by Alys Arden
The rest of the crew rolled up together in Brett’s truck. Chase and Jory jumped out of the bed before the engine was cut.
After I introduced Callis, Betsy volunteered to unload the tools, which she often did to avoid “the run.” I didn’t blame her. The run was always the worst on day one, and this one was fresh.
Fresh like a zombie.
I pulled the bandana from my pocket and almost offered it to Callis, but my stomach twitched at the thought of what was about to come. Everyone has to learn the hard way. Not that a square of fabric really did anything for you on day one. Nothing could shield you from the smell of the putrid rot.
I tied it around my face, looking at the house, more like a Victorian mansion. It was the last one on a block we’d been working on for weeks; it sat on the end, facing out toward the river.
“If you puke,” Jory said to Callis, “vacate the house so it doesn’t start a chain reaction.” He slapped his back and ran for the door.
“What?”
“Godspeed,” I said, and took off running with others.
I glanced at the X on the exterior as we stepped inside:
8-18 / #41 / 0 / 0
Searched on August 18th by crew 41. No people, animals, or bodies were found.
Six steps in, my hands went to my knees, and the coughs came in waves of three. The key was not to linger, even when your body rejected pressing forward. I clamped my jaw shut. It became mind over matter as I forced myself deeper into the smell of decomposition, the odors so thick I could almost feel them on my fingertips and taste them on my tongue. An amuse-bouche of molding textiles, mildewing drywall, and rotting rugs.
The hardest part always came right after the first wave of gagging—I pushed through the near-puking fit and made a mad dash for a window on the other side of the room. I didn’t want to seem like a wuss on Callis’s first day.
I forced the window up, splintering the wood. A glance behind as I jammed it open showed me that Callis only made it a few feet inside the door. Props to him, though; most firsties don’t make it in without running straight back out. And he’s not even puking yet. We’ve never had a first timer who didn’t puke.
He ran over and shoved his head out the window next to mine, and we sucked up the damp winter air from the courtyard.
“You can thank me later,” I said.
“I—I am thankful. At least it’s a job.”
I didn’t puke, and neither did he. He twitched and coughed and made a teeny gagging sound, but he didn’t puke, and nothing could have impressed the team more. He was officially one of us.
AJ and Chase took the bottom floor, where the water had sat the longest. Betsy and Brett took the second floor, which would be the easiest as far as damage went. That left me, Callis, and Jory on the top floor, where most of the damage was due to half the roof being blown off.
I was extra careful as I tore things away, trying to preserve as much as possible. The house seemed like it had been a beauty in its day.
Callis did everything exactly as I showed him. I could tell he didn’t want to mess up this gig; at the rate he was going, he had nothing to worry about.
The dim, shadowy house reminded me of the night we first met, and how weird his sister had looked . . . as pale as a vampire.
I glanced over at him as we worked side by side in the master bedroom, prying the last of the molding from the back wall.
What if he didn’t throw up because he doesn’t need to eat?
Once the unsettling idea was in my head, I couldn’t focus on anything else.
Callis removed the last of the baseboards and picked up a sledgehammer. I stepped back as he began ripping the plaster away.
Could there be new vampires in town? The crime rate in the city was still astronomical after all. What if I just put my entire crew’s lives in danger? And Adele’s too?
I waited until Jory left for a smoke, then jammed my hand over the sharp edge of a piece of cracked molding. “Dammit!”
“Are you okay?” Callis yelled over the sound of power tools below us.
This was a stupid idea, Isaac. I squatted and squeezed my hand. The blood dripped to the floor.
Too late now.
His head turned my way, and our eyes locked, the sledgehammer still in his right hand. I lifted the cuff of my jeans, ready to yank the stake from my boot.
“You’re bleeding,” he said, stepping toward me. My back stiffened, but then he moved past me to a dresser. He opened and shut a few drawers and then removed a ball of socks. “I’m sure they can spare a pair,” he said, pulling them apart.
