by SJ Himes
The steel corrugated doors were all closed, and Angel blew out a breath, thinking through his repertoire of spells for something that would trigger the garage door opener on the inside. He went for his bag, but the large shadow at his side chuckled, and Simeon leaned over, listening through the door.
“No heartbeats—no one alive in the garage bay,” Simeon said quietly, and Angel felt his jaw drop open when Simeon slipped his fingertips under the garage door and lifted. There was a faint screech, and Simeon paused, listening, holding still for long moments before lifting again. Without any evidence of strain, Simeon forced the heavy steel door to open, exposing the unlit bay beyond. Simeon gave Angel a slow wink and a salacious grin, and Angel snapped his mouth closed and fought back a blush at being caught staring.
The door was open a few feet, enough for Angel to hoist himself up, and crouch in the darkness on the cold floor as Simeon joined him. “Don’t move,” Angel whispered, and lifted a hand, summoning the fog inside. It rolled in past their feet, a thin sheet that separated into tendrils, gray snakes that coiled and waited for his commands. “There’s cameras on the doors and access points.”
Simeon looked as if he were about to ask, but Angel waved his hand once in a short motion, and the fog snakes leapt into action. The garage bay quickly became as murky as the outside, but it was nearly pitch black, so anyone watching on the cameras wouldn’t, hopefully, notice. The tiny red light of a camera above the inner door was blinking, and the fog hugged the camera, obscuring its view. Not completely, but enough to make it impossible for their identity to be discerned, no matter how good the digital technician in any police lab.
“We need to be fast,” Angel said, quickly standing and moving for the door. Simeon beat him to it, and listened again, nodding once. Angel stepped up, and rubbed his fingertips together, the fine leather gloves not impeding the surge of static energy he pulled from the friction. He tapped the access panel, and with a small blue spark, the door beeped and the panel flashed green. Angel opened the door, and the fog snakes slithered through, entering the hallway.
Angel gave them a moment, and then followed, Simeon right behind. The hall was dark too, only lit by overhead lighting at the far end, the cameras covered by the fog, the door to the main areas of the morgue shut. Angel sprinted down the hall, stopping halfway at a door on the left. Simeon repeated his listening trick, and when Angel got his nod, he zapped the panel again, opening the door to the large storage area. There were no cameras in here, as all the occupants were dead, after all, the claimed waiting to be sent to any number of mortuaries and crematoriums in the state and beyond.
Heavy with the scent of death, the air in the room was filled with chemicals and the stench of decomposing flesh impossible to miss. Angel sneezed, rubbing his nose with his sleeve as he headed for a nearby desk. He flipped the pages of the inventory sheet, heading for the R’s.
Remington, August. Locker 33.
Angel turned to see Simeon carefully shutting the door, the vampire watching him with open curiosity. What Angel was about to do was illegal in every country in the world—raising the dead outlawed over a century ago, prohibited with the sternest of penalties attached. It was still practiced in third-world countries in the depths of rural communities out of the law’s reach though no recorded resurrection had happened in the USA in the last sixty years. Life imprisonment and the castration of his gifts was one outcome if they were caught—if he wasn’t killed in prison. The sacrilegious viewpoints that came with the public’s opinions of necromancy would garner him no favors if caught.
“I’m about to break about a dozen laws. Last chance to leave.”
“My love, we’ve committed to our endeavor. I’ll not leave you,” Simeon admonished, coming towards him, looking down from his glittering green eyes in a way that made Angel almost forget why they were there in the first place. “Besides, I’ve not seen a raising before—this should be interesting.”
“You’re over four hundred years old, and you’ve never seen someone raised from the dead? What the hell have you been doing with eternity?” Angel asked as he grabbed a gurney from the wall, rolling it behind him as he searched the numbered doors set into the wall. He found Number 33, and put his hand on the steel door, head down, listening. Not as Simeon had before, but with his other senses—and got an echo back.
