Defiant Necromancer (Book 2 stubbing July 3)

“I guess I’d better check out my class,” Victoria said, smiling up at Tybalt.

“Probably,” he said. He leaned down and planted another soft kiss on her lips. The foxgirl opened her mouth and invited him in. She wrapped her arms around him, he pressed her lightly back, and for a minute, they rolled back and forth in the soft grass, their surroundings forgotten, more relaxed than Tybalt remembered feeling in years. It reminded him a little of being a teenager.

Before I had any responsibilities, any big causes for resentment…

When they separated, he was on top again.

He let out a long exhale and then crawled to the side slightly to lay his head on the soft pillow of Victoria’s breasts. She let out a quiet, slightly surprised breath and then stilled underneath him. He smiled. She would have to get used to this sort of thing now that she was one of his fiancees. He intended to use her body as a pillow frequently in the future.

Her breasts were nice. Soft but perky, with the same thick nipples as Vidalia’s - he could feel one through her thin dress, poking into his cheek. Medium sized breasts, right in between Mariella’s voluptuous chest and Vidalia’s smaller one.

“Perfect,” he sighed quietly into her soft flesh.

She let out a quiet snicker that rubbed her chest against him in just the right way.

I could fall asleep here if you weren’t making me horny doing that, he thought. Though honestly, I could just fall asleep here anyway. The reason I can make you feel special, Vicky, is that no one else affects me in quite the same way you do. I’m so lucky I get to have you in my life.

It was true what he’d said on their first outing together. She felt like the girl next door - like, if she hadn’t been born with fox ears and a tail, she could have grown up next to him, and they would have gotten married, fucked like rabbits, fought a bit, fucked some more to make up, popped out kids, and grown old together happily.

Victoria wasn’t like her sister, preoccupied with a sense of destiny. She wasn’t like Mariella, who Tybalt had essentially almost conned into a relationship - and who was now in the process of betraying her country.

No, the foxgirl was more like a woman he’d have married if he was a normal man - and he found himself more excited than he thought he’d be at the prospect of spending every day with her. He realized he hadn’t allowed himself to invest as much into this relationship, emotionally, as he did with Mariella and Vidalia. A part of him had assumed he would lose her to Andric or even someone else.

Now he wanted to have all those experiences with Victoria that he’d never let himself have with the village girls he’d gone out with as a teenager, because there was no one he genuinely wanted to be with beyond getting his dick wet. He wanted to skim stones with her in a pond and pick flowers for her and go skinny-dipping together.

He wanted to lay his head on her chest, or in her lap, and fall asleep on a summer day with her fingers stroking his hair - which, he realized as he thought of it, was what she had started doing, since he was already lying on her chest.

It was as if she felt the same instinctive pull as him.

He felt a strange tightening in his chest, and he tried to suppress it.

I’m… probably going to fall in love with you, he thought. Now I need to make sure I don’t say that out loud until after we’re actually married. I sound like a fool even to myself. What is wrong with me? This is the third woman I’ve become engaged to, and if I say a single word that I’m thinking, I swear I’ll bite through my tongue and swallow it…

He made himself leave the comfort of her chest, pushed himself to a seated position, and smiled at her.

“I can’t believe you ever felt like you were anything less than special.”

They kissed again, and he ran his hand up her waist, exploratory. Everything was wonderfully new. She didn’t do anything to stop him even when he grazed her breast, though her kissing slowed as if she was thinking about whether to call a halt. When he rubbed a thumb over her nipple, she broke the kiss. He pulled back, thinking he had crossed a line - and excited about testing her boundaries. Like he was a teenager doing all of this for the first time again.

“When we tell the tribe about our engagement, can you let Vidalia and I break the news to Andric first?” Victoria asked.

“Oh, sure,” Tybalt said.

You were thinking about that?