He wrapped one sock around my hand, tying it tight. “You might want to get some disinfectant on that, pronto. This place is like a petri dish of disease.”
“Yeah,” I said, sucking in a big breath of air.
For the next few hours, Callis, Jory, and I carefully attacked bedroom after bedroom, the three of us synced in a destructive dance that left us each covered in sweat and plaster dust and mold specks.
I worked until I couldn’t stand the itchy feeling from the insulation anymore; then I grabbed my knapsack and headed for the bathroom.
The room was narrow and dark except for a bright trail of sunlight from the single window at the far end, above the toilet. It was just enough to see the coating of destruction dust covering everything: the tiled floor, the bathtub, and even the pale-pink shower curtain. It was inescapable.
I pulled off my wool cap, shook out my hair, and turned on the faucet to let the water run clean while I retrieved the bar of soap and towel from my bag.
The sink turned black as I washed the grime off my arms and neck. I carefully splashed my face. It would be unfortunate to survive drowning in a levee breach, countless looter scuffles, and a vampire attack, only to bite it from a microscopic, brain-eating amoeba living in the Louisiana water supply.
As I dried off, I glanced in the mirror and froze. Letters were smudged into the thin layer of dust.
A N I M A R U M
P R A E D A T O R
A chill kissed the wet droplets resting on the back of my neck.
I shook it off. Jory’s musings, no doubt. I nearly yelled to him about it, but I lacked the energy for whatever philosophical rant he was on thanks to this week’s lesson on Nietzsche.
I stuffed the damp towel back into my bag, glancing at the words one more time. My sweat-soaked T-shirt suddenly felt chilled.
“Isaac.” A quick whisper passed my ear.
“Funny, Jory.”
The temperature dropped again.
“Isaac . . .” The sound of my name tickled over the back of my neck. I whirled around. There was no one else in the room.
What the hell?
I hurried back out into the master bedroom, trying to wipe the look of fear from my face.
“Lunch break?” Jory asked, and tossed me a PB&J.
I caught it and tossed it back. “No, thanks.”
“Isaac . . .” I swatted at my right ear, as if I could knock it away.
A draft, noticeably warmer, blew open the curtains and funneled directly toward me, blowing away the sound, wrapping around me like a protective blanket.
An odd sensation pulsed underneath my skin at my wrist, like little lightning bolts. I pushed up my sleeve, but the mark didn’t look any different. I turned and headed for the stairs.
“There he goes!” Jory said to Callis. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?” Callis asked as they both quickly caught up.
I took the stairs fast, and so did they.
“Oh Lord,” Betsy chimed as I landed on the second floor. She followed behind as I crossed the hall to the next set of stairs. “That boy is special, I tell ya. He talks to angels.”
“How do you know they’re not demons?” Jory asked.
I took the steps faster—I had to catch up with the cold.
“Oh Jesus,” AJ said when I got downstairs to the living room, where all the wall beams were now exposed.
&n
bsp; I looked back through a cloud of plaster dust. He and Chase were putting down their tools.
I made the turns like the house was my own. Down a hall, through a kitchen full of blown-out windows that overlooked a backyard full of bricks and ivy. Glass crunched underneath my feet as I crossed to the back door.
The sun grew brighter as I pushed past banana-tree leaves and overgrown ferns, fearing I’d lost it.
The whisper whipped behind me. “Protégez la.”
I glanced over my shoulder, felt the cement edge under my foot, and teetered, arms flailing, over the edge of a pool so thick with algae and plant sludge that it looked solid. There was no time to do anything but hold my breath before I submerged in toxic-looking slime.
“I’ve got you!” Callis grabbed my collar and pulled me so hard I fell backward onto the bricks, scraping my palms.
Now at ground level, I saw her.
Spirals of greenish-blond hair floated around her head like a halo. Her skin was stained with algae, and her light-blue dress ballooned at the surface of the water.
