1934 to 1938, Wool's Orphanage

Tom left the matron's office feeling deeply unsatisfied.

Three more children had arrived at the orphanage the day before, making the already limited space even scarcer. It had only seemed logical to Tom for Mrs Cole to put the two children no one wanted to (and no one should want to) share with together into one room. The matron had told him, in a very flustered and scandalized voice, that there was no way she could do such an ungodly thing, going on how improper it was and so on. Tom had tried to be at his most persuasive, had tried making her do what he wanted when that hadn't worked – but it had been no use.

When Tom told Naenia about this, a contemplative look crossed her face, before she shrugged it off and went about her day. She moved in the very next morning.

"How did you do that?" Tom demanded to know.

"Erpressung," Naenia replied as she put her meagre belongings on the other bed, the bed that hadn't been used for years. "Hm … 'pressure'?"

"What kind of pressure?"

Naenia smirked at him and then went to open the window. "For one, Mrs Cole is technically not allowed to drink on the job or even keep alcohol in the orphanage. For another, Will and Henry didn't get actually adopted – and neither did Mary. The boys were bought to work on some shady 'farm' and poor Mary sold to an old pervert."

"How do you even know about that?" Tom knew every secret at the orphanage. Every secret.

There was a loud flapping and the room darkened for a moment as Naenia's blind crow entered the room through the window.

"No one pays attention to a few crows lurking outside the window," Naenia said.

"You can communicate with crows?" Tom said flatly, suddenly angry.

"I can communicate with the dead," Naenia said, sounding amused, which made Tom even angrier – until her words sank in.

The crow wasn't blind. It was dead! And as long as she had a dead crow, Naenia could use it to communicate with all crows through it.

"What else did you learn?" Tom asked.

"More than enough," Naenia replied with a grin. "The next time Mrs Cole tries to have me set foot inside a church, she might lose her job. Although," she tilted her head, "I might have to use that leverage earlier. I think she was contemplating hiring a Teufelsaustreiber or something when I left her office."

"A what?"

"Someone who drives the devil out of you?"

"An exorcist. Wouldn't be the first time," Tom muttered, wondering how he could do what Naenia had done – how he could gain valuable information without having to sneak into the matron's office, himself. He could talk to snakes – and unlike Naenia and her dead crow, he could actually communicate with them. It was a real ability. But snakes weren't nearly as inconspicuous as a couple of crows.

"Oh?" Naenia asked. "What are they like?"

"Easy to fool."

"Tom," Naenia said, prompting him to look up. "Have you seen me?"

"You can easily change your hair and eye colour," Tom said dismissively.

"Because a demon couldn't do that," she replied dryly. "Ah, I'll tackle that problem when it arises."

The problem arose not even a week later. Tom found the timing almost amusing.

Tom and Naenia were reading in their room as usual, when there was a knock on the door and Mrs Cole's muffled voice called, "Tom? Naenia? There is someone here to meet you."

Tom managed to exchange a wary look with Naenia, before the door opened to admit a plain looking man in a grey suit. The man wore a grim expression that quickly transformed into surprise when his eyes landed on Tom and Naenia, calmly sitting on Tom's bed.

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed and then fainted on the spot.

Tom exchanged another wary look with Naenia – or he wanted to, anyway, but Naenia looked more amused than wary. Perhaps the man hadn't fainted, then, Tom thought as he watched his friend hop down and walk over to kneel next to the unconscious figure in the floor.

"I think you'd better go and get a doctor, Mrs Cole," Naenia said.

"But he is a doctor," Mrs Cole said faintly.

"Oh dear," Naenia said in a monotone voice.

Neither any of the children nor the caretakers were strong enough to move the man, so they had to leave him there until he regained consciousness – upon which he seemed to have forgotten all that had transpired and nothing Mrs Cole said could convince him to stay and take a look at the two children who had so nicely asked after his wellbeing and provided him with a glass of water. That he couldn't remember what those two children actually looked like, did not seem to appear in any way strange to the man.

Mrs Cole never called a doctor to take a look at them again.

⸸

Everyone at the orphanage knew that Billy and his group were at the top of the pecking order and that Tom and Naenia were the outsiders – they were weird, after all. When Naenia had been new to the orphanage and the incident with Martha and Henry still fresh in everyone's mind, Tom had benefited from the wide berth everyone had given Naenia. Neither of them minded being left alone – in fact, they enjoyed it immensely.

But, as with everything, the novelty eventually wore off. Children didn't have very long attention spans, nor were they all that smart (Tom and Naenia excempted, of course). Tom would never voice it out loud, but he was actually curious to see how Naenia would react to their usual bullying tactics.

