Blood Lite

by Kevin J. Anderson

  "Ha-ha. The shed was an accident. So what's the ritual for? Summoning or banishing?"

  "Banishing." I listed what I needed.

  "Ooh, big-ass banishment. What did your spook do to deserve that?"

  "The usual. Tormenting me. Insulting me. Blasting me with the Pledge of Allegiance."

  "Allegiance assault? The bastard."

  "It's probably the only thing he'd ever memorized. Anyway, if you could courier the stuff to Seattle—"

  "Seattle? You're just around the corner."

  "A hundred and fifty miles around the corner."

  "I'll be there by seven."

  "No! I appreciate that, but really—"

  "Staying at the Olympic, as usual?"

  "Er, yes, but—"

  "Seven it is. Don't eat without me."

  Savannah arrived at 7:20, bearing pizza and beer. I wasn't asking how she got the beer. With Savannah, I'm better off not knowing.

  She kicked off her knee-high boots, peeled a slice from the box and folded her long limbs into a chair, feet pulled up under her. "So, what does he want?"

  "Who?"

  "Your spook. Does he have a name?"

  "Probably. I call him Chuck."

  "So Chuck presumably asked you for a favor. You couldn't do it. He's making your life hell. You need to banish him. Which is why you shouldn't let them ask in the first place."

  "It was more of a demand, really. But I have been trying to listen more often, help with little things like passing on messages."

  "Uh-huh. How's that working out for you? Or I guess that—" She jabbed her pizza slice at the burning vervain. "—answers my question. About Chuck, though. What does he want?"

  I took a beer and sat on the sofa. "He and his cousin died in a car accident. They were interred in the family mausoleum. He wants me to open his cousin's casket."

  "And..."

  "There is no 'and.' Apparently, as a servant to the afterlife, it's not my place to question the will of the dead."

  "Asshole." She chugged half her beer. "If he's got a mausoleum, that means he's got money—or his family does. I bet there's something valuable in that casket, and jerkwad is just too stupid to realize it won't do him any good, being dead. So, if we did find something, we'd need to keep it."

  "No, I'd give it back to his family."

  "Shit. Jeremy's finally rubbing off on you, huh?"

  "There's no treasure in that casket."

  "Then why does he want you to open it? Aren't you curious?"

  I wasn't. Another necromancer lesson: Never stop to question. There are too many opportunities. Like the residual in Savannah's house—a woman forever watching out the window. I should wonder what she's looking for, why it was so emotionally powerful that the image of it is seared forever within those walls. But necromancers can't afford idle curiosity. They'll go mad chasing questions whose answers don't really matter. That doesn't keep me from feeling like I should be curious, though. "It is odd ..." I said finally.

  "Good." Savannah smacked her bottle down. "Let's go take a look and get rid of this spook, so you can skip the nasty banishment ritual. You don't want to be wiped out when Jeremy's here, right?"

  I hadn't thought of that. One problem, though . . . "If I do it, he wins. I'll have ghosts lining up to scream the Pledge of Allegiance at me."

  "I'll handle that." She tamped out the burning vervain with her fingertips. "Yo, Chuck!"

  After a moment, he appeared. "Who the hell is Chu—?" He saw the pizza and beer. "A party for me? How nice." His gaze moved to Savannah. "Whoa. You even brought party favors. Sweet."

  Savannah's gaze followed mine and fixed on a spot near the ghost. "Sit down, Chuck. Grab a beer." She sucked back the rest of the bottle, eyes rolling in rapture. The pizza came next, which she dangled over her mouth, twisting the cheese strands around her tongue. "So good. Want some?" His eyes slitted. "Teasing little—"

  "He appreciates the offer," I said, "but respectfully declines."

  She set down the pizza. "Come here, Chuck. I have a proposition I think you'd like."

  Hope glimmered in his eyes, then guttered out as he remembered his noncorporeal state.

  "We're going to open your cousin's casket. No, you didn't wear Jaime down. I'm curious so I talked her into it. Give her any grief, though, and she has the shit now to do a full banishment. And, later, if you ever come around again? Or tell anyone we did this for you?" She recited a spell. A fireball appeared at her fingertips. "I'll replace your balls with these."

