Free Limbo's Child by Jonah Hewitt

whisper.
    Nephys turned around. Hiero just wheezed impatiently.
    “What?” Nephys said, “but you just said…”
    “I DON’T CARE…what I said,” she replied resolutely. She had suddenly become far less hysterical and seemed almost calm. “I’m…I’m not leaving here without my daughter. She has to be around here somewhere. I’ll look over here while you look…”
    Just then a cold breeze made Nephys shudder. They were running out of time. This had to stop. Nephys strode over to her and grabbed her by the shoulders, took a breath and blurted it out.
    “Look, I know this is hard to understand, but I have some very tough news for you.”
    She gazed at him and her momentary resolve began to slip. She looked down at him with moist eyes as if she were about to cry again. “You mean…” her voice trembled, “she didn’t make it?”
    Nephys sighed. There was no easy way to say this.
    “No,” Nephys said, “she did make it. You didn’t .”
    A brief happy moment of relief that passed over her face was replaced by confusion.
    “Look at me, and tell me what you see,” Nephys said forcefully.
    She looked at Nephys and shook her head, looked away, but then cautiously looked back. Her eyes looked over his face – his strange eyes, his odd robes and some recognition flickered across her face. Then her eyes saw the black gash on his throat and the look turned to disgust. She closed her eyes quickly, shrugged off Nephys’ grip and stepped backward.
    “No…” she spoke it softly, then louder, “NO!”
    She was close now. She had, at least for a moment, acknowledged the possibility, but forced it away. She had seen something. Now Hiero stepped forward to seal the deal. He slowly stab-dragged his way to her feet, looked up at her and blew out a single, horrid, cacophonous note. Her eyes followed over his body with growing disgust and horror. At last, her mind could not find any last minute rationalization (Monkey? Pig? Mutant duck?) that could explain the hideous imp in front of her. The final realization hit her…she was dead …and then she screamed… for nearly twenty minutes.

Chapter Six Amarantha
    Lazlo Moríro was roaming the halls of the hospital in a moment of rare indecision. He knew that Hokharty and Graber would serve him well at their appointed errands, but there were places they could not go. To accomplish this next task, he needed a servant who could travel amongst the living and the dead. But there were grave dangers, and this servant could not be summoned to just any corpse. In fact, this one would not be summoned to a corpse at all. He needed a vessel who was not dead, or at least, not dead yet , which is why he had found his way to the oncology center.
    Moríro walked down the hall casually brushing his fingers across the doorframes of the patients’ rooms. He had covered his olive-green overcoat with a lab coat he had lifted from a closet. He had been rash and emotional earlier, and he wanted to avoid the scene he had inadvertently caused in the morgue. He had no difficulty in aping the officious demeanor of a physician since he had played that role successfully for the last three centuries. As a young man, he had attended the finest universities of Europe: Bologna, Salamanca, Oxford. His godmother had insisted. Being a doctor was an excellent cover for a necromancer. Any unusual death would be credited to the disease and any remarkable recovery would be credited to the skill of the physician. But Moríro had aspired for more than just a cover and had studied hard and learned to rely not just on his innate power, but on his medical knowledge as well – much to his godmother’s chagrin. In this way, he had plied his skills as a physician and only used his powers as Necromancer when he absolutely had to. Because of this, he had remained alive longer than any previous Necromancer, but this too had caused its own problems, which he now had to address.
    With the lab coat, Moríro’s assumed