The name-calling went ignored.

The hair-pulling was quickly discouraged, because all Naenia had to do was touch whoever had gripped her and they would run away screaming. (Tom had by now found out that Naenia could access what she called 'the thread tethering someone to life' via touch and fraying that hurt – not in a physical way, but in a way indescribable by those unfamiliar with Necromancy.)

(Tom still got beaten up whenever Naenia wasn't around.)

The broken pens and ripped clothing were easily repaired with magic. Getting water poured over yourself or you bed didn't do any damage if either was waterproof or could easily be dried with magic.

That didn't make Billy and his friends give up, but it discouraged them significantly.

Tom was impressed.

He was wary but for a moment, because it quickly became apparent that Naenia was not going to actually do anything about the bullying or overthrowing the pecking order or – anything, really. She wasn't going to do anything. Except laugh at Tom for wanting to do those things. He graciously forgave her for that, because she promised not to stand in his way, at least. She even looked at him in awe when he finally revealed his ability to communicate with snakes to her by directing the snakes into the beds of Billy and Dennis and all the others. Even Amy got one, because she had run into him the day before and then decided to sneer instead of apologize.

Tom got another beating for his efforts.

"Maybe you should focus more on moving people instead of objects," Naenia commented, when she found him, before crouching down and asking, "Hey, want to help me kill Billy's rabbit?"

They hanged it from the rafters in Billy's room while Billy was sleeping in that very same room. The attic wasn't Billy's actual room. He and his friends had turned it into something of a secret lair where Billy's rabbit lived. Billy liked to sleep there and pretend he had a real room all to himself – like Tom used to before Naenia had blackmailed Mrs Cole into letting her move into his room.

"The stupid thing has been sick for weeks and no one was doing anything about it," Naenia told Tom once they were back in the safety of their own room.

Tom arched an eyebrow. "Was it that bad?"

Naenia gave him a flat look. "If it hadn't been dying, I wouldn't have noticed. Mrs Cole knew, but thought it wasn't that bad – not that she would have wanted to pay for an animal doctor, anyway."

"You mean a vet," Tom corrected and when Naenia frowned, he added, "short for veterinary surgeon."

Tom would have thought not paying for one was reasonable of Mrs Cole, if he hadn't been aware that she used the extra money to keep her stash of gin filled.

"A vet," Naenia repeated. "I think a vet would have put the rabbit down, anyway, so we saved Mrs Cole some money."

"Have you killed before?" Tom asked Naenia.

She shrugged. "Sure, I did."

Tom blinked. He had honestly not expected that answer. "What? Why?"

"How do you think I got here?" Naenia said, raising an eyebrow at him. "I was dropped off in a London alley in the middle of winter without money and only the clothes I was wearing and Morrigan to keep me company. So I found the nearest beggar to kill and reanimate and had him bring me to an orphanage."

"You can reanimate dead bodies?" Tom asked slowly.

"Of course."

Tom blinked. Naenia looked back at him steadily. He decided to switch the topic.

"You couldn't have just asked someone to take you here?"

Naenia shrugged. "It was late at night and no trustworthy person out on the streets – the beggar I killed even tried to steal from me before I took his life. Besides, no one will miss some random beggar from the streets. I even gave him a proper burial, he should be thankful."

Tom did not feel sorry for the tramp, but wondered how Naenia could have just killed him like that. He couldn't imagine killing another human being in cold blood. Then he thought of the rabbit. It had felt weird to hang the thing – they had silenced it to make sure its death cries wouldn't wake Billy up – it hadn't been guilt or remorse or anything, but Tom had felt something.

"Didn't Mrs Cole notice the tramp was dead?"

Naenia snorted. "He was freshly killed and I might not have learned all the skills of a proper Necromancer yet, but I do have some skills with preparing the dead."

"What?" Tom narrowed his eyes. "What do you mean 'all the skills of a proper Necromancer'?"

"Lebensechte Untote! Life-like Undead," Naenia said, her eyes shining. "With the right tools and precision and ritual magic – they are such wonderful constructs!"

Needless to say, when Billy found his rabbit in the morning, his scream woke up the entire orphanage. He left both Naenia and Tom alone an entire year after that. It was an entire year of blissful peace that Tom used to assert his dominance over the other children.

Tom was expecting Billy to act up again – either him or Dennis and Amy, who were starting to give him calculating looks every now and then.

Tom was not expecting Billy to ambush them when they were sneaking out at night, accidentally trip down the stairs and break his neck.

