Dead Man Rising

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Nothing would make this feel better.

  I realized I was rubbing at my left shoulder with my wounded right hand, fiercely, as if trying to scrub away the persistent ache. I stopped, dropping my hand into my lap as I examined the paper again. There was a tiny ward-glyph at the top of the page, sketched hastily. It held no Power—it hadn't been charged.

  Maybe she'd been interrupted by whatever had torn her body apart Whatever. Whoever.

  Could a person do this? I'd seen some horrible things done to the human body, but this was…

  "When did she write this?" I actually sound like myself again, maybe because I can't breathe enough to talk. Hallelujah. All I have to do is get the wind knocked out of me, and I'll sound normal. Simple.

  "We can't tell," Gabe said. "We had Handy Mandy try it, but she just passed out When she came to, she said it was too thick and headed straight for a date with the bottle, hasn't sobered up since. It was on Moorcock's desk in her bedroom; she was in the living room when she was… killed. There was no sign of forced entry—her shields were still in place, fading but still in place, and ripped from the inside."

  From the inside? "So it was someone she knew?" I wanted to rub at my shoulder again, stopped myself with an effort that made my aching fingers twitch. I smelled something new on the air.

  Fear. A sharp, sweaty stink, as if I were tracking a bounty.

  Except it was my own.

  Gabe's eyes were darker than usual, the line between her eyebrows deepening. "We don't know, Danny."

  "What about the other two victims?"

  "They're… interesting, too. The first one—Bryce Smith—was registered as normal. Except he lived in a house with some mighty fine shielding, but he had none of those damn chalk marks around his body. And the second, Yasrule—she was one of Polyamour's girls." Gabe's mouth twisted down briefly.

  Mine did the same. Polyamour, the transvestite queen I of the sex trade in Santiago City. It wasn't her fault, sexwitches were born sexwitches, and the psionic community was too hated as a whole by normals for us to consider shunning our own. Still… I was glad I hadn't been born as one of them.

  "A normal, a sexwitch, and a Necromance." I shook my head. A stray strand of silken ink-black hair fell in my face, I pushed it back impatiently. "Gods."

  "We can't get anything else from the scenes," Gabe said. "That's when your name came up."

  Lovely. The cops call me in when all else fails. Am I supposed to feel honored? The sarcasm didn't help. I swallowed sourness again, looked down at the pale-pink paper. Gabe had made no move to take it back.

  REMEMBER RIGGER HALL. The writing glared up at me, accusing. I didn't want to remember that place. I'd done everything I could to forget it, to go on with my life.

  I wish I could tell her I'd do this just because she asked me. I tossed the paper back onto her desk, as if it had burned my fingers. I wouldn't have been surprised if it had.

  The phone shrilled just as I opened my mouth to tell her I couldn't take the fucking case. I couldn't. Nothing could induce me to even think about Rigger Hall for longer than absolutely necessary. As a matter of fact, I was eyeing the brandy, wondering how much more than two bottles it would take before the liquor would have some effect. I'd lost interest at about six last time. I suspected I couldn't drink fast enough to cloud my Magi-trained, demon-enhanced memory. Not with my fucking metabolism.

  "Spocarelli," she snarled into the receiver. A long pause. "Fuck me… You're sure?" Her eyes drifted up and met mine, and for an instant I saw through her calm.

  There were dark circles under her eyes, and her pale skin had a pasty tone she'd never had before. Her collarbones jutted out, and so did the cords in her neck. She was too thin—and there was something torn and frightened in her dark eyes.

  Something terrified. And furious. She was a psionic cop, and something had killed two psions on her watch. A normal, maybe one of the Ludders, gone mad and deciding to murder instead of simply protest the existence of psions? But what normal human could do this and tear psionic shields from the inside?

  Was it a vendetta springing up rank and foul from the deep filth of the place where I'd learned just how powerless a child could be? What revenge would wait this long and be this brutal? A group, working together? Or one person?

  "Keep them off as long as you can," she said finally. "I've got Valentine in here right now. We're heading to the morgue." Another long pause. "Okay. See ya."

  She dropped the phone back into its cradle with excessive care. "That was the Captain. The holovids have gotten wind of this."

  I winced. Then I opened my mouth to say, No. I can't do it. Find someone else.

