Death Rites

by E. A. Copen

  Maybe it was because of that the connection was so weak. I could feel it there, the buzzing excitement, the worry, the rush of adrenaline and fear. Something forbidden. That was part of the draw initially, but now it had grown stale. The excitement she’d felt initially on stage was now just part of her routine, and while she liked the attention, liked being noticed and wanted, she couldn’t help but believe there was more to life than the nameless faces in the crowd. What was the point of putting all that makeup on if no one was going to touch her?

  I opened my eyes and placed the tube of lipstick aside. While I could glean some information from it, the connection was superficial and fading. She associated the lipstick with work, which seemed to have a longing sadness attached to it that would make establishing a strong connection more difficult. Happy memories and hopeful things were always best when trying to speak to the dead.

  The t-shirt was a faded red, brighter in color than the lipstick but well-worn from many uses. The logo on the front depicted the Colosseum in Rome in white ink. Written in cursive lettering above the Colosseum was the phrase: St. Mary’s Senior Trip. Flipping it over to the back, I found a listing of names printed. Some signatures floated around the box of names along with hearts, peace signs, and some squiggles.

  Brandi had been too old to be in high school by several years, so this shirt must’ve been a keepsake she held onto for a reason. Something personal of significance. Perfect, as long as the memories associated were happy ones. Holding the shirt in my right hand, I reached for those memories. Images flashed behind my eyes at rapid speed, too fast for me to take in.

  A view out a tiny airplane window. Nausea rising in tandem with the plane’s altitude. Lights and buildings fell away, and the Earth itself seemed to shrink, the mighty Mississippi reduced to a slimy, brown worm crawling through squares of land. Brown poured into an endless puddle of sparkling blue, mud and silt being cleansed by the touch of water. Fingers intertwined. Her nails digging into Brandi’s palm.

  New image. A swimming pool. Embarrassment. Awkwardness. Everyone in the pool was supposed to be a female friend, but that wasn’t right. One girl, short dark hair, wiry against skin the color of warm coffee. She wore a bright red bikini and somehow, despite being in the water tossing a striped beach ball around, her lipstick was flawless. A name came associated with the memory, one I held onto: April.

  Another scene. After the pool, Brandi had shrugged on the red senior trip shirt over her one-piece bathing suit and walked back to her room. Her arms were cold, but the rest of her was hot, warmed by April who had her pressed against the wall, her fingernails scratching against Brandi’s palms again. Lips locked. Confusion. Hunger. Relief. But after, guilt and more confusion.

  A phase. The phrase drifted in the air around the scene, as strong as the emotions that surrounded the moment, which was clearly important. A sin. You’ll grow out of it. Shame.

  I opened my eyes, ending the vision. The t-shirt sat, wadded in my fists and stretched thin. The mix of emotion and images I’d just gotten from Brandi felt overwhelmingly heavy. As far as I could tell, it had nothing to do with the case, which made me feel even worse about having glimpsed the private moment. It was an important part of who Brandi Lavelle had been, however, which meant the shirt would be perfect for what I wanted. I looked down at it, suddenly feeling guilty over having to destroy the shirt. Strong memories were associated with it, good memories, despite all the other confusion and feelings of loss. Overall, the vibe I’d gotten from the memory of her trip to Rome had been positive, and it was always difficult to destroy positive memories.

  If it led me to her killer, though, it’d be worth it.

  I took the chalk and drew a simple summoning circle with five smaller intersecting circles. Inside those circles I placed my candles, putting Brandi’s t-shirt in the center. That done, I went to my kitchen and dug out some of the leftover Chinese takeout Odette and I had ordered in the night before. Fun fact about spirits. Like men and dogs, they’re more likely to show up and hang out if you offer to feed them.

