I stayed in the doorway.
‘I’m Vivia Brisk.’
The cyclist smiled politely. ‘Berenice.’
‘And your surname?’
Her face darkened with suspicion. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘So I can fill in the form.’ The attention span of the newly dead is shorter than a politician’s promise. It’s not worth bothering with detailed explanations. I’m lucky if they can follow a sentence to its end.
‘Oh. It’s Nazarak. N-A-Z-A-R-A-K.’
‘Date of birth?’
She answered, but I didn’t hear because of the wings. A thousand wings all flapping at once. The room darkened as misshapen bodies blocked the moonlit window.
Some of the dead are angry, most are confused, but this wasn’t the dead. There were other things here.
Feathers squashed up against the glass, followed by a very human-looking face—a harpy. The normally docile creature bared its teeth at me and hissed. Others crowded round it, looking just about as unfriendly as the first.
‘What’s got you in such a flap?’ I said out loud, not really expecting an answer. They might have had human faces, but I’d never heard one speak.
Berenice paid them no attention. She cycled down the room once more, then headed back down the stairs.
The harpies screamed as one, a high-pitched squeal that made me clap my hands to my ears. The first one I’d seen began to headbutt the window. It cracked. Blood trickled down its forehead, but it didn’t seem to notice. Fury filled the brown eyes staring into mine. It headbutted the window again. The others jostled and fought beside it to get in.
I reached out and ran my hand over the bedroom door, but it didn’t feel right.
I sped down the stairs. There was no door between the kitchen and the living room. The back door in the kitchen flickered. Cheap wood, then metal. It wasn’t right either. Leaving the underworld is not as easy as getting in.
Glass crashed as the harpies broke through the windows and flooded the kitchen. A hand-sized shard of glass flew through the fat woman’s head. She took another bite of her sandwich.
One of the creatures landed on the table, its human face thick with dirt except for the white tear tracks down its cheeks. It bared its teeth at me.
I ran out the kitchen and raced to the front door. Talons grabbed my hair from behind, and a line of heat hit my face as its claws tore my cheek. It screamed again. I scrabbled at my neck for my key, pulling it so hard I broke the chain.
I pushed the key into Malcolm’s front door, and it changed to cheap hardboard, painted with red-brown varnish and covered in children’s stickers, a single cat flap at the bottom.
My door.
I twisted the key in the lock and shoved open the door back to the world of the living.
9
Air flooded my lungs. I gasped and sat up. It was the sitting up bit that made me bang my head into Little’s as he leaned over me.
White sparks hit my eyelids. I fell back against the sofa. I reached out to my left and pulled the paper bag to my mouth. I hadn’t eaten so there wasn’t much to come up.
My left eye pulsed against the lid. All the liquid in the hollow spaces of my body pulsed in turn, wanting out. I used the bag again, then lay back, wiping my mouth with a tissue. I don’t mind being dead—the underworld has great entertainment value—but reverse decomposition is no fun at all.
The longer I was dead the worse it was, but as long as I came back within three hours, when rigor mortis set in, I recovered quickly enough.
When the nausea had faded enough for me to risk opening my mouth, I said, ‘What were you doing?’
‘Your cheek slashed open by itself. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ Little’s voice was just a little too high-pitched.
I reached up and felt a groove, slippery with blood, about three centimetres across my left cheek. It ached under my fingers. Deep enough to be nasty, but not enough to need stitches.
‘Take my hankie.’
Something touched against my hand—cloth. I hoped it was clean, but I took it anyway and held it to my bloody face. My cheek throbbed.
‘Seriously, what was that?’
‘Harpies.’ I opened my eyes a crack and fought another surge of nausea. I lay back on the crinkly plastic and took deep breaths.
‘What?’ Little asked.
‘Creatures of the underworld,’ Dunne said. I opened my eyes a crack to see him perched on the edge of an armchair. Haddad was nowhere in sight. ‘Body of a bird, face of a woman. I thought you said they usually ignore you.’
