by E. A. Copen
After rolling my sleeve, I grabbed his hand and squeezed.
The Baron’s grin widened and he squeezed back, sending a surge of power crawling up my arm. It felt like the same power that engulfed me every time I stepped into a graveyard and let my shields down, only darker. Thicker. Heavier. And it burned.
I looked down at the skin of my arm, eyes widening at the sight of myself on fire, the glow lighting up The Baron’s face. I tried to jerk my hand away, but he held me fast. The flame crawled up my arm and caught my shirt, shoulders, hair, and head on fire. When I opened my mouth to scream, the flame crawled inside to burn my tongue. In desperation, I dropped to my knees, let go of the staff, and pawed at my face to try and swat the fire away, but it was no use. The flame was a living thing made of fingers and claws. It forced itself up my nostrils and into my sinuses to turn them to ash. When I closed my mouth, the fire ate away my lips and forced open my jaw to cram itself down my throat. It burned away my eyes and invaded my skull, burned through my ribcage and set my heart ablaze.
Even as the flame burned my lungs away, however, I felt them fill with icy sea water. I doubled over, coughing and gasping through a mouth I no longer had. Water spilled out onto the dirt floor, but still, I couldn’t breathe. I was burning and drowning at the same time, and still, The Baron did not release my hand.
As if that wasn’t enough, someone unseen must’ve pulled a gun and shot me in the head. I felt the bullet rip through my skull and exit on the other side, felt what remained of my muscles slacken and die, and in the split second between, felt a strange mix of regret and relief.
But I didn’t die.
The fire faded, and the weight of age settled in. I felt the strain on my bones, every injury I’d ever had flaring to life tenfold. My height shriveled. My brain addled until I forgot my own name. I lifted my other hand, which was somehow unburnt, and watched the skin wrinkle and thin until I could see the veins pumping beneath. I watched the joints swell and gnarl until my eyesight went, too and my vision became a haze of cloudy white. The loss of sight must’ve been too much. My heart seized. I grabbed at my chest as an icy stabbing pain took hold, and slumped over.
And still, I didn’t die.
In minutes, I suffered through cancerous tumors affecting every organ all at once. I vomited until I hung, dehydrated and unaware, in the Baron’s palm. I wasted away of starvation, fully aware of my stomach digesting other vital organs. My muscles grew stiff with fear, and I felt the full weight of a car slam into me.
I experienced death in every conceivable way, living through it and fully aware of my own impending doom. Yet, no matter what I felt, no matter what I watched happening to my own body, I didn’t truly die. If I could’ve thought through all the pain and misery destroying my body over and over, I might’ve wondered if it was really happening at all, or if this were some sort of sophisticated glamour. But I couldn’t think in words. My brain was overloaded by the sheer number of ways I was experiencing my own death.
All the while, power crawled into me, settling in every cell, changing something on a microscopic level. The surge of it shifting things around was all that grounded me. Even when my senses failed, I remained aware of the magic coursing through my body, mingling with the power already there. The two powers felt at war, crashing against each other until the sheer force of the impact left them threaded together as one.
I don’t know how long it took, but when I came to, I was curled in a tight ball, gasping shallow breaths, practically frozen solid. My hand was still clutching The Baron’s, though Pony knelt next to me, one hand on my shoulder. Little aftershocks of pain spread like waves through me as visible magic, lighting up the darkness like blue lightning.
“You gave him too much,” Pony whispered, shaking his head.
“I have given him only what he asked for,” The Baron said. “The power to kill gods.”
“You should have given it to him in stages, as you tried with me.”
The white skull paint on the Baron’s face twitched. “Times were not so desperate then, and you weren’t nearly as much of an ass.”
“Look who’s talking,” I wheezed out at a barely audible volume.
Finally, The Baron retracted his hand. “There, you see? He’s practically recovered already.”
I was in no shape to move, let alone pull myself together enough to face Vesta, but time was running out. The longer I laid there on the floor of a subterranean grave, the more time Vesta had to kill people who didn’t deserve it. I tried to sit up, but my muscles wouldn’t obey. So much for practically recovered.
