Kiss of the Necromancer (Memento Mori Book 1), page 1
Kiss of the Necromancer
Memento Mori: Book One
Kathryn Ann Kingsley
Copyright © 2021 by Kathryn Ann Kingsley
First Print Edition: June, 2021
ASIN: B093TCZPST
ISBN: 9798515841744
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
To be continued in
Follow Me!
Also by Kathryn Ann Kingsley
About the Author
Foreword
My agent, Nutmeg, insists that I tell you all that she is very disappointed with the lack of attention and recognition she has received regarding her diligent and frequent attempts to “fix” my manuscripts by deleting entire portions of them and replacing them with ASCII art.
She is utterly beside herself that she has yet to receive a single thank you from anyone for her hard work and long hours.
Regardless, I hope you enjoy Kiss of the Necromancer and the Memento Mori series! Thank you to my readers and my fans for supporting me. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate all of you.
Even if my cat doesn’t.
1
Memento Mori.
Remember that you will die. That death is coming for you.
“I remember falling.”
“Is that all?”
Maggie shut her eyes. “No.”
The stone crenellations on the balcony dug into her palms. She could feel the grit as the edges of the blocks jabbed into the cuts on her hands. She had been running away from someone. Standing on the edge, she turned to look in horror at the man who had been chasing her. Dark robes swirled around him. Only his silhouette was visible, cut out against the firelight of the torches behind him.
He reached for her.
She let herself fall backward into the darkness.
Indigo wool fabric whipped in the wind as the world rushed past her. Someone screamed her name, but it was too late. Hewn stone walls of the castle exterior turned to rough, jagged cliffs.
Then…all movement stopped.
Her ribcage collapsed.
Her lungs flooded with blood.
Her skull cracked.
She died.
She cringed. The memory of the pain of the impact crashed over her. She could feel the snap of her spine. She could feel the split in her skull. She could feel herself bleeding out. It was like an egg that had fallen from a counter and hit the tile floor. Cracked and splintered and oozing out from the fractures. A fragile and delicate thing that was never to be mended.
She remembered staring up at the starry night sky and the thin white clouds overhead, wondering if she would become a cloud when she died.
And death was right on the horizon for her.
“I remember falling to my death.”
Silence. She shuddered.
It had felt so real.
The quiet scratch of a pen on a piece of paper. “Is that where it ends?”
She hesitated, picking at the cuff of her oversized hoodie. It was emblazed with two skeletons and read “Lurk, Laugh, Loathe,” in distressed font. There was a loose string at the edge of the fabric, and she twisted it around her fingers and under the nail, enjoying the way it bit into her skin.
“Marguerite?”
It didn’t matter how many appointments she went to. It didn’t matter how obvious the symptoms were. The shame was always fresh and raw every time she wound up in this situation.
Maggie bounced her leg.
She really didn’t like being reminded of the fact that she was insane.
Taking in a deep breath, she held it, and buried in the long exhale, she finally replied. “No.”
“Please continue.”
Staring down into her lap, she hesitated for a moment. But what was the point in hiding? That was why she was here. That was why the court ordered her to be here. Either she went to these little sessions and kept getting reminded of her condition, or the checks stopped coming. And the checks were important.
It wasn’t like she could hold down a job.
Wasn’t like anybody would hire her, anyway.
Not when she couldn’t remember anything from her past. She remembered the last eighteen months…and before that? Nothing.
Zilch.
Nada.
Bupkis.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. She could remember plenty of things; it was all just nonsense. Nightmares filled her mind. Visions of death and dying, of fear and running away from something trying to catch her. Of a man—a creature—whose face she had never seen.
A hand, black as pitch, reached for her. Claws, jagged and impossibly long, slipped from the shadows. Silver circlets hovered around its wrists, floating as if they were outside the law of gravity.
Black robes.
It was coming for her.
She had to run.
But it was all impossible.
The only memories she had of her past were ones that couldn’t possibly have happened. Everything else was gone. It was the product of some “significantly traumatic event” or whatever the fuck the doctors wanted to call it.
Muttering, she kept picking at the loose string of her hoodie. “I’ve been coming to these appointments for a long time now. I don’t understand the point in making me talk about things that aren’t real.”
“Healing takes time. Now, please…what else happened after you fell?”
She shot the man across the coffee table a glare. “What always happens when things fall. I stopped falling.”