  I stepped into the circle myself, barefoot, placed the takeout container, lid open, next to the shirt, and flicked open my pocket knife to draw the blade across my thumb. The tiniest line of blood beaded on the surface of my skin. I pressed it against the chalk circle line and closed the circle. The magic sprang up around me, sealing me inside until I released the magic. I walked around the circle with my Zippo lighter, holding it to the candle wicks and lighting them as I mumbled the familiar incantation in Latin.

  For the record, aside from when I’m doing an incantation, I don’t speak a word of Latin. Pony had tried to teach me while I was his apprentice, but I’ve never been much good with languages. I’d memorized the basic incantations and their variations, but never really bothered to learn most translations.

  After lighting the candles, the interior of the circle became hotter. Sweat trickled down between my shoulder blades and over my forehead. I wiped it away, careful not to let it hit the ground. With the lighter in hand, I squatted in front of the shirt and held the flame to it until it lit up.

  “Brandi Lavelle,” I said and stood, switching back to English to complete the less delicate parts of the spell. I held my hands over the smoke rising from the t-shirt. “I summon thee forth. I command you to commune with me in the realm of the living.”

  The flames surged higher, both around the circle and in the center. The lights above flickered, and the air suddenly felt heavy and electrified. I repeated Brandi’s name and commanded her presence two more times, my voice growing louder each time. It wasn’t necessary, being so loud, but it was easy to get into it. When I had to do this trick in front of patrons—a rare event because of how much I had to charge to make it worth my while—the showmanship almost guaranteed a bigger tip, but alone it was mostly for the hell of it. Working with magic gave one hell of an adrenaline high.

  I’d just finished the third call, summoning Brandi’s spirit forth when the door to my apartment crashed open. I spun around as five cops in body armor stormed into the apartment, Detective Knight leading the charge with her gun drawn and trained on my chest.

  “Police!” she yelled. “Keep your hands where I can see them!”

  I panicked as she stepped dangerously close to the charged circle. “Watch the circle! Don’t step on the circle!”

  All my flailing must’ve spooked the skinny black cop to her right because he squeezed the trigger on his gun. The bullet hit my outstretched palm and sailed through clean, leaving a nice hole behind before slamming into the wall behind me. It hit me with enough force to send me spinning. I hit the ground on top of the burning shirt and rolled to put the fire out. In my hurry to not die, I managed to smudge up the circle. Magical energy, unspent, released on the room in a torrential blast of wind that blew posters from the wall and knocked over my television.

  “Hold your fire!” Knight screamed.

  The next thing I knew, her knee was in my lower back. She yanked my arms behind my back, not even apologizing for the way it popped my left shoulder out of place.

  “What gives?” I said as the black guy who shot me came to stand over me, pointing his gun at my head.

  “Lazarus Kerrigan, you’re under arrest for the murder of Brandi Lavelle,” Knight said, tightening the cuffs.

  “The hell? Hey, watch the hand! Fuck, man, that hurts! You could at least offer me a bandage!”

  Knight jerked me to my feet. “You have the right to remain silent,” she growled into my ear. “I suggest you exercise it.”

  “Got a t-shirt, size small,” said one of the other cops, kneeling next to the smoldering shirt. “Matches the description of the missing shirt from her locker.”

  “Burning evidence.” Knight tisked. “I knew you were a con man, but I didn’t peg you for a stupid con man.”

  I struggled to turn around and survey the scene. One of the cops kicked over a candle, spilling wax everywhere. “Hey, man! Careful!” As I shouted at t
he cop, I caught sight of a wisp of white smoke hovering in a corner. Slowly, the smoke took form, shifting into the pale form of Brandi’s torso. Her arms and legs were missing, which was in keeping with how I’d seen her on the sidewalk, though she wasn’t flat. What do you know? The summoning had worked after all. Too bad I didn’t have time to get any information out of her before Detective Knight and company hauled me away.

  Chapter Four

  Brandi’s ghost followed me to the cruiser. She floated there, five feet off the pavement, following at a distance. I was amazed that she was able to maintain form after the circle was broken. Most apparitions couldn’t. It took tremendous willpower to do so.