  Instead, what came out was, "You weren't at Rigger Hall, Gabe." I knew her career like I knew my own, like I knew John Fairlane's. Necromances were rare among psions, we listened for news about one another. If Christabel Moorcock was dead, there were only three left in the city, two of them in this very office.

  Of course Gabe hadn't gone to Rigger Hall, she hadn't been poor or orphaned.

  "No." A flush rose to her cheeks. "I went to Stryker. My mom's trust fund, you know. But… Eddie went to Rigger."

  Eddie. Her boyfriend. The Skinlin.

  He'd gone with us to Nuevo Rio, had almost lost Gabe to my quest for revenge, and been knocked around a good bit himself. And Eddie had been to Rigger—which meant he would have his own nightmares. The net of obligation closed tight around me.

  Oh, fuck. "I guess we're going to the morgue."

  I was rewarded with a look of relief so profound that I was sure Gabe didn't know how loudly her face was speaking.

  Jace made no sound, but he hitched himself up to his feet, scratching at his forehead under a shelf of tawny hair. He stretched slightly, his aura touching mine, thorn-spiked Power offered in case I needed it. I pushed the touch away—but gently. He didn't sway on his feet, but he did scoop his staff up and twirl it, the small bones clicking and clacking together. The familiar sound did nothing to comfort me.

  "Hades," Gabe said, "I was afraid you'd—"

  "I won't promise anything. It's been a while. I might not be able to do it, might need to practice before I can get back into the swing."

  But I felt the tattoo shift on my face, its inked lines running under my skin, and knew I was lying.

  Chapter Six

  The morgue was across the street, in the basement of a county administration building that looked as if it predated the Seventy Days War, graceless crumbling concrete and some oddly-shaped old glass windows instead of plasilica. Fine, thin clouds were beginning to blow in from the bay, and the sunlight had taken on a hazy quality. I could almost taste the barometric pressure dropping. Sudden shifts like that used to give me a headache.

  I breathed in the stink of Saint City and once again felt the city press against my shields like a huge animal waiting to be stroked. The security net on the morgue building let us in, the armed guard in the foyer lowering his plas-cannon. Legal augments rippled and twitched under his black-mirror body armor. He had a chest the size of a small barrel of reactive and a pair of old optical augments set into his cheekbones, mirrored lenses that looked like sunglasses until their polarized magscan capability gave them away. The guard's lip curled behind Gabe's back as he saw us. I toyed with the idea of giving him a grin, decided against it. Gabe wouldn't like it if I got into a scuffle. Not to mention Jace was hungover—why make him fight? Besides, one normal with legal augments wasn't even a challenge, not anymore. Even if I didn't have a sword.

  Gabe signed us in at the counter, staffed only by an AI receptionist deck in a gleaming steel humanoid casing. We were given plasilica one-liners to smooth over our datbands, and in we went.

  Necromances don't like morgues, but they're bearable. At least inside a morgue there is cold steel and the clinical light of medical science. The aura of dispassionate research helps. Not like graveyards and funeral homes, where grief and confusion and agony and generations of pain dye the air a razor-
grieving red. The holovids make it look like Necromances spend all their time illegally digging up bones in graveyards, but truth be told that's the last place you'd look for one of us. You'd have a better chance in a hospital or a lawyer's office.

  Though hospitals aren't easy either. Any place soaked with pain and suffering isn't easy.

  Jace's hand curled around my elbow when we got to the bottom of the staircase, a warm hard human touch. Gabe pushed though the swinging door and we followed her, boots clicking in uneven time over the same blue glittery linoleum as the police station. I didn't shake my arm free of Jace's touch all the way down the hall. The man was stubborn, following me on bounties and picking up after me. I didn't know what debt he thought he was paying.

  I didn't even know what debt I was paying on now, I had so many due.

  I pulled away from his hand as Gabe flashed her badge at the admin-assist behind a sheet of bulletproof. The girl's throat swelled as she nodded, her pink-streaked hair sticking up in the new Gypsy Roen fashion—she had a subvocal implant. Her fingers blurred as she tapped on a datapad. I wondered who she was talking to while she was taking dictation, followed Gabe through the fireproof security door, and swallowed against the sudden chemical stench. I wish I could figure out how to quit smelling that.

  "Hey, Spooky," a thin geek in a labcoat, carrying a stack of paperwork, called out. "You here for the deadhead?" Then his eyes flicked past her to me, and he stopped cold, unshaven face turning the color of old cottage cheese.

