It was as much his prison as it was hers. No matter how much he built upon the old shack, the foundation was dirt. Old nails stuck out of the porch scraping against his soaked shoes. The wood came from scattered houses from werewolf break-ins. He hammered them in to reinforce his own home with a two copper hammer. When Emily was younger, she tried to paint the house but couldn't stick with a single color, so the new sections had different colors than the older sections. Paint was expensive, so he stuck to white, black, and gray. Old cheap paint peeled under his footsteps from Emily's misguided attempt to breathe life into their home.
She drank blood from a leather bag supplied by the Camazotz family. He ate discarded bread or feasted on rats, rabbits, or the occasional slow bird. Raising chickens had gone fine until a werefox family moved in. Then, the kits made a game of eating his chickens until none were left. It was a long-held grudge that he wouldn't let go until he died.
Vincent tried the door, and it was locked. Hope filled his breast at the thought that his sister could be alive. How else would the door get bolted after Resnick Camazotz left? Unless the man magically found Emily's key. She had told him it was lost or it could have been stolen. His fists tightened; he didn't have a key and didn't need one.
He installed the lock because he knew it backward and forwards. The tumblers were as familiar to him as the teeth in his mouth. Vincent pulled a lock pick from his pocket and slowly hit the tumblers in the log listening for each click. Normally he would give the password knock, but he didn't want to confirm it with silence. Emily was a light sleeper and often opened the door before he knocked. She giggled and told him she could pick out the sound of his heartbeat among a crowd. His blood vessels moved a certain way like no one else.
Those were the words of a vampire, someone who preyed on humans, but it was also a sign of security. She wouldn't be fooled into letting someone inside.
When the last tumbler fell into place, he moved the bolt out of place and let his door swing open. The sweet smell of death greeted him like a familiar friend. Corpses were all around him in his daily life. People were too ready to die for the republic if it meant their families could have a better life. Men like Resnick weren't the norm minders were supposed to care for their charges.
"It isn't too late to walk away. This room is filled with Nina pollen." Sif sniffed the air and shivered. "Rats are scurrying in your basement," Sif said.
It didn't bother him vampires could control rodents, wolves, insects, and serpents. His sister's familiar collection wasn't of interest to him.
"Can you smell anything else?" Vincent asked.
"Not through the pollen," Sif said.
He stepped through the threshold. "Emily," he called.
She should have gotten up groggy and pissed off before cursing him for leaving the door open in her lair. Didn't he know vampires hated the sun or were boarding the windows in good fun?
"Why won't she answer?" Vincent asked.
He saw Emily in bed, her face paler than he had ever seen, almost translucent. Two holes in her neck told him everything. A taboo had been committed on his own sister. He didn't need a nose like Sif's to smell out the culprit. While being attacked by werebats, his minder drained his sister dry. He had no standing to accuse one of the Camazotz family.
Sif searched his bookshelf and pulled out a tome filled with bookmarks. "Ice magic is something necromancers are good at. Were you preparing to become one? You need three attributes to do that; most humans only have one. It takes decades of training to get more." Sif said.
Old Jim had trained him to get each attribute. It had only taken him 2 decades to get 8.
Vincent knew the spells but lacked the class to use them. Why go through the trouble of earning attributes if he wasn't going to use them. Necromancy would give him an 11th attribute, his final one. SPT, the spirit attribute, would strengthen his anima for one day obtaining lichdom. By sacrificing the pleasures of life, he could live practically forever in undeath.
There were classes with the necromancer skill, but none were so dedicated to raising the dead as the necromancer. It even had advanced classes stacked atop it. Fast leveling tricks had been perfected over the millennia. Necromancy-only perks enhanced raising and revival beyond any other class.
The idea was a piece of driftwood over a sinkhole. Stories of necromancers bringing back ancient vampires in exchange for packs of power came to mind. They were the heroic epics of his childhood, often ruined but a blundering paladin obsessed with forcing the poor to pay tithes. He gripped his driftwood and pulled slowly, bringing himself out of the muck.
Vincent took the book from Sif's paws and opened a page on preserving corpses. Vampires were undead immune to most ice attacks. That didn't mean what propaganda conveyed. Ice affected them differently than humans. Instead of causing cells to burst like a white mage did, the undead cells of zombies, with their healing spells and ice magic, failed to burst a vampire's cells. To them, being encased in ice was merely problematic instead of deadly.
He took hold of that idea and ran with it.
"I'm going to bring her back," Vincent said.
"You can't; you don't have a class, your already 30, and no wolf pack would take a necromancer in their ranks." She still wanted him; that wasn't a lie.
"How many attributes do you think I have?" Vincent asked.
"Too few to be worth abstaining from a class for your entire youth," Sif said.
She had not been happy about that when he told her. Waiting wouldn't get him anywhere. Emily always hated his lack of power. Vincent would have preferred to be rich to powerful. The power of money was easier to understand than levels, skills, and spells. Someone took his choice away when they killed his sister. If Vincent wanted any chance to save her, he needed to go into a class he wasn't ready for. Necromancy wasn't something he would have chosen for his first class. Vincent should have had more time to decide on his one bonus attribute. Circumstances had taken his sister; he could have her or get revenge on the man who killed her. Vincent tightened his fists until he couldn't stand it and brought up the class menu.