‘They do. Usually.’ I swallowed. There was a lump in my throat the size of a boulder, but without all the lovely smoothness. Harpies were attracted to sites of great torment, and I hadn’t seen a flock that size for some time. A single murder would normally attract one or two, but a flock that big? And that aggressive? Nothing I’d seen in Malcolm’s house explained their presence or attitude. I swallowed again and breathed out heavily through my mouth.
‘She doesn’t look very well,’ Little said.
‘She’s just been dead. Give her a few minutes.’
‘She doesn’t look like she’ll be able to walk, and I’m not carrying her.’
It took a second for my brain to catch up. Walk where?
‘She’ll be fine. Just wait,’ Dunne said.
I pulled myself into a sitting position and successfully managed not to throw up. I rubbed at my face. The memories were already beginning to fade, like a particularly odd dream. I started talking before they disappeared entirely. ‘There was one woman and a girl.’ I searched my memory. ‘And one dead man.’
‘Causes of death?’ Dunne asked. He’d undone the top button of his shirt and loosened his tie. He tapped his pen rapidly on top of his notebook.
I reached for the memory, but it was washing away like all other dreams.
‘The girl’s throat was cut.’ I described her as best I could. I rubbed my temple. ‘Her name was... Bernice. I think.’ In my mind’s eye, I saw the girl’s mouth spelling out her surname, but the letters were lost. ‘She was the only one who looked like she’d had a violent death. She was riding a bicycle. Wouldn’t keep still.’
That also matched violent death. Murdered souls tended to concentrate on one thing—anything—to stop them thinking about what had happened to them. Another memory returned. ‘Oh, there was a snake!’
‘Death by snake? Different.’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ I frowned. Dunne knew better than to distract me while I was trying to hold on to the memories.
‘Sorry, go on.’
‘The woman had been dead for a while.’ Was she holding the snake? Why did I think the snake had said something? I couldn’t remember. ‘The man was older. No reason to think it wasn’t natural causes. It felt like an old death.’
I closed my eyes, reaching for more detail, but nothing else came to mind. ‘That’s all I remember.’
Dunne finished scribbling. ‘That’s very helpful. You know the drill...’
‘If I remember anything else, I’ll let you know.’ I took the blood-soaked handkerchief away from my face and balled it into my fist. ‘Sorry, I’ll get you another one.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Little said. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Better.’ I said, and I was. I still had the shivers and my head felt like a truck had driven through it, but I was better enough to give Little a closer look. His pale skin was almost white, and his demeanour had changed. Instead of lolling about, he sat on the edge of the sofa, left leg jigging against the edge of the seat.
I looked from one to the other. ‘What happened? What have you found?’
Little glanced at Dunne who said, ‘We’re not sure, but I’d like your opinion.’
Not sure? Either someone was dead or they were not. Zombie or not. They had a sniffer to tell the difference. The only thing I could do that they couldn’t was identify who any scrap of meat might have been. Curiosity tic
kled my brain.
I stood up and wobbled.
‘You need help?’ Dunne asked.
I shook my head. ‘Give me a minute.’
I held the back of the sofa until I was sure I wasn’t going to fall over, then followed them out of the room unsteadily.
The living room led into a small landing with a steep staircase. I followed them past it, and into a kitchen with a sky-lighted extension an exact replica of the one I’d seen in the underworld.
To the right of the kitchen was a large cupboard where the space under the stairs was walled off. It contained a large chest freezer pulled halfway out the cupboard door, the lid propped open with a frozen loaf of bread. A white-coated Scene of Crime Officer was in the process of pulling out cling-wrapped packages of pale meat. They weren’t labelled, which wouldn’t surprise anyone who bought their meat from an independent butcher, but I didn’t need Little’s sniffer nose to tell me it was human. His face did that. It drained of blood. He looked away, and I couldn’t help but remember the cat was still a newbie despite his big mouth.
‘Is that—?’ I began, but Dunne interrupted me.
‘This way.’
Little nodded. I looked back at the cling-wrapped parcels. ‘Human,’ he whispered to me. ‘With something else mixed in, but it’s sure as hell not beef or pork. No bones though. No skull, or rib cage.’