  It wasn't as satisfying as it might have been. His stringy hair was cut in the bowl shape Jasper Dex had made popular. It didn't suit him. Neither did the color of his face. His eyes came suspiciously close to bugging out. I wondered why—working in the morgue, he probably saw his fair share of Necromances, between Gabe and John Fairlane.

  Then I remembered I was golden-skinned, with a face like a holovid model's and a share of a demon's beauty without the persistent alienness of a demon; my hair was ink-black, longer than it had been and silky, refusing to stay back unless braided tightly, sometimes not even then. I looked like a particularly good genesplice to most normals, like I'd paid a bundle to look like a holovid wet dream.

  The emerald in my cheek would just give normals a reason to fear me; an atavistic fear of psions in general and Necromances in particular. Silly normals sometimes mistake Necromances for Death Himself, loading another layer of fear onto the trepidation they feel about all psions.

  If they knew how unconditionally Death loved His children, maybe they would fear Him less. Or more. But psions were feared by normals all over the world, just because we had been born different.

  "Yeah, Hoffman, I'm here for the pile of meat that used to be a deadhead." Gabe's voice was a slap bouncing off the hall walls. "This is the big gun. Dante Valentine, meet Nix Hoffman."

  "Charmed, I'm sure." The dry tone I used was anything but. My voice echoed, not as hard as Gabe's, but casually powerful; I had to remember to keep toning it down especially around normals. The effect my voice had on unsuspecting civilians was thought-provoking, to say the least.

  "Likewise," he stammered. "Ah, um, Ms. Valentine—"

  "Which bay is the body in, Hoff? Caine's?" Gabe barely even broke stride.

  "Yeah, Caine's got it, he's in his office. He was doing toxicology." The young man's eyes flittered over me. I knew what he was seeing—a particularly desirable gene-spliced woman—and wished I didn't. His pupils swelled. If I flooded the air with my scent I could have him on his knees, begging without knowing why. Yet another side effect of whatever I was now.

  Hedaira, a flat ironic voice whispered in the lowest reaches of my mind. I shut that voice away—it hurt too much to hear it. Why was Japhrimel's the voice I used to hurt myself?

  "Thanks, jerkwad." Gabe sailed past him, and I did the same, letting out a deep breath between my teeth. I did not sneer. It took some effort.

  "You've got yourself a reputation," Jace murmured in my ear. I snorted something indelicate. "Oh, come on, Danny. You're too cute. Maybe we should get you one of them Oak Vegas Raidon outfits."

  "I can't raise the dead in a black-leather bikini," I muttered back, grateful once again because the damnable urge to smile rose again. Gabe's boots clicked on the linoleum.

  "A studded black-leather bikini," Jace corrected.

  "Pervert." The stench of human cells, dying decaying dead, rose up to choke me.

  How did Japhrimel stand it? I wondered, and my left shoulder suddenly burned as if something hot was pressed against it, scorching the skin, twisting. I could almost feel the scar writhing on my skin.

  I stopped dead. Jace nearly ran into me, stopped just in time, the bones tied to his staff clicking together. His Power stroked me briefly, a pleasant touch that would have unloosed my knees and made my breath catch if I hadn't been struggling to make my lungs work, my skin running prickly with demon Power. "Danny?"

  "Nothing." These flashes of heat were getting more and more pronounced lately. I wondered if I was going into demon menopause.

  There was another, nastier idea. I wondered if the flashes of heat had anything to do with the Prince of Hell.

  What a nightmare-inducing thought. Assuming I could sleep, that is. I put my head down, started forward again, lengthening my stride to catch up with Gabe. "Just a thought."

  "What kind of thought?" He sounded only mildly curious, his staff tapping in time with our footsteps.

  "The private kind, J-man. Back off."

  "Fine." Easy and calm, he let it drop. How he managed to do that I could never guess—it took a lot to ruffle his smooth surface. Maybe it was growing up in a Mob family that did it, made him so hard and blank; impenetrable. Or maybe it was putting up with me. Why did you hand over your Family, Jace? Just give it up? People have killed to stay in Families, let alone control them. You could have had everything you ever wanted. Why?

  I wished I could find the words to ask him.

  Gabe stopped in front of another door. Her bobbed hair swung as she turned her head slightly, a quarter-profile as pure as an ancient marble in a statis-sealed museum case. "Word to the wise. Caine's a Ludder."

