by Faith Hunter
I gave him the finger in silent reply, shut the door, and locked it. Then I turned back, with an artificial smile on my face, and went to the kitchen to pour three iced teas.
By the time I’d carried the glasses back to the coffee table and fetched the sugar and spoons, Andy had relaxed sufficiently to put the shotgun completely aside. Lyons didn’t seem to care one way or the other; he was sitting as if he were in his own home. “Miss Holly,” he said, and accepted the tea with a charming smile. The only thing the man lacked to make him look like an affluent oil baron was a thousand-dollar Stetson. “You’re too kind. It’s getting a mite warm out there.”
“Then you’d think those jackasses would go on home,” Andy said. “Hate to see ’em get some kind of stroke.”
“Now, now, those people are exercising their perfectly legal right to assemble and their right to free speech,” Lyons said. “Those people got convictions, and they’re not afraid to stand up for them. I respect that. I’d think you’d respect it, too.”
“In my time, men of conviction ran the risk of taking a beating, or a bullet,” Andy answered. “Ain’t got no room to respect liars, and fools who believe ’em. As far as I can tell, your world’s got no consequences for telling lies and making threats, and that’s toxic, mister. It lets cowards be bullies, and make no mistake, that’s what these folks are. Bullies. I’ve known heroes. They damn sure ain’t heroes.”
Lyons studied Andy for a moment, sipping his iced tea. Then he turned to me. “Is that how you feel about it?”
“I think someone stirred up a mob, maybe even using magic,” I said. “And put them to work to drive the witches out of Austin. And I think that someone is probably you, Mr. Lyons.”
The smile slipped, like a greased belt on an engine, and for a second I saw the cold, calculating man behind the good ol’ boy mask.
And I saw the power.
Witches aren’t superheroes; we don’t have Spidey sense or any ability to detect things beyond our particular specialties. But from time to time, some things are so powerful they make themselves known, regardless. Even a regular, normal person would feel it.
And Andy and I both knew, in that cold second, that what was sitting there sipping iced tea pretty as you please was not a human being at all. Not in any sense we could have named it.
I expected Andy to make a grab for the shotgun, but he was smarter than that. A shotgun wouldn’t do squat in this moment of revelation. Something like Pete Lyons sneered at mere human violence. We were small before him. Small and very fragile.
The smile came back. “Good iced tea, Miss Holly. Thank you for your hospitality.”
“What are you?” I asked.
“Your city councilman,” Lyons said, perfectly calmly. “I got elected earlier in the year on a platform of clearing out corruption, you might recall. Well, I found some. I’m getting rid of it, and making this city safe for decent folk.”
“I know what you are,” Andy said. His eyes were slitted and dark, and he was as tense as Lyons was relaxed. “Seen something like it before, back in the wars.”
“The Zombie Wars?” Lyons shook his head and laughed. “Old West romantic nonsense. Like you, Mr. Toland. Fables like that are the reason we don’t need witches and their filthy ways. Corpses killing innocents? Horrifying nonsense.”
I knew the story of the Zombie Wars, from the Old West time when Andy had originally lived and died; corrupted resurrection witches had tapped into power that nobody truly understood to launch that war, and the good witches of the time had sacrificed their lives to stop it. Andy had been the last, and he’d died ending it.
“Is it?” Andy asked. “Holly Anne, you ought to know, some bits of that war didn’t make it to the history books. Like where those original bad witches got all that power from. Was a man by the name of Hattan—Joshua Hattan. He was a demon-raiser.”
I felt a jolt, because there weren’t many witches who truly practiced anything like dark magic—magic that was in and of itself completely evil. But demon-raisers . . . they were the blackest of the black. That was a power that could not be used for good; it would taint any action, no matter how pure it seemed. It was the power of rot and ruin, decay and doom.
“I killed Joshua Hattan,” Andy said. “But it ain’t easy to dispel a demon once he’s in this world. Clings on like a stench to anything once owned by the witch that raised him up. You a collector of old things, Mr. Lyons?”
