1.

Tarael Vanth woke up to his cell phone vibrating and a ghost shouting at him. Both were surprisingly common at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday night.

"Vanth! Your phone is ringing, and it's annoying!" Cecelia demanded. Vanth opened an eye just in time to see her ghostly fingers pass through him as she tried to shake him.

"I'm awake…" he grumbled and shrugged off the chill on his skin left behind by her touch. For a moment, she became clearer from the magic she had swiped from him. He sat up and fumbled for his phone.

"What," he answered.

"Is this Tarael Vanth? I got your number from an acquaintance, and I require your assistance," a man's voice demanded from the other end of the line. Vanth could almost smell the entitlement through the phone.

"How many bodies?"

"Two."

"Sex?"

"Female, and they are human," the man replied and gave him an address. It was located in the more expensive areas of the human district. Vanth didn't want to have to get out of bed, so he rattled off an obscene amount of money.

"Done. When can I expect you?"

"Give me twenty minutes." Vanth hung up the phone and rubbed at his face. "Should've asked for more money."

"I keep telling you that," Cecelia said from where she sat on the end of his bed. She was an old ghost dressed in the flapper dress she had died in during the 1920's. She had taken a liking to him on his first visit to London and had been haunting him ever since. She wasn't the only one, but she was the most vocal one on trying to run his life.

"Bit of privacy?" Vanth said.

"I've seen it all before," she laughed at him, then vanished through a wall. He found his jeans on the floor and pulled a clean shirt from his work clothes dresser. They tended to be band shirts that were so old they were falling apart. He had a messy job, and more often than not, he had to burn whatever he wore. He went through a lot of clothes. He laced his boots in the dark and stumbled into his bathroom.

The ghouls must have cleaned again because someone had rolled up the end of his toothpaste tube. Small tasks kept them busy and stopped the rigor mortis from kicking in. Cleaning and laundry were the first things Vanth taught them. That and not to bite each other for fun.

He braided back his long black hair. He had only washed it a few hours beforehand, and rich boys always made the biggest messes. After nearly ten years of being a cleaner for the rich and monstrous, Vanth knew it to be a fact.

He washed his face and ignored the permanent smudge from his waterproof eyeliner. He would be back in a shower in a few hours anyway.

Out in the kitchen, a ghoul was doing its best to make coffee and was struggling with the buttons on the machine.

"Leave it, I'll do it," Vanth said, moving it out of the way. It shuffled off and immediately started to water the plants. The triple-storied funeral home he had converted was more spotless than usual.

He frowned, and his brain realized what was wrong. The ghouls weren't resting. Not that they needed to in the same way the living did, but usually, they only managed small tasks before getting distracted and going down to the freezers. They had been cleaning over and over again.

Fuck. He should have felt the pull on his magic that he had given them to keep them animated.

"A problem for later," he grumbled, filling a travel mug with coffee and heading downstairs. The van was already packed, so he opened the back doors so his two current ghouls could climb in.

Cecelia popped into existence again. "Be safe, Vanth. Something doesn't feel right tonight. The dead are restless."

"The dead are always restless," he said and got into the driver's seat.

"I'm not joking, Vanth. It all feels wrong," Cecelia replied, stamping her foot.

"I'll be careful," he promised her. He always was. He was still operating his business after so long because he was cautious to the point of being paranoid.

Vanth drank his coffee as he drove through the rain-drenched streets of Inferno. He lived on the edge of the mage district, and that was about as close as they liked a necromancer like him.

Even in a city full of monsters and magic, necromancy talent was rare. People feared it as they rightly should.

Vanth never had to choose the magic path; he had ghosts following him for as long as he could remember. If the mage guild knew just how powerful he really was, they would probably all band together to kill him.

Every few months, some cocky fucker tried to take him on, and Vanth turned them into a ghoul for their audacity. The two he had in the back of his van were mages sent to kill him. Bodies that already had a bit of magic in them tended to reanimate better, so they did him a favor.

Vanth pulled up in front of the address he had been given. It was a two-story house that was generically neat. The kind of house you didn't look twice at.

A sliver of dread shot up his spine as soon as his boots hit the concrete driveway. The hair on the back of his neck rose, and he looked around. Perfectly manicured yard, no signs of decay or rot anywhere that was a usual sign of something fucked up going on. It didn't taste like dark magic, at least not of a type he knew. His senses were never off, and every one of them flashed with a bright EVIL light.

