Silver Bullet

by SM Reine

  “You’re right. Fritz needs me.” She sucked in a breath, closed her eyes. “I just need to find the strength.”

  Instinct made me take her hand. Her fingers curled around mine.

  She stood over the body for another silent minute, as if gathering her thoughts. And then Isobel held her free hand over the body, palm-down.

  “Yvette,” she said softly, eyes going unfocused. “Yvette, come here.”

  Her magic hit me like it always did. It pulsed through my veins, made my head ache. But through my watering eyes and itching nose, I watched the ghost of a woman sit up from the body, showering murky white energy around her.

  Within moments, Yvette’s ghost stood on top of the body, hairless and naked.

  Her neck was glowing. I blinked, rubbed my eyes again. Didn’t change anything. Her tattoo was definitely glowing. Somehow, even though she hadn’t kept her hair or outfit, she’d managed to keep the bleeding apple imprinted on the side of her neck.

  “How does that work?” I asked quietly, trying not to break Isobel out of her reverie.

  When she responded, it was in her quiet, not-quite-there voice, and Yvette’s lips moved. The ghost was speaking through Isobel. “You mean this?” Yvette touched her neck where the giant tattoo burned like the sun. It blanched her features, making it impossible to see her face. “Swearing to the Apple is an oath of the soul. It’s permanent.”

  I was surprised that Yvette knew what I was talking about, much less understood why her ghost would have a visible tattoo. She must have been a witch when she was alive. A powerful one.

  Bet she was much higher than a three. Not that I was still bitter about that.

  “The Apple?” I asked, focusing on the conversation. “What’s the Apple?”

  “My chosen family,” Yvette said. “We are witches and men who have worshipped Adam since the dawn of humanity.”

  “Adam. Do you mean the first man? Garden of Eden Adam?”

  “Yes,” she said through Isobel.

  That was kind of interesting, but it wasn’t anything relevant to my extremely urgent need to recover Fritz. I didn’t care if she was a cultist or a famous actress or a graduate of Barnum and Bailey’s Clown College. I just needed her to look alive.

  I circled around Isobel and Yvette. The ghost was see-through. Too pale to pass for living.

  “Can you boost her somehow? Make her look more…realistic?” I asked Isobel.

  She clenched her hands into fists and let out a long, slow breath. Her brow furrowed with concentration. Yvette darkened fractionally until I couldn’t see the horizon through her waist anymore. She remained too pale, though.

  Isobel kept concentrating, pushing, making the magic build. Tension rippled through her body.

  Not much changed with Yvette, but I could tell that Isobel was trying hard. I sneezed into the crook of my elbow three times, very quickly, and had to walk away from them to catch my breath. The amount of magic was smothering.

  When I composed myself and looked back at Isobel, Yvette looked exactly the way she had when I’d left.

  “This isn’t going to work,” Isobel said. “I can’t make a ghost look real. Do you want to ask her anything else while she’s here?” The magic slipped and Yvette faded to a normal level of ghostly semi-translucence.

  “Where’s Cain?” I asked, struggling against my choking disappointment.

  Yvette flickered. “We don’t have any single base of operations. We’re always on the move. Always running. People don’t want to hear what we have to say, so we hide.”

  “Okay. So where was the last hideout?”

  “The Grand Sierra Resort.”

  That was a hotel-casino in Reno. That gave us something to investigate—a list of names to search, a way to find more information about our quarry before facing him down on Sapphire Beach.

  “What does Cain want to achieve?” I asked.

  “He wants to assemble the ethereal gateway so that we might access the ruins, open a door to Eden, and free Adam—blessed is He, may He walk upon the Earth once more.” Isobel’s nose wrinkled as she spoke for Yvette. She was conscious enough to find that distasteful for some reason.

  It didn’t explain why Cain had been rooting around in David Nicholas’s office, though.

  “What does David Nicholas have to do with this…gateway?” I asked.

  “The demons wish to possess the gateway so that they can pursue the power beyond,” Yvette said. “It will change the world if they seize it. We can’t allow that. Only Adam, blessed is He, may have that incredible power. Cain was investigating how far David Nicholas’s recovery efforts have come.”