I nodded. The lack of bones didn’t surprise me. Zombies tended to boil and smash their meat, then eat the bones first to remove the most obvious evidence. Malcolm, you asshole.
Dunne led us through the back door of the kitchen into a garden choked with waist-high nettles and overgrown butterfly bushes.
The garden was ablaze with white floodlights and under cover of one of those white tents designed to keep off the rain and stop nosy neighbours snapping pictures for the tabloids. Fat brown slugs inched their way through the mud, showing yellow innards here and there where police boots had stomped on them. My boots sunk into mud up to the laces.
At the bottom of the garden, the wooden fence had decomposed enough that it was just a few sticks in the mud demarcating the boundary of the Brannicks’ garden from what looked like an overgrown concrete parking lot.
White-suited figures swarmed over it. I followed Dunne and trudged through the break in the fence. The concrete parking lot belonged to what appeared to be an abandoned car dealership. It was an inverted L-shape, the shorter portion with the sales building facing the road on the other side, and the longer part tucked away to run along behind the row of houses.
The police lights were stark, and they’d extended the white tent to the lot, but there were still deep pockets of shadow. Despite the buzz of cops coming and going and the bright lights, there was still something eerie about the lot: a forgotten place suddenly exposed.
I became aware of someone’s eyes on me and looked up to see Haddad frowning at me from a line of rusting cars parked against a graffiti-splattered wall. Butterfly bushes pushed their way through the back seats, and strands of dead flowers hung out smashed windows.
The car in the middle was missing its front half and so rusty it was impossible to tell the original colour. Haddad had been in the process of bending over the open boot and prodding at something with white-gloved fingers when she’d spotted us.
Aaron Slender stood beside her, stiff and arms folded, his brow furrowed. He unfolded his arms when he saw me. His eyes flicked to the scratch on my cheek. ‘What is she doing here? This is meant to be a secure site.’
Dunne looked uncomfortable. ‘I thought she could take a look.’
‘What for?’ He turned his attention to Haddad. ‘Did you approve this?’
She stared daggers at Dunne, but nodded her head, unwilling to show dissent in front of the NRT chief. Slender looked from one to the other.
Dunne raised his eyebrows. ‘Vivia’s been at a crime scene before. She knows not to do anything stupid. Besides, she knows about the weird dead stuff. And this is weird dead stuff.’
Haddad still didn’t look happy, but she indicated the boot of the car with a gloved hand.
I peered inside. An unzipped hard plastic suitcase lay on top of other detritus. Neatly curled into the case was a mummified yet unmistakably human form, rendered black by decay and decomposition. It wore jeans or some other type of thick trousers, and fibres remained from a shirt but they were black and gunky like the rest. The suitcase lid was damaged and covered in the same black muck as the body. Long thin grooves like tiny railway tracks were scraped along the top of the suitcase lid, along with tufts of hair.
I couldn’t figure how the body had fit into the suitcase. Even with the body dried and shrivelled, it fit like tuna in a can. There was no way the body at full weight should have fit, even with someone sitting on it and struggling with the zip. Of course, the sum total of my forensic experience came from watching CSI, so I didn’t discount the possibility there might have been an obvious explanation flying over my thumping head.
Little was watching me intently. ‘Pick anything up?’
‘Like what? You mean the way it fits in the suitcase?’
He gave me a disappointed look. I released the part of me that recognised the dead and scrutinised the corpse again, but it just looked like a dead body to me. A bit strange, but still dead.
‘This is a waste of time,’ Slender growled. He hadn’t once looked me in the eye.
‘It’s worth another opinion,’ Dunne said. Slender grunted.
Haddad pointed at the end of the row of cars. I walked over, careful where I put my feet. The others followed. She opened the closed boot of a rusty box-shaped Golf and stepped back.
