by C. E. Murphy
I sighed. “Surprisingly naked?”
“Well,” she said cheerfully, “yes. Fantastic, actually, but surprisingly naked. Who convinced you to wear that?”
I said, “Phoebe,” in a voice that I hoped spelled her doom.
Melinda laughed, which boded poorly for my doom voice. “Half the force will thank her for it. Have you seen Michael?”
“Michael? Morrison?” I didn’t know a lot of other Michaels, but I never thought of my boss by his first name, and found it bewildering that Melinda did. “Morrison’s at my party?” I had a fair amount of experience with the world ending. None of it had looked anything like a costume party, or else I’d have put Morrison’s attendance down as a sure sign of the apocalypse.
Melinda’s eyebrows shot up. “You invited him, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t think he’d come!” Curiosity got the better of me as I craned my neck to look around. “What’s he dressed as?”
“A cop, of course.” Melinda sounded delighted.
I squinted. “He is a cop. That’s not a costume. Unless he’s in uniform, but that’s cheating.”
Billy, sounding every bit as pleased as Melinda, said, “Oh, he’s in costume.” I turned my squint on him, then peered around again. Morrison typically wore suits, except for when protocol demanded he pull out the full captain’s dress uniform. I hadn’t seen him in that since a funeral in June, and while he’d looked as handsome and solemn and reliable as a police captain should, I didn’t think he should get away with it as a Halloween costume. Especially when I’d let Phoebe put me into some strategic bits of leather and a sword. I’d have died of hypothermia if the party wasn’t a success.
Thor reappeared, bearing drinks and a look of amusement. “Have you seen the captain?”
“I don’t even believe he’s here.” I took one of the plastic cups he offered and sniffed its contents—pink and foamy—suspiciously. “What is this?”
“I didn’t ask. There were two choices. One involved dunking my head and apples. I took this one.” He took a sip of his own drink cautiously, then made a moue. “Typical fruit-drink-and-soda party stuff.”
Reassured, I took a sip, then coughed, eyes tearing. “You forgot to mention heavily spiked.” I blinked tears away, then took another sip more carefully. Woo. Worse than the Johnnie Walker I’d gotten wasted on a few months ago. At least I expected that to knock me senseless.
Melinda heaved a melodramatic sigh. “Do they have anything nonalcoholic?”
“They better. I told Phoebe we had minors attending the party.” I nodded at Melinda’s belly. “You look ready to pop.”
“I was ready to pop three weeks ago. I’ve forgotten what my feet look like. My children have taken to calling me El Blobbo.”
“They have not,” Billy said equitably. Melinda beamed at him and he said, “They call her La Blobbacita,” which earned him a sudden reversal of the beam into a credibly injured pout.
“When’s the big day?” Thor took a swig of the pink drink and made a face.
Melinda let go of her pout to sigh gustily. “November sixth.”
“Well, that’s not too bad, right? Only another week.”
Spoken, I thought, like somebody who’s never been pregnant. I didn’t say it out loud because it opened up a whole bunch of questions I had no desire to answer, but the look Mel gave him pretty much said what I didn’t.
Billy grinned. “She’s doing jumping jacks every morning to try to hurry things along.” He bent to give her a kiss, promised, “I’ll find you a drink,” and cleared a path through the crowd. Evening gown or no, he was by far a big enough guy to do that easily, though it closed up behind him again.
Melinda, beaming, called, “My hero,” after him, then folded her arms across the top of her tummy and looked around. “Good party, Joanne.”
“Thank you. From shut-in recluse mechanic to partying shamanic police detective within a year. You too can get on this ride if you’re over this tall.” I waved a hand near the top of my head, then took another hasty swallow of my drink. Apparently it was more potent than I’d realized, if it was taking me from wanting a drink so I didn’t have to think about my mystical power set to babbling about it.
Melinda, bless her, snorted and stood on her toes in an attempt to reach the required height, while Edward leaned forward to knock his forehead against the side of my still-lifted hand. He had a good three inches in height over me, and his voice dropped somewhere around his, um, knees, as he murmured, “I wouldn’t mind getting on that ride.”