“Why, yes, I do happen to love those bygone days, Mr. Toland,” Lyons said. “Pity about the knife. I thought you’d pick it up. I suppose someone did, eventually.”
The knife. The old knife, driven through the photo, pinning it to the lawn.
“Forensic technicians,” I said. “Using rubber gloves. It’s toxic, isn’t it?”
He shrugged. “Well, that all depends on your definitions, I suppose. Let’s just say it opens a window that’s very hard to close. Never mind. I have other things.” He stroked the turquoise hunk in his bolo tie fastener—a massive piece of intense blue-green stone, shot through with thick black veins. It almost looked . . . organic.
But it was a distraction. “Ain’t the tie as worries me,” Andy said. “It’s you wearing a dead man’s boots.”
“You’re welcome to try to take them,” Lyons said. There was that smile again, warm and deceptive and deadly. “Can’t promise you’ll be the same afterward, though. Once you touch them, you’ll have to have them. I killed a man for them. Wore them walking away from his corpse, still warm from his feet. They change you. They give you everything you want.”
“They burn you black inside,” Andy responded. He didn’t seem afraid, or angry. He just studied Lyons now with what I could only think of as pity. “Ain’t nothing of you left in there, Mr. Lyons. So what’s your plan? Drive out the witches, kill what resists like you did Portia, then claim this city for your own?”
“City?” Lyons’s smile didn’t falter. “Thinking too small, son. Austin’s just some provincial little cow town. I’m taking the state. Then I’ll take the country. Wait until you see what’s coming, Andy. Just you wait.”
He drained the tea and put the glass down, then offered his hand for a shake. I stood up and retreated, well out of range. Lyons made the same gesture to Andy and got the same response. “Well, then,” he said. “Guess we all know what’s what. Thank you kindly for the tea.”
“Get out,” I said flatly.
He didn’t object, and he didn’t linger. He walked straight to the door, opened it, and stepped outside. He gestured toward the people on the sidewalk—a peculiar little circular gesture—and as if he’d flipped a switch, they all stopped staring at our house, began chatting amiably with one another, and headed toward their assorted vehicles.
“Tell you what,” he said, turning to face Andy and me. “If you two pack your things and leave town within twenty-four hours, I’ll be generous and let you live. If you don’t, I’m going to have to kill you both in a very bad way. Then I’ll bring you back to serve me in the next phase of my plans.” He tapped his fingers to his forehead in a mock salute. “Good talk. See you soon, ma’am. Andy.”
I couldn’t stand that smile anymore. I kicked the door shut with a boom that must have shaken glass throughout the house, locked it, and leaned against it as my whole body started to tremble.
“Andy?” I gulped for air, trying to calm myself. “Andy, what are we going to do?”
And in that moment, when everything could have fallen apart, Andy said without a quaver, “We burn him down and salt his earth. Because that’s what needs doing.”
The ground seemed to steady under my feet. My shaking went away. I hugged him, and he hugged me back, and the magic between us—the magic that kept him here, held him in this time, in that reconstructed body—it felt strong as steel. It was love that powered Andy Toland. It was the exact polar opposite of what powered Pete Lyons
.
Andy had a way of making things clear. Clear and simple. Not easy, never easy, but clear.
“How do we go about that, exactly?” I asked.
“We’re about to find out,” he said. He went to the window and peered through the curtains. The protesters had already vacated the street, and Pete Lyons was pulling away in his black Cadillac SUV, just as a courier van cruised to a halt in front of our mailbox. The uniformed driver got out and trotted up the walk with a small package and a clipboard.
Andy opened the door, signed, and accepted the package, and the driver left in under fifteen seconds, heading for his next delivery.
Inside the envelope was a small glass bottle. In the bottle was a scraping of skin.
Portia’s skin. Ed Rosen had come through.
“Let’s get to work,” Andy said.
