The Necromancer ✓

Chapter Seventeen

"I need you to stay away from here today," I told my mother in the morning. I found her in the stairs outside my room.

"That boy cleaned your kitchen," she said.

"Huh?" I asked, walking down the stairs.

"Your lodger. Housemate. Tyler."

"Sorry, what do you mean, he cleaned my kit..." the word died on the tip of my tongue as I walked into the kitchen. I looked at the floor, where the pool of blood had been, only yesterday, dried to a stain next to the bench. It was gone. "Tyler did this?" I asked, starring at the floor.

"Yesterday," she said.

"How did he do it?" I asked. I knelt down to look more closely, swiping my palm over the surface of the wood. He hadn't even dented the resin.

"I think it was baking soda."

"Oh," I stood up and went to make a cup of tea. "I wouldn't have thought of that."

"You got lucky with him," she said. I dropped my teabag onto the bench.

"What?"

"Tyler seems like a really nice young man," she said, walking around the bench to stand in front of me.

"Oh," I picked the teabag up and put it into my cup. "Right."

"Are you feeling all right?"

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah. I'm just a little on edge."

"Yeah," she nodded. She looked genuinely concerned.

"Anyway," I said, subtly changing the subject. "I need to test a spell today."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, and I think you should probably get as far away as you possibly can, just in case something goes wrong."

"Okay," her eyes were a little watery when she smiled at me. I felt a touch of guilt for getting rid of her earlier than was really necessary but I didn't think I could handle her hovering around all day when things were so new between Kieran and me.

I still felt raw all over.

I brought the book down to the kitchen and set it down on the bench. I got my supplies out of the cupboard and lay them out beside the book. Kieran sat at the table watching me.

"Did you want to be inside," I asked, picking up the jar of salt, "or out of the circle?"

"Which would be better?" he asked. He sounded very serious and respectful when he spoke and I felt like he really valued my opinion. He treated me with the respect due to an expert in her field. I thought that was how he saw me, preparing for my ritual, an expert on the dead.

"You can come in," I said, "but it might be distracting..."

"You want me to stay out of the way."

"No, it's not-"

"It's okay," he said. "I understand that you don't want to say it." I gave him a tight smile. He was right, but I didn't have to go out of my way to acknowledge that, did I? "Is it okay if I stay here?" he asked, tapping the wood of the table. "I'd like to watch."

"Yeah, that's fine." I walked the line of salt around the bench. Honestly, that's the main reason that I love island benches so much. You can do a ritual in the comfort of your own kitchen, and still cast a solid circle around your workspace. I'd like to see someone walk a line of salt through a kitchen wall, in order to surround a normal bench. No seriously, that would be something to see.