by Melissa Marr
I glanced up at the camera and smiled in what I hoped was a reassuring way when the draugr strolled in.
The ones old enough to be semi-sentient evoked the kind of aversion I usually reserved for weddings and lectures. Tall, dark, and dead came through the door of the bookstore like he thought he was alive. I was expecting him, of course, but no amount of expectation quelled my disgust when the infected ones approached me.
“This store is off-limits to draugr under the age of twenty,” I said. “You fed on a customer.”
“Hello,” he said.
“I will not allow you to eat people,” I stressed.
Somehow the big-assed sword on the counter wasn’t a clue. I mean, no one really thinks of me and says “oh, she’s subtle.” At least after tonight I could claim that someone—or something—thought I was understated because my combo of sword and “off-limits” still earned me a friendly look.
He smiled in what I guessed he thought was an alluring manner. He had all his teeth plus the two shiny extra teeth that dead things grew, and if you could overlook the icy skin and vague scent of death, maybe a draugr could be attractive.
Somewhere in his malfunctioning mind, he thought he was sexy.
I mean, okay, more than a few living humans seemed to enjoy banging the dead. I just couldn’t grasp it. Maybe if my heart wasn’t thumping in irritation and agitation, I would be the sort of woman who thought blood-breath was an aphrodisiac. My mother certainly had.
Sadly, for him, I hadn’t inherited her perverse streak—just her temper.
“You are not welcome here,” I added in a louder voice.
He nodded and then took another step. This one had to be trying to live off a blood-bank diet. No one much discussed it, but dead blood diets seemed to make draugr little better than Hollywood zombies. Faster, of course, than the shambling zombies on screen, but not much for thinking.
“This store doesn’t serve the recently dead,” I explained calmly.
He nodded again, as if he understood, but he wasn’t retreating.
“You know there are laws, right? And you bit a customer.” I reached under the counter, hand searching for the button that would summon the police. Protocol. Every public encounter with an aggressive draugr outside a registered graveyard or cemetery had to be reported. Stores and streetlamps had alarms mounted in reach. All a human had to do was press an alarm so the police could be aware of attacks, potential attacks, and self-defense events. It was all recorded, charted, mapped.
Most of the time, pushing that button was the last act of a person’s life. Me? I might have the record for successful post-button life.
Button depressed, I said, “The online stores will ship to—”
“You aren’t like them.”
I reassessed its age to closer to fifteen. It spoke clearly, but with obvious effort. Someone had been babysitting this one for it to live this long.
“You smell,” it said as it sniffed so hard it looked like a feral pig. No tusks, mind you, but definite pig snout face.
I grabbed the gun under the counter. I preferred the up-close reliability of steel, but some nights I was impatient. Pointing out that I seemed not-quite-human brought my foul streak out faster than anything other than blind-dates.
“I would like you to leave and not return.” I pulled a little grave dust magic to my surface and into my skin. It was like cocking a gun—primed but not yet engaged. I just wanted to be ready if it was old enough to be faster than my aim. Freshly awakened ones were predictable. I knew how old they were. On the street or in a store, it was a guessing game. It felt closer to fifteen, but I couldn’t be certain.
It lunged at me, grabbing for my arm and stretching over the counter.
I lifted the gun and squeezed the trigger, aiming to the left of where it stood and hoping I guessed correctly. Just in case, I fired a second shot to the right as quickly as I could. More and more I felt which way they were about to flow before they did. Those were the good nights.
This was a good night.
The round I’d fired on the left hit the thing. The stench of old death was instantaneous. Congealed blood started to ooze from the hole that was trying and failing to seal. Heart shot. Now that the thing wasn’t able to flow into the speed that it relied on to escape, I emptied three more rounds into it. Eye. Eye. Throat. Four hits, one loss, and one spare in the chamber in case it had a friend.
I shifted the gun into my left hand and grabbed my sword with my right. I leaned down and beheaded it before it could repair itself enough to rise. Once it was well and truly dead, I watched the door. I always worried that they had friends. Contrary to what we used to whisper in the dark about the creatures that lived on blood, they weren’t pack beings. No nests or families. They were typically loners.
But even loners got urges for the occasional friend or fuck.
I stared at the door as I called out, “Roll doors.”
The clattering of the metal shutters dropping over the windows and doors was loud, but comforting in the way of steel at the end of the day. I watched the creature, making sure that it couldn’t flow, as I listened to the solid thunk of the doors slotting into the anchors.
The latches all clacked, sealing us in.
The store phone line lit up.
“Tomes and Tea. How can I help you?” I said cheerily as if there was any chance it wasn’t the police.
“We had an alarm from your store—”
“It’s dead. The draugr, not me, I mean.”
“How many other fatalities?”
“None.”
The bullets weren’t ejected from the body on the floor, so the thing was, in fact, dead. I watched the decaying process, as if time sped. The bodies not only stopped moving, biting, screwing, and whatever else they did. They also raced through the years between their first death and this permanent one. The oldest of their kind faded to ashy powder rather than stopping at bone.
“Geneviève?” the officer on the line asked after a pause. “Is this Miss Crowe?”
“Yes,” I said softly.