His heart clenched, and his jaw ached from how hard he bit down. It hurt, what he was about to do—that he would talk to a man he loved as an uncle and mentor again only after he was dead. There was no longer any time for them to reconnect in this life, to repair whatever broke when the Salvatores were murdered. Angel would find out what happened, and he would have his revenge. There was no justice left in this city for those carrying the Salvatore name and their allies—the Macavoys may have been reduced to a handful, but the lesser branch of the family, the Collins, were everywhere, choking the foundations of BPD like ivy, cracking and separating the individual blocks into those who weren’t to be trusted, and those who could do nothing.
“Did you guess at my age, mo ghra, or has someone in the clan been talking?” Simeon asked, going to the other side of the gurney and holding it in place as Angel grabbed the handle to the storage locker, the cold metal chilling his hand through his glove. He opened the locker, the door releasing with a hiss and flood of cold air.
“So I’m right then? Early 1600’s, late 1500’s?” he said, and while looking at Simeon’s face instead of into the black, square void that held his friend’s body. He was inches away from doing something horrible and necessary and all he could do was focus on Simeon, and keep his voice from cracking. “And your clan ignores me unless I need to save a fledgling from a bad case of I-ate-a-witch. They don’t talk to me.”
“Yes, you are right,” Simeon agreed, his gaze cautious as he watched Angel though his lips quirked at Angel’s exercise of wit. Simeon wisely refrained from speaking about his clanmates. “Though I’m not certain exactly what year I was turned. Around then is a good estimation.”
“Tattoos give you away,” Angel gestured vaguely with his right hand as he gripped the ice cold steel of the bottom of the positive temperature unit. He pulled, and the mechanism smoothly slid forward in a well-oiled motion. A beige sheet covering the body did little to disguise the form underneath it, and Angel held his breath as he hit the latch that would bring the slab down to waist height. It gave a soft jerk, then quietly lowered, resting atop the gurney with a moan. Best to keep everything at this point, as they might need to get away fast if interrupted.
He sent a glance at the door, the fog swirling patiently as it waited for his next command. No motion came through the glass window, so they were alone for now. He needed to hurry, and he was torn between the need to freeze up in personal horror and his desire for answers.
The body of August Remington was as torn and destroyed as it had been when Angel first saw it, moments after August’s life bled out down his stairs. The sheet was damp, even in the cold, the sundered flesh seeping bodily fluids even after death, giving a macabre outline to the mortal wounds below. No heartbeat to push blood through vein and artery; no, it was the flesh itself that wept, too many gashes to close, never mind the cuts made by the autopsy.
Angel gripped the top of the sheet, fingers curling around the edge, bunching it in his palm. He pulled it back, an unforgiving and unrelenting decision that stole the air from his lungs.
August Remington was a man no more. Just a body, the echo Angel sensed through the steel door even bigger, louder. Recently departed and glaringly vacant, the corpse before him was both better and worse than many he had seen in the past. His eyes picked out the telltale slash patterns of a vampire attack, the retractable claws on each finger lethally sharp and a few inches long depending on the vamp’s age. Across the arteries on both sides of his neck, his abdomen disemboweled, and one of his femoral arteries sliced to the bone, all done in the leanest of seconds. He was slain not as food, but as a vampire would attack with the
intent to only murder. August was spared being a food source, only to die in a great rush of blood and pain.
Angel looked up at his companion as Simeon growled, a feral sound that should have Angel worried. He was alone in a room of dead people with an undead creature that killed in much the same way as the killer did to August—yet Angel was not afraid. Not of Simeon. He’d never been afraid of Simeon, he realized—insanely attracted, and emotionally engaged for the first time in his adult life.
“He died fast, mo ghra,” Simeon whispered, meeting his gaze. “He had no time to suffer.”
“I know,” Angel whispered. “He’s still dead, though.”
“I have the scent of the one who killed him. I will be able to identify the killer if we meet in person, and he will die for what he has done to your friend. Have no fear that justice will not find the killer.”
“Whether by your hand or my magic, I have no fear of the killer getting away with this,” Angel vowed.
He was afraid, though. Fear raced through his heart and mind as he came face-to-face with his purpose here.