  “And how far has he come, exactly?”

  “He’s gone nowhere at all,” Yvette said. Guess that was good news. I still wasn’t clear on what it would mean for David Nicholas to have “incredible power,” but I was happy that he didn’t have it.

  “Okay, cut her out,” I said, squeezing Isobel’s hand tightly in mine. She didn’t respond. “Izzy? Come back to me.”

  The ghost evaporated and Isobel swayed on her feet. She pressed the heel of her palm against her temple. “Adam,” she said, speaking in her normal voice again. “Eden. Do you have any idea what she was talking about?”

  Her warmth seeping through my shirt made it hard to think. “Not a clue. How about you?”

  “I got some images from her. She’s not crazy, Cèsar. This cult is obsessed with this Adam guy to a sickening degree.” Her hands slid up my chest, resting over my heart. “Whatever they want—we can’t let them have it. We can’t give them the pieces of that gateway.”

  I was willing to agree with her on that, except that giving them pieces of the gateway might be the only way to save my ass. “We need another plan,” I said.

  “Actually, we need a helicopter.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t make a ghost look real. But we’ve got a whole body here.” She swept her hand over Yvette’s corpse. “She’s pretty fresh—no rotting yet. We could cover up those wounds and put some blush on her cheeks and she’d seem pretty alive. So…why don’t we just reanimate her?”

  “Just reanimate her?” I asked. “You mean, like a marionette?” Maybe Suzy’s idea hadn’t been that crazy after all.

  “Like a zombie,” Isobel said.

  “Sure, yeah, let’s do that. We’ll just run down to Necromancers-R-Us and grab a witch that can make Yvette’s bones dance. Let me call the helicopter.”

  “You think you’re so funny.”

  Hey, I was pretty damn funny, thank you very much. “The OPA doesn’t have any necromancers on staff,” I said. “We don’t do zombies.”

  “You don’t do zombies.” Isobel smiled. “But I know someone who does. And so do you.”

  Ann looked even more like an ordinary, awkward teenager than when I had first met her.

  I’d never seen her outside the Temple of the Hand of Death in Helltown, and she wasn’t all that impressive to behold in the real world. Her spine was hunched like she lived in front of a computer, but her shirt still wasn’t quite long enough to cover the bottom roll of her stomach. Her bushy hair was pulled into a bushier ponytail at the nape of her neck.

  She was the acne-riddled stereotype of a D&D-loving hacker-nerd that had haunted me through high school, making me hide my comic books in my anatomy binder out of the fear I’d get a reputation like hers.

  And she was now our only shot at getting Yvette’s body to Cain.

  “This is our savior?” I muttered under my breath as Ann stumbled climbing out of the helicopter.

  Isobel gave me a warning look. “Be careful with what you say around her.”

  “I won’t hurt her feelings.” I didn’t talk shit about kids. I wasn’t that much of a jackass. But I was going to be thinking shit at Ann pretty loudly, since I was betting everything on her supposed expertise as a necromancer. Right about now I had a hard time believing that she’d be able to spend five minutes in the sun without getting burned,
much less raise a convincing zombie.

  “I’m not worried about Ann’s sense of pride,” Isobel said. “She doesn’t have one. I’m worried about—”

  “Belle!” Ann interrupted. She hitched her backpack higher on her shoulder and shuffled toward us faster.

  Isobel’s smile was wan. “Hey, Ann.”

  “And hello, Agent Cèsar Hawke,” the girl said, thrusting a hand at me. Her whole arm was pasty-pale. Getting out on the helipad on the roof of the condominiums was probably the most sun exposure she’d gotten in weeks.

  I shook her hand. “Good to see you again, Ann. I appreciate that you’ve come out here to help us.”

  “What else was I doing?” she asked. It didn’t sound like a rhetorical question. She really might not have been sure what else she was up to. I didn’t know, and frankly, I didn’t want to know.

  When I’d last seen Ann, she had been hanging out alone in an infernal temple as darkness fell. Nighttime was when any sane human being got the fuck out of Helltown. She’d looked like she was just getting warmed up for the evening.

