Last Breath

by Debra Dunbar

  In this case, where there was smoke, there wasn’t necessarily fire, at least not the normal incendiary kind. My skin crawled as I saw the smoke twisting like blue tentacles, as it rose then looped back down to curl along the ground. I grabbed my companion’s voluminous cloak.

  “Stop. Stay here.” I had a bad feeling about this. A really bad feeling.

  The skies opened up, and the woman wrenched her garment from my grasp, shrieking as she ran for the pavilion. About twenty feet out, she stopped, her shrieks turning into one long scream.

  I tried to keep the panicked look from my face as I jogged toward her. Storms were the perfect time for casting, when personal energy could be supplemented with environmental for extra oomph. I’d never seen blue smoke like this before, but had no doubt it was accompanied by chicken entrails or something equally gruesome.

  It wasn’t chicken guts. It was a dead body, and the blue smoke was coming from a crater where his chest should have been. My breath stopped somewhere in my own chest and I fought to keep from screaming myself. It was one thing to see dead bodies on my favorite crime show, another to come across one in a park—one that smelled of burned flesh and coppery blood.

  Last Breath

  By

  Debra Dunbar

  Copyright 2016, All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Formatting by Anessa Books

  Chapter 1

  THE SKY WAS that ominous yellow that heralds a downpour. Thunder rolled in the distance, but I knew this storm was right overhead. A burst of wind whipped the bush I was crouched behind into a frenzy, stinging me with the slap of branches. I should have headed for shelter, but there was no way I was leaving until I’d found the bastard that had killed two of my friends. He was out here somewhere, and I wouldn’t rest until he was dead.

  There. My muscles tensed, sword at the ready as I saw a flash of blue behind a tree. I’d lose the element of surprise by running across a twenty foot stretch of open ground, but I didn’t need surprise to take this guy down. Eighteen years of lessons gave me a distinct advantage when it came to hand-to-hand sword combat.

  The light dimmed with the fast-moving storm. Lightning streaked to the ground, followed almost immediately by a crash of thunder. I darted from behind the bush, hunching low. Something hit my arm, and I swung from reflex.

  “Ow. Damn it. Too hard. You’re hitting too hard.”

  Oops. Barely two hours into our LARP and I already had a reputation for knocking grown men on their ass with my PVC and duct-taped foam sword. “Sorry. Are you okay?”

  A woman stood to her feet, her cape brown with dust and her beaded headdress askew. “I think my teeth flew into the next county. What’s with the head-shot?”

  I was used to taller opponents and had aimed blind. “Sorry,” I repeated.

  Now came the weird part—the part where I didn’t finish her off, even though if I’d been using a real sword a mercy killing would have been in order. “On the authority of the King of Glenelg, I, Solaria Angelique Ainsworth of Middleburg, take you captive.”

  She glared at me, righting the beaded cap and picking a stray twig out of her long, dark-blond hair. “Think again, girlfriend. I hit you with a freeze spell. I, Melisandre the Magnificent, am the one taking you prisoner.”

  One thing I’d learned about LARPing in two short hours was that I hated mages, especially ones that added the title “magnificent” to their name. The normal rules that applied to magic didn’t seem to exist in this fantasy war-game and egos trumped any hint of talent. “Freeze spell, my ass. I didn’t hear any incantation, didn’t trip a magical barrier. How the heck did you put a freeze spell on me?”

  She pointed downward and I looked at what had smacked me in the shoulder. No way. Just… no way. “That’s a beanbag. I know the rules here are kind of wacky, but in what universe does throwing a beanbag at someone constitute a magical spell?”

  “I say freeze then throw the bean bag. If I hit you, you’re bespelled. If I don’t then you get to knock me into the ground with your sword. I hit you.”

