I’d never been trained for wielding powerful magic like a cudgel to defend myself. That didn’t mean I couldn’t—every magic user could do a little bit of something in the realm of physical manifestation of power.

Yet, the problem was, I froze. Perhaps it was feeling so good after the raising, perhaps it was the fact that I was here with the murderer, all alone, thinking, Fuck, I’ll die alone just like I was born.

The mailman was a bullet aimed for my heart. Well, he was a postal worker with a knife trying to kill me, but the metaphor sounded nicer. I could see how this was going to go badly.

Then, there was a clicking sound—tick, tick, tick—I couldn’t make any sense of. Out of the corner of my eyes, something white flashed past, and before the mailman could repurpose my skull as a knife block, he hissed in pain and stumbled.

The knife—a fucking kitchen knife made to take apart big, chunky cuts of meat—dropped from his hand and impaled itself in the carpeted floor about three inches away from my left leg. That finally made me jump, and I made a sound, not really managing a proper scream to get help in here. Christine had to be just outside the door.

“You fucking dog,” the mailman said. He was on the floor, one hand clutching his left ankle.

The poodle. The fucking poodle had charged at him and had gotten him in the heel. She’d moved back, away from the immediate striking distance he had, but that was only going to last for so long.

“Aaaah,” I said. Help. The word is Help!, Lionel Hawkes.

The mailman looked at the knife. He was going to go for it and try again, and this time he was going to take the poodle with him. The caning in questions was still in the room, hadn’t run, her beady eyes focused on him, her jowls raised as she growled like a itty bitty chainsaw that fit in your purse.

“No,” I breathed. Was I whispering? “No…” I was fucking whispering.

The mailman went for the knife, only…

He sort of withered. Like, he shriveled up like a grape forgotten at the very back of your fridge, skin going dark and drying out until his eyes looked too big for his shrinking skin. His fingers were dried sticks, curling in on themselves, and he collapsed, making more noise with the gasp that followed than I had managed.

I knew what that was. I looked at the poodle. The poodle looked right back at me.

“You’re…you’re cursed?”

Being a dog, she didn’t respond, and anyway, this was when Christine came charging back, her jaw dropping when she was confronted with the sight of one extra body that hadn’t been here five minutes ago.

“Hawkes, what the fuck?”

“He…he tried to kill me.” I pointed at the knife that was still conveniently stuck in the carpet, exhibit A.

“Shit,” she said. “Oh, shit. What the fuck did you do to him?”

Of course she would think it was me, never mind that my necromancy couldn’t do anything like turning a killer into a raisin. But when a magic user was in a room with a newly deceased—well, he was still sort of gurgling, so not quite there yet—even someone as open and tolerant as Detective Rice looked at me first to see if I had done it. I couldn’t blame her. She didn’t know any better.

So I shook my head and explained. I pointed at the poodle. “This dog is cursed. She bit him. Oh, Liza said he killed her, and I guess he heard. He came at me with a knife.”

“Liza?”

“Mrs. Lee. He had a knife.”

“You mentioned the knife.”

“Oh. Okay. He came at me with it.”

“Yeah. I see that. What the fuck.”

“I really only raised her, and she confirmed her name, and then she pointed and said he killed her.”

I was pointing at him too, but the mailman’s breaths were getting shallower and shallower. This was some curse on that poodle.

“I get that.”

“He was going to stab me with a kitchen knife!” Excellent job, Lionel Hawkes. Finding my screaming voice when the danger had passed was a wonderful survival strategy. Perhaps me not being interested in dating anyone with a uterus was a blessing for humanity as a whole.

“Calm down. I get it.”

Christine holstered her gun. I hadn’t even realized she’d come in here with it out. I didn’t normally miss things as glaring as that.

“He was going to stick that knife into me,” I said, sounding much calmer now, maybe even a little bit teary.

The poodle walked up to me and sat down next to me. I petted her little fluffy head. The drooling wasn’t so bad.

#

The crime scene that had grown from a single murder to a double one was closed relatively quickly after all of that. Christine handled it, and all I was going to have to do was file reports, one on my raising, the other an incident report that was going to get me yet another mandatory shrink session. Just my luck.

I was sitting on a chair in Liza’s kitchen with the poodle at my feet when Christine walked in, crossing her arms.

“We’re pretty much done, but I don’t know what to do with that.” She pointed at the poodle. “You say the dog is cursed. That means I can’t call animal rescue because what if they get bit? It’s alive, which means I can’t send it off to the evidence unit either.”

I jumped to my feet. “You can’t hurt her! She protected me.”

Christine frowned. “I wasn’t going to shoot her dead in this kitchen, but I need you to tell me what to do about an animal with a curse that can kill people attached to her little dagger teeth. Can you undo it?”

I dropped back into the kitchen chair with a sigh. I’d tried that, had tried sensing the curse. I wasn’t an expert in analytical spellwork, but I knew that whoever had made this curse and bound it to the poodle was good. If the mailman hadn’t come at me with the knife, I’d have never known that the dog even had a curse. The only thing I was pretty sure about was that it was a death curse, one that wasn’t going to affect me one bit thanks to my necromancy. Everyone else though…

I shook my head, my gaze drifting to the light green linoleum floor. There was an old stain here, looking like a misshapen pancake drenched in maple syrup. “No. And I don’t know anyone who could.”

Christine sighed. “Look, Hawkes—”

“No! Please. You can’t kill her.” The dog growled as if she understood what was going on here.

“Then what do I do? Are you going to take custody of her?”

I looked at the dog. She stared back with her weird little eyes. There were no pets allowed in my apartment, I knew that because a neighbor had once called the landlord about that dead cat I had reanimated and allowed to roam around and meow. I understood the issue with living animals, but as I told the landlord, the cat had been dead and wasn’t going to make any messes or scratch a doorframe, nothing like that. He’d still made me get rid of her.

Unfortunately, I had a thought then. It was bad luck because Dr. Lily had gotten me to talk about my sex life. There was no other reason he was on my mind. None.

I swallowed. “I think I know someone who can take care of her.” An immortal, I was pretty sure, wouldn’t even flinch at a little death curse.

“Someone responsible? This is a death curse. You said so yourself.”

Responsible was not among any of the adjectives I would have used to describe the Devil. He was, however, the only person I could think of who could take her, and I’d been to his ridiculously big house with that obscenely large garden. It wasn’t like she was going to bother him at all. She’d be able to roam in the garden most days, and she’d be happy. Her death curse wouldn’t matter because she wouldn’t have to bite anyone.

So I lied. “Yeah. He’s very responsible.”

Responsible my ass. He was the Devil, and all he had going for him was the sex appeal. Maybe his height. And he was probably also really wealthy thanks to being an immortal.

I looked at the poodle. “So very responsible.”