“Sorry,” she said, like she could read his mind. Or maybe his face was just that transparent right now. “I just want things settled as quickly as possible. I don’t like matters being up in the air… Plus, once we announce our engagement to you, you’ll undo our maiden’s braids, and she can finally - um, you and she can finally…”

Tybalt put his hand back on her breast and gently squeezed. “It’s kind of arousing how awkward you are about this.”

“I don’t mean to be,” she said, half-giggling. Then her face became serious. “You’ll… undo my braid at the same time, which means I’ll also be, um, available to you, as far as everyone knows. I hope you might be a little more patient with me, still.” She reached up, took his palm away from her breast, and held his hand in her lap, squeezing and caressing it as she looked into his eyes. “I want us to really feel like we know each other, before we… become one flesh. If that’s all right with you. I, um, Vidalia and I were raised to understand that a woman doesn’t refuse her husband in this area. So I’ll be available to you. Either way.” She looked away, slightly embarrassed, fidgeted, twirled a strand of hair behind her ear that had somehow gotten loose from her braid. “I just have this idea that something in our first encounter will reflect the relationship itself.” She smiled at him, and there was a hint of lust there that Tybalt didn’t think he’d seen before. “I want to be eager, like Vida is, not anxious.”

You’ll probably be anxious either way, the necromancer thought. But I have no reason to rush you. I can at least make you wait for it until you want it for yourself at least as much as I do.

He pressed the back of her hand to his lips and kissed it.

“I’m happy to wait for you, and glad… to know it’s me you’ll be waiting for,” he truthfully said. “You’ve made me very happy today, you know.”

She brushed the loose strand of hair back again and blushed.

“I’ve made myself happier, too, believe it or not. I wasn’t delaying my decision before, um, for fun. It was to have a sense of certainty… and it feels good to know. To have confidence in my choice.” She cleared her throat. “Now I’ll take a look at my class and see if I’ll actually be any use to you outside of normal wife functions.” She let out a nervous chuckle.

***

Victoria opened her status screen.

“Is it everything you were hoping for?” he asked, cautiously returning the smile.

“I’m going to be helping you out a lot,” she said. “I really do have a class: Chthonic Priestess of Mudo.”

“Excellent. Sounds very useful. We need to get you some levels!”

“I wonder how I do it.”

I already got a little experience, somehow. Was that from kissing the High Priest?

“You should talk to Stanislaw - the mummy former High Priest - about that later. He’s inside Vidalia’s tattoo, which feels like an even better decision now that you acquired this class. It would be redundant for a priestess to be carrying around a High Priest all the time. For now, though, I understand that prayer and meditation can bring you closer to Lord Mudo.”

Well, I guess Vida practices her class by sleeping… and I know she’s been advancing it more lately, ever since her visions started coming true in bigger and more significant ways. And it’s possible I just got experience from kissing Tybalt. It works in mysterious ways.

“Maybe you could pray over some of the dead bodies I’m working with.”

Victoria automatically turned to look at the amalgamation of corpses that Tybalt had been assembling before he walked over to where she was. But he stepped into her line of sight, apparently leery of letting her gaze too long at what was frankly a horrific display of the necromantic art.

“I meant some of the bodies I’m planning to work with,” he clarified, waving behind him dismissively. “These human bodies were basically just junk, a bunch of miners who weren’t going to be good for anything anyway. So I decided to use them as raw materials for experiments.”

“Did you… just now kill them?” she asked quietly.

“Some were already dead, but a few of them, yeah.” He sounded a bit sheepish.

Victoria realized he was wondering if she was judging him. The killing was unnecessary, she knew. The miners were his prisoners, not a threat.

“I don’t care about them,” she said after a moment. “If that was what you were thinking.”

“All right.”

“They chose their fate when they decided to set the Army on us.” She tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice. It was hard to know the right thing to say about this to Tybalt, who had been one of the Army’s foot soldiers only weeks ago.

She didn’t hold anything against him or Mariella, but she was far from forgiving the other humans of the Kingdom for their crimes.

“Hopefully we’ll have the luxury of giving others the chance to change their allegiance in the future,” he said. “When I don’t need every weapon of war I can get my hands on.”

