Dead Man Rising

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Anubis stalked to the very edge of the abyss in His full form, the obsidian-black, smoothly muscled skin of His arms and legs gleaming wetly. His ceremonial kilt rang and splashed with light, gold and gems glittering; His collar was broad and set with more jewels. The god's slender dog's head dipped, regarding me with one merciless, pitiless Eye, a black Eye that held a spark of crystalline blue light in its orb. He stood at the end of the Bridge anchored in the hall of Death, the Bridge I had walked so many times to bring a soul back.

  His arms crossed, one holding the ceremonial flail, the other holding the crook. His will stopped me on the Bridge, my not-self wearing the white robe of the god's acolytes, my golden feet bare on the stone. Please! It was an agonized cry, with all the force of my Will behind it—the sorcerous will I had learned to use, used all my life; the will that pushed Power to do my bidding, the will every practitioner had to create and use if he or she expected to cast any spell. My throat swelled with the agony of that cry, a physical ache in a nonphysical space. Please, no! No! I will give you anything, I will go in his stead, please, my Lord, my god, give him back!

  The God of Death looked down on me, His daughter, His faithful servant, and shook His head.

  Bare, laid open, I struggled against that kind implacability. I offered it all: my own life, my service, every erg of power and heat and love I possessed. I could never give Jace what he wanted from me, but letting him go down into Death's dry country... No. The stubbornness flared, and for the first time in my memory, my god paused.

  One hand extended, one finger, weightless, touched the crown of my head. There was a price for the balancing of Death's scales. Was I prepared to pay? Was that what he was asking me?

  Anything, I whispered. I will give You anything I have, anything You ask.

  And Death paused again. I read the refusal in His ageless, infinite eyes, and struggled uselessly against it. My cheek burned, the emerald flaring with drenching light, driving back the blue flame for one eternal moment. On and on, the strings of my psyche snapping, tearing, rent…

  I was shoved back, pushed out of the space between worlds, rammed choking and sobbing back into my body. I cradled Jace's empty husk to my chest, tilted my head back and screamed again, a sound so massive it was soundless, rising out of me like light from a nuclear fission. I was still screaming when the cops arrived, still screaming when Gabe fought through the press of sound, her nose bleeding from the wall of psychic agony. She fell to her knees, taking me in her arms. Her human warmth folded around me while I sobbed, mercifully robbed for a short while of every shred of demon power. I screamed again and again with only a broken human voice while I clutched the breaming, living body to my chest.

  Breathing, yes. Living, yes. But nobody had to tell me that the soul inside was gone. My demon-given Power had mended Jason Monroe's shattered body in a mimicry of a sedayeen's miraculous ability to heal, but he was dead all the same.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I folded my hands carefully around the paper cup while late-afternoon sun slanted over the street. Gabe spoke softly to someone, they were processing the scene. I huddled in the back of an ambulance hover, a brown woolen blanket around my shoulders, my clothing stiff with dried blood and noisome fluids. I shivered, the black liquid masquerading as coffee inside the paper cup slopping against the sides.

  It had been the middle of the day, everyone at work, nobody home except Hollin Sukerow. Which was a good thing, my scream and the explosion of loosed Power had taken out a good chunk of the building. Debris littered the street, smoke clearing on the air. It looked as if a wandering shark had just cruised by and taken a big half-circle bite out of the brownstone.

  I shut my eyes. Gray shock closed over the darkness behind my eyelids again. Again the spiked warmth from the mark on my shoulder fought it back. Tears leaked hotly between my eyelids, dripping down my cheeks. My tangled hair was full of dust and blood and dirt.

  They had taken Jace's body to the hospital. He was breathing, his heart beating, everything apparently fine… except it wasn't. It was an empty shell, an empty house, the soul fled but the housing that contained it intact. All the Power granted me by a demon's touch could not change Death's decree.

  My sword, tucked up against my leg, hummed softly. I sat on the cold rubberized floor of the ambulance hover and exhaled softly. The whine of a slicboard rattled over the scene, and I realized my lips were still shaping the prayer to Anubis.

