The Necromancer’s Dance

Angel quirked a brow at the handsome vamp without taking his eyes off the slim cigar, and let his vision blur at the periphery, focusing on the tip, and called soundlessly for fire. A tiny red ember flared to life at the end of the cheroot, and a thin wisp of smoke rose. A soft, wordless sigh echo through the room, and the atmosphere shifted. It was as if the roof was gone and they were all under the open night sky, hemmed in by close walls, cocooned and safe. Nothing but a sensory illusion, but was powerfully present. Magic—it moved Angel in strange ways. He let his eyes close, and tipped his head back as he took that first sweet drag of freshly lit tobacco, potent and burning, hot as it slid over his tongue and into his lungs.

Angel sensed the power in the room, heard the whispers of it as it pooled and eddied around him, gray and cool and fluid. His eyes were still shut, but that was no matter. Angel could see the magic as no one else in this room was able, tangible and real and malleable. He held his breath, the smoke deep in his lungs, and called. It answered, rising from the floor and peeling off the walls, racing from the dim glow of the humans in the room. It came to him, time slowing, the magic winding about itself, roping and writhing like snakes made from liquid light and smoke. Angel held the tumbling cloud of magic in front of him, with the merest shift of his thoughts and opened his eyes. Angel dropped his chin, and looked to Greg. Angel held his breath, reality around him slow and heavy.

Angel let the smoke out of his lungs, blowing it to where the cloud of magic hovered unseen. If Angel called more magic, any one could see it, but there was no need. He had enough. Angel was not raising the dead, merely manipulating the approaching death of the compelled man, so what he gathered was sufficient. The smoke from his lungs arced through the invisible magic cloud, and thickened, becoming more substantial. It grew, and moved with the magic gathered over the table. Angel heard Simeon shift on his feet, and the other vamps stiffened. The humans all inhaled sharply, and stared. They don’t often see magic performed, going by their reactions. Greg was so far gone he was barely conscious.

Time to play.

Angel gave the smoke and magic cloud a gentle mental nudge, and a thin thread of it peeled off from the mass and snaked out towards Greg. He saw it coming, and jerked, trying to escape the chair. It was the compulsion working, trying to get the compelled out of the way of the spell.

The smoke was on him before Greg even finished lifting in his seat. A thin thread ran into his gaping mouth, as if inhaled. The magic pulled the writhing mass from the air into his body. Eventually all the smoke was absorbed, and Greg stopped breathing. He slumped in his chair, hands falling from the table, and he fell over, forehead smacking the hard wood surface.

“Mors nos tangit omnes,” Angel whispered, releasing all tension from his muscles, relaxing fully in the chair.

Death touches us all.

He pulled in a breath, and collected his thoughts, taking his time. Though not too much time, a man was dying across the table from him.

“Life reduced to cold corpse, enslaved flame to ash. Ash to smoke, death made spirit. All is mine by first and last breath. Potest quidem mortuum meum,” Angel recited softly, each word pushing the smoke and magic through Greg’s body.

What is dead is mine.

The tobacco was the corpse, the spark Angel called the enslaved flame, the ashes to smoke, and so on. Magic was an English major’s wet dream of symbolism. Angel used the bare bones version of a greatly complicated spell, not needing the full incantation. He was not aiming to create a zombie, just get some answers and free an idiot from another magic user’s influence. Technically Greg was dying right that second. Body starved of oxygen, his brain suffering under the rapidly eroding compulsion that was killing him just as fast as Angel’s spell.

Until Angel stopped it.

Vision blurred again, melding the invisible with the visible. Angel watched the smoke running through Greg, filling every crevasse of his body, every artery and vein. It raced through his nerves, his muscles, and battled its way up the compelled man’s spinal cord. Angel saw when the gray smoke hit Greg’s brain stem, and that is where the sparks happened. Angel was able to see the compulsion, and set the smoke on it like a hound to a coon. The smoke flashed hot, and burnt away the spell buried in Greg’s brain. The remnants disappeared fast, as swiftly as small embers thrown from a bonfire.

Now he is mine.

“Hear me, Gregory Doyle. Hear me, and obey. Breathe, and speak.”