Strange Brew

by P. N. Elrod

  I tightened my grip on the cleaver and swallowed hard. As I took a step toward him, Donal looked up at me. I knew he could take me apart.

  And I knew he was done fighting.

  Andy turned toward me, and our gazes met again.

  He’d taken two steps toward me when Lottie’s poison took hold. Andy’s fearsome strength of will might be able to deny bullet wounds, but this was different. Very different.

  His legs folded, and he fell to his side, panting. His pupils grew huge, no longer silver but black, black as the death that was coming for him.

  “Next time,” he whispered. “You watch yourself, Holly Anne.”

  I dropped to my knees beside him and put my hand on his forehead as he began to convulse.

  I tasted poison on his lips, and I wondered in a black, desolate fury if it would be enough to finish me. It wasn’t.

  The universe wasn’t quite that merciful.

  “MISS CALDWELL,” DETECTIVE Prieto said. I raised my head slowly, every muscle aching and hot. Part of it was Lottie’s poisonous mixture; the other part was a collection of injuries I hadn’t realized I’d accumulated until the heat of battle was past. I was back in the hospital. They’d taken Donal away in a steel prison truck, howling for his dead brother. They’d taken Andy away in a coroner’s wagon, along with Sam. I’d screamed about the two of them riding together, but the cops thought I was out of my mind.

  Maybe I was.

  I looked at Detective Prieto wearily, too exhausted to care about the pity in his eyes. “Did you find her?”

  “We did,” he said. “She was drugged. Chained up in a room underneath Sam Twist’s house.”

  I nodded. “And the others?”

  He just looked at me. Sam hadn’t needed the others, of course. He’d needed only Lottie to keep Donal alive.

  Perversely, Lottie still lived, like the cockroach surviving nuclear winter. And so did Donal, for all the good it did him.

  “You okay?” Prieto asked. It was my turn to stare, and he turned away from what he saw in my expression. “Lottie’s down the hall, I hear. They say she’ll make a full recovery.”

  With that, he pushed open the door to the grim little hospital room and left. It hurt too much to stand up, but I did it anyway, and shuffled to follow.

  Prieto was getting into the elevator when I emerged, but he caught my eye and jerked his chin down the hall. “Four down,” he said.

  The doors shut.

  Carlotta was a lovely woman with the soul of a pig. I’d always known that, but I’d never really known.

  I’d never seen the depths. Now I couldn’t get out of them. Not without climbing over someone else.

  She’d do.

  Carlotta was asleep. She looked older than I remembered, with black hair threaded with silver and lines on her face. Could have been someone’s mother, someone’s grandmother. Asleep, you couldn’t see the real person.

  Her eyes opened when I dragged a chair up next to her bed—brown, as confused as any soul dragged back from the dark. Except she’d been drugged, not dead, and the softness cleared from her in seconds.

  “Holly.” She nearly spat my name. “I should have known he’d spare you. Sam always liked you.”

  I didn’t answer her. Somewhere, in the coldest part of me, I was seeing the agony of Andy’s last moments, and I was realizing how much Lottie would have enjoyed it.

  “The others?”

  “Dead,” I said. My voice sounded soft and distant. “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Bringing back the dead and fighting them like dogs. For money.”

  Lottie’s bitter brown eyes narrowed. “Don’t you judge me, you little bitch. We all bring them back for profit.” She smiled slowly. “I’m just creative.”

  The room looked red for a few seconds, and I had trouble controlling my breathing. My hands ached, and realized I’d clenched them into tight, shaking fists.

  “Creative,” I repeated. “Why’d you ask Prieto for Andy?”

  “I knew somebody was stalking us,” she said. “If anybody could stop it, Toland would have been the one. Besides—” She was still smiling, and it had a sharp, cutting edge to it. “—he’d have made me a lot of money, after. A lot of money.”

  I shuddered. It was hard to stay in the chair. Hard not to put my hands around her throat and squeeze.

  “You’re done,” I said. “I’m going to make it my personal mission to see you’re finished.”