Pony must’ve realized because he sighed, grabbed my arm and hoisted me up. The old man wouldn’t be able to carry me far like that, though. Certainly not up two flights of stairs, through a graveyard, and to a car.
The Baron frowned at the scene of Pony trying to hold me up. “That won’t do. Persephone, my dear, do come and help?” He snapped his fingers, and my reaper stepped out of the darkness.
“You’re here too?” I asked as she slung my other arm over her shoulder. My head rolled forward. Dammit, I didn’t even have enough control over my neck muscles to hold my head up. Pony grabbed a handful of hair and jerked my chin away from my chest, letting it fall back limply.
“Where else would I be?” Persephone said. “I am by your side always, Lazarus, just in case.”
Her words weren’t very comforting, especially in light of all the deaths I’d just lived through. Don’t I live in a charmed world where a sentence like that even makes sense? I scoffed inwardly. And where I’d expect comfort from a reaper.
Pony and Persephone lifted me between them and started for the stairs, pausing when The Baron swept up in front of us, the staff in his hand. He offered it via an outstretched arm. “Don’t forget this. Looks like you could use a walking stick just now.”
I tried to glare at him, but my head was stuck in such a way that I could only see him by looking down past my nose. Pretty sure I didn’t look the least bit threatening. Pony let go of me long enough to take the staff and slide it through the back of my shirt, tucking it into my pant leg. I’d have protested, but seeing as how I couldn’t use my legs, it didn’t seem to matter.
As Pony and Persephone hauled me toward the exit from the grave, I shouted back at The Baron, “I’ll be back for Lydia’s soul. I expect it in one piece.”
“Oh, I’m counting on that,” said The Baron. Dark laughter followed us all the way out of the tomb.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Persephone and Pony dragged me up and out of the tomb and into a storm. Wind whipped my hair and clothes around, and the rain came down in sheets to soak me to the bone. It felt like it froze against my skin.
They took me to another cemetery gate, taking a path that didn’t bring me close enough to Emma to check on her. I wanted to and even asked nicely, but Pony shook his head. “It’s too close to dusk. We’ve got to get you out of here.”
At the gate, I shouted for them to pause. “I need to get my shields built back up before we step beyond the gate.”
Persephone shifted my weight over her shoulder. “Hurry up. I don’t like the rain.”
How do you think I feel? I closed my eyes. The wall I’d built going down into the grave had long ago tumbled, and I hadn’t had the energy or mental capacity to build it back up since dying, but I hadn’t felt the dead pushing so hard against me either. Maybe whatever power The Baron had given me made them less interested.
I envisioned the wall of vines, painstakingly rebuilding it inch by inch. I didn’t get far before it felt like someone drove an icepick into my brain. “Ow.”
Okay, so maybe I’d skip the vines and try for the trees. I did, and the same pain blindsided me out of nowhere. Dammit, putting up mental defenses wasn’t supposed to hurt.
“What’s wrong?” Pony asked.
“Not sure.” I shook my head and tried again, but this time it hurt so bad I let out a curse.
“You can’t block out the
dead, Lazarus,” Persephone said with a frown. “Not like that. Not anymore. Life is the antithesis of death. You keep that up, you’re more likely to give yourself a stroke than to ward off random ghosts and spirits.”
I tried to turn my head but still couldn’t move. I’d always shielded myself from the random dead. They were everywhere. Without my mental shields in place, I’d see spirits at every turn, and they’d see me right back. It was enough to drive most necromancers insane, which was why I’d spent months, years even, learning to solidify those shields. If I couldn’t bring them up, I’d leave myself vulnerable.
Only if I’m completely unshielded, I thought, moving my eyes over the cemetery gate in front of me. It worked a lot like a shield, too. The walls and gates of the cemetery worked to keep ghosts and spirits in, yes, but it was also a barrier particularly nasty things couldn’t cross. Demons, for example, couldn’t step foot on the consecrated ground of a graveyard. Malevolent spirits didn’t either. I don’t have to repel the dead with life. That was just the easy way. Other options seemed less pleasant to imagine, more difficult to fathom, but I didn’t have a choice.
