Casting Shadows
Page 20
It would take a long time, but New Orleans would recover. It’d worked, our little gamble.
I congratulated myself until I remembered Odin’s warning. Somehow, we won the battle, but there was still a war to fight, one I was going to have to sit out now that I was dead. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right, but that was the price of victory it seemed.
Remy stopped outside a palm reading and tarot shop on a corner and hugged herself.
Detective Drake, who’d been coordinating some of the relief efforts nearby, lowered his radio and went to put a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to go in there, miss. You should let someone go in to clean up the scene first. It’s not easy to look at.”
Remy’s chin quivered. “He was my friend, Detective. My oldest and dearest friend.”
Drake nodded and stepped back.
I followed Remy inside and quickly wished I hadn’t. Whatever Foxglove had done, he’d died fighting. That much was evident. The broken pieces of the man that had been my Knight, Remy’s protector, and a friend to us both when we needed it most, told the story of a fighter too stubborn to die easy. Judging by the stains on the wall, Mask thought he’d won several times and walked away only to have Foxglove get back up, spit blood and say, “Is that the best you’ve got?” That’d be just like him.
Finn stopped in the doorway, waiting.
Remy knelt next to his head and moved bloody strands of hair away from his face. “We should bury him in Faerie. He was a Knight, after all, a true Knight, Finn. Like in the stories.”
“He was,” Finn agreed.
She turned to look at him. A tear fell when she blinked. “What is it?”
Finn sighed. “I just overheard something on the radio. Remy, there’s no easy way to put this. It was your dad. They said… They said he did it to himself. That it was the price of finishing the seal.”
She turned away again. “I see.”
Finn came and put a hand on her shoulder. “New Orleans is safe because of them. Because of them, we have the stones back and stand a chance of liberating all of Faerie.”
Remy pushed her tears away. “Where is he?”
Drake put them all in a Humvee. At the last second, Nate rushed over and talked with Drake before getting in too. The Humvee took them to the station where they’d taken my body and laid it out on one of those uncomfortable cots. The weird thing was, someone had jabbed an IV in my arm and was working on getting a bunch of other equipment set up. Why bother with all that for a dead man?
Nate pushed everyone out of the way and ran to my side, peeling my eyelids up and shining a flashlight into my eyes.
“I already examined him,” said the doctor that had been working on me. “No pupil response. No pain response. He’s in a vegetative state. This man is barely breathing.”
I blinked. Breathing? Hold the phone. I thought Louisa the pencil pusher said I was dead?
“You are, in a manner of speaking.”
I spun around.
Baron Samedi pulled a cigar from between his lips, puffed a perfect O into the air and leaned on his cane…which was now a shovel. He grinned at me with his perfect white teeth. “Just imagine my surprise when I got the call from human resources telling me about an escapee, and that escapee is you.” He gestured to me with the cigar.
I waved the smoke away, even though I couldn’t smell it. “Cut the crap, Samedi. I’m obviously not dead. Look, I’ve got a heartbeat, blood pressure…”
“Sure, if you want to call that alive.” He shrugged.
I turned back around and studied my prone body with a sigh. “What’s happening to me? How am I even alive if I removed my soul? Wasn’t it consumed in the spell?”
“The first law of magic is the same as the first law of thermodynamics, my friend. In a closed system such as the transfer of power from one object to another, nothing is ever truly destroyed. Just...changed. But without a soul, this is all the life you can hope for. It’s a shame too. I was actually starting to like you.”
“I was quitting.” I gave Samedi a skeptical look. “So you’re telling me my soul is still out there. What if I get it and put it back in my body? Can I come back from this?”
Samedi put the head of his shovel against his shoulder. “If you do it in time. I don’t have to dig your grave for another six days, and as long as I don’t dig, you live. Between you and me, Lazarus, I would prefer not to dig. My life will be easier if you come back and name your own replacement.”
The situation wasn’t ideal, but it was far from hopeless. All I had to do was find my soul, give it a little spit-shine, and somehow get it back in my body before the seventh day. It wouldn’t be easy, especially since I couldn’t interact with the physical world, but it was more than I’d had a minute ago.
Samedi tipped his hat, turned his back, and started to walk away.
“Hey,” I called after him, “where should I start looking?”
He removed his hat and waved it at me, singing “Somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight.”
That bastard was going to be about as helpful as usual, which meant not at all. I was completely on my own. Not even Emma could help me with this one.
I sighed and floated up a floor to stare at the map of New Orleans we’d left on the projector. “Well, I’d better get started.”
TO BE CONTINUED…
Author Notes
First, let’s get the thanks out of the way. It’s always awesome when readers stick around for these little tidbits of extra information I’ve started putting in the back of the books. I never know if anyone reads these, but since I’ve always liked reading author notes, I thought I’d start putting them in.
Here’s the most fun part of the book where we get to sit down and have a chat about how this particular book came to be. If you’ve made it this far, I’m going to hope you don’t want to murder me for the ending. It’s not really a true cliffhanger since the story is resolved, but it’s as close as I’m willing to go. This is the first book in my ending trilogy for the series, and as I teased on Facebook, things have to get worse before they can get better for our heroes.
Speaking of heroes, this one features a character who owes his entire existence to a song: Ulmir, the dwarf. There are actually quite a few characters in this series who were named after songs (Lazarus, Milly, and Khaleda), but Ulmir is the first who wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t fallen into a random YouTube hole while totally not procrastinating (cough).
Ever since founding the Court of Miracles, I’ve been wanting to showcase some of the more ragtag members of the court. I knew I wanted one to play a major role in this book, but I hadn’t settled on who until I stumbled on Windrose’s cover of Diggy Diggy Hole. As someone whose favorite procrastination—I mean relaxation tool is Minecraft, I already knew about the Yogscast song and the animation, but the metal cover really got the gears turning in my head. I knew immediately that I needed to round this book out with a proper dwarf, and Diggy Diggy Hole became Ulmir’s theme song throughout as I worked.
If you’re ever interested, I do make playlists for most of the books I work on. You can find the unofficial playlist for Casting Shadows here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD24kY13J3GWUPnSqXQVdseHm-L8PCfmH
By the time you’re finished listening to the epic playlist that helped me write this book, I’ll likely already be hard at work on LOST SOUL, the next Lazarus book (out October 8th, 2019). In the meantime, keep an eye out for some other books in the Laz’verse and the Hellbent Halo series.
Until then, keep being your awesome badass selves.
~E.A.
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Books by E.A. Copen
The Lazarus Codex:
Death Wish (free prequel/mailing list magnet)
Death Rites
Organ Grind
Shallow Grave
Knight Shift
Death Match
Death’s Door
Night Terror
Dark Revel
Dark Horse
Casting Shadows
Hellbent Halo:
Fractured Souls
Smoke & Mirrors
Devil’s Due
Standalone novel in the Lazarus Codex universe:
Master of Shadows
The Judah Black Novels:
Guilty by Association
Blood Debt
Chasing Ghosts
Playing with Fire
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Beasts of Babylon
Broken Empire: Aftermath
Kiss of Vengeance
Cold Spell
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