  "Bitch."

  "He agrees to your terms," I said, "and thanks you for your help."

  She pulled on her boots. "Off to the graveyard we go then. My first mausoleum break-in." She paused at the door. "Actually, my second, but if Paige asks ..."

  "It was your first."

  It wasn't the first mausoleum break-in for me. Or the second. A practicing necromancer needs "artifacts of the grave" and the easiest way to get them is from bodies in crypts.

  Between grave robbery and graveside summonings, I'd been in enough cemeteries to write a guidebook. I could also write a security manual for cemetery owners. I rarely encountered more than floodlights and an hourly rent-a-cop drive-by.

  This cemetery had taken the extra step of locking the gates after dark... a gate attached to a fence with gaps you could ride a horse through. They'd splurged on lights too, and from a distance the place looked like a runway. But all the lighting in the world doesn't help when you're outside the city limits, a mile from the nearest house.

  As we'd driven up in Savannah's car, I'd suspected Chuck had played us—this cemetery looked too small and new for family mausoleums. Apparently, though, it'd been designed by someone with a background in real estate, creating "mixed-dwelling" communities. Here, you had your apartments (columbaria), single-family dwellings (graves) and McMansions (mausoleums). The latter targeted families with too much money, too high an opinion of themselves and too little time to actually check out the product before plunking down cash. The buildings were little more than faux Greco-Roman sheds.

  Savannah picked the lock and we stepped inside to what looked like a camp bunkhouse, stinking of damp wood, the walls lined with berths and a few coffins. "So which—?" I began.

  Chuck motioned for silence and made me relay it to Savannah.

  "Um, okay," she said. "But someone should tell him 'waking the dead' is only an expression."

  And, it seemed, we were the only ones supposed to stay silent. Chuck kept up a running commentary as we cast our flashlight beams around. When Savannah approached his cousin's casket, he got louder.

  "Do you hear that?" Savannah asked. "I can't hear anything with Chuck yapping." Which I began to suspect was the point.

  "Something's in here." She bent to unlatch the coffin. "Are mice scavengers? If so, I think we have a nest of them chowing down at the body buffet."

  My "wait!" came out like the squeak of a mouse, which must be what she mistook it for, because she threw open the lid. The corpse leapt up like a jack-in-the-box, shrieking and gobbling, fingers worn through from battering the casket, bone tips clawing the air, flesh tatters waving.

  I'd seen this coming, but I still fell back. Even Savannah did, punctuating hers with a "holy fucking shit!"

  At the sound of her voice, the zombie went still. His head swiveled toward her. Then, with the grace of a landlocked hippo, he lurched over the side of the casket. Savannah stepped back and the zombie—his internal bits and bones out of whack—hit the floor, limbs sprawled.

  "Dude, chill." Savannah brushed a stray bit of flesh from her jeans. "Do we look like grave robbers? Your cousin brought this nice necromancer here, and I'm guessing he wanted her to help you out of your predicament."

  The zombie looked around but, of course, couldn't see the ghost, who'd taken a seat on an empty berth and watched, arms crossed, waiting for me to get on with my job.

  After a moment, the zombie got up. It wasn't easy. His left leg had evidently been brok
en in the accident and coroners didn't reset bones on dead people.

  He propped himself against the berth and looked at us, his gaze keen and very human. A real zombie isn't the shambling brain-chomper of movie myth. It's a ghost returned to its corpse. Simple .. . and simply horrifying.

  "So how did this happen?" I asked.

  "What the fuck does it matter how it happened?" he shouted, voice garbled, wheezing through a hole in his throat. "Get me out of this rotting corpse!"

  "You know, it shouldn't be rotting," Savannah said. "Someone went cheap with the embalming, dude."

  "Stop calling me that."

  "Would you prefer 'decomposing hunk of stinking meat'? Speaking of which, he is damned ripe, Jaime. Can we crack open the door before I hurl?"

  I motioned for Savannah to tone it down and made a mental note to give her zombie sensitivity training later. "Again," I said, "how did you—?"

  "And again, what the fuck does it matter, you dumb twat."

  He did not say "twat." The word he used made Savannah grab him by the suit collar and shake him.