  I wasn’t scared of a seventeen-year-old girl. I wasn’t. Seriously. But I’d have to be insane not to be kind of cautious.

  I led Isobel and Ann toward the maintenance staircase, avoiding the penthouse. More personnel had arrived and turned our condo into a hive of OPA activity. Another scrying spell was being conducted in our living room—led again by Bellamy and Suzy—and a few techs had staked out the kitchen to analyze data on the Grand Sierra Resort’s recent guest.

  I’d emailed Vice President Lucrezia de Angelis for permission to use Ann as a consultant, so her presence was authorized and expected by the rest of the team. Isobel, however, still wasn’t officially supposed to be on the scene of an OPA investigation. We had to be sneaky on our way down to the basement, where I had socked Yvette’s body away.

  “The zombie needs to look convincing,” Isobel explained in a whisper as we hurried down twenty flights of stairs toward Yvette. At least, I was hurrying. Ann was still shuffling, slow and steady. “She doesn’t need to be perfect, but we’ve got to convince Cain that Yvette isn’t dead for at least…I don’t know, do you think ten minutes will be enough, Cèsar?”

  “Sure,” I said. Why not?

  I had no idea how long everything at Sapphire Beach was going to take. All I knew was that I had somehow become responsible for the hand-off with Cain. I was going to escort Yvette and face the werewolf. Again.

  Malcolm was figuring out the rest.

  The kopis had reassured me that I would be safe during the operation. There would be armed guards hidden all over the mountain, not to mention some guys out on the lake in a (black) Union boat, ready to sweep in if anything went wrong.

  I’d have dozens of men providing backup for me at the lake. Gary Zettel’s unit, Malcolm and Bellamy, and a few extra snipers.

  Perfectly safe way to double-cross a crazy werewolf cult leader.

  “I can make a good zombie,” Ann said. “I could make her look alive for days if you wanted. But I’m going to need a sacrifice.”

  “A sacrifice?” I interrupted.

  She looked at me like I was the dumbest person she’d ever seen on the face of the Earth. It was kind of a teenage girl’s specialty expression, if my sister Ofelia was anything to judge against. “We need to sacrifice a life in order to bring another life back. It’s not that complicated.”

  “No, not complicated at all,” I said. “Let me just knock off the admin aide at the lobby desk so we can make Yvette pretty.”

  Ann didn’t seem to have noticed my snark. She looked thoughtful. “That could work, but don’t rush to kill anyone yourself. I’ll need to do it as part of the ritual.”

  Oh, for fuck’s sake. Where was I going to find a sacrifice?

  My mind immediately went to David Nicholas. If there was anyone that I wouldn’t mind turning up dead, it would be that guy. But I wasn’t actually certain that nightmares were killable.

  Isobel massaged her temples. Looked like she was developing a headache. “We’ve talked about this, Ann. We can’t just kill people for sacrifices.”

  “We can, and we need to if you want a convincing zombie,” Ann said.

  I raised my hand like I was in class.

  “Does it have to be a human sacrifice?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  IT WAS NOT ALL that hard to obtain a daimarachnid for Ann’s ritual.

  What, you didn’t seriously think I was going to try to kill David Nicholas, did you?

  All I had to do was head up to the penthouse suite and ask nicely for a living daimarachnid. As it turned out, Malcolm hadn’t been joking about trophies. And not all of the trophies had been slaughtered.

  “Living spider-demon for a ritual sacrifice, eh? No problem! We took a few samples to the warehouse we’ve bought outside Fallon.”

  “We bought a warehouse outside Fallon?” I asked.

  “The Union did,” Malcolm said. “We’ve dug up too much interesting stuff at the Silverton Mine to ship to LA for analysis. We’re founding a new base in the Reno-Sacramento territory to simplify a bit.” He shrugged. “This territory’s been unguarded too long anyway.”

  I seemed to remember David Nicholas saying something about the territory belonging to him and the Night Hag. I didn’t think he would take too kindly to the Union setting up camp there.

  “How long do you think the, uh, sample will take to get here?” I asked.