Footsteps shuffled behind us, and Betsy was already muttering prayers under her breath. I didn’t have to turn around to know Brett was making the sign of the cross.
Callis stared at the body, shocked but completely silent. He looked at me, and then back to the body, and then back to me.
“Welcome to the crew,” I said.
“I guess Adele was serious when she said your friends call you the Corpse Whisperer.”
I didn’t say anything else.
He offered his hand and pulled me to my feet. “How often does this happen?”
“Too often,” I said, suppressing a wave of nausea. I shielded my eyes as a cloud shifted and the sun beat down on the pond. The girl’s shiny black shoes, just breaking the surface of the green water, glistened. I frowned. “But this one is different. Look at those shoes . . . There’s no way that girl’s been in there since the Storm.”
AJ’s two-way bleeped. “You might want to get NOPD down here for this one,” he said, confirming my suspicions. This was no Storm victim. I thought about the thugs last night, about all the recent crime reports, and about Adele and Dee walking around the Quarter alone. We weren’t that far away.
When I turned back to Callis, he was staring at my left arm. “Something wrong?” I asked.
“No . . .” His eyes slid down to my wound; the bandage had fallen off sometime in the ordeal. “How’s your hand?”
My stare hardened. “Just another day at the office.” There was something about the way he was looking at me that I didn’t like.
He turned to the body like he was trying to swallow a smile and then looked back at me. “I’m sorry if I seem excitable. It’s just that I’ve mostly been hanging out with a nine-year-old for the past couple months.”
Suddenly we were back to that night at the hotel, and I felt like I was unnecessarily intimidating him.
I grabbed his shoulder. “Man, I’m going to have to get you out of the house more often.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking.” He smiled.
By the time D-MORT arrived and then left—claiming that crime scenes weren’t their protocol—most of the crew had already packed up and left. Only AJ and I had stuck around waiting. And Callis was filling out his paperwork.
I sat on a brick step near the pool of algae sludge. Even though it was ridiculous, I felt the need to watch over her—protégez la. I could barely even pronounce the two words, but they’d been seared into my memory the night of the séance. I imagined Adele floating face-first in the pool. Protect her.
Protect who?
I thought about that psychic and the attic. “You’ll regret it,” he’d said to Adele. Protégez la. Protect Adele?
“AJ, where y’at?”
When I looked up, I saw Detective Matthews entering the courtyard. NOPD was finally here, which turned out to mean just Detective Matthews and his partner.
They rolled out the yellow tape and fished the girl out with the same stick they used to scoop leaves from the pool, because they had no idea how long it’d take forensics to arrive. They zipped and catalogued her and left the body bag at the side of the pool, next to a cement cherub riding a water-spitting dolphin.
And then that was all I could take. I had to get the hell out of there.
I hurried upstairs to the third-floor bedroom, grabbed my bag, and started back down. When I got to the second floor, Callis was coming out of a room with a bounce in his step.
My old grief counselor’s voice ticked in my head: Everyone handles tragedy differently.
I hooked my arm around his shoulder as we went to the last set of stairs. “I think you must have been a coroner in another lifetime. Or a mortician or something. I’ve never seen someone so chill after finding a dead body.”
“Maybe,” he said with a sly smile. “I’m not sure how much I believe in other lifetimes.” He turned to me. “And I owe you a thanks, Isaac, for giving me a chance. I think you’ll find that we’re not so different, you and I.”
“No worries,” I said, trying to imagine myself wearing black nail polish.
When we got to the bottom, he headed to the front door. “Job number two calls.”
I nodded, and he was out. I did one last loop back to tell AJ I was bouncing.
The courtyard was now swarming. More cops, National Guard. The woman from D-MORT was back, arguing with one of the detectives about who was responsible for taking the body.
“What the hell is going on in this city?” AJ asked Detective Matthews, who he’d cornered near the pool. AJ was a retired Miami cop, so he was used to both crime scenes and storms. He still worked the beat some nights as a reserve; he liked to feel involved.