  Anubis et'her ka. Se ta'uk'fhet sa te vapu kuraph. Anubis et'herka. Anubis, Lord of the Dead, Faithful Companion, protect me, for I am Your child. Protect me, Anubis, weigh my heart upon the scales, watch over me, Lord, for I am Your child. Do not let evil distress me, but turn Your fierceness upon my enemies—

  I stopped, choked on the rising tears, and forced them back down. Just like a kid, crying because a toy had been taken away, sobbing messily and completely.

  No. I was not a child. I would never be a child again.

  "Thank the gods you're here," Gabe said.

  I opened my eyes to see Eddie heeling his slicboard as the cell powered down, ending with the board neatly racking itself against the step of the ambulance hover. "How is she?" For once, Eddie didn't growl or sneer. Instead, he pushed his shaggy hair back from his face and stole a few worried glances at me in between examining Gabe. He didn't even glance up at the hole in the side of the brown-stone.

  Gabe shrugged, an eloquent movement. "Danny?"

  Both of them approached me, Eddie's rundown boots scraping the wet pavement. His long dirt-colored coat flapped. His aura, smelling of earth and pines, sweat and beer, meshed with Gabe's swirling Necromance sparkles.

  I swallowed bile, looked up at their worried faces. Sunlight glittered in my reactive-dry eyes. I blinked.

  "I didn't grab him in time. He was moving quicker than I've ever seen him move. He threw himself at Keller and Mirovitch—" I repeated it through the lump in my throat, my voice barely recognizable. Hoarse and wrecked, the voice of a stunned survivor of some natural disaster on the niner holonews. Change the channel, flip the station. Repeat as necessary.

  Gabe's hand closed around my right shoulder. She squeezed just a little. "You already gave your statement, Danny. You don't have to."

  "I should have caught him." Why did my voice, as hoarse and ruined as it was, sound so young? "I should have caught him." I held up one golden hand. "All the strength Japhrimel gave me, I should have caught him." My face crumpled again, soundlessly contorting into a mask. A tragedy mask, the darker half of laughter's coin. The mask I'd seen on so many other faces when a loved one passed on.

  Gabe whispered something to Eddie.

  "Goddamn." The dark circles under his eyes were almost gone. He looked better. "Look, Danny, I'm gonna take you to our house. We can clean you up, maybe get you something to eat."

  "I'll be fine," I said tonelessly, hoarse. "Got work to do. The others on the list—"

  "They've been taken to safehouses," Gabe said. "The building security net included stillcams. We've got a few good shots of Lourdes. They're all over the holovids, make the press work for us for once. Someone will call him in, and we'll take him down." Her mouth twisted slightly to one side. "Hard."

  It was a promise of revenge, one that should have made me grateful. I felt nothing; the numbness of a razor drawn swiftly through flesh, the breathless moment before the pain starts, before the blood begins to flow.

  "Nobody will see him." The ectoplasm had vanished, leaving only a faint shimmer on the bodies; the other victims had been found too late, no trace of ectoplasmic attack remaining. If we'd seen the slimy eggwhite of a ka taking shape in the physical world, we would have been more cautious. A lot more cautious. "Any more than anyone would see you if you really wanted to stay invisible. And he's… I think… Gabe, he's got Mirovitch… inside him."

  "You saw Mirovitch? But I thought you said he…" She looked as confused as I felt.

  Focus! The sharp stinging slap of the deep voice o
f my conscience jerked my head up. I'd been staring at my boots. "Gabe. Look. Poly told me that the kids all took a piece of Mirovitch. What if Keller took the last piece? Or somehow… I don't know. The first death was a decade after Mirovitch's… disappearance. Maybe the Headmaster wasn't as dead as everyone thought."

  Gabe nodded. Her sleek hair dipped forward over her shoulders. "So he's out for revenge?"

  "Revenge, maybe, who knows? But most certainly collecting." I waited until Gabe absorbed this, then tossed the cup of coffee into the street. Steaming liquid spilled out. I watched as the steam twisted into angular shapes, dissipated. "I don't know if safehouses are going to be any good. I don't know how he's tracking them."