—
Making the shell for a resurrection was a brutal process, requiring a ton of supplies, space, time, and energy. Like cloning, I would suppose, only vastly accelerated. The difference was that the body created was not alive; it was a simulacrum. Everything was in place, held in stasis for the moment that the spark of life entered it.
It also wasn’t something that I could do, or even help to do. So I left Andy in his private workshop, surrounded by supplies, his long steel table in the center, and went to take my mind off my worries.
I cleaned. Any spot that Pete Lyons had touched, I used a cleansing potion on it, brewed of rosemary and sage and witch hazel, activated with my own sweat and brewed with a spell. As I scrubbed, I saw the faint black stain of his presence become visible and then fade away.
The iced tea glass was a total loss, though. I handled it with rubber gloves, put it in a paper bag, smashed it to pieces, and then buried it deep in the backyard. It would kill the grass around it, almost certainly, but that couldn’t be helped. The sugar bowl suffered the same fate. I soaked the spoon in the potion and then buried that, too. The good, clean earth would absorb the darkness, eventually; earth magic was slow, but it was powerful.
When I was certain that everything was cleaned, and every window and door warded for protection, I started the resurrection potion. While that brewed, I made burritos. Hours had passed by the time I unwrapped a burrito and sat down in front of the TV to eat it.
I clicked on the local news—and was sorry I had.
“The controversy over the presence of practicing, for-profit witches in the Austin community continues to grow, with protests erupting at places of business all over the area. In Clarksville, a large crowd gathered this afternoon in front of this store, Magick Incorporated, known to supply local witches with materials used in their spells and rituals. As you can see, Jim, the police failed to contain the protest, which turned violent . . .” I watched, sickened, as the footage played of sign-wielding, screaming people throwing bricks at the windows of my favorite store, shattering the plate glass. They stormed in, pushing and stomping one another in their eagerness to destroy, and I caught a glimpse of Lois Herndon and her two employees being dragged into the street. “Two employees of the store were admitted to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. However, proprietor Lois Herndon suffered a massive head trauma and was pronounced dead at the scene.”
The news anchors didn’t even pause to shake their heads in mock sympathy. They just went on to the next story, which featured one of the protesters earnestly explaining why what they were doing was right and good, and of course they didn’t approve of the violence, but didn’t the Bible say . . . ?
The reporter seemed sympathetic.
I shut it off. I’d lost my appetite, too, though the burrito was delicious; I wrapped up the rest and put it in the fridge, along with the others. I couldn’t take anything to Andy, since he would be locked in the ritual for hours to come; any interruption, however well meant, would ruin the spell.
I went to bed cold and alone, and I dreamed of snakes slithering through the house, up onto my bed, and twining around my neck to choke me.
I woke to find Andy sitting next to me on the bed, his hand gentle on my forehead. Beyond him, the windows were still dark. The clock said it was four in the morning.
“She’s ready.”
—
I have to admit, this one was hard. Harder than most, because I knew Portia, at least slightly. She was an overweight, kindly lady who’d been vain about her dyed hair and her skin; she’d been obsessive about skin creams and wrinkle prevention, and given that she was lying naked, pale and still on the table, all her faults and flaws laid bare, it seemed a very sad memory to be holding. I tried to think about other things, like the way she laughed, shy and quick, as if afraid she might be caught at it.
This body didn’t hold the wounds of her death; it was her in the moments before the damage was done, as close as could be achieved.
Now for the hardest part.
Andy let me take the lead, because he’d done the tough work of making the shell, but he stayed close, in case of trouble. I opened Portia’s mouth, poured in the potion, whispered the words, and then sealed it with the kiss of life—infusing the potion with my own breath, my own will, my own energy. And through it, reaching through the other side to Portia.
I felt it when we connected; it was a physical shock, like grabbing hold of a hot wire. I felt myself spasm all over from it, and only long experience kept me there, my lips touching hers, as I felt her spirit traveling through the dark, writhing and clawing and fighting and screaming and then present, sinking into that silent form.