  “How?” Lottie’s laugh broke on the air like ice. “You’re a stupid girl. I’m the victim. You counting on the Review Board? Better not. With so many resurrection witches gone, they might give me a fine, but they need me. Now more than ever.”

  She was probably right, at that. Resurrection witches were a rare breed, and she and I were the only ones left working in the city. The Review Board would blame Sam. Lottie would get away with a slap on the wrist.

  Lottie would do it again, and I wouldn’t be able to stop her. The police wouldn’t act. The dead didn’t have legal rights.

  I stood up. Lottie’s dark gaze followed me as I crossed to the door. There was a thumb-lock on the inside, and I flipped it over.

  Lottie laughed. “You going to kill me, Holly? You going to spend your life in prison over dead men?”

  “No,” I said. “Funny thing about comas, Lottie. You can slip back into them without warning. It’s really tragic.”

  A flash of something in her eyes that might have been fear. Her hand reached for the call button.

  I got there first.

  I held her down. She struggled, and snarled, but when my lips touched hers, it was all over.

  I was the best resurrection witch in Austin. One thing about being able to give life to the dead . . . you can take it from the living. It’s forbidden, but it can be done.

  I didn’t take all her life. Just enough.

  Just enough to leave her wandering in the dark, screaming, trapped inside her own head. Her body would live, mute and unresponsive, for as long as modern science could maintain it, but Lottie Flores would never, ever bring back the dead again.

  Not even herself.

  ______

  ANDY WAS IN the morgue downstairs, and I had to see him. What I’d done to Lottie had hurt me in ways that might never be right again, but somehow seeing his face, even in death, would give me peace.

  He was so lovely. And he was at peace, the way I knew he should be.

  I kissed him lightly. I didn’t have any potion, and I put no spell behind it; it was just a kiss, just the brush of lips.

  But the emotion behind it—darkness and passion and need, so much need, it seemed to bleed silver from my pores.

  Magic.

  I felt him reaching for me, in the dark, and I couldn’t help but respond. It wasn’t my own doing. I wasn’t this strong.

  I felt the connection snap clean between us, silver and hot, vibrating like a plucked string.

  His eyes opened, and he smiled.

  “You came back,” I murmured.

  “ ’Course I did, Holly,” he said. “I’ll always come for you.”

  “I didn’t—there’s no potion—”

  “Don’t need it,” Andy said. He stirred, and the sheet across his bare chest slipped down, revealing raw bullet holes that were, before my eyes, sealing themselves closed. “Got myself some skills, you know. More than most.”

  I kissed him again, tasting potions and poisons and my own tears. “How long can you stay?” I asked.

  He smiled. “Long as you want me.”

  Forever.

  Rachel Caine is the author of the popular Weather Warden series, with the most recent book, Gale Force, released in August 2008. She also writes the New York Times best selling young adult Morganville Vampires series; the fifth installment, Lord of Misrule, was released in January 2009, with Carpe Corpus following in June 2009. She has another series, Outcast Season, starting in January 2009 with the novel Undone.
In addition, Rachel has written paranormal romantic suspense for Silhouette, including Devil’s Bargain, Devil’s Due, and Athena Force: Line of Sight (which won a 2007 Romantic Times BOOKreviews Reviewer’s Choice award). Visit her Web site: www.rachelcaine.com. Myspace: www.myspace.com/rachelcaine.

  VEGAS ODDS

  KAREN CHANCE

  THE POUNDING BEGAN at 2:11 A.M. and continued until I hauled my weary ass out of bed. My hand fumbled awkwardly around the nightstand until it finally closed over my gun. I was fuzzy from lack of sleep, but I never left my weapon behind these days. Besides, I was going to need it to shoot whoever was banging on the damn door.

  I threw on a robe and stomped downstairs, only to be almost smothered by the huge bouquet of hot house extravagance that was waiting on the front stoop. “D-delivery?” someone said, about the time I realized that the forest of roses had legs.

  “Do you know what time it is?!”

