Hex Appeal

by P. N. Elrod

  I flipped open the cell, and said, “Melaine?”

  “Hey, Miss Caldwell,” her bright, calm voice said on the other end. “I got an urgent call for you from a Detective … Prieto? He says you know him.”

  I knew Detective Prieto, all right. A chill settled over me and quickly deepened to artic levels. “Go on,” I said. Next to me, Andy watched, waiting and still.

  “Here’s his number—” She read it off slowly, making sure I had it before moving on. “He says that he needs you to look at a crime scene, right away. He gave me the address.”

  I scribbled down the information on a sheet of paper. “Did he say anything else?”

  “Not really.” Melaine paused for a moment, then said, “He sounded a little weird, actually.”

  My pencil stopped midnote. “Weird, how?”

  “Shaky. And I’m married to a cop. I’ve never heard a police officer sound like that. He seemed—spooked.”

  That didn’t make my bad feeling go away. In fact, it intensified. “Okay,” I said. “Please call him back and tell him I’ll meet him there in twenty minutes.”

  “Will do.” Melaine rang off.

  Andy was watching me, and he was still holding my free hand. “You look like it’s something nasty.”

  “Probably,” I said. “I’m sorry, honey. I have to go.” Normally, I would have asked him to accompany me, but if he had a potion on the stove, there was no way he could. “You did say that will smell better, right?”

  “Cross my heart,” he said, and kissed me again. I stepped back and straightened my shirt, which had somehow gotten a little rumpled, then checked my office skirt and sensible low-heeled shoes. They looked approximately crime scene appropriate.

  “You look just fine,” he assured me, and gave me that crooked, intimate smile that made the thrill set in much deeper. “Better out of all that getup, but—”

  “Mind your manners, you roughneck heathen.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I won’t embarrass you in public. But in private, I’ll be happy to make you blush all you want, anywhere you want. You just say the word.”

  Oh, how I wished I could. Instead, I said, “The call was from Detective Prieto. He’s got a crime scene.”

  Andy’s smile disappeared, and his body language shifted in subtle, dangerous ways. Old West gunfighter kind of ways. He suddenly looked loose-limbed, rangy, and very dangerous. “How’s that old dog?”

  “Still hunting,” I said. “And I think he might have caught something bad he needs my help with.”

  Andy nodded slowly, eyes gone dark and far away. “Wish I could go with you, sweetheart. I don’t like sending you off alone, something like this.”

  “That’s nice, but you know, I did get along just fine for years on my own without being chaperoned by a big, strong man.”

  That got me a small grin. “Still don’t like seeing women go running off into the dark unescorted,” he said. “I know it’s a more civilized time, but that don’t mean there ain’t wolves out there.”

  Oh, I knew that, almost as well as he did. “Chauvinist,” I said.

  “I’ll have you know I was raised Lutheran, missy.”

  That made me laugh, then cough, because the smell coming from the kitchen had, if anything, intensified. “I think something’s burning,” I said, and Andy gave me another peck on the cheek and went back to his stirring.

  I got out my own go-bag, which I kept stocked for emergencies. Nothing but basic supplies, because if I was asked to do any kind of full resurrection, it would take days of time and effort to complete brewing up the necessary potions anyway.

  In the bottom, I had tucked a legal-to-carry Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol.

  Welcome to Texas.

  I had no doubt that if Andy had joined me, he’d have had guns in his bag as well. And knives. And probably high explosives. Even in Texas, though, some of that wasn’t legal to carry around, so we usually just left it as an ignorance-is-bliss kind of thing.

  I was, unexpectedly, feeling a little vulnerable without him at my side.

  “Holly Anne?”

  He was watching me from the kitchen doorway, spoon still in his hand. He looked adorable in that apron.

  I looked into his face and saw the concern. I managed a faint smile. “I’m fine,” I said. “Honest. No worries, okay?”