“You know witches aren’t immune to their venom,” the officer on the line said. “This is the fifth draugr you killed in the last two months.”
Ninth, I silently corrected. Some were jobs. Some were awkward side effects of the job. Either way, there were nine dead-again bodies in the last eight weeks. It was a wonder I wasn’t more exhausted.
I closed my eyes and suggested, “I guess I keep ending up at the wrong place.”
The officer snorted. Murdering the dead wasn’t illegal. Hiring people to do it or being hired was. Those who pulled it off were usually lucky or had encountered an exhausted one—or one still asleep.
I only killed to keep people safe. What I never said aloud, though, was that I liked it. I worried that it made me too much like them. There was a satisfaction I found when I killed that I couldn’t explain. It didn’t feed me, but it sometimes took the edge off my temper.
And that frightened me.
I wasn’t a sociopath. I just enjoyed protecting my city, and there was sometimes a satisfying jolt inside my body when I fought and didn’t die.
“Miss Crowe,” the officer said. “Seems like a lot of body retrievals around the places you go.”
“Are you suggesting I shouldn’t call them in?” I asked lightly.
“No.” The officer on the line sighed. “I’m suggesting that you stop seeking them out. You’re as able to die as the rest of us.”
“Uh-huh.” I hoped he was right, but I had good reason to doubt it. I really tried not to lie outright unless I had to do so. Too much time around Eli? Too much time studying ethics? I wasn’t sure, and I had no desire to ponder it.
Life was easier unexamined.
“We’ll send the Con Crew at dawn,” the officer said. “You’ll need to make a statement this time.”
I smothered a sigh. “Dead guy tried to grab me. I shot him. There! Statement made.”
“Tell that to th
e retrieval officer at dawn.”
We disconnected, and I glared at the corpse. I hated being trapped, but since I apparently had to be the one to talk to the Con Crew, I was stuck at the shop. I think it was their way of keeping me off the streets.
That meant being around Jesse and not slipping and saying anything about Eli—or how much work I’d had lately.
Chapter Twelve
Right now, the corpse was decayed to nothing but bones and some sinew. It, at least, was dead. Finally. I never understood whatever venom or genetic wrongness caused them to walk after death, but I’d learned how to tell when their spark left.
It was dead.
I was trapped.
One of those was better than the other.
But the Contamination Crew collected at dawn. They weren’t going to drive around at night scooping up supposedly dead draugr. There wasn’t always a good way to check if they were dead. Even animated, they had no pulse. No one wanted to bend down—throat in their line of sight and scent—and lift them. In the early days, more than one of the Con Crews had died that way.
Protocol mattered, especially in New Orleans.
And my offer to go behead the dead for them went over poorly. I seemed too gleeful or some shit. Or maybe the liability insurance was too much. Either way, they did it their way. I did it mine.
My city wasn’t a place where nights were safe for most people. Some parts of the country were supposedly safe, or so the news stations all swore. To get into those gated areas required being born there or a blood test, seven generations of verifiable lineage, exceptional traits, and a donation that had more zeros in it than I could see clear to hand over even if I had the rest.
And I didn’t have the rest. My blood test would create an international panic. I would spend my life in a facility with a lot of security to keep me inside—or they’d simply kill me on the spot. So, I stayed in New Orleans. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I could leave anyhow. It was an incredible city with music, booze, and a river.
I glanced over my shoulder as the steel door behind me unlocked and opened.
“You’re sure?” Jesse asked as he came up behind me.
“I’m sure.” I pointed at the decaying corpse on the plastic tarps that Jesse had put down before I arrived. Blood and quickly contracting flesh puddled there. “It smells like wet ass.”
Jesse laughed and handed me a plastic baggie with a menthol-soaked cloth. I covered my mouth and nose.
“I don’t know how you stand it.”
“It barely smells, Gen,” he said quietly.
“Uh huh.” I tied the rag over my face. “I’ll hang out here for the night if that’s okay. Con Crew insists.”
He gave me a sympathetic look and motioned to the store. “Load a bag. It’s not much but you won’t take your cut of sales and you did this—”
“Handling it took five minutes.” I shrugged.
I was several steps away when he said, “You know I’ll accept you no matter what, right?”
“Sure.” I stared at the thing on the floor. I wasn’t much different. Living and dead all at once. I was technically alive, but no one knew what happened to the child of a draugr. The women who got pregnant to them typically aborted or miscarried.
Draugr, obviously, could impregnate women. I existed, so it was an irrefutable fact. I just hadn’t ever heard of any of their offspring living to adulthood. Lucky me.
“My mother was a witch,” I argued, as if that was a valid explanation. “I’m quick. Good at defense. I’m not sure what there is to accept. Lot of witches out there, Jess.”
Jesse said nothing at first, but after a moment, he added, “Witches don’t flow.”
I glanced back “I didn’t—”
“The first time I saw you do it was when I was falling out of that tree. We were . . . what? Ten maybe?” He shook his head. “I should have cracked my head, but suddenly there was a damn sofa cushion. Right there under me. A cushion from my living room in the middle of the backyard. You know there was no other way to explain it.”
