Dead Sexy

by Tate Hallaway

  "Oh, is that all?" he asked dryly.

  "No," I said. "William's been brainwashed by her." Sitting up straighter, I suddenly added, "Oh, Sebastian, I have to break her spell over him. It's just awful to see him like that."

  Sebastian shot me a skeptical glance. He'd switched the station back to country and western, and SheDaisy harmonized softly in the background. "Are you absolutely sure it's not just love?"

  Sebastian slowed the car suddenly, and I watched a family of whitetail deer bound out from the ditch into a nearby alfalfa field. The bright tail tufts bobbed until they disappeared into darkness.

  "He's not himself," I insisted.

  "Love can do crazy things to a person," he said.

  "Yeah, but William seemed heartless. He talked about getting sprayed by chicken blood as if it were nothing."

  Sebastian seemed to contemplate that as he searched the ditches for signs of more deer. Satisfied there were none, he started back up to full speed. "Yeah, you're right. That doesn't sound like our William, does it?"

  The car curved around gentle hills. Barren branches of oak and maple stood out in sharp relief in the headlights. A white steeple, illuminated by halogen beams mounted on the ground, cast an eerie glow among the tangle of leafless trees.

  "Ever fought a voodoo priestess before?" I thought it was worth a shot, after all, Sebastian was a thousand years old.

  "No, but I was briefly possessed by a loa once."

  "Really?"

  "It was voluntary, well, mostly. I guess the spirits that attended the ritual looked at the vampire in the audience and thought what a funny joke it would be to have Baron Samedi possess the dead guy."

  "Wow." I mean, what else could I say?

  "Yes, well, I damn near needed an exorcist. Apparently, he didn't want to leave. Luckily, even the mambo agreed that it would be an extremely poor idea to have the spirit of the grave walking around all the time in the body of some white guy."

  Having been bodily possessed by Lilith, I had some sense of how frightening that must have been, even though Sebastian did a pretty good job keeping any emotion out of his voice.

  "Do you think you can help me with William?" I asked.

  "Do you want me to?"

  I started to say "of course," when the light of Parrish's motorcycle coming straight at us suddenly blinded me.

  Sebastian slammed on the brakes. There wasn't much of a shoulder to aim for, only a thin patch of loose gravel before the ground sloped into sharp incline of drainage ditch. I braced my hands on the dash. We skidded to a stop. In the headlights, I saw a brief flash of Parrish's hair streaming behind him as he shot past.

  Police cars followed at quite a distance. We heard their sirens first, and then caught the flashes of red and white. Quite suddenly, they were passing us; the howl of the horns became deafening and the lights a brilliant strobe.

  "Well, we found them," Sebastian said. We had slid precariously close to the ditch, and Sebastian took his time extricating the car from the shoulder. He'd made a U-turn just as a big, white media van came careening down the highway. We let it pass and then joined the parade of taillights.

  Sebastian pressed a button on his watch to make it glow a faint green, then he shook his head. "His timing is off," he muttered. "He's not going to be able to keep this chase going long enough before he runs out of gas."

  "Long enough for what?"

  "The shift change at the morgue. You really want to time it so your body is being brought in just as one set of workers is leaving for the day and the next is coming in." Sebastian chewed on his lip. He surprised me by seeming genuinely concerned for Parrish. "Next one is awfully close to dawn for him. Six a.m."

  I watched as the stream of lights made a hard right turn at the next intersection. "Why's that important?"

  "He is planning on getting up and walking out, isn't he?"

  "No. He wants to be declared dead, so the FBI will close the case."

  "Why not just switch toe tags with someone? Do you know how easy it is to lose a body?"

  "In Madison?"

  Sebastian thought about that for a moment. "Right. Still. The whole thing seems awfully dodgy. What about the autopsy?"

  "He said they wouldn't do that if the cause of death was obvious."

  "Maybe. But he's a suspect in a federal case; they're going to be thorough, Garnet," Sebastian said. "If for some reason they don't autopsy, they'll take blood to test for drugs and alcohol. Did he feed before this chase started?"