  “All right,” he said. He didn’t sound convinced, but then, I didn’t feel too solid about it, either. Resurrection witches were not the first call from detectives on any police force, not since the laws had changed banning the testimony of the deceased. So it took something powerfully wrong for Detective Prieto to be speed-dialing me.

  I was heading into something awful. I could just smell it, just like the stuff Andy was cooking on my stove.

  “When you come back here, I promise, I’ll have all this cleaned up,” he said.

  I kissed him again, quickly, and escaped the smell … but I had a grim feeling that it was going to be the least of my problems this evening.

  * * *

  The address Melaine had given me was in an industrial area of Austin; industrial areas have a certain sameness to them no matter where you are in the world. Little in the way of nature had survived here, except in the artificially maintained entrance to the business park. My headlights caught the name on the sign as we turned, and I felt a startled shock of recognition.

  HIGHLAND LAKES INDUSTRIAL AND BUSINESS COMMUNITY. Yes, I’d been here before. I’d seen that dour-looking Scotsman in a kilt on the sign before. When had I …

  Oh.

  Yes, that was a bad feeling sinking through my chest, very bad indeed. I completed the turn and headed for where I saw a whole carnival of flashing red and blue lights in the distance, reflecting off the side of a building.

  I’d been here before, all right; it was one of my most vivid, horrible memories.

  Maybe it’s a coincidence, I thought.

  I should have known better.

  As I pulled up to the police barricade blocking off the area, I spotted Detective Prieto. He waved away the uniformed officer who was trying to stop me and leaned in the car window. Prieto had that hard, world-weary air that many detectives sported, coated with a thick outer shell of cynical realism. “So. You’re alone? Isn’t your dead boyfriend still lurking somewhere?”

  “Why, does it bother you?” I asked him, and couldn’t control a chill in my tone.

  “Won’t keep me up nights.”

  “You asked me here, Detective. We’re not getting off to a good start.”

  He shrugged. “It’s that kind of night. Drive around the corner. Park next to the meat wagon.”

  As I pulled to a stop, the sense of familiarity deepened. It wasn’t just the same industrial park and building. It was the same damn spot. That was just too weird to be coincidental. I turned off the engine and sat in silence for a few seconds, thinking. I wanted to get back into the car and drive away, but the fact was, I couldn’t turn down a request from the police. Witches had a tough enough time as it was, with the Bible thumpers trying to get us hanged, burned, or drowned in a dunking chair. We needed the cops to like us. Even Prieto.

  So I got out, shivering a little in the evening chill, and grabbed my bag out of the back.

  Prieto caught up with me, slumped and tired but still walking fast. “Thanks for coming,” he said, not as if he in any way meant it. “According to the files, you were involved in the last one. Figured we could get your take on what was going on here.”

  “Last one?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Up ahead, a knot of people were working—most of them crime scene technicians, collecting microscopic evidence, photographing, bagging, tagging. We stopped at the edge of the taped-off area, and Prieto waved over one of the team.

  “Tell them, Greg,” he said. He made the rest of them step away to give us a clear view. Once I had it, I didn’t really need the update because illuminated by harsh floodlights, the scene told me everything.
/>   What I faced was … monstrous.

  And it was like having the worst case of déjà vu in the world … a traumatic flashback made real, flesh and blood, so much blood. I’d been here before, stood here before, seen this before.

  I don’t know how I managed not to throw up, or faint, or at least turn away, but I forced myself to look at all the details, searching for something, anything, that would break me out of the nightmare.

  But it was all the same.

  The forensic tech studied me curiously for a second before shrugging off his questions about why he’d be talking to me at all. “Well, I’m sure you can see most of it. Victim is about eighteen years old. Pretty nasty, even for this kind of thing. You can see the mutilation from here; blood evidence tells us it was mostly done while she was still alive. She’s been dead about four hours, best we can ballpark it right now. No ID yet. Not much in the way of trace evidence, either. This is real similar to a case we had about a year ago. Same location. Same age of victim.”

  “No.” I said it softly, my gaze fixed on the pale, blood-spattered face of the girl. “Not the same age as that victim. She’s the same victim.”

