Under a Blood Moon

by Rachel Graves

  “Pushed?” I asked.

  He checked the seats, confirming that the other customers had already left before smiling at me. Suddenly the light breeze I had felt was back and stronger, then it was gone.

  “I’m pretty good at that sort of thing. It doesn’t impress chocolate buyers, but it kept the puppies in their place.”

  “You don’t sound too worried about werewolf attacks,” Danny said.

  “I’m not. I make everything you see here, which means I’m up working until one or two each morning. I keep the lights on in case someone gets a late night craving, so there really isn’t any time for a werewolf to sneak up on me. Besides, my people aren’t friendly. I’ve been in a fight or two.”

  “Around here?” I asked.

  “No, that’s why I moved. I may not be Indian but the neighborhood is accepting, more importantly it’s safe. People know each other. They sit outside in the summer and talk to you. I live upstairs. I’m invited to Diwali parties each year. This is a good place to live.”

  “Except that someone is demanding protection money, and zombies are attacking,” Danny said, dryly.

  “One zombie attack, and watch, the neighborhood will rally around Rakesh.” Indigo shook his head. “The wolves have been around, but they haven’t done anything illegal. I would have dealt with it.”

  “By calling us, right?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light.

  “Of course, by calling the police, who don’t patrol here and who haven’t been in my shop in the three years since I’ve opened.”

  Disdain dripped off his voice.

  I opened my mouth to protest, but he held up his hand to stop me.

  “I would have called you eventually, just not first. Werewolves are only dangerous in packs, and there hasn’t been one of those in years. This was probably two idiots looking to make a quick buck.”

  “Unless they’re working with zombies. Can you tell us anything about them?” Danny countered.

  “I can do better than that. I’ll email you a video of the time they were in here,” he hesitated. “Assuming, of course, that I won’t be in trouble for pushing them.”

  “Don’t even worry about it,” Danny replied with a grin. I could tell he was overjoyed to get the tape. His face fell when he looked down at the empty plate.

  “I still think you should consider heading uptown, neighborhoods aside, these chocolates shouldn’t be hidden away.”

  “Investors don’t like people who turn furry.” Indigo shook his head.

  “Is that all that’s keeping you here?” I asked. When he nodded, I went on, “I know someone who might be willing to overlook that.”

  “Thanks, bring them around. But I won’t get my hopes up, most business people really can’t see past otherworldly abilities.”

  “I don’t think he’ll have that problem,” I said with a knowing smile. I handed him my card for the email. “Thanks for the video. We’ll get in touch if anything comes up.”

  I started to leave, but Danny stopped.

  “Do you think I could get a few of these to go?” He asked, holding up the empty plate.

  ****

  By the time we got back to the station, the email was waiting for us. The images on the video were a little blurry but definitely identifiable in a court of law. The only problem was they could be anyone. There wasn’t a registry of known paranormal citizens. We were stopped again. After a brief chat with the lieutenant, we decided to switch gears and look for the zombie maker, the mysterious Madame Marie. It was only 2:30. With a little luck, we might find something for the night shift to work on.

  The phone book listed three Madame Maries, a Mary-the-Psychic, and a Maria-your-spiritual-guide. We decided to start with the psychic. Our plan was simple but exhausting. We’d go in, Danny would ask a few questions, and then I would push. The way Indigo had pushed the wolves, to see if the person had any abilities. I felt a little guilty using Indigo’s trick. It was exactly the sort of thing normal people didn’t like, the magical equivalent of picking your nose in public. At the first shop my rudeness went entirely unnoticed. The psychic couldn’t feel me, and she couldn’t answer any questions about zombies. The spiritual guide was another matter.

  “Welcome, I am Maria your guide and guardian through world’s unknown,” she began, coming out of a back room through a bead curtain. When she saw me, her heavy accent dropped.

  “What the hell are you?” she demanded with flashing eyes. Before we could answer she shouted, “Get out.”