  I was starting to get nervous. What did Parrish's blood test like? Was it even human? Would they be able to tell he was different? "I don't think he had time." Other than me, of course, but this didn't seem the right time to confess that to Sebastian.

  "Bummer," Sebastian said, gunning the engine through a hairpin turn that made me slide across the bench seat and bump against the door.

  I nodded. The lights turned again, and as I watched them scream through the darkness it appeared the police were closing the distance.

  "He's slowing," I said.

  Parrish made a quick turn into someone's driveway and then proceeded to attempt to go off-road through a cornfield. From the wild bumping of his headlight, I guessed that the cornstalks had recently been plowed under and the ground was both uneven and soft. One of the cop cars had pulled off to the side of the road and trained its floodlight on the field. I could see Parrish struggling with his Harley. Dirt sprayed everywhere, and the bike bucked and skidded wildly. The cops, meanwhile, stopped in a semicircle at the edge of the field. They cut their sirens. The silence unnerved me.

  We were a quarter-mile away, at the top of a hill. Sebastian turned off his own headlights and glided us to a stop. Not far from us, the media van did the same. As soon as the engine was off, I had the car door open and was running down the road.

  "Stay back, Garnet!" Sebastian shouted, but I couldn't.

  Parrish's engine roared as he fought to gain purchase. One wheel caught something and the bike spun out from Parrish's grasp. The wind and distance garbled the command projected by police megaphone. Whatever was said caused Parrish to pull himself upright, flip the cops the bird, and pull his Colt revolver.

  There would be no question about the cause of death.

  Surreally, the sound reminded me of Fourth of July fireworks. Parrish jerked spastically under the barrage of bullets. Then, he fell. No slow motion, time lapse, or graceful swan song, just splat, onto his back in the mud and broken cornstalks.

  Everything was silent, except for the sputtering of the Harley's engine, the chatter of police radios, and my screaming.

  I don't know when I started yelling, but, like the running, I couldn't stop. It was like I was on automatic pilot as I scrambled down into the ditch and started across the field toward Parrish's motionless body. Even when a powerful grip caught me and held me back, my feet kept pumping and my arms continued reaching.

  * * * *

  Dominguez set me down in the backseat of a squad car. The interior was warm and smelled faintly of disinfectant soap, reminding me of a hospital.

  "I'm sorry you had to see that," he said, handing me a paper cup of coffee. "What were you doing out here, anyway?" He propped the elbow of his cast on the ridge of the open car door.

  "A friend picked up the chase on his scanner." I sniffed the coffee, and was surprised by its pleasant, dark aroma. Where had this come from?

  "Leonard brought some in," Dominguez answered, jerking his chin in the direction of one of the squads. "It's going to be a long night for some of us."

  I nodded. Even though I knew Parrish wasn't really dead, I couldn't shake the image of the bullets ripping into him, the jerky, unnatural way he fell. Details revealed themselves in the replays of my memory—a fine mist of blood spraying from each puncture, the twist of pain in his expression. That fall, so sudden and final. I shook my head to clear it.

  Dominguez laid a hand on my shoulder. I could feel the sympathy in the brief squeeze. Then, "Don't go an
ywhere. I may need to take a statement."

  I watched him walk away and merge with the flurry of activity. An ambulance arrived, as did the medical examiner. The county sheriff, the crew from the media van, and curious onlookers from nearby farms all milled about aimlessly. I sat with my head against the seat, snuggled into a blanket someone had offered me.

  From my vantage point, I could see several people standing over Parrish's body, talking and occasionally gesturing at his prone, motionless body. The ambulance guys were making their way across the field with unhurried steps. A uniformed cop had taken the keys out of Parrish's motorcycle and pushed it back up the slight hill to where a tow truck waited to haul it off to… I didn't know where. The impound lot? Police auction?

  The aftermath of violence was very regulated. Everyone seemed to know their part. Except me.