He didn’t notice. He was writing in his notepad. The quiet scratch of a pen against paper was the only sound for a long moment. “And?”
Maggie shut her eyes.
Jagged rocks had met her at the bottom of the castle. Its parapets were black silhouettes against a barely brighter sky. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move.
She was already dead.
The silence of her heart was deafening. Her body was dead.
But she was still…there, somehow. Lingering. Stuck. Waiting for Death himself to fetch her.
Someone was suddenly there beside her. But it was not the reaper, although black robes swirled around him, caught in the wind she could no longer feel. He knelt beside her. Claws, long and jagged, as dark and shining as onyx, reached for her. Silver bands caught the dim starlight, stark in contrast against the shadows around him.
He spoke.
“You will never die alone.”
It was a promise and a threat. It was comforting and terrifying. A single claw touched the spot over her heart. She remembered a sensation like something was being punched through her. Not the claw, but something else. Something worse.
“Is that all the figure said to you?”
She nodded weakly. “The memory ends there.”
“And how does it make you feel?”
“Afraid. Terrified.” She refused to look up at the man and meet his gaze. The way his low, dark voice carried through the room was intimidating enough. She didn’t need to see him look through her like he always did. Like she was an open book, waiting to be browsed at his leisure.
“Is that all?”
She paused. After a long moment, she lied and nodded.
She was a terrible liar. He sighed. “We will work on that another time. Do you remember anything else about this figure from your memory?”
She bounced her leg again. It was a terrible habit. It annoyed the shit out of everyone who had the bad luck of sitting next to her. It also made her absolutely terrible at poker. She turned her attention down into her lap once more, picking at that stray string like it was the only thing in her life that mattered. “No. That’s all.”
“Marguerite?”
It was clear he didn’t believe her. But she didn’t care. She shook her head. “That’s all. The claws, the silver bands, the weird…black fabric. And that one phrase. ‘You will never die alone.’”
The man let it slide and moved on. “It seems to imply that he believed you would die more than once.”
“I guess.”
“Do you have any other memories of dying?” When she didn’t respond, he pressed. “Marguerite, we’ve been working together for some time, like you said. It’s time to be honest with me. You can trust me. This is a safe place.”
“I know, but I don’t—I don’t want t
“No one does. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. This isn’t your fault. You aren’t to blame for any of this.”
“How do you know?” She wrinkled her nose. “What if I’m just defective? What if I’m just wired wrong?”
“Then that still isn’t your fault, princess.” His low, rumbling voice went soft. His nickname for her and the way he said it sent an unwelcome shiver up her spine. “You can trust me. Now…can you recall dying any other times?”
Swallowing, she nodded. “It’s all I can remember.”
“And is the figure always there?”
“Yeah.”
“And you never see anything else about him?”
“No.”
She hated lying. But she didn’t know what else to say. The problem was that she could remember more. She could recall a flash of pure white hair, tendrils of it that escaped the black hood the figure wore. She could never see his face. But that one detail was always clear.
And it was extremely problematic.
The man across the coffee table from her had gone back to writing in his notepad. She looked up at him and winced.
Dr. Gideon Raithe, psychiatrist. Her psychiatrist.
More importantly, he was also her caseworker. He was the reason she kept getting regular checks from the state saying that she was too disabled to work. They weren’t much, but they covered her expenses. She could pay her meager rent at the “halfway home” she had been set up in, and she could feed and clothe herself. She even had enough money for a cellphone.
And it was all because he kept checking the boxes saying she was trying to get better. More than once, she wanted to run for the hills. She didn’t know why, but she was always so tempted to buy a one-way bus ticket to Mexico and disappear in the jungles of the Yucatan or some shit. I’d end up murdered in a week or getting kidnapped and sold to some drug cartel. Nah. Probably just murdered.
He sat in the chair across from her, his all-black suit standing out against the white linen of the upholstered fabric. He was always dressed like he was going to some formal affair. The most dressed-down she had ever seen him was when he had spilled tea on his suitcoat and had to conduct her therapy session in just a white tie and a black vest.
Sharp jaw, sharp cheekbones, and bright silver eyes. He had the kind of voice that she swore must resonate the glassware in the room with how rumbly it was. His receptionist wanted him in the worst way. It was clear by the way the woman stared at his ass as he walked by. And Maggie couldn’t blame her. Dr. Raithe was gorgeous.