  While Detective Knight started reading me the rest of my Miranda Rights, she opened her mouth as if to form words. I halted on the march down the sidewalk, fighting against her grip. “Shut up a second, will you? I can’t hear the ghost.”

  “I’ve had just about enough of your antics.” Knight pushed me forward. “Get in the car before I let my partner put another round in you for resisting arrest.”

  I rolled my injured shoulder and winced. “I’m just asking for thirty seconds. No, fifteen. Can you give me fifteen seconds of silence?”

  “Moses?”

  The black man who’d shot me waited ahead, casually smoking against the car with the back door open, waiting for me. He pushed off the car and flicked his cigarette butt out into the bushes on his way to me.

  “Litterbug,” I growled. “That’s a hundred fifty dollar fine for a first offense, pal.”

  “Do tell?” Detective Moses said without any hint of animosity in his voice.

  I turned to look over my shoulder where Brandi’s ghost still hovered. “So, how ‘bout it? Fifteen seconds to talk to my ghost pal and then you can run me downtown and give me my phone call.”

  Before either of them could answer, I jerked out of Knight’s hands and spun, focusing on Brandi’s spirit. “Come on, girl. Whatever you’ve got to say, now’s the time.”

  Her eyes brightened, and the edges of her form solidified slightly as if she were about to make herself visible to more than just me. Her mouth moved, forming words I couldn’t make out. I’d never been much good at lip reading. I squinted to try and make it out better. “Blurring out? Turning grout? I’m sorry, I can’t hear you.”

  Something slammed against the back side of my left knee, knocking me to the ground with a loud oompf. Knight moved to cover me with her gun while her partner, Detective Moses, got me back to my feet. By the time I was standing again, Brandi’s ghost was gone, along with whatever clue she’d been trying to give me. Or, I supposed, it didn’t have to be a clue. For all I knew, she was going to tell me tomorrow’s weather. Spirits could sometimes be weird like that. Still, that wasn’t the type of vibe I’d been getting from Brandi. I had the sense she really wanted to tell me something. If I’d been able to maintain the circle just thirty seconds more, she would have. Instead, these skeptical yahoos had to come in and wreck my day.

  “Easy there, son,” Moses said as my knee buckled. “My partner’s got a mean kick, don’t she?”

  “And you’ve got a twitchy trigger finger,” I growled. “How about some medical treatment before I get an infection or something?”

  Detective Moses grinned ear to ear, flashing perfect pearly teeth. “If you’d been a real psychic, you would’ve seen that coming, wouldn’t you?”

  I rolled my eyes as he led me back to the cruiser. “Yeah, because I’ve never heard that joke before. Seriously, the adrenaline is going to wear off soon, and it’s going to hurt like a sonofabitch. Aren’t you obligated to have my injuries treated or something?”

  “Life-threatening injuries. Everything else can wait.”

  They shoved me into the back of the car and the two cops got in the front. I blew out a breath and looked around. At least they hadn’t shoved me into a standard cruiser. This looked like one of the detectives’ private rides, and they kept it impeccably clean. No smell of vomit or suspicious stains like most cop cars had. It wasn’t a new car, no bells and whistles, but it was one of the more reliable cars on the market over the last ten years. Detective Moses’ car then. I judged that Knight was the type of gal who felt she needed to prove herself to the guys. Probably drove a sports car, but nothing too flashy because she didn’t want the guys to know she felt like she had to prove herself.

  Once they got me booked, maybe I could call Odette and have her bail me out.

  Bail? Forget that. I was an ex-con staring down a murder charge and obstruction. No judge in their right mind was going to give me the option of buying my way to an ankle monitor until my court date.

  Moses got into the driver’s seat and turned the vehicle over. I’d guessed right. “What do you say we grab a burger afterward? Feel like I haven’t ate in days,” he said as Knight buckled in.

  Knight frowned. It looked natural on her. “Thought the doctor told you to watch your cholesterol?”