  Prieto was staring at me, and I knew he’d been thinking the same exact thing but had wanted confirmation. “I thought maybe it was just a close resemblance.”

  “It’s not. DNA will confirm. It’s the same girl, Daniel,” I said.

  Prieto nodded.

  The crime scene tech frowned. “Well, obviously, that can’t be the case,” he said. “That isn’t possible.”

  I took in a breath. “Yes, it is. She’s been brought back by a resurrection witch, then killed again. The same way. In the same place.” I felt sick but oddly steady. I understood this now. I understood why I was here. Prieto hadn’t known, but he’d at least had a suspicion. “My God. He killed her all over again.”

  The tech—Greg?—seemed to go still for a moment, as if he was running that through his head a few times for clarity. “I’m … sorry. And how exactly would you know that?”

  “Because I consulted on the first case,” I said. Consulted was a euphemism, of course; I’d brought back this victim from the dead myself. I’d asked her who’d killed her, but she’d been so traumatized and hysterical that it hadn’t worked at all. I’d had to let her go without an answer. “They never caught him,” I said. “Detective … I think he’s found a way to relive his kills in a brand-new way—not just with trophies or memories or recordings. He’s found a way to actually repeat them.”

  Prieto had gone pale because he knew what I was talking about now, and the enormity of it was starting to hit him like a falling wall. “If it’s the same man, he has six kills on his list.”

  The world was spinning around me, wobbling like a top, and I had to focus hard to avoid feeling sick with it. “He just realized that it was safer to do it this way,” I said. “There’s no law against torturing and killing the dead. No law at all. As long as he can get a resurrection witch to go along with it, he can keep on going, and there’s nothing we can do to stop him. Nothing legal, anyway.”

  “Fucking hell—” Prieto suddenly turned away, overcome and unwilling to let me see it. I waited for it to hit, too, but all I felt was a black sense of betrayal and inevitability. As if I’d known, deep down, that something would never rest safely in the grave about this case, this murderer, these victims.

  Prieto paced, head down, then swung back on me. “It’s a fucking witch working with him,” he said. “One of yours. No, two of yours, right? One to create the shell, the avatar—that’s a different skill set. Then a resurrection witch to put the life back in.”

  “Maybe this isn’t what it looks like.” I said that, but my heart wasn’t in it. I just didn’t want it to be true because no matter who did it, we all had a share of that kind of guilt.

  “Don’t try to tell me this isn’t on one of you. It’s witches doing this shit. What the hell is this, eh? Legal murder?” Prieto was about one second from shoving me, from the wild, angry glitter in his eyes. “Necrophiliac sons of bitches! What kind of sick fucking sadists are you tweaks?”

  I was glad Andy wasn’t with me. He’d have punched Prieto for using language like that in front of a lady, but I didn’t care; he was right. Sickeningly right.

  I found that the words just came, all on their own. “I’m the kind that stops that kind,” I said. “Or dies trying.”

  * * *

  Prieto had pulled the case files, and he had them in his car. Not a stupid man, by any means. He’d assumed it was a copycat killing, but his forward thinking saved me valuable time, and it might even save a life, although the legal system wouldn’t quite see it that way.

  “They’re wasting their time, your forensic people,” I said. “It isn’t a crime to kill the dead.”

  Prieto sent me a scorching-hot glare. “No,” he finally said. “Resurrected people don’t have any rights, you know that. So it wouldn’t be murder to kill them, no matter how sick it is.”

  “And whoever this is, he’s counting on that,” I said. “He’s a serial killer who’s discovered a way to get his thrills without nearly as much risk.” I felt sick again and had to swallow hard to control myself. “The victims will remember, you know,” I said. “Dying before. All the pain and terror. It would only be worse this time because they’ll know it’s coming.”

  “You ever heard of anything like this before? People bringing back the dead for their own version of fun?” Prieto asked. I shook my head, but it was a silent lie. The resurrection business, like the mortuary business, attracted its share of mentally and emotionally broken people. The witch community generally policed its own, and as those kinds of offenders were noticed, they were dealt with. Quietly. With prejudice.