  We left, talked it over at the car, and decided to send Danny back in alone. I might not have a ton of experience as a cop, but my social worker days meant I knew when people wouldn’t talk. Without me, he’d have a better chance of getting some information. I sat back in the squad car watching a dad and his son go by, trying to eat ice cream cones before they melted.

  My father died when I was in the fifth grade, after that Mom didn’t even like to say his name. But I remembered a few happy ice cream moments of my own: all the football games we watched together, the day he won a stuffed animal for me at the fair, and when he took me out for my favorite strawberry ice cream. I wondered if he’d known I was a death witch. I remembered being at a funeral with him, being terribly scared but unable to explain why. He didn’t demand answers. He protected me, took me someplace safe.

  When Danny got back, my trip down memory lane turned out to the best part of the stop. Maria the Spiritual Guide was a dead end. The next two Madame Maries were mild spirit witches. Neither of them guessed what I was, but neither of them had much power, either. My friend Phoebe had more power than both of them combined. Still, between driving to each shop and spending a few minutes with each person, the afternoon was slipping away from us.

  The final Madame Marie turned out to be a grandmotherly woman who worked out of her front parlor. She ushered us inside past sepia toned photographs of long dead relatives and newer snapshots of happy families. I’d never have pictures like that, not enough relatives dead or alive. The thought made me shiver a little despite the heat.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not what you’re looking for. You should come and visit besides.” She gestured toward the couch. “After all I’ve been waiting.”

  “Excuse me?” Danny asked.

  “Since this morning. I poured my tea and the leaves were quite clear. They stared up at me saying I’d get a visitor who was searching for something. I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how I could be worth searching for, and then I realized the leaves didn’t say the visitor would find it here. Still, it never hurts to ask. What are you two looking for?” She settled herself into an overstuffed Queen Anne chair. The teapot perched on a wooden side table. I wondered what the tea leaves would say to me.

  Danny shrugged his shoulders and looked at me. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I decided to trust her.

  “We’re looking for someone who can raise zombies.”

  “Oh. My.” She pursued her lips together for a minute. I felt something. If Indigo was like a wind, she was like a breeze, soft and barely noticeable. “I suppose you mean someone other than yourself.”

  I nodded.

  “What else do you know?” she asked.

  “She goes by the name ‘Madame Marie’ and is willing to hurt people,” I offered, knowing it wasn’t much.

  “Hmmm, you know the other day I was picking up some High John the Conqueror root, and the shop owner was talking to someone about an open apartment. She felt ugly. The way people who work with death do, you know.” She glanced at me. “Present company excluded of course, you don’t feel all that ugly, my dear. Now what was that name….”

  Danny and I exchanged looks. Being part of the SIU you get used to strange things, but a grandmother who was also conjuring things up in the kitchen was new to both of us.

  “I remember, like the old TV show, Laverne and Shirley. The woman’s name was Laverne.”

  “Laverne?” I repeated.

  “Or somethin
g close to that. Anyway the shop owner was telling her about an open apartment in, well, in the darker side of town. She was saying it was perfect, and he wrote down the address. I was at the cash register by then.”

  “You didn’t happen to glance at that address did you?” Danny asked politely.

  “No, I am telling you this story for my health,” she snapped. “Of course I did. Fetch me that pen and paper over there.”

  Danny followed her finger to a pad of pink paper. She placed the pen in her left hand and settled it on top of the paper. Her hand began to move erratically, making circles and whirls. She didn’t look at the paper, just back at us. “Now I don’t remember it completely in my right mind, but thankfully my other mind remembers things much better these days.”

  The last part cinched it for me. The woman was crazy, gifted maybe, but still crazy. I felt the small breeze again. Looking down I could see the circles and whirls had stopped. Her left hand was now writing in the prettiest Edwardian script I had seen outside of a calligraphy shop. She still hadn’t looked down at the paper, but the writing went on, finishing the address. The pen stopped abruptly.

  “There you are.” She grabbed the paper, looked at it once, then folded it in half and handed it to Danny. “I’ll see you two out.”

