“Dating.” He blinked at me, eyes looking as large as an owl’s behind the glasses. “Vampires don’t intimidate easily, especially not that one. And they must find you fascinating.”
“Why must they?”
“Your position for one. They love power better than any creatures I ever met. Even demons . . . well, all right, maybe not more than demons. But on average, you know. And then there’s your necromancy—”
“I’m not much of a necromancer,” I said, trying to steer the conversation to the reason I’d come.
“Of course you are,” Roger said. “I told you, necromancers don’t just deal with dead bodies. We’re like any group—we specialize. And my specialty was always ghosts. You get that from me.”
“I don’t have to be a necromancer to talk to ghosts,” I pointed out. “Clairvoyants do that all the time.”
“But they don’t carry one around with them, do they? They don’t donate energy to make said ghost more mobile. They don’t essentially make a servant out of him, have him run their errands and spy on their enemies and do a little mental snooping, if they think it’s warranted.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, because this was kind of relevant right now. “I haven’t spent a lot of time around true clairvoyants—”
“Well, if you had, you might have noticed that they weren’t being followed around by a wad of ghosts.”
I smiled suddenly, because he sounded so serious. And with those glasses . . . “Is that the proper term?”
“What?”
“A murder of crows, a gaggle of geese, a wad of ghosts . . .”
He put down his instruments in order to look at me disapprovingly. “You can joke all you like, but it’s true. Clairvoyants talk to ghosts. What you do goes far beyond that. But, of course, that couldn’t possibly be necromancy, which only deals with rotten flesh and oozing bodies and . . . well, whatever else the Circle can dream up to keep the public so scared of us that they lock us away.”
“You’re locked away because so many of you go bad,” Jonas said, from the doorway.
Roger sighed. “You again. I thought you’d gone out to play in the rain.”
Jonas opened his mouth, but I got there first. “You have to admit, a lot of necromancers do end up working for the dark.”
“Well, of course they do.” Roger looked surprised. “What else is open to them?”
“You found work with Tony—”
“Yes, and it’s been such fun.”
“And there are plenty of freelance necromancers—”
“Patching up vampire boo-boos, what more could a man ask for?”
“—and you have magic. You could—”
“You have magic. You wouldn’t be able to do much in our world without it. But where does it go, hmm?”
“Go?”
“What is it used for?” he asked. “Magic isn’t just this lump of power, is it? A reserve to be employed any way you wish. That would be like saying that any human could play the piano beautifully just because he has fingers!”
“Well, of course people have different talents—”
“Yes, and what they can do is largely limited by those gifts. Look at me. When I was a boy, I wanted to be a war mage—”
Jonas mad
e a strangled sound and Roger shot him a glance. “Oh yes, laugh all you like, but the fact remains that I had the power to do it. I was strong enough.” He turned his attention back to me. “They make you do these tests, you know, when you come in, to measure your magic. To see if you’ve got what it takes. If you don’t generate enough, there’s no need to go any further, because you won’t be able to cast the kind of spells you’d have to learn anyway.”
I nodded.