  “Uh, a little after nine?” a man’s voice said. I belatedly noticed the sunlight cascading over my nonwelcome mat. It was a gift from a sarcastic werewolf and read, MY BITE ACTUALLY IS WORSE THAN MY BARK. I’d never been sure if he meant his or mine.

  Dammit; my clock must have stopped. And with my schedule these days, my body was so confused that it hadn’t woken me up, either. “Hey,” I croaked, like I wasn’t still holding a gun on him.

  I quickly lowered it, trying to remember how to smile. It didn’t seem to help. The overabundant foliage was shaking enough to send a cascade of petals over my doorstep, and a glimpse in the hall boy mirror explained why. My long brown hair was a tangled mess, my eyes were so bloodshot that it was impossible to tell they were gray, and weeks of almost no sleep and constant menace had reduced my smile to something closer to a snarl.

  But the delivery guy refused to be deterred by irate, possibly crazed homeowners. “Ms. Accalia de Croissets?” Surprisingly, he didn’t mangle the pronunciation of my name.

  “Lia,” I corrected automatically, reaching to the hall boy for my purse and a tip. I wondered what the right percentage was after pulling a gun on someone. My purse slipped out of my sleep-clumsy grasp and I bent to pick it up—and thereby dodged the spell that tore through my foyer and into my living room.

  I had a glimpse of drywall bits cascading over the carpet as the partition between rooms was obliterated; then my gun was up and I was firing. It shredded roses but did nothing to the mage posing as a delivery guy. He had shields, a fact I realized about the time one of my own bullets hit them and ricocheted off, grazing my cheek. So I turned the hall boy over on top of him and ran, cursing my stupidity.

  My new job was training recruits to the War Mage Corps, the magical equivalent of the police. Most of my students started out painfully naïve, yet even they wouldn’t have answered the door woozy and only half-armed. I’ll probably end up an axiom, I thought. “Give a demon an edge, and he’ll slit your throat with it.” “It’s amazing how many things a stake through the heart can kill.” And “Don’t do a Lia; keep your damn weapons with you!” Only mine were on the floor of my bathroom, where I’d dropped them last night before taking a shower.

  I could hear the mage thrashing through the mess behind me as I hurled myself at the stairs. I was halfway up when a burst of energy crackled overhead, electrifying my body and making my hair stand on end. The steps in front of me disappeared in a roar of heat and noise.

  A splinter the size of a knife stabbed me in the calf as I fell, one leg in the smoking hole, one slipping to the side to wedge itself between banisters. I didn’t try to pull free—there wasn’t time—just muttered a spell that sent the contents of a bookcase flying down at the mage. Pages fluttered like bird’s wings as they soared past my head and slammed into my attacker. They didn’t get through his shields, but a few of the larger ones staggered him, and the wildly flapping pages made it impossible for him to see. It bought me a few seconds to rip my bleeding leg free of the hole and hobble the rest of the way up.

  The damn splinter had done something nasty to my knee, which was screaming in protest and gave out entirely by the time my foot touched the top step. I dropped to the floor and a spell shimmered and blurred the air overhead. It passed close enough to ruffle my hair on its way to destroy the now-empty bookcase.

  Tiny splinters peppered my legs through the thin cotton of my pj’s as I threw an impediment spell behind me and started fast-crawling down the corridor. I’d made it a couple of yards before I realized there were no sounds of pursuit. I glanced over my shoulder—because no way had a small diversion like that stopped a war mage—and therefore failed to see the floor in front of me vanish.

  The deafening sound of the explosion whipped my head around in time for me to shrink back from the bullets spraying upward through the hole. They ricocheted everywhere in the small space, but I managed to raise my shields before any of them connected. I’d hoped to put that off a little—shields eat power like candy, and my reserves were already low. But my weapons wouldn’t do me any good if I didn’t live long enough to reach them.

  My ears were ringing as I started edging around the gap, trying to balance on the two feet of burnt carpet that remained, when another spell took out even that. The blast was a direct hit, and despite my shields, it was like a punch to the face—stunning, dizzying, knocking my head backwards. I fell a story to land hard on my dining room table, along with a ton of plaster, a couple of ceiling joists and my brand-new chandelier.