  The blanket around my shoulders was coarse and scratchy, but I hugged it tighter, anyway. I couldn't help but wonder if this strange ordered chaos is what things might have been like if I'd called the police instead of Parrish after Lilith killed the Vatican agents. Except, instead of sitting with my feet hanging out an open door, I'd be handcuffed behind a locked one.

  A passing uniform gave me a curious glance. I returned the midwestern nod of friendly acknowledgment. That seemed to satisfy him, and he went on with whatever he was doing, though he spared me a final suspicious glance. Who knows? Maybe I'd still leave here under arrest. Even though Parrish had made his ultimate sacrifice it didn't mean I wasn't still an accomplice. Dominguez could still have me locked away.

  Out in the field, which was still bathed in an unearthly white light, the EMTs hoisted Parrish onto the gurney with a rolling move, which gave my heart a little pause. Something about that movement, the practiced, respectable ease in which it was executed made Parrish's death seem just a little too real.

  What would it have been like to see the members of my coven transported with this professional calm? I remembered in my hysteria of that night, the one thing I couldn't abide was the thought that, in death, the dead Vatican agents and my friends would be treated the same way. Emergency medical types didn't distinguish between the good guys and the bad. To them, it was about doing the job right. That was part of why I'd called Parrish and told him we had to separate the Vatican agents from the others. He'd wanted to burn them all together in the house, but I'd said no.

  It was the hysteria of grief, and of… well, in retrospect, I knew the other thing that drove my insane insistence of removing the Vatican agent's bodies was guilt. I didn't want to put the two crimes on the same level because, if I did, then what I'd done was no better than what they had.

  So lost in my memories, I didn't even hear Sebastian approach. He crouched down beside me and gave me a big grin. "He couldn't have planned a more dramatic exit," Sebastian said. "Very Last Stand at the O.K. Corral.' "

  "Remind me that he's okay," I said desperately.

  "He's a vampire. Being shot hurts—at least, it hurts me. I don't know very many traditional vampires, maybe he doesn't feel a thing, but, regardless, he's fine. Nothing a little sleep won't cure."

  "You're sure?"

  Sebastian's smile waned a touch, but he held on to it as he tugged a bit of my hair. "Try not to worry. Parrish never would have let this happen if there was any real danger of him dying. He's a fighter."

  Sebastian was right. I remembered Parrish's story of how he was made. He apparently picked the wrong stagecoach to rob one night. Instead relieving a lady of her jewels, she nearly relieved him of his life. But rather than go down without a fight, he decided to bite back. She was so impressed with his chutzpah, she turned him.

  "You've certainly come around about Parrish," I said.

  "It's not him I've come around about; it's you."

  I pulled Sebastian into a hug. Nuzzling against his shoulder, I took in his scent—a manly musk with the hint of something exotic, yet familiar, like cinnamon. I could have stayed like that forever, wrapped in his comforting strength, except someone cleared her throat.

  "Ms. Lacey?" An Asian woman in her fifties with a shock of snow-white hair cut in a bob stood a respectful distance from Sebastian and me. She wore a yellow windbreaker, dark nylon slacks, and sturdy, practical ankle-high boots. "I'm the medical examiner. I'll be issuing the death certificate for Mr. Parrish, and I was wondering if you might know how I might get in touch with his immediate family."

  "He doesn't have any family. But I'm his fiancée." Sebastian's eyebrows shot up, as I fished the ring from under my shirt.

  The ME tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, clearly considering. "Are you certain there's no other living family member? No estranged sibling, uncle, anyone?"

  "His parents have been dead for some time," Sebastian supplied without even a trace of amusement in his voice, as he turned to address her.

  She nodded. Her face was impassive, but she didn't seem very pleased with the information. "Will you be handling the funeral arrangements?"

  "I own a family plot," Sebastian said. "We wish to care for him ourselves."

  It was my turn to stare in shock at Sebastian. What was he suggesting, exactly?

  The ME tried to hide a scowl of disapproval. "That's somewhat unusual outside of the Amish community," she said. "Without a blood relative, you might have some trouble getting all the approval you'll need."

  "I'm well aware of the state requirements," Sebastian said. Sebastian and the ME got into a stare down. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the stretcher being loaded into the ambulance.

