Caine, Rachel-Short Stories

by Rachel Caine

  From time to time, I think about Father.

  I ask Doktor Freud if I might go to the garden and sit in the moonlight, but he never allows it. He is careful, you see, even now.

  But mere doctors can’t cage the moon, and its secrets are written in my flesh.

  I clasp my hands over my swollen stomach.

  Only daughters, Mama says. You will have only daughters.

  The moon will see to it.

  (from Strange Brew)

  I hate raising the dead on a work night.

  My boss Sam Twist knows that, and so it was a surprise when I got the e-mail on a Monday, telling me he would need a full resurrection on Thursday.

  "Short turnaround, genius," I muttered. It took days to brew the necessary potions, and I'd have to set aside the entire Thursday from dusk until dawn for the resurrection itself. Not good, because I knew I couldn't exactly blow off Friday. I had meetings at the day job.

  Sam, who ran the local booking service for witches, was usually somewhat sympathetic to my day job-night job balancing act, mostly because I was the best resurrection witch he had–not that being the best in the business exactly pays the bills. It was a little like being the best piccolo player in the orchestra–it took skill, and specialty, and not a lot of people could do it, but it didn't exactly present a lot of major money-making opportunities.

  Then again, at least resurrections were a fairly steady business. Some of the other types of witches–and we were all very specialized–got a whole lot less. It was a funny thing, but so far as I could tell, there had never been witches who could do what the folklore claimed; those of us who were real worked with potions, not words. We couldn't sling spells and lightning. Our jobs–whatever our particular focus–took time and patience, not to mention a high tolerance for nasty ingredients.

  I contemplated Sam's message. If I wanted to, I could turn down the assignment–I wasn't hurting for money at the moment. Still. There was something in the terse way he'd phrased it that made me wonder.

  So was I taking the job, or not? If I said yes, prep needed to start immediately after work. Part of my mind ran through the things I might need, and matched them against the mental stock list I always kept in my brain. The bowls were clean and ready, I'd put them through the dishwasher and a good ritual scrub with sacred herbs just a week ago. I'd need to put a fresh blessing on the athame. I had most of the other things–rock salt, sulfur, attar of roses, ambergris, and a whole bunch of slimier ingredients. I might be running low on bottled semen, but the truth was, you could always get more of that.

  I fidgeted in my chair as I stared at the message. Sam wasn't telling me much–just timing and a dollar amount, which while considerable wasn't enough to pay my mortgage. On their own, my fingers typed my reply: I might be interested. Who's the client?

  I rarely asked, because most of the time that fell under need-to-know, and I didn't. So long as the client paid Sam, and Sam paid me, we were all good. But this time–this time I felt like it was worth the question.

  I went back to my regular work–tonight, that meant straightening out a worksheet the experts in accounting had completely trashed–and was a little surprised when Sam's e-mail came so quickly. Then again, it was a short answer.

  PD. Police Department.

  My hackles went way up. The police didn't part with their money willingly for resurrections. The testimony of the resurrected had been thrown out as inadmissible five years ago, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, and the land-office rush for witches to bring back the dead had dried up just as fast. Some of the richer cities still managed one or two resurrections a year for particularly cold cases, just to generate leads, but I hadn't seen one in Austin for a while.

  So if the Thin Blue Line was knocking, something was up, and it was big. Very big.

  Why? I wrote back, and hit send.

  It didn't take long to get my answer. Four minutes, to be exact, give or take a few seconds, until my cheery little you have mail chime dinged.

  They need a disposable, he wrote, and this time, I sat all the way back in my chair. And rolled my chair back from the computer. Tried to talk them out of it. Told them you wouldn't want in. You can pass on it, H.

  In technical terms, a disposable is a long-term resurrection–counterintuitive, but that's police parlance for you. Most resurrections last no more than a few minutes, maybe an hour–you really don't need that much time to do whatever needs to be done. It's mainly finding out the name of their killer, or where they stashed the family silver, or where the bodies are buried if your deceased soul is the one who buried them in the first place. Holding them longer is brutally hard, and gets harder the longer it goes on. When a police department requests a long-term resurrection, it's almost always specific–there's a situation that requires a particular person to resolve, or a particular skill. When the cops ask for a disposable resurrection, well, you know it's going to be bad.