This time I was sure a blush could start around the xyphoid process. His smile turned into a grin and he watched that blush go all the way down, which only served to enhance it. I whispered, “Stop that,” but not with any particular conviction.
He brought his gaze back up to my face and leered, then laughed and stepped in against me. I elbowed him with even less conviction than I’d scolded. He slid an arm around my waist, looking pleased with himself. “You brought it up, so now I get to ask something I’ve been dying to.”
I said, “No dying,” semi-automatically. Too many people around me had died, or had had alarmingly close calls, this past year. I didn’t like even joking about it.
Apology flashed through his blue eyes and he nodded, but he went ahead and asked, “Halloween’s a spooky time of year. Does it kick things into overtime?”
I frowned, first at my drink, then at my date. “Why? Have I been acting weird lately?”
He and Melinda said, “No more than usual,” in tandem, and he laughed as Melinda presented a high five for him to match. “Nah. I was just curious, and you don’t usually bring it up, so I thought I’d seize the opportunity.”
“That’s not all you’ve seized.” Billy presented a cup of water over Melinda’s shoulder. She waddled around to give him a kiss of thanks, and he smiled broadly before remembering he was haranguing Thor. “Is this guy bothering you, Joanie?”
“Terribly. Help, help.” I made a feeble attempt to escape, then blew a raspberry and leaned against Thor. “I haven’t noticed any correlation between the time of year and the amount of weird in my life, no. Get back to me in five years and I might have a better…what do you call it.”
“Survey sample?” Melinda suggested.
“Yeah, something like that. But I don’t think it fluxes and rises with the time of year. I mean, what kind of mystical portent does the second week of July have?” Actually, everything that’d happened in July had been entirely my fault, not some kind of magic cosmic conjunction. I didn’t feel it necessary to mention that aloud.
“Well,” Thor said, “it had enough mystical portent to make me ask you out. That’s got to count for something.”
“No,” Melinda said dryly, “what’s mystical is she said yes.”
“I had to. It was Alan Claussen’s band. I like them.” I actually scraped up a few lines of lyrics, half singing, “Ill met by moonlight, first kiss, stolen late at night,” which got a round of applause from Melinda as Thor staggered back as far as the press of people would let him, a hand over his heart.
“I see how it is. I’m only wanted for my concert tickets.”
I patted his shoulder, since he’d only escaped to about eighteen inches away. “Your concert tickets and your uncanny talent under the hood. There are worse things a guy could be wanted for.”
Too late, I realized the error of my phrasing, and raised my voice to say, “He’s a mechanic! I’m a mechanic! I like guys who are good with cars!” over Billy and Melinda’s synchronized “OooOOooh!”
“The lady,” Thor said cheerfully, “doth protest too much. You’re not helping yourself.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.” I was too pink cheeked and laughing to get myself out of that alive anyway, so I took a swallow of my fizzy drink and reveled in the sheer simple fun of being teased by my friends.
“Jo!” Phoebe squished through the crowd and seized my arm. I straightened away from Edward, and Phoebe shook me. I w
ent agglty while she said, “You have so got to get a load of your boss,” and swung me around to face the door. Still rattling, I looked for Morrison and whatever costume had everybody I knew insisting I needed to see him.
Instead, the doors flew open and an entire cadre of zombies lurched through them.
CHAPTER TWO
It said something very disturbing about what I’d come to consider a normal life that the first thing I did was reach for the sword on my hip. The peace knot held, which gave me enough time to remember that this was a Halloween party, and that hordes of undead weren’t unexpected at such festivities.
Still, loosening my fingers from the sword’s hilt took more effort than it should’ve. Phoebe, more or less under my elbow, said, “Well?” in such obvious delight that I scowled at her, then looked back at the zombies.
“What? Morrison’s a zombie?”