"Do you know what tier necromancy I need to bring her back as she was?" Vincent asked.
"Do you want her back? You're free now; you can do whatever you want. I could renounce my position, and we could get married. My mother put some money in a trust fund when I was born; there is enough to buy a house and live comfortably for a long time." Sif said.
"Would she abandon me?" Vincent said.
"Yes, vampires are selfish and cruel; it's their nature," Sif said.
Emily's face was more peaceful than he had ever seen. He could believe she was doped up by the sun.
Sif sniffed the air taking information from scent Vincent couldn't imagine. The raw data a werewolf could gather from scent alone was staggering. From the evidence his sister's killer was obvious. Resnick Camazotz committed the taboo and would get away with it.
Vincent wasn't well-liked among the Sax werewolf clan in rural Stack. Sif may be the only one keeping him from being hunted. She rubbed her scent on him often enough. Werewolves were natural enemies of vampires, often raiding vampire settlements and taking thralls as slaves. The Sax family, with their red hair, famously took many trueborn princesses hostage and ravaged them. Monsters emerged from those returned princesses and were butchered.
"It is also your nature to hate her," Vincent said.
"Do you love the stones in your path? Remember the Trelleborg." Sif said.
A thousand years ago, a mighty fortress held the last hope of an ethnically werewolf state. Back then, vampires used human nations as pawns directing them to drive enemies to extinction. The Saxon family was all that remained of the Saxon werewolf nation. It was the last fortress to fall, and few survived. When a conflict between a vampire and a werebeast emerged, the werebeast was often named the lost fortress.
"She didn't choose to be a vampire," Vincent said.
Sif sighed and brushed a strand of raven hair behind her ear. "To bring a vampire back like she was, you must learn the super tier spell Night Symphony. There are liches thousands of years old who haven't reached the super tier in necromancy."
Each tier was harder to reach than the last and required greater feats. Vincent's theft of Resnick's pendant raised his thief skill from tier 3 to tier 4. However, it wasn't just the theft; it was swapping the pendant for a fake under a lvl50 dhampir's nose.
A heavy knock on the door halted their discussion. Vincent opened the door to see twelve black knights and a corpse collector.
The largest black knight, a thug of a man in poorly welded iron armor, strode forward and pulled his helmet off. "Greetings, citizen and lady Saxon; we are here under the orders of Lord Resnick to complete a corpse pickup. It is within our charter the right to collect and retrieve any corpse discovered. Before you get uppity, you should know this is an official pickup with a court order signed by Judge Faraway." The black knight said.
"May I see the order?" Vincent asked.
The black knight reached into the bag at his side and pulled back empty. The man's face turned red and then purple before he mastered himself.
"It seems I have misplaced the papers, but I assure you the warrant is signed."
"A legal representative of a judge must present a signed warrant before entering a citizen's home. I expected you to know that, Charles." Sif said.
"My lady is too kind to remind this lowly one of the law. If you weren't here, I might have broken the law, which would have been a shameful blunder. This citizen would be rather angry with me, I imagine." Charles said.
"Let's take the corpse anyway, Charles. There are twelve of us, and that one doesn't have a class." The man's eyes glowed yellow as he used the scan spell. Sif bristled at the clear insult. "The other one is lvl70; we can handle her."
"He did not mean to insult you, lady Saxon and will be docked a month's wages to compensate for his lack of judgment."
"Leave and don't return without a warrant," Sif said.
Vincent closed the door in the black knight's face, banking on Sif's status to see them through the situation. He took the warrant from his pocket and looked it over before tossing it in the fireplace. Then, to his surprise, he heard the men mount up and ride away.
"What would you have done if one of them caught you?" Sif asked.
"Lose my hands and feet or been recruited as a black ranger. It's time for me to choose a class. When they return, they will have a warrant, and it will be suspicious if it vanishes again." Vincent said.
"How are you really?" Sif asked.
Vincent fell into a chair and felt his body chaff from miles of walking through the swamp. His world was going dark, and the only glimmer of hope in his life was an insane scheme. No, a scheme at least had a shot he needed to break the system and reach a level of necromancy equal to the gods themselves. Increasing a tier took mastery of that tier's spells. While a 10th-tier necromancer might pull off super-tier spells, a super-tier necromancer could crank them out like a baker's bread.
He brought up his class options and sighed at the size of his options. There were genuinely impressive classes listed, thanks to his 10 attributes.
"Is necromancy not an option?" Sif asked.
"That is not the problem," Vincent said.
Vincent glared at his options.
High Tier Classes
Hero
Dark Hero
Dark Lord
Sorcerer
Emperor
King
Celestial Martial
Void Executioner
Dragon Tamer
Blue Sage
Lord of Bones
…
An attribute from any of them would have made him truly incredible. Vincent had waited for a chance to make something of himself, and the world had cheated him. Many of his options for future classes would be sealed after selecting necromancer. His chances of becoming something more might never come. Emperor or King might have given him charisma, one of the most valuable attributes imaginable. No one went far in society without the charisma attribute.
He was born poor, and it looked like he would die only a little less poor.
"I should have walked away," Vincent said.
Sif had the dignity not to tell him she told him so. The girl deserved a better crush than him. Maybe after she saw how difficult it would be for him to succeed, she would leave him to his new impossible goal.
Vincent selected the class necromancer.