  I knew it better than anyone.

  I typed my reply back in words as terse as Sam's had been to me. Bet your ass I'm passing.

  I hit send, feeling only a little wistful twinge of regret at all that virtual money disappearing from my future, and began to shut my computer down.

  I'd just picked up my purse when my cell phone rang, and I wasn't too surprised when the screen's display told me it was Sam.

  "Hey," I said, shouldered my bag, and headed for the elevators. "Don't try to talk me out of it. I don't do disposables. Not anymore."

  "I know that," Sam said. He had a deep, smoky voice, the kind that implied a cigarette-and-whiskey lifestyle. I didn't know that for sure; for all I knew, Sam might have lived prim as a preacher. Sam and I didn't exactly hang out; he kept himself to himself, mostly. "Not trying to talk you out of it, H, believe me. I'm glad you turned it down."

  "Shut up," said a third voice, male, grim, and completely unfamiliar.

  "Who the hell is that?" I blurted. "Sam–"

  "Detective Daniel Prieto."

  "Sam, you conferenced me?" He'd never put me on the spot before.

  "Hey, they're the cops. I got no choice!"

  "Hear me out." Prieto's voice rode right over Sam's. "I'm told you're the best there is, and I need the best. Besides, you have a prior relationship with the–subject."

  My mouth dried up, and I stopped in midstride to lean against the wall. A few coworkers passed me and gave me curious looks; I couldn't imagine what was on my face, but it must have been both alarming and offputting. Nobody stopped. I tried to speak, but nothing was coming out of my mouth.

  "Holly? You there?" That was Sam. I could still hear Prieto breathing.

  "Yeah," I finally managed to say. "Who?" Not that there was really much of a question. I had a relationship with only one dead man. He was the only disposable I'd ever brought back.

  And Prieto, right on cue, said, "Andrew Toland."

  I felt hot and sick, and I needed to sit down. Never a chair around when you need one. I continued walking, slowly, one shoulder gliding against the wall for balance. "Sam, you can't agree to this. You can't let them do it again. Not to him."

  "What can I say? I'm just the dispatcher, H. You don't want to take it on, that's just fine." The words sounded apologetic, but Sam didn't do empathy. None of us did. It didn't serve us well, in this line of work.

  Cops had the same problem. "I have to tell you, if you don't agree, we're still bringing him back. It'll just be somebody else running him. You said this Carlotta is next on the list, Mr. Twist? She's the one who recommended this particular guy be brought back, right?"

  "Lottie?" I blurted it out before I could stop myself. No. Oh, no. Carlotta Flores and I went back a long time, and not one minute of it was pleasant. In resurrections, we prided ourselves on detachment, but Lottie took pleasure in the pain that her resurrected souls felt; she enjoyed keeping them chained into their flesh. I'd reported her dozens of times to the review board, but there was never any real evidence. Only my own word for what I'd seen.
<
br />   The dead can't testify.

  It was her fondest wish to run a disposable, and it was the very last thing she should ever do. God, no. The idea of letting her handle Andrew's resurrection was more than I could take.

  Detective Prieto somehow knew that, but then again, I supposed he'd done his homework. He'd probably gotten it from Sam, the chatty bastard.

  "That a yes, Miss Caldwell?" Prieto asked. Sam was distinctly silent.

  "Yes," I gritted out. "Dammit to hell."

  "Right. Let's get to business. City morgue, Thursday at dusk, you know the drill. Come loaded, H." Sam was back to brisk and rough again, his brief moment of empathy blown away like feathers in a hurricane.

  "Send me the details." I sounded resigned. I didn't feel resigned. I felt manipulated, defeated, and enraged.

  "Will do," Sam said. I heard a click. Detective Prieto had signed off without bothering to say good-bye. "Better you than Lottie, I guess. Though look, if you just don't show up, what're they going to do? Arrest you?"