I closed my eyes again, and this time I let my imagination recreate the walls of the tomb I’d just left. Concrete walls reached high, reinforced by steel rebar and iron gates. For good measure, I tipped the walls with iron spikes and shut the gate tight. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than nothing.
“Okay,” I said opening my eyes and. “I’m ready.”
Persephone rolled her eyes. “About time.”
As soon as my body passed through the gate, the pain of life returned. My back ached, and my ribs felt like someone had hit me with a bus. The hole in my hand where Moses shot me burned like hell.
And Odette…gone. But that was a very different kind of pain, one I hadn’t realized I’d lost stepping into the cemetery. It weighed heavy on my heart and made my throat tight. I had to resist the urge to pull out my phone and dial her number over and over, if only to hear her voicemail message. Not that I could move well enough to hold the phone anyway.
The hearse pulled up without Pony having to do anything and Pony climbed in, pulling me with him. Persephone helped him stuff me inside, but didn’t move to get in.
“Not coming with us?” Pony asked, holding the door.
Persephone shook her head. “There are rules about reapers interfering in mortal affairs.” Her eyes slid to me, hesitating. “You occupy a special position now, Lazarus. Not only do you straddle the world of the living and the dead, but you are a bridge between other worlds, one of the few who can represent the interests of those who are neither gods nor mortals. I caution you against misrepresenting our interests.”
She’s talking about reapers, I realized. People like her, neither alive nor dead. If I screw this up, it reflects badly on her. “I’ll do my best,” I promised.
“You’d better. Or I’ll have to come for you.”
I shivered as she slammed the door shut, and it had nothing to do with the rain or the cold.
“Quite the reaper you’ve got there, boy.” Pony knocked on the partition. Once again, it slid aside only just enough to allow his voice through. “To the Hogarth house.”
“I’m in no shape to fight, Pony. I need the use of my body back.”
Pony nodded. “Not easy, coming to an understanding with death like that, eh? Well, I might be able to do something about it, but it’ll take a few minutes to work.” He rummaged around in his pockets and came up with a prescription pill bottle. The label had been torn off so that when he shook it, three round white pills were visible.
“What the hell is that?” I asked, wishing I could move my head for a better look.
“Present from a witchy apothecary friend. Not all of us are magical outlaws like yourself. Some of us still have friends in the Quarter.” He opened the bottle, stood, bracing himself against the car wall with one arm, gripping my chin with the other. Once he had a handle on his balance—a difficult thing to do in a moving car—he squeezed his fingers into my jaw, forcing me to keep my mouth open, and upended the bottle. All three pills fell into my mouth.
They tasted like soot and ash dampened by day old football player sweat. In a word, gross. Without any water to wash them down, I had no choice but to chew and swallow.
“Ugh, that is foul,” I said as Pony sat back down. “Tastes like Sybille’s work.”
“She’s never had a penchant for flavor,” Pony agreed. “Smoking two packs a day probably doesn’t help, come to think of it.”
Sybille was an old flame of Pony’s, a witch who’d once taken an interest in raising me to learn the difference between mint leaves and poison ivy by feel. That was a fun summer. Lots of oatmeal baths. In a way, I missed that old life and being part of the magical community in New Orleans, but they’d turned their back on me as soon as I entered my guilty plea. I wondered what they’d think of me now.
The hearse pulled to a stop next to an unfamiliar curb. Pony rolled down the window and took a peek outside. “Can’t get any closer,” he said, his brow wrinkled in concern. “Bunch of gangsta-looking junkers taking up all the parking.”
“That’d be Darius and his boys. They’re my backup.”
Pony gave me a worried glance. “You really are hanging out with the wrong crowd these days, Laz. We’re going to have to have a talk after this about your friends, son.”
“Just help me get out of here.”
Pony opened the door and slid my arm over his shoulder. “When’d you get so heavy?”
“Hey, man, give me a break. It isn’t my fault I’m mostly dead.”