  This was ridiculous. If I could run around Baltimore throwing beanbags at people and causing them to be deprived of motion, I’d be set for life. “Do you know how involved a spell like that is? Eight different types of herbs, six of them not even found in this country, a lead weight, and unbleached silk string. The astrological alignment means you can only cast it once every three months, and the chances of holding the spell static in an amulet or object until you want to release it are less than fifteen percent. For a generalized freeze spell you’ve got a five percent chance of success as long as you meet all the other criteria. Specialized you’d need a poppet and a drop of blood—even then your success rate only rises to ten percent.”

  Her mouth made a tight, thin line. “I’m the mage. You’re the paladin. You’re also frozen and my prisoner.”

  Paladin. I winced. I was a Templar, not some do-gooder, holier-than-thou, kamikaze-with-a-sword. Although in this game, it seemed I’d been assigned that detested role. I was wanting to whack her again with my foam sword, just out of principal, but I held back. These were the rules, and I didn’t want to alienate my new friends by refusing to submit to the enemy. “Fine. Lead the way, oh mighty wizardess.”

  Lightning flared. We both jumped and I felt a sizzle of static electricity across my skin and smelled the sharp bite of ozone. Thunder shook the ground, nearly deafening us. I dropped, pulling the other woman down with me and holding her until I was sure there wasn’t another strike, or a burning tree about to come down on our heads.

  “Screw the prisoner thing,” the woman said, her voice shaky. “Run for that pavilion over there.”

  That pavilion “over there” was right where the lightning strike had come down, but it was the only shelter nearby and big, fat, cold drops of rain were beginning to splat against my plastic armor. I ran, slowing my stride to let the mage, hindered by twenty yards of fake velvet fabric, keep up. We crested a knoll and I saw smoke rising in the air.

  “Fire,” Melisandre the Magnificent gasped.

  But in this case, where there was smoke, there wasn’t necessarily fire, at least not the normal incendiary kind. My skin crawled as I saw the smoke twisting like blue tentacles, as it rose then looped back down to curl along the ground. I grabbed my companion’s voluminous cloak.

  “Stop. Stay here.” I had a bad feeling about this. A really bad feeling.

  The skies opened up, and the woman wrenched her garment from my grasp, shrieking as she ran for the pavilion. About twenty feet out, she stopped, her shrieks turning into one long scream.

  I tried to keep the panicked look from my face as I jogged toward her. Storms were the perfect time for casting, when personal energy could be supplemented with environmental for extra oomph. I’d never seen blue smoke like this before, but had no doubt it was accompanied by chicken entrails or something equally gruesome.

  It wasn’t chicken guts. It was a dead body, and the blue smoke was coming from a crater where his chest should have been. My breath stopped somewhere in my own chest and I fought to keep from screaming myself. It was one thing to see dead bodies on my favorite crime show, another to come across one in a park—one that smelled of burned flesh and coppery blood.

  Just because I was a Templar raised in the art of war didn’t mean I’d ever actually experienced it. A dead body… this was a first for me. Don’t puke. Don’t puke. I forced my breakfast to stay put, but couldn’t tear my eyes away from the corpse.

  “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” Melisandre fumbled to dial her cell phone, nearly dropping it in the process.

  Sh
e was going to call 911. It was too late for this guy, although I guess someone had to remove the body.

  Snap out of it. Templar training included an anatomy intensive on cadavers, and we’d all studied drawings and photos of various supernatural methods of death. Still, this was my first up-close and personal view. Time to stop freaking out and start doing my job.

  My job as the only Templar in Baltimore, that is. Not a paladin. Not a Knight. But still a Templar with the responsibilities that my birthright entailed.

  I took a steadying breath and bent down to examine the man, careful not to touch anything. He had on the same dark-green cloak as my companion, his eyes fixed wide in surprise, a beanbag clutched in his left hand.

  “My name is Melissa Davies and his is… was Ronald Stull. We were in a role playing game, and there was a lightning strike. No, there’s no way he’s still alive.”

  She knew him. I felt a pang of sorrow. It was bad enough for me to find a stranger dead in a park, but to find a friend? Melissa was wrong, though. Ronald wasn’t killed by a lightning strike. The blue smoke began to dissipate, and I saw what I’d suspected—a sigil burned into the grass beneath the body. I’d need to wait until the police, or whoever, moved him to get a look at the entire symbol, but its presence meant this wasn’t a random magic act gone wrong. It was a hit.