  "Uh, so are you going to do an autopsy?" I asked.

  "In cases of violent death it's usually required by law," she said. "However, when there is a known and undisputed cause of death, it can be omitted at my discretion."

  I'm sure I looked visibly relieved.

  She gave me a hard stare. Her eyes flicked over the safety pins on my jeans, the skull earring, and then over to Sebastian's equally monochromatic clothes. "You're part of some cult, aren't you?"

  I'm sure my mouth dropped open. When I dressed as a Goth, people made a lot of assumptions about me, but this was the first time anyone had accused me of being in a cult. "I'm Wiccan, thank you very much."

  "As pagans," Sebastian cut in; no doubt sensing a rant was imminent, "we're against all the artificiality surrounding death."

  Of course, the funny part was that Sebastian was Catholic. Still, I was grateful he stepped in. What I would have said wouldn't have been nearly so articulate or diplomatic.

  "I've heard about you people," she said with a nod. "You've got a pagan cemetery on that crazy commune of yours."

  "Circle Sanctuary is not a commune," Sebastian supplied. "And, we are not 'you people.' "

  "Whatever," the ME said. The scowl she had been suppressing twitched across her thin lips. "Well, if you can assemble all the appropriate forms and you follow the law, I don't care what you do with him. Be sure everything's in order before you try to collect the body from the morgue."

  "Yes, ma'am," Sebastian said as deferentially as he possibly could.

  She walked away. Which was good because I really, really wanted to smack her.

  With the ambulance gone, the crowd thinned considerably. A few squads remained to collect evidence and secure the scene or whatever they were doing. I didn't really care. I felt emotionally exhausted.

  "I wonder if we can go," Sebastian asked no one in particular.

  "You can," Dominguez said coming up out of the ditch. "But, I'd like to talk to Ms. Lacey for a moment."

  "Garnet?" Sebastian didn't even really acknowledge Dominguez's authority in the matter. He looked at me expectantly.

  "It's okay," I told Sebastian. "Why don't you bring the car up?"

  Sebastian nodded, but before he left, he took a moment to give Dominguez an appraising look that suggested you-hurt-her-and-I'll-kick-your-ass.

  Dominguez waited for Sebastian to move off before speaking. He watched Sebastian with a curious expression on his f
ace, like he was examining a bug under a magnifying glass. Finally, Dominguez announced, "He's different."

  In the Midwest, calling someone "different" was a major insult; it was the Norwegian equivalent of "Wow, he's completely fucked-up." The only thing worse you could say might be "unique"—that implied someone was a true psycho.

  "What makes you say that?" I bristled. "You hardly know him."

  Dominguez shrugged. "I read people as part of my job. There's something about your friend that's out of step with the ordinary. I can smell it on him."

  Not to mention the fact that he probably "read" differently being a vampire. "So, you just came over here to insult my friends?"

  "No, I came over here to tell you that I know."

  Fear stabbed through me. To hide my concern, I folded up the silvery blanket and set it on the seat beside me. "Know what?"

  "Parrish isn't dead."

  I tried to act incredulous. "How can you even say something like that?"

  He tapped his temple with a finger. "I felt it. His consciousness is still in there."

  Well, that was good to know.

  "Tell me he's not one of those zombies you were talking about," Dominguez said wearily.

  "He's not a zombie."

  "Thank God," Dominguez said. "Don't tell me anything else. I don't want to know."

  That surprised me. "You don't?"

  "No," he said. "As far as I'm concerned, case closed."

  "Really?"

  "Don't push it," he said, with a raise of a finger at my hopeful tone. "It's easier this way. Parrish is a straightforward suspect with a history of violent crime, and for all intents and purposes he's dead. Anything else, I don't want to know."

  I wanted to say "thank you," but that seemed inappropriate. "Okay."

  He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. "Okay."

  When he looked at me the way he was now, I couldn't help but remember the hot and heavy in his car. I could feel a blush heat my cheeks. "Uh, well, I guess I'll see you around, then."