  "You think Mirovitch is inside Lourdes?" Gabe's eyes were wide and dark. It was the stuff of nightmares, a psi carrying something like that around. A mule carrying a Feeder's ka.

  A Feeder, hungry for Power. And instead of feeding from random victims, or having a mild case of being Feeder, Mirovitch was inside Keller, and taking back whatever the kids took from him years ago. Claiming his own. It made sense. The worst, absolutely worst type of Feeder. Hungry, hard to kill, and so very close now to collecting the leftover pieces of itself and becoming a fullblown ka, moving from mule to mule and draining each one as it went, turning them into soulless zombies—or worse, into Feeders too. A spreading contagion, replicating itself wherever it could.

  "I'm guessing it's a ka, Gabe. Nothing else seems to fit." My throat stung, my eyes watering from the sunlight. Yes, only the sunlight. "I have something I have to do." Straining for politeness. It was a long reach.

  "Danny. Please. Go with Eddie. Get some food. Get cleaned up and come to the hospital. We'll do this together."

  I shook Gabe's hand from my shoulder. She backed up half a step, and I saw the sudden flicker in Eddie's aura. "You don't have to worry," I told them both, still in that little-girl voice I had no idea I still possessed. I heard the hurt clearly in my voice, too worn to camouflage or swallow it for once. "I'm not going to lash out at you. You could have a little more faith in me."

  "I know you wouldn't," Gabe said. "But you've got that look again, Danny. That scary look that says you're about to go hunting, and gods help anyone in your way."

  "That's about right." The ambulance hover rocked a little on its springs as my tone turned chill. Eddie shivered. The wind rose slightly, keening through the broken edges of the brownstone above. "I was too fucking young to kill Mirovitch all those years ago. I should have, I wished I could. I used to dream about it. This time, I'm old enough and armed enough to do it." I looked up at the smoking hole torn in the building. "I need to find out about this Bryce Smith guy—if he was just a cover for Lourdes. What the connection is. We still don't know that."

  Gabe nodded. The purposeful milling around the scene continued behind her. Two coroner's hovers lifted off, the whine of hovercells cutting through the sound of the gathered crowd behind the yellow plasilica tape marking off the borders of the investigation. I saw flashes pop, and guessed the holovid reporters were out in force. My eyes followed the hovers as they rose gracefully, then banked and flew away toward the station house and the morgue. Sunlight stung my eyes even more, making hot tears roll down my cheeks. "Hospital." I winced at the childlike breathiness of my voice. "They've taken him to the hospital?"

  Gabe nodded. "Yeah. Come with us, Danny."

  No. Please, no. "His sword. You don't need that for evidence, do you?"

  Eddie made a brief restless movement. I was being rude again.

  I was too tired to care. Japhrimel had never told me about the weariness of demons, the weariness of a being that didn't need sleep. A weariness that seemed to sink into every bone, every thought. Or was it a weariness peculiar to hedaira? I had nobody I could ask.

  I was adrift again, as if I was twelve years old and shipwrecked by the death of the only family I had ever known. Again.

  "You know it's yours." Gabe actually looked hurt. "I'm so sorry, Danny. I know you loved him."

  My lips puckered as if I tasted something sour. Maybe it was only failure. I didn't even know that myself, Gabe. "Thanks." My voice sounded as if it was coming from someone else, someone whose harsh tone was flat and terribly loaded with Power. If the god hadn't temporarily denied me the ability to use the demon Power I'd been granted, I might have leveled the building. Or even more.

  Probably more.

  Definitely more.

  "Don't, Danny." Eddie was uncharacteristically serious, examining me. His shoulders slumped as if under a heavy weight. The wind plucked at his coat, mouthed his untidy hair. "Don't do this to yourself."

  Don't do this to myself? Don't DO this to myself? "Who else should I do it to? I'm kind of out of victims, in case you hadn't noticed. Everyone who gives a damn about me dies sooner or later. You should be getting as far away as—"

  I didn't realize I was shouting until Gabe clapped her hand over my mouth, stepping close. Her dark eyes—human eyes—were bare inches from mine; she was much shorter than me, but I was sitting on the edge of the hover's step, so her nose hovered next to mine, her mouth on the other side of her hand. Her breath brushed my face, and the smell of kyphii and her perfume mixed, driving through my nose. My demon-based scent flared, a wave of musk and spice, and her pupils dilated slightly. That was all.