  “Did Ronald have any enemies?” I asked once Melissa had hung up.

  Her hands shook as she stashed the phone. “What, like Zeus? No, he didn’t have any enemies, aside from the imaginary ones in our game. He was killed by lightening.”

  No, he was killed by a being with an affinity for lightning, not by the electrical event itself, a being who liked to remove the lungs and heart, a being who surrounded himself with blue smoke.

  A sharp pain shot through my side, and I rubbed the spot where my scar was, thinking it was a really bad time to get a muscle spasm. “Lightning doesn’t usually leave a demon sigil on the ground, or produce blue smoke.”

  Melissa gave me a wary look, taking a step backward. “Copper chloride. It burns blue. And random burn patterns in the grass are not demon sigils.”

  So says the woman freezing opponents with beanbags. Although I couldn’t really blame her. She didn’t grow up looking at demons-gone-wild photos or autopsies of werewolf victims. This was all fantasy to her and I was a nutjob conspiracy theorist. “Sorry, I get a little carried away with the game sometimes. How well did you know him?”

  She relaxed at my explanation. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one running around this LARP in the Park who “confused” what everyday people considered to be reality and fantasy. Melissa could believe whatever she wanted, but Ronald hadn’t been carrying around copper chloride—which causes blue flame and green smoke. And that was a sigil. I’d swear it on the Templar tattoo inked into my right wrist.

  The woman turned her back on the body, hugging herself tight. The brief downpour had become a light shower, but her cloak was soaked, her hair plastered to her head in thick strands. “He joined us a few months back. Some of the guys had played online with him and asked him into the group. He was really good. Ronald could sneak up on anyone, and he was really accurate with his spells—I mean his beanbags.”

  None of that explained why he was dead on the ground. Unless he’d hit the wrong sorcerer with a beanbag. “Are you two the only magic users in the group?”

  She nodded. “It was nice to have a backup, you know?”

  I’d learned that wizards got captured a lot in this game. They ran out of beanbags, and with no armor fell quickly to a PVC and foam sword.

  “What did he do? For a living, I mean.”

  I worked in a coffee shop, and tried not to touch the bank account my parents kept dumping money into. This guy’s cloak and jeans looked a lot more expensive than my thrift-shop purchases, so I was guessing he worked for more than minimum wage.

  “I don’t know. I think he was a programmer or something.”

  Or something. That cloak looked nice. Nicer than the one Melissa was wearing. Nicer than I’d seen in the costume shops. There was a chance Ronald took his mage persona seriously. Really, really seriously.

  The wail of a siren sounded in the distance, growing louder. I looked around and picked up a stick the wind had knocked loose, then stretched it out to lift the folds of Ronald’s cloak.

  Melissa wiped the rain off her face and gestured toward the body. “Should you be doing that? I mean, aren’t you contaminating evidence or something?”

  “Evidence that Zeus struck this man down? You said yourself that he got hit by lightning. It’s an accident. There is no evidence.”

  She frowned. “Well, then it’s disrespectful.”

  It was disrespectful to be examining a dead man’s garment while his body was still warm, but once the EMS people got here, I wouldn’t have the chance.

  Green cloak. Real velvet by my reckoning. Satin lined. It wasn’t new from the wear around the hem and the faint stains on the lining, but it had been well taken care of. On the inside of the cloak I could see tiny slits—the openings of pockets. And I was willing to bet they weren’t filled with beanbags either.

  “I hear the ambulance. Can you go meet them and show them where to go?”

  She hesitated, eyeing me with suspicion.

  “I just moved here six months ago and have never been in this park before today. I’m not even sure where my car is at this point.”

  Melissa nodded. “I’ll be right back.” She eyed my stick. “Stop poking him, for heaven’s sake.”