“No!” She thrust a finger out, pointing dramatically. I followed the line of her arm and still didn’t see my boss. There were a pair of cross-dressed hippies, an Elvira being hit on by an exceptionally sleazy-looking vampire, an ’80s Miami Vice look-alike and what appeared—from various blue skin, white hair and black leather costumes—to be the entire cast of a science-fiction show, but Morrison’s distinctive silvering hair wasn’t visible anywhere. I shot Phoebe an irritated look, opened my mouth to speak, and my gaze snapped back to Don Johnson without consulting my brain.
“Oh my God.”
Morrison turned around at my high-pitched exclamation, and Melinda, gleefully, said, “Told you he was a cop.”
I made a gurgling noise deep in my throat.
He had it all: the gradated cop sunglasses, which were not at all the right shape for his face; the pastel-pink shirt, unbuttoned far enough to show the world that Morrison had a very nice chest with what appeared to be the ideal amount of coarse, graying hair. The white blazer thrown over his shirt matched pale slacks and he wore loafers without socks. I stared at his feet, trying to wrap my mind around Morrison being that casual, then brought my gaze back up to the crowning horror.
“What did you do to your hair?”
Self-conscious wasn’t a look I was accustomed to seeing on Captain Michael Morrison. He touched his head, then glowered at me. “What’d you do to yours?” “It’s a wig!”
At a loss for moral high ground wasn’t a look I was used to seeing on him, either. “It’s temporary,” he muttered.
I laughed, and, without thinking, slid my fingers through the tidy brown cut. It wasn’t a bad color. I just thought of the silver hair and the damn blue eyes as part and parcel of Morrison’s aging-superhero look. Changing the hair made him look younger and more human. “You’ve even got stubble.” Stubble no more belonged in Morrison’s universe than, say, animistic-based shamanic magic did. It didn’t stop either of those things from being in his universe, but they didn’t belong. “Look at you, Morrison.”
Instead, he looked at me, which made me notice I still had my fingers in his hair.
I said, “Shit,” and pulled my hand back, focusing on his shoulder while I tried not to blush. It didn’t work, and the best I could do was hope nobody called me on it. Hoping nobody’d noticed I’d been feeling up Morrison’s head was asking too much. “Sorry. Is, uh, is that the color it used to be?”
“It was blond.”
“Really?” Silver-shot suited him, and I couldn’t imagine him with anything else. Even seeing it, I couldn’t quite imagine it.
“Really,” he said with a hint of amusement, then helped me get my footing back by saying, “Look at you, Detective.”
I regained enough equanimity to give him a severe look. “I’m a princess warrior. You’re the detective here, Captain.”
“I’m in disguise,” he told me. “You’re not supposed to call me captain.” He hesitated a moment, looking a couple inches up at me. My boots were heeled, giving me a rare height advantage. Unshod, Morrison and I were the same height down to the half inch, and I’d been known to wear heels just for the satisfaction of looking down on him. Not recently, though, so finding myself taller than he was disconcerting.
He let his hesitation out in a breath, said, “Looks like a good party, Walker. Thanks for inviting me,” and reached past me to accept a drink from somebody.
I stayed where I was a few seconds too long, convinced he’d been going to say something else entirely and still waiting for him to say it. Morrison, and the party, moved on, leaving me wondering just what it was I’d thought he’d been going to say, and what I thought I’d have said in return. Not that long ago Morrison and I had had a wholly antagonistic relationship. Like everything else in my life, it’d gotten more complicated lately.
No, that wasn’t true. We’d drawn some lines in the sand, the captain and I, that was all. I, had drawn a line in the sand. I’d taken a promotion to detective instead of taking a chance on something else entirely, and Morrison respected the decision I’d made. Which meant whatever it was I thought he’d been going to say, he wouldn’t have, and I needed to stop worrying about it.
I nodded, a too-visible acknowledgment that I’d given myself a firm talking-to, and turned around to find all my friends looking as if there were many, many unspeakably interesting things going on in their minds, and as if they would all very much like to speak them. Even Thor had a hint of that look about him, and while picking up on subtle social clues wasn’t my strong point, I was pretty sure the guy who was more or less my boyfriend wasn’t supposed to look like that with regards to me having a conversation with another man.