  "Show some respect, dickwad. She's trying to help you." A sharper shake. "That right hand looks a little loose. If I smack it off, it ain't growing back."

  I motioned for Savannah to release him. Zombies are notoriously unhygienic.

  "The reason I'm asking," I said calmly, "isn't to satisfy my curiosity. I don't really care how you got in there. But until I know, I can't get you out." I swept off a dusty berth and perched on the edge. "Why don't I take a guess? You and Chuck—"

  "It's Byron," said the ghost.

  "You and your cousin. You die in a car accident. You come back as ghosts. You find a necromancer. You demand something and you won't let up, so he teaches you a lesson by shoving you back into your body. Am I close?"

  The zombie tried unsuccessfully to cross his arms. "I only wanted him to bring us back to life."

  "And he did," Savannah said. "I didn't mean like this"

  "That's the only way it can be done," I said. "I'm sure he tried to tell you that. You didn't believe him. So he showed you. Now he'll let you stew for a few days before setting you free." I took my flashlight from the berth. "I'll go talk to him and get this sorted. Where is he?"

  "Why?" Chuck said. "Not good enough to do it yourself, Red?"

  "No, I'm not 'good enough' to free another necro's zombie. It can't be done."

  The zombie turned on me. "What? No way."

  "It doesn't matter. I'm sure I can persuade this guy—"

  "He's gone," Chuck said.

  "Gone where?"

  "If I knew, do you think I'd bother with you?"

  When I asked what had happened, the cousins each gave their own rambling account, drowning out and often contradicting each other. After wading through the bullshit that blamed everyone but themselves, I figured out two things: One, some people never learn; two, I wasn't getting Chuck's cousin un-zombified any time soon.

  After their pestering led the necromancer to return the cousin's soul to his body, Chuck decided the best way to fix it was to pester the guy some more. The necro had opted for an impromptu vacation to parts unknown.

  "Okay," I said. "I have a lot of contacts, so tell me everything you know about him and, hopefully, in a few days—"

  "A few days!" the cousins said in unison, then launched into rants that could be summed up as: "You're useless and stupid, and if you don't get him out of that body, you'll regret it." After a few minutes of this I began to think that, while I never thought I'd condone zombification, I could see the other necromancer's point.

  If I could have stuffed Cousin Zombie back into his casket, I would have, but getting him there meant risking a noxious scratch or bite. So I agreed to attempt a soul-freeing ritual. And I kept attempting it for an hour before I gave up. That's when Savannah mentioned she knew a spell that might work.

  "Why the hell didn't you say so?" the zombie said.

  "A spell for freeing souls?" I said. "I've never heard of that."

  "Because it's not meant for zombies. I'm thinking outside the box."

  "Thinking?" the zombie said. "Must be a new experience for you."

  "Do you want back inside the box? Nailed shut?"

  "So, this spell," I said. "The real application is ..."

  "Knocking the soul out of a living person."

  "Temporarily, I hope."

  "Supposedly... but that's why I haven't tested it. Lack of volunteers."

  The zombie cleared his throat, air whistling through the hole. "This is all fascinating, ladies. But in case you haven't noticed, this body isn't getting any fresher."

  Savannah looked at him. "I want to be clear that this is an untested, very difficult, very dangerous dark magic spell, intended for use—"

  "Oh, for God's sake. Do you want me to sign a fucking liability waiver?"

  "No, but I happen to be a mixed-blood witch," Savannah said, switching to a tone that sounded eerily like Lucas's legalese-speak. "That means when I cast a spell, the results can be more vigorous than intended. I'm trying to become a more responsible spellcaster by considering the ramifications—"

  "Rotting here ..."

  She glanced at me.

  I nodded. "If anything goes wrong, I'll tell Paige you read him the disclaimer."

  Savannah cast the spell. The first two times, nothing happened, and the cousins started their heckling. By the third cast, her eyes were blazing as she spit the words, and I probably should have stopped her, but when I saw the zombie's skin balloon and bubble, like a pressure cooker, I thought his soul was about to pop free. Something did pop. His left eyeball shot out, bounced across the floor, then came to rest, optic nerve quivering like a sperm tail.