She nodded, and then Tybalt led her uphill a half mile, to where the climate began to get a bit cooler. There was a row of five dead beastfolk, two ibexmen and three foxmen.

“These are the casualties from the battle for the village,” she said.

“Yes. Maybe your connection with Lord Mudo will help one or two of them become something better than ordinary undead. No guarantees, of course. I’m still feeling out how this works myself. Creating intelligent undead is always a gamble, even after weeks of practice. The only guaranteed thing was that the former Beastkings all came back with their wits. The ancient beastfolk practice of mummification seems to be far more advanced than anything I’ve found in my book… but it also takes weeks of skilled labor. It’s not something I can do myself, and the limitation is that mummies all come back with the exact same traits they had when they were alive. It limits their growth potential. For instance, my revenant Baldwin acquired a skill as a revenant that he couldn’t have developed as a human. But so far, none of my mummies have acquired any skills from leveling up. There’s a much bigger potential upside to getting an intelligent undead that wasn’t preserved as a mummy… unless the mummy is made from a person who was very powerful in life.”

“I understand,” Victoria said, nodding. She knew Tybalt was explaining it to her, not so much because she needed to know the logistics, but more because he wanted her to know why he wasn’t having these beastfolk mummified - because he was worried she might think he was callous toward dead beastfolk, not trying everything he could do to preserve their intelligence. There was some truth to that, but she wasn’t offended by it. These were just dead bodies. Flesh and bone. They would only ever have life again if Tybalt gave it to them.

“Is there anything you want to ask me?” the necromancer said.

“No, Tybalt.” She managed a small smile, despite the sight of the dead bodies in front of her, stiff and cold - and three of them formerly members of her own tribe. “Don’t worry. Go finish your project. I’ll do what I can. If I can do anything.”

He nodded and left. Victoria closed her eyes and felt for the connection between herself and Lord Mudo. She knew it was strong.

She knelt in front of the nearest body, an ibexman, and she began to silently pray.

Dear Lord, please look favorably upon your poor servant here, untimely killed but committed to your service even beyond his death…

Slowly, the foxgirl circled around the bodies, kneeling beside each one for special attention, almost trance-like as the feeling of conviction grew in her. After just fifteen minutes, she heard the notification for a level but suppressed it, maintaining her focus. Another thirty-five minutes later, she received a second level, but she didn’t notice this time.

Words had come into her head as she continued, prayers in languages she did not speak, phrases whose meanings she did not entirely grasp herself. She uttered them in her mind regardless. Perhaps out loud, too. It was hard to know, in this strange state of total concentration, whether she was speaking out loud or not.

She just knew that she was done when Tybalt shook her by the shoulder.

“Vicky!” he said, a little too loudly.

She blinked up at him. “Oh, what?”

He gestured at the sky. The sun was setting.

“How long was I up here?” she asked.

“Hours, naturally.” His lips twitched, and she could tell he was trying not to smile. “The sun isn’t setting early today.”

“Well, raise these guys,” she said, after a moment. “I want to see if all my hours of labor had a result.” She suppressed her powerful desire to check her status and see what had come of her effort there. Time enough for that later.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and kissed her on the forehead before pulling her to her feet. She almost told him that she didn’t need the help, but as she rose, she felt more tired than she had expected. Also woozy and hungry. Her knees were sore from repeatedly kneeling, rising, moving to the next place, and then kneeling again, and she could see indentations in the ground in some of the places where she had prayed.

I hope that won’t happen every time.

Tybalt knelt and touched the ibexman Victoria had started with, and she found herself clenching her fists in anticipation.

Yes, yes, come on…

The contact between Tybalt and the body continued for a few seconds, and then it twitched. She looked at the necromancer impatiently, until he turned his head to look back at her.

“Sorry, Vicky, this one’s just a regular zombie.”

Her heart fell.

“Oh. Um, well, keep going!”

He did.