who had recently come into the coroner's office for him to examine. He did the autopsies, provided the reports. Pretended to send the bodies off to wherever the families expected. If there’d even been a family. One woman had been a Jane Doe. Drowned. Never claimed, despite her face being plastered on the internet. The world’s loss, it seemed, was his gain.
Piece by piece, he put the woman together. Science and medicine had developed well past the tales of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. That’s what Erik thought of. But it hadn’t come so far as to bring people back from the dead. Though it did have lasers and other things to minimize the scarring if the spell didn’t work properly.
Spell.
He glanced at the book sitting on his computer desk. Next to the modern laboratory of his basement, the book seemed decayed and out of place. A bitter laugh escaped him.
“What am I doing?”
But the woman on the cold, steel table was more beautiful than he could have ever imagined. Long, black hair fell over her shoulders, and when her eyes opened, they would be a vivid blue. Not exactly Robin’s egg blue, but close. With flecks of gray in them.
He smiled at the thought. Doubt wiggled in his chest. The scientific mind. The mind that should shun all things mystical. Especially necromancy. Old world, uneducated beliefs to explain things they didn’t have the answer to.
But still. Here he stood.
The pieces came from multiple cadavers, with three various skin tones. All white, but from light to deep tan. He wasn’t sure how that would work with the spell. It only said to choose three. No more, no less.
So Erik chose the most beautiful women and took their best parts. The perfect woman created for him, by him.
He hooked the wires from monitoring equipment to her naked form. Nothing would come from this. He kept telling himself that. This was just an experiment. One last attempt to satisfy an all-consuming loneliness.
And when it failed, Erik would go to work. He’d do his job one last time. Say goodbye to his colleagues. Then, he’d come home, drink a fifth of bourbon, and take his handgun to bed with him.
It wouldn’t be sad. It’d be something better than this. Something better than the loneliness. The book he found was his last ditch effort to escape the loneliness. To find something that would end the ache in his heart.
Erik was just so damn tired of being alone.
If the spell worked, the woman’s devotion would be only for him. She would love only him. But she would be her own person. Not a shadow of the others.
The spell warned of that. Not to expect the personality of someone who had died. They were gone. This spell was not to bring back the soul of the dead.
But to create a new life from the dead.
Erik didn’t know if that meant she’d have a soul or not, but he wasn’t sure he cared. Not so long as she loved him.
He brushed his fingers over her forehead, then pulled away as though it had shocked him.
“This is insane.”
Yet, he walked over to the book. He picked it up. Even still, he felt the bits of dirt embedded into it. Graveyard dirt, according to the dealer. No matter where the book disappeared, they always found it in a graveyard. When or how—well only the book decided.
And, according to the dealer, it only came to the people it would best serve.
He figured it was all snake oil nonsense to get him to buy the book. But there had been an undeniable call. Something that made his heart pound and his palms sweat. He’d never been a nervous man. He wasn’t nervous at that moment either. It was something much more... primal.
And considering the dealer found Erik—well, people conned other people all the time.
But be warned. The end of the spell read. What you seek may not be what you receive. And in the end, a price is always paid.
Erik was more than willing to pay it if it ended his long suffering.
Taking a breath, he opened the book to the proper page. The spell was written in long strokes, each letter curved and styled on ancient paper that he handled with the gentlest touch. The last thing he wanted was for it to tear or disintegrate in his hands.
Then his last hope—crazy as it may be, would disintegrate along with it.
He read from the page—from a language that he guessed