Read Dead of Night (Ghosts & Magic #1) for Free Online

walls, in seated positions like the world's most fucked-up collection of dolls. I knew how sick it was, but I'd been ghosting for three years. I also knew how useful they could be.
    Bringing the dead back to life was easy enough, once you knew what you were doing. In its simplest form it was a test of will - mind over matter. I could hear the thrumming of the magic around me, a decent pocket of energy that had been the reason we'd chosen this house. That, and the cheap rent paid in cash. I could feel it too, a charge in the air that tickled my skin when I stood still enough.  
    There was a brick wall between being a sensitive and being a user, but once you made it over that didn't mean you were on the same level as every other user out there. Wizards varied with regard to both power and ability. Most of us had an affinity towards a specific frequency or range of frequencies within the magical fields, and that was what made someone an illusionist, or an aquamancer, or a necro. Those that could work with the whole range were the rarest of the rare, and those that could do it well were even rarer. The only ones like that I knew about were the heads of each of the Houses.
    When the reversal had taken place and the fields became active, it was the Houses that had helped bring some kind of order to the chaos of a world where not only had magic suddenly become very real, but so had a number of other things that had once been thought to only exist inside of fairy tales, movies, fantasy novels, and nightmares. The new humans weren't limited to alternate homo sapiens. The fields affected everything, and not all of it was friendly.
    It was the masters of the Houses that had also figured out that this whole thing had happened before, all those years ago, during the fairly early days of man when the last reversal had occurred. Scientists had called it the Laschamp event, after the lava flows that proved its occurrence. Considering the shift before Laschamp had happened almost a million years ago, the one after should have continued for hundreds of thousands of years, meaning we would have had magic and everything that went with it from our humble beginnings as neanderthals.  
    Instead, it lasted somewhere between two hundred and five hundred years.
    So what had happened? The working hypothesis was that a single wizard had found a way to force the polarities to shift back, and in doing so had not only destroyed our access to magic, but had also killed anything that had ever absorbed the power, including himself. It always seemed too convenient to be true, but the Houses pointed to the sudden and tremendous population growth of what would evolve into homo sapiens, the only human types that weren't killed in the blast. Knowing what I knew now, and putting myself in that position... I couldn't say I wouldn't have done the same thing.
    In any case, the Houses had been a single House once. A conclave of the most powerful wizards to evolve from the shift, who joined together during the original crisis to help keep the world running smoothly. Of course, given time they began to argue about what they should be doing with their power, and so the conclave went rock band and split up. A pretty even balance of power emerged among the many now fragmented Houses, and with none of them wanting to challenge one another openly, they looked to anonymous agents, ghosts, in their constant see-saw battle for control.  
    Sometimes it was about money, other times it was power, and most times it was to stop one House or another from getting too much of a foothold. Whatever their individual reasons, in the end it wound up being the best thing for the world at large, because it prevented any massive, open wars from developing. When you considered that conventional warfare was bad enough on its own, the idea of adding magic to the mix only made it all the more terrifying.
      The other benefit was that it helped keep a good portion of users under control. As long