Angel was afraid of himself, and the inexorable way he came to the conclusion that he would be raising the dead. Where was the man who lived a quiet life, teaching because he couldn’t see himself doing anything else, and who bemusedly mourned the loss of his brother while he yet lived? Where was the cranky and prickly sorcerer who looked for random hookups and never slept in the same bed with another soul? Where was the man who neatly exorcised himself from the remnants of the Blood War, refusing to live as if he were still trapped in battle every day?
All he was now, in this moment, was a man again ravaged by grief and frustration, powerful beyond his peers, and no notion of restraint or caution as he ran towards a legion of killers, be-damned the consequences.
“Fuck it.”
Chapter Seven
Felonious Conversations
Angel pulled his bag off his shoulder, dropping it at his feet and crouching next to it. He pulled out a foot-long black-and-green malachite-gripped athame and braided black leather rope, and a small red pot, the clay soaked in ocher and sealed with red wax.
Angel moved his bag out of the way and stood, and he handed the jar to Simeon, who took it with a raised brow and no questions. Angel tossed the ropes on the body in front of him, and yanked the sheet away totally, letting it flutter to the floor.
“He hasn’t been autopsied yet,” Angel said, aghast. It was over the twenty-four-hour time limit placed on deceased practitioners—August should be sown up and prepared for the crematorium by now. Fresh anger coiled in his core, and Angel let out a soft snarl that made Simeon blink at him in surprise. “I think it’s obvious the police couldn’t give a shit about August now that they know who he is. A Salvatore ally, no matter how far removed, gets no consideration in this town. Add this to the fact that the police never came by with the picture of the summoner’s face they supposedly got from the statehouse cameras. Someone is trying really hard to set me up to die.”
Angel was so mad his fingers ached where they held the stone and metal grip of his athame, the hard ridges digging into his palm and the underside of his fingers. The long, wavy watered steel blade shimmered in the pale light, its latent power responding to his emotions. He set the blade down carefully on the metal slab, making sure not to touch the corpse before closing his eyes and breathing in deep, trying to find his calm, his center. This was not combative magic, fueled by emotions—this was pure high sorcery, and while he had the strength to do this spell without the artifacts and rites, to do so he would need to open the veil, and alert any practitioner within a block to his presence. To do magic at this high level without veil-sourced power meant Angel needed the artifacts to both give him supplemental energy for the working and provide anchors for the spell. He would be providing most of the power for the resurrection, along with maintaining the fog spell. He would be useless once done.
It was a good thing Simeon came along after all. Angel grinned, somehow the thought of the vampire carting his limp and exhausted ass home after draining himself to passing out making him want to laugh. Angel opened his eyes, and held his hands out in front of him, over the body.
Angel called to his hellfire, the green flames snapping and writhing to life around his hands, up to his wrists, his gloves remaining untouched and whole. Angel kept his breathing slow and measured, and picked up the coiled leather rope, the black leather supple and smooth. The leather resisted the hellfire, treated by spells to remain intact just as his gloves were until a major working was completed and Angel let it burn. Hands aflame, Angel snaked the rope across the corpse’s legs at the ankles and tied them down. He then moved the rope up, and tied down the hands and the waist of the corpse, looping the long rope under the slab and gurney, keeping the entire length intact.
There was just enough rope left to lash across the corpse’s throat, though not too tight.
August would need room to speak.
Angel then picked up the athame, the blade leaping to life with hellfire of its own, matching Angel’s. He held out his hand for the jar his silent and watchful companion still held, and Simeon cautiously dropped the tiny red jar into Angel’s fiery palm.
“What is so potent you open it with hellfire and blade, mo ghra?” Simeon asked him quietly as Angel used the athame to pry the cork free from the red jar, flakes of wax evaporating in soft hisses as it melted in his hellfire.