  I felt my lip curl up. A genesplice-is-murder, psions-are-aberration, Luddite-Text-thumping fanatic. They were everywhere these days. "Great. He's going to love me."

  Gabe opened her mouth to reply, but the frosted-glass window set in the door darkened. The hinges squealed, and I had to kill the sardonic smile that wanted to creep up my face. I had the distinct idea that the hinges were deliberately left dry. Come into my parlor, said the medical examiner to the hapless police detective. My right hand tightened, searching for the hilt of a sword. I actually twitched before I remembered I didn't have a katana anymore. My hand ached, one vicious cramp seeding into the bones and twisting briefly before letting go. Getting better. It used to ache all the time, now it only ached when I wanted to reach for a hilt and found only empty air.

  "Gabriele," the stick-thin elderly man said. His eyes, poached blue eggs over a bloodless mouth and pale powdery cheeks, swam behind thick plasrefractive lenses. His lab coat was pristine, the magtag on his pocket read R. Caine. He'd chosen a caduceus logo on the tag; it reminded me of my own accreditation tat. A mad giggle rose up inside of me, was suppressed, and died an inglorious death as an almost-burp. "And some company. How charming."

  "Afternoon, Dr. Caine." Gabe's voice was flat, monotone. Deliberately noncombative, but slightly disdainful at the same time. "I presume Captain Algernon has spoken with you."

  If he could have sneered, he probably would have. Instead, his eyes lingered on me. The pink dome of his scalp under a few thinning gray-white strands of combed-over hair added to the egglike appearance of his head; no cosmetic hair implants for this gentleman. His teeth were still strong and sound, but they were terribly discolored, shocking in this age of molecular dental repair. Like the dry hinges, his teeth were probably deliberate too. "This is most irregular," he sniffed. "What is that?"

  "D
ante Valentine, Dr. Caine. Dr. Caine, Dante Valentine." Gabe moved slightly to one side, still between the doctor and me. I got the impression she was ready to jam her boot in the door if he decided to try to slam it shut.

  "Pleased to meet you." I lied with a straight face, for once.

  His watery blue eyes narrowed behind the lenses. "What are you?"

  I set my shoulders. I'd been given the cold shoulder by a lot of normals, he was going to have to work harder than that to irritate me. "The proper term is hedaira, Doctor. I'm a genetically altered human." The words stuck in my throat, dry and lumpy. Wouldn't you love to know, Doctor. I didn't ask for this to be done to me. And I have no idea what hedaira even means. The only person who could have told me is ash in a black urn. When I'm not hallucinoting his disembodied voice to flog myself with, that is. "Although I suspect abomination is the term you're looking for. Let's get this over with."

  "Who did your genesplicing?" He licked his thin, colorless lips. "It looks like an expensive job."

  Expensive? I guess you could say so. It cost me my life and someone I loved. I felt it like a sharp pinch on already-bruised flesh. So maybe he would manage to annoy me. One point for the Ludder doctor. "That's none of your business. I'm here to view a body in a legitimate murder investigation. Should I come back with a court order?" My voice made the glass in the door rattle slightly. I think I'm behaving badly. A lunatic giggle rose up again inside of me. Why did I always have the urge to laugh at times like this?

  Dr. Caine's wiry eyebrows nested in his nonexistent hairline. "Of course not. I know my duty to the police department. Despite their habit of sending me cadavers."

  "Why, Doctor, I thought it was your job to deal with cadavers." I didn't move, my feet nailed to the floor despite Jace's sudden grip on my elbow. I hated the syrupy sweetness in my voice—it meant that I was about to say something unforgivable. "Perhaps you should retire."

  "Not until I'm forced to, young woman. Come inside." He laughed mechanically and didn't look pleased, but ushered us into a small office jammed with a desk, two chairs, two antique and crooked metal file cabinets, piles of papers and files, and a thriving blue-flowered orchid on top of another file cabinet, this one wooden and glowing mellow with polish. That was interesting. Nearly as interesting was the dry-erase board set on the wall across from the second door. Dr. Caine's handwriting was spidery, and it wandered inside the neatly-ruled sections, keeping track of what body was in what bay and what tests needed to be done. At least, that's what I assumed the complicated numbers and letters meant. It looked like a code based on the old Cyrillic alphabet.