  I offered a weak goodbye and watched Danny do the same. I heard about the automatic writing trick in college. I’d never seen it from someone who was really doing it. Danny must have been equally stunned. We didn’t say a word to each other on the drive to the address on the paper.

  I should have realized where we were going before we left her house, even her comment about the dark side of town didn’t make it clear to me. When we got there, two blocks away from Indigo’s chocolate shop, around the corner from the QuickStop, I almost smacked myself for being naive. She hadn’t meant dark as in evil, but dark as in a very old fashioned and unattractive word for people who weren’t Caucasian. I took a minute to revise my mental image of Madame Marie, from grandmotherly crackpot to bigoted grandmotherly crackpot. Danny read my disgust on my face.

  “It’s not her fault. It’s the times she was raised in. My grandmother says things about the British that would peel paint. That generation, they didn’t think it was hurtful.” Danny pointed to a doorway and we went inside.

  The building had been a town home once, now it was five apartments with an extra one set aside for a manager. It was clean and in good repair but old. The people who lived here cared about appearances but didn’t have money to spend on matching wall fixtures or things like elevators. We followed the stairs to the third floor and knocked on the door.

  “Who is that knocking on my door? Who needs my wisdom?” the voice from my answering machine called out. Danny motioned for me to stand to the side of the door.

  “My name is Gallagher. I’m having a problem at work. I was hoping you could help me,” he called through the door.

  “Of course. You come right in, and bring your lady friend too.” She opened the door wide to us, and the smell hit me. Death, decay, rotting flesh, we have so many words to describe that smell, and none of them do it justice. I almost gagged. We walked down a short hallway into a barely furnished room cloaked in incense. The smell of sage didn’t even make a dent in the reek. I wondered how she could stand it.

  The woman had turned her back on us. She walked in grandly and then turned to sit in an easy chair like a throne. She was old, with skin so dark it looked blue-black, and long white hair that argued for a mixed heritage. One of her eyes was covered with a cataract, turning it a murky white. She wore cornrows by the side of her face, with charms and bones mixed into the braids. She started to say something to Danny but then her eyes, that one murky white eye and the other wet looking brown one, fell on me.

  “You,” her voice was a hiss, the accent all but gone. “You destroy my zombie, then you come to my home? What kind of a fool woman are you? And who led you here?” Her voice rose up to a screech. Suddenly the air was foul. I was choking on it, suffocating in a room full of air. I fell to the floor on my knees, the room shrinking around me.

  “Stop.” Danny’s voice cut across my panic. The sight of his gun, drawn and pointed at the old woman, brought some air to my lungs. Even that foul stink felt sweet, I drew in a shaky breath and called to my own power at the same time.

  “Who do you think you are to order me?” She stood and gestured with her hand toward the carpet. Something was coming toward us. At first, I thought it was a rat, but the tail was too thick. My vision cleared as more air reached my lungs. There were several of the things now, running toward us. Danny shot the first one and before it exploded into bits, I realized it was a severed hand. They were all severed human hands running across the floor on their fingers.

  I heard the old woman cackle as Danny fired again. At least five hands now, coming toward us. Danny shouted at her to call them off, but something caught me, something more important. The smell, that terrible smell, had gotten worse. It was coming from behind me. I turned around to see a very dead woman stumbling toward me. One of the hands reached Danny and began climbing slowly up his leg. He was trying to pull it off his pants. He didn’t see the greater danger.

  The power washed over me like water. Fear or some hidden anger triggered it, and the part of me that was me, the part that liked strawberry ice cream and sleeping late on Saturdays, was gone. The part that remained was all death witch, and she was angry. I looked at the hands and they stopped. The one on Danny’s leg dangled absurdly. I concentrated my hate on it: it withered, decayed, and crumbled. I turned to the next one, rage making me calm. Danny was saying something, calling my name. I could barely hear him from where I was in my head.

  “The zombie!” Danny said.

