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A young woman walked along the beach a few miles from her home. Eliza Gomez did this trek every Saturday, walking a mile and a half and then a mile and a half back to her car.
"Morning!" a man said, startling her.
"Good morning," she said, but she kept walking.
"I hope I didn't scare you. I haven't seen you out here before," he said, "This is part of my usual route."
"I'm a little early this morning," she replied, glancing at him. He seemed nice enough.
"I walk every day. What about you?" he asked.
"I'm only out here once a week or so," she said, wondering if she'd have to walk the other direction in the future.
He continued to be polite, however, and once they got to talking she stopped paying attention to how far they had gone. Until she felt something change, beneath her feet.
Eliza was a necromancer although it wasn't a comfortable part of her own identity. She could feel that there were bodies beneath the ground ahead of them and off to the side, toward a wooded hiking trail. Eliza looked in the direction she felt the dead but there was no sign of the graves. She stopped walking.
"Are you okay? I usually walk just a bit farther," Geoff said, "You're not getting tired, I hope."
"No," Eliza said, quietly, "This place gives me the heeby jeebies. I'm going to turn back. Maybe I'll see you next week."
"Sure," he said, "See you next week."
Eliza walked back to her car alone, her shoulders tight the entire way. She sat in her parked car and thought about what she'd felt. The bodies were modern and the ground unhallowed. It wasn't any kind of a cemetery. The bodies were too recent. There were too many of them. She sighed, rubbing her face.
She really didn't want to do this but she called the local police on the non-emergency line.
"I'd like to report a mass grave," she said, reluctantly.
"Excuse me?" the woman sounded doubtful, "Is this a prank?"
"No, ma'am, I was out walking along the beach this morning and I found a lot of graves. It's not any formal cemetery, as far as I can tell," Eliza told her, trying to sound like she wasn't crazy.
"There was more than one body?" the operator asked, suddenly intense, "How many?"
Eliza tried to remember, "A lot. I didn't stay to count them, maybe a dozen."
"A dozen dead bodies?" the woman had circled back around to doubtful again, "Out in the open, on the beach?"
"Not out in the open, they're buried," Eliza told her, putting her head on the steering wheel, "But I can feel them. I can show you where they are. Someone buried them relatively recently."
"Ma'am, falsely reporting a crime in California is a misdemeanor. You could face up to a $1,000 fine and up to six months in the county jail," the operator told her.
"Please try to prosecute me," Eliza laughed, derisively, "I'd love to be wrong but I'm not. Someone has been burying bodies illegally near the beach."
"You'll have to file your report in person," the operator said and promptly hung up.
"Great," Eliza muttered.
It was Saturday. She had the day off and it was early. So, she set her GPS to take her to the closest police station.
The policeman she spoke to very nearly arrested her. Eliza was well aware that any report she made had been filed in the trash. She almost couldn't blame them. Eliza had never worked as an animator; she'd spent her life trying to repress her abilities. Her full-time job was as an administrative assistant in a veterinary clinic.
Eliza was conflicted about ignoring the mass grave she knew was just beyond her route. She didn't know what she was going to do or if she was going to do anything. The next Saturday she went back to walk her usual route. Geoff joined her again. Eliza realized she'd completely forgotten about him. She might have walked a different section of beach if she'd remembered he might try to talk to her again.
"I'm sorry," she told him, "I've forgotten your name. I'm Eliza."
"Geoff," he said, pronouncing it like Jeff, "With a G-E-O not a J-E."
"Huh," Eliza made a noncommittal noise.
They talked and walked for a while but Eliza was quieter than she had been the week before.
"You getting tired," he asked, glancing around them. When they'd started to get close to the mass grave site Eliza's steps had started to slow.
"I don't want to go as far as we did yesterday," she told him, adding honestly, "It's farther than I normally walk."
"No worries," he said, reaching out for her arm. Or at least, Eliza had thought he was reaching for her arm. She felt a pinch in her side and she was startled.
"Ow," she said, before her vision started to fade, "What---?"
The next thing Eliza knew she woke up beneath a cover of trees. She could still hear the birds and the waves from the beach but those sounds were farther away. She couldn't move her body and her mind felt like it was coated in cotton.
"Wouldn't it be wild if you were some kind of psychic," Geoff was saying, "Not a very good psychic, clearly, otherwise you wouldn't be here bleeding."
He laughed. Eliza had the feeling he'd been talking to her for a bit. He clearly didn't expect a reply. She couldn't move so she couldn't form a word much less a sentence. She felt her blood hit the ground. Her magic responded to blood on the earth.
My special ability is still working, she thought through the fog.
She reached out, while Geoff talked about burying her with the others, and tried to pull the dead toward her.
Help me, she thought as she faded out of consciousness again, I don't want to die.
When she woke up again she was handcuffed to a hospital bed and there were armed guards. I took her a long time to figure out what had happened. She had nearly been killed by a serial killer. She had been his thirteenth victim. He'd been cutting through women, unnoticed, for years.
After she'd passed out again the corpse she'd raised had slaughtered Geoff. Eliza had never been taught that a murder victim raised from the dead would definitely kill their murderer before doing anything else. The police had needed to bring in an animator from Missouri to put the corpses she'd raised back in their graves. The animator had discovered where the bodies were originally buried and had found the other murdered victims. One of the woman's bodyguards had found Eliza.
Eliza's lawyer told her that killing someone with magic was an automatic death penalty case. It didn't seem to matter to the court that she'd been acting out of self defense, or that she hadn't had any other way to fight back. Eliza was transferred from the hospital to a federal prison to await her trial and execution.