  The moment she was out of sight, I did more than poke him. In spite of the dangers of touching a demon-slayed corpse, I dove right in, digging through the cloak pockets and mentally cataloguing spell components. Rue, wormwood, gold filings, salt. A whole lot of salt. I didn’t have much time, so any papers I found I pocketed, feeling a twinge of guilt. Melissa knew him. I was hoping she knew him well enough to help the paramedics notify next of kin.

  By the time the medical personnel rounded the knoll, carrying a stretcher and led by Melissa, I was standing beside the body, stick tossed aside and an innocent look carefully composed on my face.

  “Holy crap.”

  I didn’t think trained emergency staff were supposed to be quite so shaken by the sight of a dead body. After all, they’d probably been first on the scene to far more gruesome murders than this. Or not. With the blue smoke cleared, Ronald’s chest cavity looked like he’d been part of some horrible sacrifice. Ribs were cracked and spread upward like bony towers. Lungs and heart were completely missing, leaving a bloody, muscle lined hole where the organs had been.

  They set the stretcher down and eyed the body. “I’m thinking the lightning hit the ground, then rebounded and took him in the back.”

  Melissa gagged and turned her head. I leaned closer, wanting to see both the sigil and the back of the body. If the paramedic’s hypothesis was correct, then the guy’s backside would be a blackened, burned mess. Maybe they were right. Maybe my paranoia over the recent vampire and necromancer events was making me see magic around every corner. Ronald had a bunch of spell components in his pockets. He could have had copper sulfide and other stuff in the ones his body had blocked me from searching. He could have been killed by lightning that left an odd pattern on the ground.

  Or not. The two men rolled the body over. His backside was untouched beyond the blood that had seeped under him and stained his cloak. And the burn mark on the ground was clearly a sigil.

  “What the hell? Rob, take a look at this.” The two men shook their head over the burn mark, commenting that it was the weirdest lightning strike they’d ever seen.

  Me, too. Usually there was a blackened smoking tree, or a charred piece of earth with a circular section of burned and melted foliage radiating out from the impact area. Not this weird, squiggly burn. I tried to commit it to memory, wondering how crass I’d look if I took out my cell phone and snapped a picture. Probably pretty crass. Sigils were tricky though. One mark re
versed, or slightly higher, called a completely different demon. That’s why this particular form of magic required a detailed practitioner, and why it had a high rate of casualties. Had Ronald practiced magic outside of his LARP activities? If so, this might have not been a hit, but simply a case of a sloppy summoning coming back to bite him.

  Like my sloppy summoning. I hugged myself, remembering the violent demon who had appeared instead of Vine. I’d barely managed to shove him back to hell. And I was well aware that if someone else summoned him and he got loose, he could very well come after me.

  Was that what happened with Ronald?

  Melissa and I followed the stretcher to the ambulance, all of us walking in silence. The rain had tapered off to a light mist. Once the sun came out, the humidity would be unbearable. I couldn’t wait to shed this plastic armor, and I’m sure Melissa felt the same about her sodden cloak. She was worse off, drenched-clothing wise. The plastic armor had at least shielded some of my body from the rain, but she was soaked through. Her hair was stuck to her face and neck, the headdress absurd on top of it all. I touched a hand to my own hair, thankful for the braid that I always wore when fighting. It might not be the most flattering hairstyle for me, but at least I didn’t have wet hair clinging to my skin.

  The police were at the ambulance, as were the press. I recognized one of the reporters, and she nodded to me. Janice. Was it just last week we’d met to discuss the Robertson murders? She was going to think this was an odd coincidence, me being here. I thought it was an odd coincidence my being here.

  The officers took down our names and information. It all seemed straight forward. No crime scene photos. No yellow tape. Just a guy killed by a lightning strike, and our information to ensure all the boxes were filled out on the form.

  “It hit the ground right where we found him,” Melissa told them. “We were in a role playing game. The others are at the other end of the park, but we were out doing reconnaissance. The lightning hit, and there was static everywhere. The thunder nearly deafened me. When the rain came down, we ran for shelter, and that’s when we found him.”