  "They'll let Lottie do it instead. You know I can't let that happen, Sam."

  "Kind of guessed, yeah."

  "Why him? God, Sam–"

  "Don't know. Lottie had some kind of chat with Prieto, next thing I know, he's telling me it's Toland he needs. Maybe Lottie told him about how tough the son of a bitch was. Is."

  Maybe Lottie just wanted to yank my chain. Equally possible.

  "Holly? Sorry about–"

  "Yeah. Whatever. See you." I folded up the phone. I couldn't take any more of Sam's vaguely false apology. He knew my agreement was final. You don't become a witch making false promises. The stakes are far too high.

  I must have punched the elevator buttons properly, because next thing I knew I was in the lobby, walking toward the parking garage. I couldn't feel my feet, and wherever my head was, it wasn't a good place. I went to the car on autopilot, got inside, and bent over to rest my aching, sweating forehead on the steering wheel.

  My name is Holly Anne Caldwell, and I'm a licensed seventh-generation witch, with a specialty in raising the dead.

  And I wished, right at this moment, that I was one of them.

  I buried myself deep in prep work. It took up most of my nights, and I sleepwalked through my day job until Thursday.

  Late Thursday afternoon, I went to raise the dead.

  I knew the way to the morgue all too well. I had a parking pass, and the guard at the door knew me by sight. He still checked me against the list and opened up my heavy case to check the contents. All aboveboard, along with my certification papers from the State of Texas. I'd dressed professionally–a nice dark suit, very funeral home-friendly, with sensibly heeled shoes. Moderate makeup. Light perfume.

  It helps, because I do run into the odd person who still believes witches come with green faces, cackling, and cauldrons.

  The guard hooked me up with a temporary ID badge and escorted me back to the–excuse the phrase–guts of the morgue, which always reminded me of a large-scale industrial kitchen, with all the chrome work surfaces and sharp instruments neatly arrayed on racks. Once there, he checked with the coroner's assistant, then backtracked me to a room that was normally used for family viewings. Nobody had bothered to dress it out for this occasion, so there was a certain creepy sterility to it that unsettled me.

  Detective Prieto unsettled me, too. He was about my father's age, stern and possessed of one stony expression as far as I could tell. He didn't like me, and he didn't like what he was doing. He gave me the paperwork, I read and signed, and he checked all my credentials again before leaving the room to stand in the viewing area.

  I pulled the sheet back on the corpse, and there, lying pale and still in front of me, was Andrew Toland.

  He looked damn good, for having been born in 1843, and especially since he'd died in 1875. By rights, I should have been looking at a skeleton, not a fresh corpse–like last time we'd been through this, another witch had produced a copy from his genetic template. It was known as a homunculus, in the trade. How such things were made was a closely guarded secret, although I knew the body would contain some kind of tissue or bone from the original corpse to hold the link. I wouldn't have known how to begin to conduct that kind of operation, but then again, the witch who'd made the mortal clay couldn't have breathed life into it, either.

  Specialists.

  I'd been here before, in this very room, with Andrew. One year ago, almost to the day–my first disposable. I'd been nervous, and excited, and thrilled at the prospect of meeting the man who'd made history. I hadn't been prepared, then, for the idea that I would like him.

  And that I would mourn him when it was time to let go.

  I didn't want to do this. It had hurt too much, been too intimate. I wanted to walk away from all of it… but if I did, someone else would be standing here within the hour. Someone like Lottie, who would turn something wonderful into something horrible.

  I had no choice.

  Andrew Toland looked peaceful, frozen at that moment of death. He no longer had the wounds that had killed him; the last witch had repaired that as part of the reconstruction. He was just… dead. All I had to do was bring him back.

  And once again, I had to wonder: Why him? Lottie had wanted him, specifically. It could just have been her one-two punch of hating me and wanting the prestige of running a disposable, but I couldn't believe that. There were easier ways to hurt me, and Andrew Toland was nobody she'd want to mess with. She knew his story, just as I did.

