Alternate Setting: Necrotic Narcotics

A fan turned overhead, but its failing motor added only a squeal, rather than comfort, to the stale air. Serious men with automatic weapons and fancy suits did their best to ignore both the noise and heat. Their boss was sitting in a worn chair towards the center of the room, looking somewhat more comfortable in a open shirt and stylish khakis. Reflected in his silvered sunglasses was a magician wearing a top hat, white body paint, and little else.
   "What you ask, is knowledge I have already granted another."
   "I can pay you double whatever he is offering."
   "No slave am I, I bare not the chains of money. What other offerings can you provide."
   "Women, wine, protection."
   "Protection?"
   "Sure you don't think this shack is a good place to stay when making enemies in the cartels you don't support? That hill outside would let a half-decent sharp shooter put a bullet in every head with hardly a thought.
   "And what good would that do them? My servants are well beyond needing their head, and the fetish is stored nowhere near here - without me, nothing keeps them at bay.
   "So what do you want?"
   "To Help."

***

Dead men tell no tales. They don't take a cut of the product, steal from the boss, or engage in side-business either. For that mater, what legal consequences can you levy at a walking corpse?
   Drug runners the world over are turning to dark magic to augment their operations. Gangs are literally killing each other to get the secret - and produce more soldiers in the process.

Police departments are only beginning to get rumors of this action, and most dismiss it as just a new type of combat oriented designer drug or horror stories to scare enemies into submission.A select few special agents and renegade cops have figured out that it might be more, but for now, their support is limited. Even those who know its real have far to many questions left to effectively stop it. How did the cartels find this, how come magic is working at all?


What if the necromances themselves have an alternative motive?  They already control death itself, and could have used these creatures for profit in many other ways - why this, and why now?