  I turned toward it. The thing stopped and shuffled its weight back and forth. I reached out with my power, filling the room and then the building. The woman who had made it was gone. Whatever she had done to bring the zombie back, I was stronger. But I hadn’t given the zombie any direction, it just stopped, waiting. The woman the zombie had been was pretty, with short brown hair. She died in a car accident. I felt the knowledge in my mind. I wanted the hands to stop and they had. I hadn’t needed to speak the word or command them. Now I looked at the zombie and knew its history. The power running beneath my skin felt unnerving. The zombie’s flesh had started to rot away. I wondered how she looked whole, and her face began to heal.

  “Kill it!” Danny shouted. “Don’t fix it Mors, kill it!”

  He said the words, and I made it happen. The body fell to the floor, animated no more. My power begin to leak away. Then someone turned the world back on. Sirens blared from the street, noises filtered into my world. My senses came back slowly. I saw a pair of shocked uniform cops standing in the hall. I was lucky enough to pass out before I could smell again.

  Chapter Three

  I came to in the back of an ambulance. There was an IV in my arm, and an EMT standing over me. I hoped it wasn’t the same one I had yelled at during the last zombie attack. The ambulance smelled like plastic, and then I realized I was getting oxygen through a plastic hose.

  “How long?” My voice surprised me. The words were raspy and hard.

  “A few minutes. We gave you enough sugar, but your blood oxygen levels were pretty low, like a choking victim low. We’re going to keep you here until they get back up.”

  “Investigation?”

  “If you’re stupid enough to want to go back to work, detective, I can’t stop you.” Her face showed she didn’t approve. I ignored it and closed my eyes, trying to remember everything that had happened inside. It was hard to recall, like something that had happened when I was drunk. I suppose in a way I had been drunk, drunk on power. Still, I needed to understand what had happened, and I couldn’t do that if I couldn’t remember. I spent a good twenty minutes reconstructing the details in my head.

  Danny stuck his head into the back of the ambulance. I looked at the EMT expectantly, and she began u
nhooking me without a word. Her lips pressed into a thin line. I could tell she was desperate to chastise me. Finally she let a short “be careful” slip out. It must have felt good.

  “What did I miss?” I rolled my sleeve down over the Band-Aid that covered my IV wound.

  “Madame Marie is gone. She left while we were playing with her pets. The apartment is filled with voodoo paraphernalia.” Danny shook his head, the way he said paraphernalia I knew he wanted to say crap. It made me look around him, and sure enough, there were news cameras.

  “When did they get here?” I tried to keep my gesture discreet.

  “About 10 minutes ago, someone tipped them off. The line is recorded, and if we’re lucky, they got a number for the guy who called. Of course right now, I’m feeling pretty lucky to be alive.” It was the closest Danny would come to saying thank you. I wanted to tell him you’re welcome, but I couldn’t think how. We were awkward for a moment, the way men and women are when they’re close but not involved. I started to say something but was interrupted by the feeling of wind across my skin. Indigo stood in the crowd behind the police tape. We went over to him together.

  “Next time you want more chocolate just come buy some, you don’t have to go to this trouble.” He handed me a box wrapped with a light blue bow. I opened the lid and bit into a chocolate caramel crème. I finally said thank you with my mouth full.

  “Don’t mention it, the neighborhood needs you.” He turned to Danny. “This building? A week ago there were three open apartments, today they’re all full. You might want to see who the other two people are. It could be coincidence, but…”

  “Thanks for the tip.” Danny smiled at him. He snatched a candy from the box. “And the candy, which I know is technically medicinal so I’m only taking one.”

  We all laughed together at the idea that he would stop. I was happy to share. Whatever they had pumped into my veins had taken care of the usual desperate hunger that came after I used my abilities.

  Someone called us into the building. Actually they called for SIU, not us specifically. It was nice to be anonymous. Inside, the apartment had been covered with crime scene tape. We came down the long hallway. I glanced inside the first room. A pale-looking photographer was photographing the hands. I wanted to tell him they looked a lot worse a minute ago, but Danny’s voice called me into the second room.