He, however, was also the only one who put aside that gossipy look and offered me a hand. “I have it on pretty good authority you can dance.”
“I have it on better authority that I’m an embarrassment on the dance floor.” I put my hand into his anyway and he tugged me through the crowd to a space where the pressed bodies played against each other in more graceful rhythms. Music dominated that corner of the room, compliments of someone willing to play the parts of both Frankenstein’s monster and DJ at Phoebe’s party. It was her party; the fact that I’d invited half the police department and they’d showed up didn’t make it any less hers. I wouldn’t have known where to start in renting a hall or getting a caterer, but providing a significant portion of the guests defined me as co-host. The dance floor was a bit less crowded than the rest of the room, and I alternated between taking cues from Thor—I really wasn’t a very good dancer, but I could manage to follow a lead, at least some of the time—and watching the room.
People were having fun. At my party. I imagined telling my fifteen year old self that a dozen years later she’d be what she’d have called popular, back in the day, and knew she’d never believe me. I didn’t quite believe it myself. On the other hand, my plastic cup full of foamy pink stuff was gone, and having a cup of heavily spiked punch inside me made it easier to believe almost anything. I said, “Six impossible things before breakfast,” aloud, and when Thor crinkled his eyebrows at me, snorted. “I need another drink. Water this time. Oi.”
“The bar’s over by the dunk tank. Lead on, MacDuff.”
“That’s lay on,” I said, suddenly cheerful. A man who was into cars and misquoted Shakespeare was a good guy to be dating. I squirmed forward through the crowd.
Squishing through partygoers was good for my ego. People who could barely move in the crush did double takes and stepped back to admire the whole costume. I heard an “Ow!” and Thor’s innocent whistle, like he’d maybe prevented a wandering hand from copping a feel. Overprotective boyfriends should probably be scolded, but instead I grinned and looked back to thank him even as I kept pressing forward.
All of a sudden the crowd disappeared around me, sending me stumbling. Thor let go of my hand, which didn’t help at all, and I caught myself on the edge of a cauldron.
I said something clever like, “Buh?” and got a laugh for it, but I was genuinely surprised. I didn’t remember us ordering up a gigantic pot—and it was gigantic, com
ing halfway up my thigh and an easy four feet across at its bulge—but Phoebe stood on its other side, looking pleased with herself.
Nervous instinct made me glance around for a third witch. I’d spent a bit of time in a coven, and had absolutely no doubt of their goddess-granted earth power, but I didn’t have any particular need to hoe that row again, particularly at a party. To my relief, it appeared that it was just Phoebe, me and the cauldron at center stage. I knew I wasn’t a witch and I was pretty sure Phoebe wasn’t, so I straightened up and dusted my hands against my skirt, all take-charge and businesslike. The minor detail of not knowing what business made me stage-whisper, “Are we boiling somebody for dinner, then?” across the cauldron.
“Sure! Boil, boil, toil and trouble!”
Nobody ever got that line right. I muttered, “It’s ‘double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble,’” and the cauldron erupted.
My first thought, through the green smoke and the coughing and hacking, was that I really should’ve been allowed to complete the couplet and set the charm before anything exciting like an explosion happened. My second was to notice that the shrieks around me were turning to laughter, and my third was to notice I didn’t seem to be missing any body parts. In the grand scheme of things, that was good.
The undead rising gracefully from the cauldron were less good. There was something inhuman about the way they came up: smooth, effortless, as if they floated instead of climbed like normal human beings. They didn’t seem to be intent on flinging themselves at anyone in search of human flesh, but rather twined around one another, sensual in every move.
I didn’t especially like horror movies, but I was fairly certain your average zombie didn’t have abs of steel, or an ability to undulate the way the pair in the cauldron did. Zombies were more about body parts dropping off than rhythmic motions. I held off panic another few seconds, giving reality just enough time to set in.