Tom looked at the twisted body at the bottom of the stairs for a moment, unable to comprehend what had just happened. His arms and legs were spread at odd angles and his neck twisted in a way that couldn't be comfortable – or, well, wouldn't have been comfortable, had Billy still been alive. He definitely wasn't alive anymore. There was no way he was.

"They will never believe it was an accident," Naenia said calmly.

Tom winced and cursed under his breath as he looked over at her. "We need to get rid of the evidence."

Naenia mustered the body with a contemplative look on her face.

"Naenia?"

She turned to him. "I have an idea. Let's reanimate his body. I don't have the right tools here and I've never tried it on my own with a human body before – not the long-lasting magic, at least – but I think I could turn him into a proper Undead." She shrugged. "And if he doesn't last forever like he should if I do it properly, then at least we won't be implicated in his delayed death. They will never notice until it's too late."

And so they set to work. Or Naenia did. Tom couldn't bear to handle the dead body. He barely managed to watch her work without throwing up all over himself.

Naenia, meanwhile, calmly carried the body to the attic, where she laid it out on Billy's makeshift bed. First, she rearranged his limbs, so that they weren't twisted anymore and looked almost normal – except for the visible bruising. Then she asked Tom to retrieve a knife as small and sharp as possible that she used to systematically cut open Billy's body, so she could take out his organs and do – Tom wasn't sure what she did, because he couldn't bear to watch anymore, at that point. Eventually, Naenia stitched him back together and used her magic to heal the stitches, so they became invisible to the untrained eye. Then she closed her eyes, concentrated, and called for Billy.

The body posing as Billy Stubbs was less talkative and tended to space out randomly, staring at nothing in particular, but he was seemingly alive. Naenia's hair had turned completely white overnight, which made people suspect she had something to do with Billy's sudden change in behaviour, but there was nothing they could prove. Billy wasn't telling them anything, after all. Not a single person caught on to the fact that Billy Stubbs was dead. Tom could only marvel in silence at Naenia's feat.

Unfortunately, Billy's change in behaviour made the adults rather wary – more than they had already been, anyway – and also more alert. Which was why they were caught sneaking out again merely two weeks after the incident with Billy. And this time, no one accidentally fell down the stairs and broke their neck.

Mrs Cole grounded them for three whole months.

Naenia didn't mind staying inside for a few months, even though they could have perfectly well used their magic to sneak past locked doors and added patrols. Tom shrugged and accepted it for what it was. Then, a few weeks into their confinement, Naenia caught the flu. Tom hadn't been sick even once his entire life and neither had Naenia – at least for the time he had known her – until now.

He watched with narrowed eyes as the doctor Mrs Cole had sent for examined Naenia. (Tom didn't trust the man even one bit, no matter how real his credentials looked.) Doctors never meant well when it came to people like them – people who were special. And Mrs Cole had also never meant them well, even though she hadn't called a 'doctor' since the last one had promptly fainted.

"Mild fever, chills, fatigue, loss of appetite, sore throat, headache, and aching joints," the man listed off in a detached voice that made Tom despise him even more. "All common symptoms of the flu. She needs a lot of rest and water. I recommend that you keep an eye on her at all times, in case the symptoms get worse."

Mrs Cole glanced at Tom. "That won't be a problem."

Tom narrowed his eyes even further. He would not let Naenia out of his sight. At all. Ever.

After a week of no improvement – although the sore throat had made way for a terrible cough and Naenia frequently got nosebleeds, now – and the doctor had said two weeks of recovery time were perfectly normal, but Tom didn't believe him and Naenia wasn't getting any better – Tom took matters into his own hands. Which meant heaving Naenia onto his back and sneaking out at night – the very thing they had been grounded for and which was, Tom thought, the cause for Naenia's sudden sickness – so he could bring her to the graveyard. The dead were mildly curious about the little Necromancer being sick, but Naenia mustered up the strength to sing a song for them regardless.

The next morning, almost all symptoms had disappeared and only the fatigue remained.

Tom was very smug about having found the solution.

Naenia didn't comment on it.

From then on, things were peaceful. Billy Stubbs had been taken out of the equation and everyone else had been terrified into submission by Tom. For Amy and Dennis, Tom needed to take more drastic measures – but he and Naenia discovered a cave full of ancient magic in the process, so it was a fruitful endeavour, in the end. Naenia continued practicing magic with him, never even trying to take his place at the top of the pecking order. Every newcomer learned quickly to keep their head down. All was well.

And then the 'Professor' arrived.