"Fuck, I really need to learn to say no," he whispered. He could get back in his car and drive away. Just pretend like he had never felt it.

A ghost girl popped her head out of the hedge beside him. "Hide! He can't see you if you hide."

"Who, sweetheart?" he asked.

"You're late," a voice said, and Vanth looked up at the man standing in the light of a side door. It was the owner of the voice that hired him.

"I was finishing up somewhere else," Vanth lied, his hackles rising.

He let a few of his mental wards drop and instantly smelled the reek coming off him. He looked freshly showered, with no blood under his nails. He seemed as dull as the house, with pale brown hair and forgettable features. That is until he really looked at you. His eyes were dark brown and cold as a crypt despite the welcoming smile.

"I'll just get my bag of tricks, and we can get started," Vanth said, smiling back. He opened the doors to his van and let the ghouls out. He grabbed his kit and made sure his dagger was within easy-grabbing distance.

"Seems like a nice neighborhood. Do you live here?" Vanth asked, stepping inside the house. He could already smell the blood, and so could the ghouls. They bumped against each other restlessly.

"No, I don't live here. Why are you asking personal questions?" the man said, his eyes narrowing.

"I'm asking so I know if there's going to be a nosy neighbor writing down my license plate numbers," Vanth replied, keeping his tone light. The man in front of him wasn't possessed or was a daemon or one of the human demon hybrids that popped up occasionally.

The man smiled. "No one is going to notice. They never do."

"Been in this kind of jam before, huh?"

"I usually take care of it myself, but your name has come up in certain circles as being discreet and reliable."

Vanth hummed. "You have to be in this business. Want to tell me what happened?"

"Let's just say I had a bad day and played a little too hard with my toys." There was a gleam in his eyes that Vanth really didn't like. He opened a pink door he was directed to and looked inside. There were two bodies that were placed on identical twin beds.

Vanth knew he lived in the gray of the world, but there were some lines that he would never cross.

"I see," he said and placed his kit down on the pale wooden floorboards. He crouched down and surveyed the carnage of the butchered bodies.

"What are you doing?" the man asked, amusement in his voice. "Admiring the view?"

"Not exactly." Vanth cleared all the angry bees in his head before knocking three times on the floor. Ghosts suddenly appeared in the room. Small, scared little ghosts of the children that had lived in the room over the years. "Well, that settles it."

The man snorted. "Settles what?"

"What I'm going to feed my ghouls tonight." Vanth moved with all the grace and strength his fae blood had gifted him. He pulled the enchanted black dagger from his bag and drove it into the man's chest before he could raise a hand against him. He sank to the floor, gasping for air and fumbling for the dagger. Vanth smacked his hand away.

"Don't pull that out now. I wouldn't want you to die on me, and it's been enchanted to hold your blood in." Vanth pulled out one of the drawers of his kit, took out a syringe full of a fun paralytic he had distilled, and injected it into the man. He stopped going for the dagger, his body losing feeling.

"Put this one in a bag and make sure he's in the space at the front of the van," he instructed his ghouls. The small ghosts were murmuring all around him. "You don't have to stay here anymore. He's going to suffer for what he did to you. I promise."

He had a job to do, but just not the one he had been summoned for. He sent his magic through the ether, and the little ghosts blipped out one at a time as he sent them into their Afterlife.

Vanth pulled his phone from his pocket and rang his favorite police officer in Inferno. "You need to come to the following address," he said when the phone picked up.

"Vanth? What's happened?" Dimitri grumbled.

"Just do it. Oh, and don't worry about finding the culprit. It's been taken care of," Vanth said and hung up on him. He cast a quick spell to erase any DNA he might have left behind and ensured the door to the house unlocked.

Vanth was heading for home when his phone started ringing. He was going to hang up again when he saw it was Andres. "What do you want at this time of night, creeper?"

"I just had something weird land in my crematorium, and I think you should look at it before I burn it," Andres replied.

"Define 'weird' because I've had a bitch of a night already."

Andres's voice was barely above a whisper. "Magic. Fucked up scary magic. I can smell it, but I can't see what happened. Someone is trying to hide the evidence."

Vanth turned his van around. "I'll be there in ten. Put the coffee on." It was just going to be one of those fucking days.