Matthews shrugged, the exhaustion showing on his face. “This new crime wave is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Record violent-crime arrests in the last two months. No profiles . . . The only pattern seems to be the number of first-time offenders—it’s mind-blowing. People got nothing to lose.”
“Any progress on the Leecher?” AJ asked. I hung back a sec, waiting for the answer.
“No new victims in over two months. Not enough resources to keep on cold cases.”
Leecher was the name the media gave the post-Storm “serial killer.” I was too tired to not roll my eyes. I butted in. “See you tomorrow, AJ.”
Matthews caught my eye. “You the one who found this body?”
“No, the whole crew was here.” That wasn’t exactly true, but Robbie Lombardo, one of my guys back in Brooklyn, always said never drop your name near a cop.
“You look familiar,” he said, taking a step closer.
I shrugged.
“Aren’t you the guy who’s been hanging around Mac’s daughter?”
“So?”
“You kids have some kind of thing for dead bodies?”
“You look familiar too. From Mac’s bar?” On more than one occasion, I’d helped Mac carry him to a bed in a back room after one too many moonshines. I wouldn’t normally be so brazen with a cop, but this one got on my nerves. I hadn’t forgotten how quickly he’d suspected Adele of homicide at the Wolfman’s crime scene last fall.
His stare hardened, and I knew I was about to get the “You better treat her good or else” speech for the millionth time.
“Watch out for that one,” he said, instead. “I’ve been a cop for a long time, and something tells me she’s not all that she seems. Like her ma.”
My arms crossed. What the hell is that supposed to mean?
“Maybe that’s what I like about her.” I lifted my arm overhead as if to stretch, and a breeze whipped through, spattering the algae-infested sludge from the pool all over the detective’s suit.
“Messy job,” I said, trying not to smirk as he swore up and down the length of the pool.
When I stepped out the front door, the paparazzi were there waiting like vultures. One jerkoff was scaling a pole to the gallery. Fucking media.
“Private property,” I said, and yanked his ankle.
He fell back down, but I caught him by the collar.
“All right!” he said, putting his hands in the air.
Chill out, Isaac, before he puts his camera in your face.
I walked away, threw down my board, and kicked off, thinking about asshole reporters, and asshole detectives—what the hell had he meant about Adele’s mom?—but mostly I thought about dead bodies as I rolled down the shitty road.
I pushed off a few more times and fabricated an air current to give me an extra boost.
After I’d found the first few corpses on site, I thought I just had really bad luck. We all knew that every time we started a new home, finding a body was a possibility. I knew firsthand that the priority for first responders had been people who were still in need of rescue, not the dead.
Then I realized that a gentle breeze always swept through a house just before I found a corpse. At first I’d just assumed it was my Air magic, but now I realized there were other factors guiding me to the dead bodies as if I were following the threads of invisible cobwebs.
Like the cold.
And now there were the whispers—at the cemetery and again today at the house.
Something had whispered my name . . .
CHAPTER 20
Vampire Catacomb Academy
I stood on the street across from the convent, overlooking the imposing concrete wall into Medici territory. Why did I get here so early? Especially considering how much I’d been dreading the first day of school.
But the longer I’d sat at my vanity in my polyester uniform, the more nervous I’d become, so I ripped the Band-Aid off and walked straight here. Now I wished I’d gone to the café first instead.
Because now I was standing in the exact spot I’d stood calling 9-1-1 to report the man with the blue eyes’ body.
Right before I accidentally broke the enchanted seal.
Even now, the metal pulled me—not in a way that was tempting, but with a slight tingle of energy, making me acutely aware that I had some kind of connection to it.
I tried to ignore it, instead focusing on how swollen my lips felt, and how the skin on my neck felt a tiny bit raw from Isaac’s unshaven face. The slight sensation gave him an ever-presence, instantly making me feel calmer about walking into this place.