She kept bouncing her leg.
But that probably wasn’t the first thing people noticed about him. It might have been the second, but she figured it wasn’t how people defined him in their heads.
That award probably went to the fact that his chin-length hair was pure white. Not “I went gray early,” but as white as snow. It was exacerbated by skin tone that answered the question of what would happen if someone from the Middle East didn’t see sunlight for a few decades.
But the white hair.
It was the same as in her hallucinated memories.
She shook her head and looked down at her lap again.
“When you recall these memories of yours…how do they make you feel?”
She shrugged. “I told you.”
“Marguerite.”
“I think I prefer ‘Maggie.’ It’s much easier to say.” She smiled faintly. She hated all the questions. And the one question she had learned she hated more than any other was the one he had just asked. It always felt pedantic. It was somehow saccharine.
“Very well. Maggie, how do these memories of yours make you feel?”
She shifted to sit with her legs crossed in front of her. Namely so she could stop bouncing her leg like an asshole. She leaned on them to quiet the nervous action. “I told you. Afraid.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Something’s always chasing me. Or…or hunting me, I don’t know. I’m always running away.”
“From the figure?”
“Yeah.”
“Does he ever hurt you?”
She opened her mouth to answer then paused. She thought she had known the answer. The answer should be “yes.” He was a monster in her dreams. A nightmare. A creature stalking and chasing her.
But she did remember something after falling from the castle balcony. She remembered those inhumanly long talons lifting her from the ground. She remembered being cradled against black fabric.
“You will never die alone.”
A promise and a threat.
Comforting and terrifying.
Angry…and mournful.
She was afraid of him. She was afraid of dying. But that wasn’t all she felt. There was something else there, lurking in the shadows of her stilled heart.
“Maggie? What do you remember?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. Sorry.” Embarrassed, she smiled at him. “Defective brain went for a walk. It’s fine.”
“You aren’t defective.”
“If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be here. I’m nuts.”
“That’s for me to decide, isn’t it?” He smirked at her. A twist of lips, the bottom just slightly fuller than the top. He had a white goatee, neat and carefully trimmed. Silver eyes sparkled with a playful humor. “Unless you’re gunning for my job.”
“Sit here all day and listen to whackos go on for hours about how they’re a chicken stuck in a human’s body or how they remember being chased and slaughtered by some weird Lord of the Rings knock-off Nazgul?” She scoffed. “No, thanks. I think I’ll pass. Rather be the whacko.”
“I don’t have a client who believes he’s a chicken.” With another twist of his lips, he glanced back down to his notepad. “Anymore.”
She laughed and leaned back against the sofa cushions. The room was decorated to feel comfortable but sparse. Books lined the walls, and she suspected he didn’t actually own any of them. It was well-lit. Bright and sunny. Everything about it was meant to feel cheerful and hopeful.
“How are you doing, Maggie?”
She shrugged again. “I’m okay. I’ve been sleeping.”
“Have the pills helped?”
“Yeah. They…keep the dreams away.”
“Do you take them every night?” When she hesitated, he looked up from his notepad, arching one thin, white eyebrow at her. “Please tell me the truth, princess.”
She wondered if he gave all his clients nicknames. That was what she got for buying a hoodie with an image of a princess in a pink dress standing over a bloody dragon’s corpse that read “I Can Save Myself” on it for her first appointment with him.
Well. Her first appointment with him outside the hospital.
She still couldn’t remember a whole lot of those weeks she spent strapped to a cot, plugged full of drugs. “I don’t like how they make me feel the next day. Like I’m stuck in a fog. I only take them when I really need to sleep.”
“Is that the only reason you don’t take them?”
She couldn’t hold his silver gaze. She glanced back down and tucked a strand of her long dark hair behind her ear. She had just finished dying the tips neon orange, and she was having fun twisting the dyed portions around her fingers. It made her smile. And she loved anything that made her smile. “No. Not the only reason.”
“Why, then?”
“I…don’t want to be like this. I want to remember. And if the dreams are part of it—if they’re a clue—then I need to dream.”
“Are you always afraid when you dream?”
A hand pressed to the back of her neck and pushed her against the wall. The flaking paint crumbled from the impact, chips of it falling to the floor. This place had been abandoned for many, many years.