  Andrew had lived a hard, interesting life, and he'd earned himself a reputation, in his thirty-two short years, of being one of the toughest men of a rough-and-ready period of American history. A resurrection witch, like me, he'd gone down fighting during one of the worst zombie wars ever conducted in the Southwest. From time to time, a resurrectionist goes bad, and when that happens, the results are massively dangerous. Get three or four of the bad ones together, and you have the makings of an unstoppable army of the dead.

  Andrew Toland had gone up against that, and earned himself a broken neck. Then, by prior agreement with his friends, he'd had himself resurrected to fight again.

  He'd won. Most of his allies had been taken out, and in the end he'd carried on by himself–a gritty two-week campaign of attrition against the toughest opponents imaginable. And even when his resurrection witch had been killed in the last critical moments, he'd still managed to stay alive long enough to take out the enemy. It had been unheard of then, and it was still without parallel, and in the textbooks apprentices studied, he was an entire chapter all his own.

  You just don't get badder-assed than that.

  I knew Prieto was watching, and the last thing I needed was to lose my objectivity at a time like this. I put all my feelings away in a lockbox, bent down, and opened Andrew Toland's death-filmed eyes.

  I parted his clay-cold lips and poured in the first, massive dose of the potion. It pooled in his mouth, liquid silver, and then I performed the part that nobody else could do.

  I kissed him, very gently, on the lips and completed the last step of the preset spell. I felt a line of power spooling out of me, traveling through the dark and connecting, with a jolting snap of power, with the spirit of Andrew Toland.

  The last time I'd done this, Andrew's power and strength had overwhelmed me. This time, they felt oddly soothing. Like being folded in warmth and light.

  Andrew swallowed, coughed, and blinked. His skin remained pasty white for a few seconds. The cataracts on his eyes faded first, fainter with each blink, and then his skin took on color.

  He wasn't back, but he was breathing.

  I took his hands and poured more power into him, raw and wild. It was sweaty work, bringing back the dead, and it required me to be vulnerable in ways most witches weren't willing to attempt. I had to touch his soul, and let him touch mine. I had to not just taste death, but to drink it down–accept it as a lover.

  He gasped when I made contact, and the shine in his eyes shifted
from mere existence to real life. Real consciousness.

  I heard the first slow thud of his heartbeat, then the second. Then the rhythm falling into place.

  And despite all the drugs cushioning his fall, I saw the agony hit him–I felt it, too, dim but strong, through our link, and had to breathe deeply to control the pain. He didn't scream. Some did, but not Andrew; he hadn't screamed when I'd revived him last year, either. His hands tightened on mine, brutally strong, and I tried not to wince. It'll pass, I told myself. Breathe. Breathe, dammit.

  I was doing fine until he met my eyes, and he whispered, "Holly. Wasn't it finished? Didn't we get him?"

  Holy hell. He remembers.

  For a frozen second I couldn't think what to say, but training came back to me in a rush. Establish control. Guide the dialogue.

  "Andrew," I said, and my voice was low and gentle and soothing, entirely steady. "Andrew Toland. Do you hear me?"

  He nodded. He hadn't blinked since focusing on me.

  "I need you to sit up now," I said. "Can you do that?"

  He could, and he did. He swung his legs over the edge of the cold morgue table and came upright, and I stopped him long enough to adjust the sheet over his lap. I wasn't usually so fussy, but Andrew had thrown me off; I couldn't see him as a tool. He was a man, a living, vital man.

  He hadn't looked away at all from my face. There was something very unusual about him. I'd brought back hundreds of dead, and I couldn't think of a single one who'd begun the process with a question like that. It takes time for the personality to reassert itself, for memories to come clear.

  He had been crystal-clear from the moment our souls had touched.

  "Holly, you must tell me the truth," Andrew said. "Did we kill that bastard?"

  How could he possibly remember who I was? I'd had one other soul I'd brought back twice, the CEO of a major corporation who'd forgotten to pass along the passwords to some vital corporate accounts. I'd had to do it twice because the board of directors wanted to be sure they had everything from him, and that man, young and fit as he'd been, hadn't recognized me at all. Hadn't remembered a thing from one resurrection to the next.