See, necromancers are like really bad ambulance drivers. We don’t get there until way after the body’s cooling in the middle of the road.

Ghosts aren’t really people. They’re tattered bits of soul left over from the dying. Shreds of memory, personality, will. Whether it was yesterday, last month, twenty minutes, two hundred years ago. Doesn’t matter.

You’re. Too. Late.

Because ghosts? They don’t just happen. You’re not getting a ghost if Grandma strokes out taking a shit on the toilet. No, it takes trauma. Mental, physical, spiritual. It can be sudden, or take a lifetime to build.

Suicides, homicides, accidents, gunshot wounds, stabbings, beatings, poisonings, car crashes, hangings, Colombian neckties, hacked to pieces by crazed cannibal killers. You get the idea.

We necromancers get to experience it all in nightmare color and THX sound whether we want to or not. Sure, any schmuck with some talent can talk to the dead, but we’re born to it.

There is no such thing as a pretty death. It doesn’t exactly paint a rosy picture of the human experience.

Some of us don’t care. They’re the scary ones. You get some serious Patrick Bateman shit with them.

Some of us care way too much. They’re the tragic ones. By thirty they’ve dug themselves into a hole, too afraid to keep living and terrified of dying because they know that’s not the end of things. There aren’t many necromancer suicides, is what I’m saying.

Like doctors or morticians, most of us land somewhere in the middle. Dying’s tragic, but shit happens. Death is something that needs to be accepted. It’s not good, it’s not bad. It just is.

But some deaths are a little harder to take than others.

Burn victims, for example. The ones who go from smoke inhalation or carbon monoxide don’t usually leave a ghost behind, but if they burn to death? Jesus fuck, it’s rough. It’s not just agonizing, messy, and loud, it can last anywhere from five minutes to an hour or more.

First time I saw the Echo of a burn victim was a car accident on a back road that had happened three or four years before. Middle of nowhere. Guy inside slow roasted for almost an hour before he finally died. He was conscious for way too much of it.

That’s what makes this particular Echo I’ve been watching for the past couple hours, a woman set on fire in a burned-out shell of a three-bedroom bungalow in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles, so unusual.

She starts at the door to the kitchen, becoming visible as she enters the living room. There’s panic on her face. Someone I can’t see shoots her in the back. Her legs go out from under her. She hits the ground screaming, but keeps dragging herself away.