Pony hopped out of the hearse, dragging me along with him. As soon as we were outside, we found ourselves facing down a handful of Darius’ thugs with their guns drawn. Their aim shifted to Pony. “Easy fellas, he’s with me.”
Before anyone could move, a deep bow-wow resonated through the air and Joeline muscled her way between two thugs to tackle me. Pony broke my fall, but grunted as the dog, which probably weighed more than me, stood on my chest to lick my face. “Dog,” I gasped. “Help.”
“She likes you, Magic Man.” Darius appeared and dragged Joeline back by grabbing the skull-studded collar of hers. He paused when he saw Pony crawling out from under my weight. “Who’s the old man?”
“Darius, Pony Dee. Pony, Darius. I’d get up to introduce you two, but I kinda still can’t move.”
Darius shifted the AK he had slung over his shoulder—where in the hell had he gotten an AK-47 anyway? “What’s wrong with him?” he asked Pony.
Pony found his feet and walked a few feet to collect his hat, placing it on his head. “He’ll be fine. Just give him a minute. In the meantime, mind helping an old man drag this idiot out of the road before we all get hit?”
Just as Persephone had, Darius helped Pony lift me. One arm slung over each man’s shoulder, they dragged me toward Vesta’s house and deposited me behind a purple pickup truck with gold trim. They dropped me to the pavement without ceremony.
“Okay, Magic Man, me and my boys are here and armed, as agreed, but I don’t see nobody that needs shooting. What’s the plan here?”
“Let me explain…” I tried to think of a way to put it to him simple, but nothing came to mind. “Nah, let’s summarize instead. As soon as I can move, I’m going to go find a way inside. Vesta’s got a whole private army of security goons. I need you to keep them busy while I deal with her. No guns, Darius. No bodies if we can avoid it.”
He nodded. “We can do that. I got crowbars and baseball bats in the van. We can bust some kneecaps if that’s what you want, but if her goons have guns, I ain’t gonna stop my boys from shooting back in self-defense, man.”
I hadn’t seen her security with any guns, but that didn’t mean they weren’t armed. I’d hoped to avoid a gunfight in the streets if at all possible, especially since the cops would respond as soon as someone called 9-1-1, but I couldn’t ask Darius not to shoot back. Hopefully, Emma and Moses would h
elp me smooth out any legal messes once this was all over. And if they didn’t, at least they’d be alive. I could deal with any broken promises to Darius later if it came down to it.
“Try not to,” I said. “We don’t want the police showing up to break up the party until the party’s mostly over.”
“I’ll hang back, just in case,” Pony said.
I turned my head. Hey, what do you know? Pony’s magic pills seemed to be doing their job. I hadn’t planned on having him at the mansion with me when I went in, but I could use the backup. If everything went as planned, someone would have to help Moses and Naomi out while I kept Vesta busy. Besides, Pony would be a useful source of information. He seemed to have some experience with the powers The Baron had just given me.
But I didn’t want him to become a target. He might mean well, but Pony wasn’t fast or quiet. If he went in with me, he could just as easily be a liability as an asset, so it was just as well he wasn’t planning on following me in. I’d always been better on my own anyway.
I didn’t have much more time to think about it. Dusk had come and gone. The streetlights kicked on, exposing our position to anyone who might’ve been keeping watch. They’d probably already seen the cars and gone on high alert, but now they’d see we were armed and ready to cause trouble. Good thing my plan didn’t rely on the element of surprise.
My limbs suddenly woke up, though they were all pins and needles like they’d fallen asleep. I decided it was time to risk standing and had Pony and Darius help me to my feet. I kept my back against the truck but turned my head to get a better look at the mansion. A guard stood on the porch, still as a statue, watching, waiting for us to make the first move.
They know we’re here. They’re ready for us, and they’ve got hostages. I’ve got no idea how many of them there are, or what they’re capable of. But I’ve got a big stick. I shifted the staff in my hand. And maybe some extra powers that I don’t quite know anything about. I’ve won worse fights with less.
I tried to think of any fights I’d actually won. Ever. My memory came up empty. Even in prison, I’d gotten through my sentence mostly by keeping my head down and learning how to take a punch.