  I’d heard of one or two rapists who revived the dead to attack them before letting them slip away again. A few who got their kicks torturing. I’d never heard of one turning serial killer, or someone enabling one. How had he—or, God help us, she—slipped through the cracks? And if you counted the witch who’d created the shell, that made two of them who were guilty and keeping their silence.

  Sickening didn’t really cover it.

  “So how do we start?” Prieto asked. “Do we go back to the parents?”

  I shuddered. “No. The last thing we should do is let them know about this,” I said. “Bad enough they lost a daughter so horribly in the first place, but to know she went through it again, just as horribly … we’d be continuing their torture, not relieving it.”

  Prieto looked even sicker as he ran it through his head. “Okay. So where’s our starting point?”

  I held up a file. “We could try working it from the burials. An avatar witch needs a piece of the real person to make the physical body—bone, hair, flesh, blood. You start exhuming them and see if any of the bodies have been tampered with; I’ll bet you find they’ve all had samples taken. If I understand forensic rules properly, he—or she—should have left some trace evidence behind in the process—digging up a body is a messy, sweaty business.”

  “And what will you be doing?”

  “Tracking avatar witches. There aren’t more than a few dozen of them in this state; it isn’t a common skill in our circles, and they all have to be licensed.”

  “Couldn’t it be somebody out of state? Somebody brought in just for this purpose?”

  “Sure,” I said, and shrugged. “But we’re a close-knit community. Someone will know something about it, even if it’s just the supply shops who furnish what we need.”

  “How am I supposed to get bodies exhumed? I need family consent,” Prieto said. “What kind of excuse am I supposed to use for that?”

  “The serial killer’s struck again, but you have a revolutionary new scientific technique that wasn’t available before,” I said. “As far as I can tell, most people don’t understand science any better than they understand resurrection magic. Families will give you permission for the exhumation, almost certainly, if you tell them it
will help us catch him.”

  “You mean, if I lie my ass off to them.”

  “Do you want this stopped, or not?” I thought about it for a few seconds, and continued, cautiously, “There’s a third thing we can do. We can keep an eye on the dump sites. He reused one, he might reuse others. These places mean something to him.”

  “Well, that’s a problem,” Prieto said. “This isn’t officially a crime, and overtime’s not something we can throw around like confetti; our budget’s stretched so thin it squeaks. There are five other dump sites. Can’t cover them all, especially not during the night.”

  “I’ll take the one that comes next in the series,” I said. “Just in case he sticks to the pattern.”

  “Not by yourself, you’re not,” Prieto said.

  “Andy could—”

  He made a sharp movement and cut me off. “I want one of mine in on it,” he said. “I’ll find a volunteer. You want to bring Toland along, that’s on you, but I need somebody who isn’t on the side of the witches.”

  That was insulting, but I understood his position, really. He didn’t trust witches in general, and if he sometimes, grudgingly accepted me, that was only a temporary thing.

  “Fine,” I said. “You put whoever you want with us. But I’m definitely going.”

  Prieto nodded, got out of the car, and began giving orders to break down his investigation.

  Andy and I would find these people.

  And when we did … hell would descend if Andy had anything to say about it.

  * * *

  I braced myself at the front door for the smell. On top of the trauma of the evening, I wasn’t sure that I could really face it, but I needed to see Andy. I needed to talk to him about all this, pour my heart out, tell him just how awful I felt. He was the only one I could tell.

  I unlocked the door and came inside, locked it, and realized that I was holding my breath, dreading the moment … but I forced myself to relax.

  And the smell that washed over me was nothing like what I’d been imagining. It was unbelievably sweet and clean and lovely, and I found myself closing my eyes in an explosion of sensual ecstasy. I moaned in utter satisfaction and sank bonelessly into the nearest chair as it rolled over me and through me, taking all of my day’s frustration and exhaustion along with it.