  Cousin Zombie screamed, breaking it off in a string of profanities long enough to hang someone with, and from the looks he shot Savannah, there was no doubt who he'd hang.

  "Hey, I warned you." She prodded the eyeball with her boot. "You know what they say. It's all fun and games until someone loses—"

  He lunged at Savannah. She hit him with a knock-back spell, sending him smacking against the wall, the flimsy building trembling. He bounced back, fists swinging.

  "Watch out," Savannah said. "That hand is really wobbling."

  He ran at her. She caught him in a binding spell.

  "Damn, this isn't easy," she said through clenched teeth. "It doesn't work as well on zombies."

  "Nothing does."

  "We've got about ten seconds before he breaks it. And he's really pissed."

  "No kidding!" yelled Chuck/Bryon, who hadn't been silent, just ignored. "You popped out his eye, you incompetent—"

  I returned him to ignore mode.

  "Should I try the spell again?" Savannah asked, face straining with the effort of keeping the zombie bound. "I think I was close."

  I looked from Cousin Zombie, frozen in a savage snarl, to Chuck/Bryon, spitting dire vows of vengeance, and I decided that at this stage, "close" wasn't really an issue. "Go for it," I said.

  It worked the first time. That is, the spell worked in the sense that it didn't fizzle. It didn't release his soul either. Just that loose hand, which sailed off and flopped like a trout at my feet.

  "Did anyone not see that coming?" Savannah asked. The zombie broke the binding spell then and Savannah showed off her single year of ballet lessons by pirouetting and skating out of his way as he lumbered after her.

  "Forget her!" Chuck/Bryon shouted. "Get the necromancer. She's old and slow."

  Great advice, if only zombies could hear ghosts. His cousin kept dancing with Savannah, who, after a few rounds, zapped him with another binding spell. Caught off balance, he tottered and fell sideways.

  She whisked off her belt. "Are you over this 'I should be more helpful' shit yet?"

  "In general, no. In this case, as you may recall, I was done with it long ago. Then you convinced me to open Pandora's casket." I walked closer, skirting the zombie in case the spell broke. "We aren't gettin
g this guy back in that box without a fight. Even if we manage it, someone could find him, and I'll be the only council delegate who's ever had to haul her own ass before a disciplinary committee."

  "Molly Crane." I stared at Savannah.

  "You remember Molly." She looped the belt around the zombie's ankles.

  "Dark witch? Your mother's contact? You sent me to her for information, she knocked me out, dragged me into the woods, tried to torture me and dump my remains in a swamp? I vaguely recall her, yes."

  "So what do you think?"

  "About what?"

  She untwisted her scarf. "Molly would love to babysit this guy for you. Not only does she get a slave, but the bits that fall off are gold on the black market. Then, when you've found that necro, he can de-zombify this guy, preferably after Mom's back to deal with him." Again, I could only stare.

  "What?" she said as she gagged the zombie with her scarf.

  "Last time you saw Molly Crane you were leaving her gagged and bound."

  "I didn't gag her. And she'll be over it." She knotted the scarf. "If not, then this is the perfect olive branch. She'll be happy for the excuse. I'm Eve Levine's daughter. Having me in her contact book is almost as valuable as those zombie bits. Of course, there is an alternative. We can put him in my trunk, take him to your hotel..."

  "Do you still have her number?"

  "Right here." She took out her BlackBerry.

  Chuck/Bryon leapt from his perch, where he'd been listening. "Am I hearing this right? You're going to sell my cousin into slavery?" He strode over to me, switching to his death body for effect. "You do this, and you will regret it. You think I was bad before? That was nothing compared to what's coming. I'll haunt you every minute of every day, and there's nothing you can do about it."

  "Nothing?" I said softly.

  He crossed his arms. "Nothing."

  I took a slow step back toward the middle of the mausoleum.

  A smirk rippled his defiant scowl. "So, Red, I'd suggest you start speed-dialing those contacts of yours."

  "Uh-huh." I scanned the crypt, walking the perimeter.

  "That's right. Find a place to get comfy. It's going to be a long night."

  I stopped at a casket and my gaze settled on the plaque. Byron Carruthers. "Your name's Byron, right?"