Her lips warmed beneath mine, and she took a breath like a sob, and I tasted death flooding out of her and into me, a taste like rancid meat and grave dirt. It was a natural part of the spell. That didn’t make it any better, and I swallowed convulsively, my eyes pressed shut, to make it pass faster.
By the time I’d managed to control myself, she was breathing normally, and her own eyes were fluttering open.
I helped her sit up. She was as clumsy as a newborn, and just as confused; the colors and sharp edges of the world sat hard on those resurrected.
I glanced at Andy, and he moved forward with a warm, soft blanket that he wrapped around her. She tried to help him, but her hands were still too weak to grip things firmly, so I took charge and held it for her, tucking it into a tasteful approximation of a toga.
“Portia,” I said then, as I took both of her cold hands in mine. I could feel her pulse. It was racing fast, very fast. I could also feel the magnetic pull of the dark inside both of us—a pull that would draw her inexorably back to it. There was no such thing as cheating death, in the end; there was only a way to fool it for a while. As a witch, she knew that as well as I did. “Portia, honey, do you know who I am?” Often they didn’t, even if I’d known them before. They had to be reminded, over and over. “It’s Holly Anne Caldwell.”
She licked her pale lips and said, “Resurrection witch.” Her dark eyes shifted focus, to Andy. “Mr. Toland.” That was a very good sign, I thought. I kept holding on. Physical contact helped, in the early stages. “Am I dead?”
That was a question they all came to, eventually. It usually happened right before the memories rushed in—the ones that death held back, at first, out of kindness.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m right sorry, Portia. Do you remember?”
That was the trigger. I felt it hit her through the link we shared. You can’t keep yourself truly separate in this kind of business; it’s messy and sweaty and intimate and personal.
I not only felt her remember it.
I felt it.
A crush of terror, blind and unreasoning terror. The smashing impact of a crystal ball on my upraised arm, shattering bone. Then again, on my shoulder. My ribs, breaking like glass. My skull cracking, then bursting.
And then, as life ebbed, the hot line of the cut across my throat. A sacrificial bloodletting, unnecessary except f
or ritual, because he’d already done enough damage to kill me. No, her. Portia.
She was staring at me with huge eyes, shadowed with horror. “I know,” she whispered. “What he did, what he did to me, I know—”
“Who?” I had to keep her focused. This was the hardest moment of all, harder even than the pain of her death. “Who was it, Portia?”
“You know,” she said. “It was the man in the boots.” She shuddered, and her eyes rolled up until the whites showed. “He isn’t a man.”
“No,” Andy agreed. “He’s a demon. Portia, you have the gift, and we need you to tell us. You know what we need to know.”
It was shocking, how suddenly her eyes rolled down to focus on his face again. “Yes.” The dark pupils expanded, consuming the brown around them until her irises were completely eclipsed. “There’s an abandoned train station next to the Amtrak station. That’s where he’ll be. But you have to get there fast.”
“Does he know we’ll be coming?”
“He made me tell him where you’d come to kill him,” she said. “Before I died. But I lied. I told him you’d kill him at your house.”
That made me cold, because she’d warned him we’d kill him in our house, and his response? Go to our house. Spit in the face of destiny.
That was just how confident our serpent was of his ultimate survival.
“Thank you,” I said, and I pressed a kiss to her forehead. “You’ve been very brave, Portia. You’re a hero.”
She smiled, just a little. “I just got murdered, that’s all. But you’ll get him for me, Holly.” The smile faded, and the darkness in her eyes grew to terrifying proportions. “Beware the dog.”
I couldn’t hold her, and I knew it. Some resurrections are like that—minutes, at best. I’d been able to manage more than a day only a handful of times—and one of them had been Andy Toland, resurrected from his Old West slumber, more than once.
But Andy, the most powerful resurrection witch who’d ever existed, had simply refused to leave that last time. And still he stayed, because of me.