“We brought it out earlier. You just forg—”
“No. I didn’t forget.” Jesse looked at me intently. “That wasn’t the only time either. I wasn’t sure until I saw one of them the first time. Those draugr that showed up at the river. Do you remember? I suspected you were different, but I wasn’t sure. That night, I knew. You flow, Gen.”
I stared at him. For most of my twenty-nine and change years, Jesse was my constant. My rock. My shelter. My best friend.
“We were eighteen when I figured it out for sure,” he said mildly as he wrapped the corpse up in the tarp and duct taped it shut like it was some strange gift. He stood up. “Been a minute since I knew. If it was going to change something with us, it would’ve happened years ago. You’re still my family.”
And I stood there watching him, trying to figure out how this conversation had happened after all this time.
“Gen?”
I met his gaze.
“Do you want to admit that Eli is hunting with you again while we’re clearing the air?”
I shook my head. “I was going to tell you.”
“I know. He told me accidentally, though.” Jesse stared like he was trying to will understanding directly into my mind. We both knew Eli did exactly nothing by accident.
“How?”
“I met Christy last night and—”
“Oh?” I’d been trying to set them up for a year.
“Yep.” Jesse said, popping the ‘p,’ but he didn’t spill any details. Instead, he said, “Eli asked about you. He gets a tone when he’s irritated with you.”
“So, you knew he saw me because he sounded irritated?” I glared at Jesse.
“When you two are around each other, he’s irritable, and you are happier.” Jesse grinned. “If I liked him more, I’d feel bad for him.”
“He’s likeable,” I muttered.
“You’re my only family, Gen. I’m honor-bound to dislike any man who looks at you like he does. And he looks. He wants to screw my sister, so I must hate him. It’s like a law or something.”
I sighed. I loved him in a way I doubted I could love another human, but sometimes I understood why siblings fought. He watched me as if I needed to defend myself or Eli. I wasn’t doing either.
After a tense moment, I pointed at the remains. “It’s dead, but I’d still feel better if you slept upstairs. I can stay down here to be sure—”
“No.” Jesse rolled his eyes. “It’s been reduced to bones now. Find some books. There’s a fifteenth century Book of Relics that I stowed in a hex box for you, but grab whatever else catches your eye.”
Despite the rest, my attention perked up. I had an excellent collection of esoteric magic and mysticism books thanks to Jesse. Some months, I was sure my book buys were what kept the shop afloat. The sensitive books were on display in enhanced glass boxes that were soldered to silver and steel pedestals. They couldn’t be removed without the keys that were woven into his skin and mine, so to buy any of those, either the buyer had to be an already approved customer or I had to vet them.
“And an illuminated cook book,” Jesse added.
“What year?”
My best friend laughed at my undisguised hope. “Not that one, I’m afraid. Still looking for it.”
I’d been searching for a seventh-century potion that I thought might yield a few new defenses. At least, I thought it was seventh-century. Record keeping was questionable with magic workers, and rumors were intentionally created. Still, all reliable data I’d found said that the seventh-century book was the real deal. I just needed to find the damn thing.
“Grab your new books.” Jesse pointed. “We’ll go up and get some rest. I already changed the linens in your room.”
“Not my room,” I muttered.
“The ‘guest’”—he made air quotes— “room that no one else ever uses because you keep clothes and swords and weird smelling tea bags in it.”
“Tea
bags?” I laughed. “I’d like to see someone drink tea out of a spell bag. Wake up with a fucking bunny tail or who the hell knows!”
“Books, Gen.” Jesse waved me forward.
And then he stood there waiting until I’d retrieved my payment and accompanied him up to the apartment that was my second home.
I was hoping that we weren’t going to have a heart-to-heart about the fact that I would likely live on in some way after my heart stopped beating. Because the sheer truth was that my second life would only last as long as it took to starve. I wasn’t eating people. My earth-magic mother raised me as a g’damn vegetarian. If I couldn’t eat the flesh of a cow, how was I to eat people? No. Hard fucking no.
Sooner or later, I needed a plan for what I’d do after I died. Short of buying the working guillotine I’d found on an auction site, I couldn’t handle it myself. And somehow, I felt like replacing my sofa with a guillotine would send an alarming message to my friends. That meant I needed a friend or friends who could behead me when the time came—or find a guillotine that was accessible to the public.
Chapter Thirteen
I typically needed about as much sleep as a junkie on a good long bender. It wasn’t that I never grew tired, but I had the peculiar metabolism that meant that I could do a low-grade activity while my body recharged. Watch a show? Take a bath? It was as if by powering down my brain, I was somehow recharging muscle and organs. It made me particularly efficient, but it was sometimes lonely.
But for actively sleeping, eyes closed and body reclined, I only needed maybe four hours a day unless I was injured. So, the guest room—which Jesse called my room—had a stack of books that were designed to numb me to sleep, as well as a bizarre assortment of chamomile teas and lavender bath bombs. He had long allowed me to claim that I had insomnia. What else was I to call it? “Lack of metabolic need to sleep” sounded less than human. “Fucked up” sounded negative. So, we called it “insomnia” and treated it with relaxation tricks.