  “What the doc don’t know won’t hurt him none.”

  Moses directed the car back into traffic while Knight got on the radio in the dash to report their status. She hit the talk button and the radio squealed, prompting her to put her hands over her ears.

  The small hex spell I’d mumbled on getting into the car had absolutely nothing to do with it.

  Scowling, Knight slammed the receiver back in the holding arm and looked back at me. “What the hell are you grinning for?”

  “Nothing. Just going through the list of circumstantial evidence in my head. You don’t have enough to hold me.”

  She turned back around and crossed her arms over her chest. “Guess we’ll see about that.”

  As soon as she turned around, a vision blindsided me. I didn’t get them often, not like Pony Dee, and I had zero control over when and where they happened, but I did know they were always more likely to hit me if I screwed up a spell. Considering how badly the summoning in my apartment had just gone, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  It hit me like a bolt of lightning, the sensation of it slamming into one side of my skull. My grip on reality waned, and I was transported to another place and time to watch events unfold beyond my control.

  This vision took me to a house on fire.

  I stood in the foyer of a big house, in front of stairs engulfed in flame. Fine furnishings scattered around along with houseplants told me this was a place in a well-to-do neighborhood, and that the owner probably had money, but the space also lacked any personalization. The oil paintings melting on the wall were cheap reproductions, and there was too much seating in the living room for it to be a family home. It looked more like a waiting room. Even had a couple of signs on the walls detailing curfew and a code of conduct. The plastic laminating over those signs was melting too.

  Terrified shrieks came from the floor above me, the source hidden behind a wall of fire and smoke. I couldn’t move in this vision, or else I’d have gone upstairs to see more. Instead, I had to glean what I could from my other senses. The screams came at different paces and pitches. Two women must’ve been stuck upstairs. They still had a path down and out of the house, but only if they booked it down the stairs right now, and the smoke would’ve kept them from being able to see that path.

  They were trapped with no hope of rescue.

  The shock exited my skull as painfully as it went in and I doubled over in the backseat of Detective Moses’ sedan hissing in pain.

  “Quit your whining,” Knight scoffed. “You’re not going to die.”

  As if on cue, the radio squealed back to life just as a garbled message came through. Knight reached for the speaker and pressed the button. “Say again, dispatch. Didn’t catch that.”

  I leaned forward and listened to the crackling voice on the radio as it relayed the code for a house fire, suspected arson just a few streets away. Dispatch barely got the code out before I shoved my head forward between the two front seats. “You guys need to answer that call.”

  Knigh
t scowled at me. “Does this look like a fire engine?”

  “Look, I had a vision—”

  She rolled her eyes. “Here we go.”

  I ignored her. “—and in that vision, two women died in a house fire because the fire truck was too damn far away to do anything about it. We can get there in time, but we need to go now.”

  “Moses, get us to the station so we can toss this loony in a cell.”

  Skeptics. Nothing I did short of a miracle would convince Knight that I was telling the truth. Lucky for me, I keep miracles up my sleeve. Well, normally. To perform one, I typically needed either an important object or physical contact. I grimaced at the idea of what Knight might do to me if I touched her, but what choice did I have? With my hands cuffed behind my back, I didn’t even have use of them, so it was time to do something drastic.

  Anything to save a life, I thought and laid my head on her shoulder.

  “What the fuck?” She put her hand on my forehead and shoved me away.

  The contact lasted only a second, maybe less, but my senses were already heightened from the earlier vision and the recent slew of spells. It was just enough.

  “You got too many irons in the fire, possum,” I said, repeating one of the phrases I’d gleaned.

  Knight turned in her seat and punched me square in the jaw.

  Didn’t see that coming. I fell back into the seat, seeing stars. “The hell?” When my vision cleared, there was Knight, tearing up, her face hard.

  “Don’t you do that,” she growled, clearly hurt. “Don’t you pretend to channel my granddad!”