  The impact knocked the air out of me, which is the only reason I didn’t scream. My knee had caught the edge of the table, and of course, it was that knee on that leg and oh my God. Something in the joint thwanged before the pain hit me broadside and the world went weirdly bright for a second.

  My slide off the table was more of a fall, my injured leg softening under me. I tried to put some steel into it, to straighten up and find my balance, but the best I could do was a drunken stagger as the room spun around me. I teetered, turned shakily, and barely recoiled in time to avoid the folding door from the hall. It came spinning past my head to crash against the far wall in an explosion of slats.

  Imminent death is an excellent cure for dizziness. I threw myself at the kitchen door, planning to make for the back steps and a judicious retreat. But I collided with a fireball spell instead. It bounced off my shields and burst against the kitchen table, flooding the air with the acrid smell of not-found-in-nature materials on fire.

  I belatedly realized there was a second assassin in the laundry room. And yet another figure was silhouetted against the frosted glass of the back door, working to get past the wards. So I had at least three dark mages after me, and I still didn’t have any weapons.

  Well, shit.

  The long-standing hostility in the supernatural community between the Silver Circle of light magic users—of which the Corps forms a part—and the Black Circle of dark mages had recently escalated into all-out war. As a result, new recruits to the Corps were being housed at HQ until they acquired enough skills to maybe not get themselves killed. But there wasn’t room for everyone, and old hands like me were expected to fend for ourselves. Which I’m going to start doing any minute now, I thought, hitting linoleum as the back door blew in.

  I looked up to see a werewolf in the doorway holding a couple of fast-food bags. “What the—!” he began, but suddenly the air was full of french fries and gunfire, and the newcomer dived for the floor. I scrambled to reach him, my brain screaming, Get in front of him, get in front of him, don’t let them kill him! even as he was pulling me backwards into the dubious safe zone between the pantry and the fridge.

  “Get down!” I yelled, but the latest spell missed us and hit the ceiling instead, dropping beams and plaster as well as a flood from a waterline. It didn’t manage to put out the fire, but it did leave my bathtub teetering on the edge of the abyss.

  “Is this a bad time?” Cyrus asked. My boyfriend had plaster in his dark hair and dusting his motorcycle jacket, but his Glock was in his hand and his bro
wn eyes were calm. In fact, he looked more composed than me.

  “I don’t remember us having a date,” I said, dropping my shields for an instant to send a spell at the laundry room door. It exploded inward, and I heard someone yelp. I grinned viciously.

  “It’s Valentine’s Day.”

  “I hate holidays. Crap always happens to me on holidays.” I peered out the window and saw what I’d expected: two shadows fell across the pebbly dirt that passed for a lawn in Vegas, although there was nothing to cast them. Mages under cloaking spells, just waiting for their buddies to flush me out into the open. So not happening, assholes.

  Cyrus dragged me under the burning table to avoid a spell from mage number one. He’d taken up a position just outside the dining room door, giving him a good angle on the pantry. “What’s going on?” he demanded.

  “Delivery guy was an assassin.”

  “And you fell for that?” He emptied a clip into the mage’s shields, forcing him to draw back slightly to conserve power.

  “I thought the flowers were from you! I should have known better.”

  “Are you hinting that I’m unromantic?” He fished a backup 9 mm out of his jacket.

  “The guys trying to kill me send more flowers than you do.”

  “I never really pictured you as the flowers-and-candy type.”

  The bathtub ended the discussion by taking that moment to kamikaze the kitchen table. The scorched Formica splintered, catching almost none of the tub’s momentum before it slammed into my shields, popping them like an overstretched balloon. I had a momentary heart-clench of “Cyrus!” the taste of bile and gunpowder thick in my mouth. But he was okay. Somehow, we both were.

  I realized that my shields had lasted for a split second after impact, enough time for him to get a grip on the slick bottom of the tub, keeping it from cracking our heads. That was lucky for more than one reason. A hail of bullets from above and a spell from the side were both deflected by our porcelain-and-steel umbrella.