Inside was another curled-up corpse, desiccated and unidentifiable as to gender or age, but this one wasn’t in a suitcase. It looked as if it had just been dumped in the rear of the car. A blanket that might have once been plaid covered the lower half. Like the other body, this one lay in a black soup of decomposed tissue. I leaned down to get a closer look.
It moved.
I yelped and jumped back. Slender barked out a laugh.
The neck vertebrae slid, and the leathery skull turned its empty sockets towards me. What had been someone’s hand lifted up slowly as if it was an enormous effort and stretched up towards me. One of the finger bones fell off and landed on the stained blanket.
Slender put his hands in his pockets. He looked amused. ‘Source of the infection right here. And it’s been disturbed recently. Saves us a lot of time and trouble.’
The dead creature was still scrabbling at us—if you could call taking around five seconds to close and open your fingers scrabbling. I was aware of Little’s gaze on me as if he were waiting for something.
I bent closer to the body. It didn’t smell dead. I reached out and touched the leathery index finger.
Slender smacked my hand away. ‘Bloody hell, you idiot! Do you want to spend the next two days in quarantine?’
I closed my eyes and reached inside for that place that sensed the dead. The body wasn’t there. Odd. A horrible suspicion clamped my mind. I opened my eyes again, bent closer, and sniffed. There it was. A scent like camphor. Soft, but definitely there. To Little, it must have been overwhelming.
Horror clenched my stomach. The cold air suddenly felt much colder.
‘This one’s not dead,’ I said. ‘It’s still alive. It’s not a zombie.’
‘Told you,’ Little said. He looked smug.
Slender pointed at the desiccated corpse. ‘Seriously? Its organs are rotted away. Maybe it’s some kind of new zombie.’
‘No. No, it’s not. I’m a death witch. The one thing I can do is tell if a body is dead. That one’s not dead.’ Nausea rose up through my stomach. ‘Besides, I can smell its soul.’
‘So?’ Slender said. ‘Zombies have souls. That’s the whole point. Soul stuck in dead flesh.’ He rubbed at the moles under his nose.
‘You can’t normally smell souls,’ I said. Little nodded vigorously beside me. ‘Not in the li
ving. Not in zombies. This body’s soul is leaking. It’s a bit like how you would normally only smell blood if someone’s bleeding. The soul’s been damaged.’
‘What does that mean?’ Haddad asked.
Realisation dawned on Slender’s face. ‘Soul magic.’ His hands clenched into fists. His nose wrinkled as if he’d smelled something a lot more disgusting than two corpses.
‘Yes, I think so,’ I said.
Haddad turned away suddenly and walked off. A few seconds later, I heard the sound of her being sick.
Soul magic was incredibly rare. Magic or any kind of thauromancy requires power from somewhere. Most spells are drawn from the elements—earth, air, fire, water—but there is a fifth option: the soul.
It’s impossible to use magic to harness the power of the soul without destroying at least part of it, and it’s one of the few crimes to carry an automatic life sentence.
I reached out again and touched the thing’s index finger. This time Slender didn’t stop me. He turned away.
At my touch, the thing that looked like a corpse stopped moving. Its eye sockets turned to mine. I shivered.
Haddad returned, wiping her mouth. She still looked a little green. ‘Why does it look dead if it’s alive?’
‘I don’t know.’
Haddad bent down to the thing in the boot and touched it with a gloved finger. The skull opened its jaw and closed it as if it were trying to tell us something. She blinked slowly, trying to gain composure. ‘If it’s still alive, is it aware?’
‘I don’t know that either. I’d guess the soul of whoever this is, is being used as a power source to maintain some sort of spell, but this is far outside my area of expertise.’
Slender’s eyes shot to mine. ‘I should hope so.’
Haddad shuddered. I’d never seen her so rattled. ‘And when the body stops leaking, when there’s no soul left? What happens to the spell?’
I considered my words carefully. ‘I don’t know. I guess it would depend on the spell’s function. If the spell has served its purpose, then that would be it. If the practitioner wanted to keep it going, he’d have to find a new victim. Kind of like putting in a new battery.’
The Secret Dead (London Bones Book 1) Page 5