  Malcolm glanced at his watch. “An hour?” It had taken several hours to dredge Ann out of Helltown. It was already six o’clock in the evening. Just a few hours left to save Fritz.

  I tried not to freak out about that.

  “An hour is fine, I suppose,” I said. “It just needs to be alive and in the basement as soon as you can manage it.”

  “ETA on our zombie?” Malcolm asked.

  “An hour, plus however long it takes to perform a ritual.”

  “Excellent. We’ll say…three hours to departure. We’ve already got men setting up around the beach. Don’t want to keep the werewolf waiting.” He grinned and moved to leave.

  I grabbed his arm. Lowered my voice. “One more thing. I need a rental car as soon as possible, to be picked up in Reno and dropped off in Los Angeles.”

  “Rental car? You going home?”

  “Not me,” I said. “Our…other consultant.”

  Understanding brightened Malcolm’s eyes. “Ah. Good idea. It’s getting a bit crowded in this building to keep secrets.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  Unfortunately, Isobel hadn’t agreed with me as readily. In fact, she had been downright pissed when I told her that it was time for her to leave. I was surprised that she’d put up such a fight. Isobel was transient by nature, so I figured she wouldn’t mind moving on earlier than expected.

  She’d insisted that she was part of the team and wasn’t going anywhere until Fritz was safe. It was a nice thought, except that she wasn’t really part of the team—at least not officially—and I wasn’t sure if Zettel would waste time arresting an unauthorized person on the premises. The Union seemed like a shoot first, ask questions never kind of department.

  My frustration must have showed on my face. Malcolm smirked. “Does she know she’s leaving yet?”

  “She knows,” I said. That didn’t mean she had actually agreed with me, but I was about eighty percent certain she’d see sense by the time the rental car arrived.

  “I’ll make arrangements,” Malcolm said.

  “Thanks.”

  I turned to leave the penthouse, but the sound of a conversation in Fritz’s bedroom stopped me beside the door.

  “I think this must be what’s waking up the Night Hag,” said Allyson, the redheaded witch with Gary Zettel’s unit. I’d never heard her speak before, but there was no doubt in my mind that the deep, gruff voice belonged to her. “You know what this can do?”

  I glanced through the doorway. Fritz’s belongings had been s
et aside and his room repurposed for conferences. Another piece of that white ethereal stone sat on the table between Allyson and Bellamy.

  “It would explain the obfuscation,” Bellamy said.

  It would?

  “There would have to be more than this. The mine only had a few fragments. Not enough to build the entire arch. But look at this…” Allyson pushed the laptop toward Bellamy. “That’s how much we have. This is what we’re missing.”

  I couldn’t see the screen, but Bellamy made an interested noise.

  Allyson realized that I was listening in. She turned a cold stare on me.

  I started walking again, feeling guilty, even though I wasn’t sure why. We worked for the same company. We were on the same side. We were even working the same case now. I had the rights to all the same information that Allyson did…in theory.

  But Fritz’s BlackBerry was heavy in my pocket, reminding me that more information wasn’t always a good thing.

  Sometimes it was better to dwell in the dark.

  Ann spent the hour until delivery preparing the basement for her ritual. First, she rearranged the furniture so the tables were in the center of the room. Then she swept the floor, humming quietly to herself as she cleaned. The stone scepter jutted out of her back pocket.

  “What else do you need to make your circle?” I asked as I hauled Yvette’s body onto the left-hand table.

  Ann gave me a blank look. “Circle? Why would I make a circle?”

  “Death magic never needs circles,” Isobel explained.

  One more way that necro-whatever witches were fucking weird. “Great,” I said, rocking back on my heels, wiping my palms down my slacks. “That’s…great.”

  I wasn’t feeling great, watching Ann prowl around the corpse like a kid on Christmas morning. Isobel approached death with a healthy amount of trepidation, reflected now by the way she sat in the corner, as far from Yvette as possible. Ann seemed genuinely pleased to come face to face with a cadaver.

  The girl paused beside Yvette’s body, studying her closely while fingering the stone scepter. “Is this a witch?”

  “Uh…” I wasn’t sure how to tell. I glanced at Isobel, but she looked as helpless as I felt.