A Ghoulish Midlife (Witching After Forty #1) - Lia Davis Page 0,18

have to physically touch him to know that. Shuddering, I closed my eyes. Please let him disappear.

No such luck. He was still there. At least his body was. Damn.

With shaking hands, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed 911. “Clint!” I yelled. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the man’s lower body. His upper body and head were hidden by the dumpster. I backed up and banged on the back door without taking my eyes off of the dead feet. “Clint!”

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“Yeah, I just found a body. Behind Imaginary Homes Bookstore, partially hidden by the dumpster.” My voice was shaky with fear, but who could blame me? I hadn’t seen a dead body since… Well, not like this, not since I was ten.

The door slammed behind me. “Holy shit,” Clint whispered. “That’s a damn dead body. Holy shit.”

“No,” I answered the operator’s question, which I’d almost missed. “We won’t touch anything. I haven’t. I just threw a bag of trash in the dumpster.  Clint inched forward and put his fingers on the man’s leg. Checking for a pulse, I guessed.

“Back away and wait for the police to get there,” she said.

I grabbed Clint’s arm, and we shuffled to the front of the alley. He took a moment to walk around the building rather than touch the back door again and locked the front door before returning to me. “We’re closed,” he said in a nervous voice. “This is awful.”

I wrapped my arms around my middle and nodded. Death was not my thing. It would only lead to pain and memories I didn’t want to relive.

As soon as the police arrived, we tiptoed behind them back into the alley. It took them a while to catalogue everything, but when they finally moved the dumpster, I caught a look at the guy’s neck and gasped, slamming my hand over my mouth and backing away.

I knew what he was. And what was worse, I knew him. I’d just never realized that my Aunt’s old friend was a necromancer. I tried to keep from hyperventilating as I looked at the gray tattoo on his neck.

It looked just the way my Auntie’s had. The way my Yaya’s had, and the way mine had before I’d changed it. Witch marks were only visible to other witches, so I’d enlisted the help of Aunt Winnie. The tattoo was invisible to humans, thanks to her spell on the ink, but to other witches it appeared green, like the Earth witches on my mother's side of the family. I got the other part of myself, the part I kept locked away, hidden, from Dad.

The police whirled around when they heard me, to see what I was gasping about. I had to think fast. Telling them that this poor dead guy was a necromancer wasn’t an option. I had no idea which of them knew that I was a witch. Only Sam knew I was one as well, and he knew why I hated that power.

Probably none of the officers there had the first clue since I didn’t recognize any of them. “Is Sam coming?” I whispered.

One of the officers walked closer. “He’s on his way. Are you okay?”

“I just… I know the victim.” A sob caught in my throat as the rest of the words froze there. He’d been killed. Necromancers were incredibly difficult to kill. I could see blood and what to me looked like a stab wound through his shirt. “How did he die?” I asked.

"Stabbed.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

But how? Necromancers didn’t just die when we were injured. The injury had to be incredibly bad. Either something fast and severe, or so massive there was no recovering. “Stabbed where?” I asked.

“Directly in the heart.”

Oh. That would do it if the knife was big enough and long enough.

But who would kill a necromancer? Who would know to stab in just the right spot?

I knew the answer, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself.

Likely only another necromancer or a very advanced magic user. We held our secrets close to our chests, and it wasn’t common knowledge that we were hard to kill. Not common at all.

This whole debacle threw me back into the memory I tried so hard to repress.

The day I stopped using my necromancy magic was the single most traumatic day of my life.

My dad had been dead for five years. He was in a horrific car accident on the interstate involving