  "Shut the fuck up, Dante," she said softly, conversationally. "We're using your hover. You're coming to my house to get cleaned up, and we're going to the hospital. We'll catch this fucker, and when we do, what we do to him is going to make a werecain kill look sweet and clean. I dragged you into this, and if you want to blame someone, fine, blame me and we'll do some sparring later to hash it out. But for right now, sunshine, you're with us. You got it?"

  It was ridiculous. It was ri-fucking-diculous. I was part demon, stronger and faster than her, with enough power to level a building when a god wasn't stopping me. Hunger began, a faint cramping under my ribs. But hunger wasn't what was making my hands shake so that I had to clasp my sword, hard, to keep them still.

  I stared into Gabe's eyes, her irises so dark her pupils seemed to blend into them. This close I could see the fine speckles of gold in her irises, and the faint freckles that dusted her perfect patrician nose. Her aura closed around me, the comfort of another Necromance, not seeking to minimize the pain. Her cedary perfume spilled through the shield of demon scent, and I was grateful for it.

  Her eyes looked directly into mine.

  I have only stared that intensely into one other pair of eyes, and those had been brilliantly green, glowing green. As it was, wordless communication passed through her into me, a zing like an electric current, stinging all the way down to the quick. It was a different kind of communion than the one that passed between me and Anubis, and still different than the alien ecstasy of Japhrimel's hands on me while he stared unblinking through my humanity. No, this was purely female communication, something as deep and bloody as the depths of labor pangs.

  And for all I'd never had a child, I still knew. Every child knows. Every woman knows, too.

  "I'm with you, Danny," she finally whispered. "You owe him being at the hospital. You know what we have to do."

  My vision blurred. It wasn't shock, it was hot tears. Gabe's eyes were gentle and utterly pitiless, but still grieving.

  I nodded, slowly. Her hand fell away from my mouth, but she didn't look away. She offered me her hand, and I took it gently, my fingers sliding through hers.

  Eddie hunched his shoulders. He said nothing as Gabe pulled me to my feet.

  Soft beeps and boops from the machines monitoring pulse and respiration filled the air, and a tide of human pain scraped at my skin. Hospitals aren't comfortable for psions. All the advanced technology in the world can't hide the fact that a hospital is where you go when you're sick, and the terminus of getting sick is dying. Even the Necromance, whose entire professional life is bound up with death, doesn't like being reminded that he or she is finite and will one day
tread the same path as the clients.

  The room was small, but at least it was private. There was even a window, showing the thin sunlight outside and clouds massing in the north. We were up on the third floor, the curtains pulled back, smooth blue plasflooring under our feet… and Jace Monroe's body, lying perfect and breathing like a clockwork toy on the tethered hoverbed with its white sheets and dun blanket. His hair glowed in the pale light; he finally looked relaxed and about ten years younger.

  The chair sat stolid and empty on the other side of the bed. Eddie stood at the foot, and I found myself next to Jace's hand, looking down.

  Gabe exchanged low fierce whispers with someone at the door. She was a licensed Necromance and the investigating detective, and if she said he was dead her word held in a court of law. With two Necromances in the room and an EEG showing flatline, there wasn't any doubt: Jason Monroe was dead, and this was a flagrant use of Hegemony medical facilities for no good reason. Still, Gabe made them go away so we could say goodbye to the soulless body on the bed, probably invoking the second clause of the Amberson Act.

  I didn't care. Was past caring. I was scrubbed down and wearing Eddie's shirt and a fresh pair of jeans—not Gabe's, she was too small, and I didn't want to ask why they had a pair of pants in my size at their house. My boots were still wet, but at least they'd been rinsed off. My hair lay wet and tightly braided in a rope against my back that bumped me whenever I shifted my weight.

  Gabe closed the door with a firm click. I felt the tingle of Power and glanced over to see her place a lockcharm on the handle. The rune sank in, barring the door with its spiked backward-leaning X; simple and elegant like all of Gabe's magick.