Free Limbo's Child by Jonah Hewitt Page A

mantle of authority and grey hair was all he needed to pass unnoticed. As he walked past the rooms, he averted his dark eyes, partly out of respect for the occupants’ privacy, but mostly because his fingertips could tell him all he needed to know. Male, age 79, esophageal cancer, lifetime user of chewing tobacco. Wrong gender, and the subject needed to be able to talk anyway. A woman, mid-60s, brain tumor, inoperable, not ideal, but workable, very near death. However, she was surrounded by loved ones who wouldn’t take kindly to strangers intruding on their last moments.
    This was going to be difficult. He needed more time to find a suitable vessel, but he had little left. It wouldn’t be long before the three bodies missing from the morgue would be detected. Even if no one suspected that they had gotten up and walked away, their absence would be noticed and quickly attached to the stranger who had come looking for a dead relation. He had to act quickly and find a vessel soon.
    He wasn’t entirely certain it was the right thing to do, to summon up her , but there was no one else to turn to now. There would be consequences of course, there always were, but he needed to talk to Margarita and Margarita was now beyond his reach. He had hoped that Margarita would replace him, but she had followed another reckless path. She was never a true Necromancer and could not be summoned, but he had someone in mind who might be able to find her. His fingers trailed along the walls of the hallway: leukemia, carcinoma, lymphoma, there were certainly a lot of dying people here, but none of them were quite right. Some were months away, others only days, but all that were even remotely close to passing were annoyingly attended by loved ones. It was long past visiting hours, but not even in this wretched, mediocre age were people heartless enough to deny a person their last moment. Some of those attending were holding the hands of the unconscious who were no longer aware that anyone was there. They held on tightly in hope that there would be one wakeful moment of recognition before the end.           
    Other sentinels were in chairs, half-sleeping, awaiting the moment of passing, or the changing of the guard, as other relations took watch. Elsewhere, there were those who were dying but still conscious, using their last moments of strength not to fulfill their own desires, but to comfort those who had come to comfort them. Everywhere there were spoken promises and whispered hopes; circuitous, casual conversations that avoided the topic of death like the plague, yet somehow still acknowledged its omnipresent hand. There were confessions and prayers and tears and honored silence that screamed louder than the sharpest retort. It was cruel and noble and pitiful all at once.
    Moríro withdrew his trembling fingers from the walls and squeezed his eyes shut. It was nothing he hadn’t heard before, but it weighed on him more deeply than it had in a long time. As he opened his eyes, he saw something quick and fleeting and almost transparent dart down the corridor into a room at the end of the hall. It was small, like a child, but not really present, as if it were between this world and the next. As it passed, the linens of the gurneys and clothes of people walking in the hall flitted briefly as if moved by a faint wind. Moríro blinked his eyes several times. No one else in the hall reacted. It was not unusual for a Necromancer to see things that mere mortals could not. He had seen the souls of the dead passing into the next world, if only faintly, but this seemed different. If this was a spirit or a vision he couldn’t tell, but he had learned long ago not to ignore even the most simple of signs.
    He walked to the end of the hall and turned and looked into the room. A pervasive silence hung there, broken only by the horrid clicks and beeps of this age’s wretched machines. Beyond a thin curtain, he could see the end of a bed, the covered