“The venom of a thousand pit vipers, from a massive nest, found beneath an Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb,” Angel said casually, the cork popping free and landing on the slab. “Concentrated liquid death, kinda. It carries the essence of passage between this world and the next. I’m not sure what effect it’ll have on the undead, so don’t touch the cork.” Simeon eyed the cork with suspicion and put his hands behind his back, his disarray tux giving him a dashing mien, even surrounded by death and the scent of loosening flesh.
Angel dipped the tip of the athame in the contents of the jar, a clear, viscous fluid dripping thickly from the sharp steel. The flames lit the fluid, and it burned even as it pooled and dripped back into the jar. He waited for the excess to fall away, then put the jar down, and with great care, put the cork back in place. Angel took a moment, then began.
A cut. Less than an inch, just above the groin, the burning venom lining the flesh. Angel moved the blade, feeling the energy create a line, anchored by the venom, and it pulled on his hand as he moved the athame up the body to hover over the sternum. Another cut, deep enough to separate flesh, the venom locking in, a burning line of hellfire connecting the two cuts. Angel moved the blade, now with both hands, fighting the pull of the two anchors. He dragged the blade down, slicing first one wrist, and moving slowly, his boots almost losing traction with the force pulling against him, Angel awkwardly went around the slab and gurney to cut the other wrist. Each deposit of venom, each new line of hellfire connected in a macabre constellation, Angel felt a lessening of his reserves. It was draining him and fast.
Angel was sweating, arms shaking, breathing in ragged gasps as he fought against the horrendous pull on the athame. His hellfire now snapped and hissed on the nearly complete design, and he had two cuts left. Over the head, Angel cut the space midway on the corpse’s forehead, the flame darker, more static, and Angel felt his shoulders twitch, muscles ready to give out. His whole body was battling, moving the athame as if it weighed hundreds of pounds, and he knew if he made it through this, he would be beyond sore in the morning.
Simeon hovered next to him, hands up as if to help, but a short jerk of Angel’s head stopped him. Angel fought and strained, the line of hellfire dripping from the athame’s point, sizzling and snapping, fighting him in return. He was warping the very fabric of the natural world—the design he was cutting in place was both map and target for the spirit he was calling on the Other Side. It had to be complete, and perfect this first time, because he would not have the strength to try again, not before August’s body was burned.<
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With a strangled cry of triumph, Angel made a tiny cut on the corpse’s bottom lip, and he fell backward as all tension left the blade, the constellation of venom and fire snapping into place, reverberating through the room with a deep, almost inaudible roll of sound.
Arms numb, fingers tingling, Angel stood, sweat pouring down his temples and back. He sucked in some air, and coughed, feeling as if all the strength in his body was draining out of his pores into the cold air. In a way, it was.
“August Remington. Friend, brother, son, lover, teacher. I call to you. Find your way back to life’s remains. Hear me, and obey.” His words were ragged but as clear as he could make them. He gripped the athame tighter, and pointed it at the body, the constellation writhing, smokeless and yet the air was thick with sulfur. The venom made the air bitter, and Angel stepped back to the body, holding the athame’s point over the ravaged flesh where beneath a quiet heart lay. “August! Hear me, and obey! Return to life’s remains!”
He called to the echo, the vast emptiness he sensed within the body. He sent his words towards the place of nothing, the place all souls passed through when the body failed. The body was merely one place from which to access the nothingness beyond, but it was the surest way to recall the departed.
The soul already knew the way.
“Angelus…” A thin whisper, nothing more. It echoed about the room, as sharp as ice and far colder. The burning lines froze, then simmered, the flames dying down, becoming green embers that roiled and spit. The body was now more than connective tissue and flesh—it was no longer empty.
A jerky and short inhale, muscles trying to function after hours of starvation and the flaccid state of decomposition. Enough air made it through a ravaged throat into lungs left silent, and the corpse that was once a living man named August opened its eyes.
There are moments in Angel’s life where he has perfect clarity, where the world is crystalline and bright, and every atom of existence can be recalled in exact form years later. And it was with a flash of deep regret that this became one of those moments. Heart heavy, Angel took a hand from the athame and cupped the bone-white cheek of the man he once called uncle and mentor.
