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My mind raced with questions. “So how would they get anything from being in a physical relationship with someone? The jiangshi married Mulan’s sister and had to know she’d expect the relationship to be consummated.”

Zenos stopped explaining to stare. “Ya have the oddest mind, Aran.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, I’ve been told that before.”

“No wonder ya’re a guardian’s wet dream. Ya have beauty and a unique mind.”

My lips flattened into a line. “Why do yer compliments never sound like compliments? Can we just stick to talking about the problem?”

Zenos grinned and shook his head. “Okay. I can see ya need some sexual education this morning.”

“If that’s yer idea of flirting, cut it out, Zenos. Ya know I’m not interested.”

The dragon mage rolled his eyes at me. “By the Ancients, ya’re a testy woman. The physical is rarely all physical, right? I’ve never asked yer nosy question of a jiangshi but I’m guessing they would enjoy the spiritual energy and the magick that comes with the sex even if they no longer feel the sensations in their own form. His body might function mechanically—like yer Wu Shaman’s vibrator—but ya’d have to check with them to see exactly what they get from having relations.”

I blew out a breath. “Sorry. I just...” I stopped talking before I dug the hole I was in any deeper. “So, okay. Back to the spell. Do ya know any that would give the physical sensations back to him? Maybe expecting to return his full humanity is too much.”

Zenos lifted both hands and spread them as he talked. “The only spell I know would require that we put a wandering soul within his body to join with his condemned one. The wandering soul would create a bridge over which sensations could pass.”

“That sounds creepy and too much like a three-way.”

Zenos stopped explaining to laugh. “We might manage to call a roaming soul to us, but if this jiangshi hates humans as much as ya say, giving him the power of two souls would be unwise. Ya could be creating a bloody supervillain who could possess anyone.”

Given my experiences with the magickal souls inhabiting the Dagda stone, more power was the last thing I wanted to give to the jiangshi who Rasmus had said craved power above all else.

"I'll pass on that solution. I don’t want to make a supervillain.”

Zenos nodded. “No, I didn’t think so.”

“All I want is for him to have the semblance of a human life for as long as he lives. Mulan’s talisman should fix his vampiric tendencies to steal energy and possess others. But that leaves me fixing the zombie part of him. The power he’s leeched from others is all that’s keeping that dead body alive. Since we plan to take that power away, that leaves us the problem of what to use to help him stay alive.”

“Without his ability to leech off others, he will most certainly revert to the dead human he was when he became a jiangshi. His body would return to its decaying zombie-like form.”

“That makes sense, I guess.” I sighed as I looked down at my book. “He needs some sort of regenerative spell.”

Zenos rose from his chair to pace. “Aye. Or he needs to permanently possess a different body that’s not dead.”

There was a time in my life when I would have considered that sort of comment to be a joke. Rasmus had changed my views of what was possible. “Ya know, guardians make bodies all the time and can move souls around. I think they use a combination of science and magick. Science creates the organic matter but it’s the magick of multiple light beings that fuses the soul to it. I’m not sure how they handle the human programming part. It creeps me out sometimes to see how much they can dink with a person’s memories.”

Zenos snapped his fingers. “That’s it. It’s not regeneration, lass.Resurrection—we need a resurrection spell and one that can be repeated over and over. It would work like demon regeneration, only faster. If we got it right, his body would never go zombie on him again.”

I rubbed my forehead. What we were talking about sounded more like a movie plot than anything we could pull off in reality. “What kind of magick is strong enough to resurrect a person? That’s not what the guardians do. I think they start from scratch and grow their own.”

Zenos stopped pacing to stare at me. He blinked for a few moments and then laughed. “Guardians are irrelevant to this task. Still... ya’re not going to like what I’m about to tell ya.”

I chuckled. “Well, that’s nothing new.”

His grin was wide. “Yes, well, resurrection requires bending a few holier-than-thou rules about the life and death cycle on this planet.”

My face crinkled in confusion. How would our magicks bend holy rules? None of us were of that faith. Then it came to me and I smacked my forehead. “Good Goddess, Zenos. Ya’re not talking about using angel magick to restore him, are ya?”

“Aye—I am. The best part of this plan is ya already have all the angel power we need without us having to bargain with one of the sneaky winged buggers for some. My solution resolves yer fairy problem too. Ya can thank me later for that bonus.”

“What bonus?My fairy problem is not with the angel magick holding Ezra in place. It’s the fact that he wants to kill me.” Damn the dragon mage and his twitching lips. “Do ya seriously find it funny that someone wants to murder me?”

“Yes, I actually do. The only threat that bloated fairy poses to ya is in invalidating yer past with him. If ya cared less, ya would have taken his head instead of making him a decoration in yer home. All that power he’s carrying could become yers if ya killed him properly. Ya’re a woman of power. Use it for yerself now and again. It would be a good thing for people not to count on yer mercy.”

“But I don’t want the power Ezra stole from Goddess only knows who. I want him to leave this plane of existence so I never have to think about him again. I’ll be dead long before Ezra of Airingdale will be allowed on this side of the veil.”