer. Who didn’t even attempt to hide her abilities from him. She sat there, brazen as you pleased, clutching her demonic hellspawn upon her lap as it rumbled out an ominous hissing noise. His own hackles rose in response, and it took everything in his willpower for his wolf not to start growling at the monster.

  “I can’t believe my father hired you,” she said, squinting up at him with blue eyes, though they held nothing of that icy cold the dead displayed—they were darker, though not friendly. “What the hell are you?”

  “A werewolf,” he said with a hint of bite. “Do you have a problem with my kind?”

  “Do you have a problem with mine?” she retorted.

  Touché, he thought. Well, he could hardly hide his own dislike, it seemed. “I did not… expect for my charge to be… a necromancer.”

  “How can you not?” Now she scowled at him, her mouth a thin, unpleasant line. “If you’re assigned to me, surely you’d know what you were dealing with?”

  “I was assigned to you by my father, in truth,” he replied. “He was the one with the original job offer, and he extended it to me, as he’d promised protection of another. We’re a family business.”

  “And he failed to mention about me, I suppose.”

  He did, Janos thought sourly. This was just like his father. Constantly trying to persuade him that necromancers weren’t twisted or unholy. That they just did their jobs. That way back when, it was thanks to one that they caught his mother’s killer.

  But all he remember
ed was the furious, grabbing, blood-clotted hands of a corpse protesting its own resurrection. Not whatever interrogation had been extracted out of that corpse to lead to the arrest of the club killer.

  “You can drop the job, then, if you want.” She stroked that hideous bundle of bones, and it started to make sounds like a washing machine. “My father can find someone else.” The fact that she sounded rather hopeful about this irritated him further.

  “No, it’s fine.” Plus, his father would personally hang him out to dry if he refused such a high-paying job because of a tiny bit of discrimination. “I was simply surprised. It’s not often I see...” His sentence stumbled to a close. His throat constricted, unable to utter what he wanted.

  She examined her cat. Something darkened in her expression. “Alright,” she said. “I suppose this isn’t a common sight...” With a small sigh, she closed her eyes. The creature jumped off her lap and began to burrow beneath loose soil. In a moment, only the top part of its spine stuck up, and she piled more earth on top. The quivering under the soil abruptly stilled. “I’ve dismissed her. Better?”

  “Yes,” he said, thanking her, while a horrible crawling sensation traveled up and down his spine, lending heavy nausea to his brain.

  “In case you’re wondering, I don’t do this outside of the home property.” Talia stared at the spot where the cat was buried. “The magic might be legal here, but there’s still plenty of hatred against it. So I prefer to cause minimum disruption—keep it all in the safety of my home.”

  “That would be wise,” he said, while privately hoping he’d never have to be exposed to it again. Small chance of that. Necromancers carried heavy demand for their powers, in investigations, in understanding last wills, and sometimes hunting down the souls of those long ago lost. “As I understand it from my contract, I am to accompany you everywhere.” At her little frown, he continued with, “I will try to be as discreet as possible, stay out of your way when applicable, and ensure that you come to no bodily or magical harm. My contract’s on a three-month renewal, so should you be satisfied with my services, we can continue the arrangement long term.”