Death Rites

by E. A. Copen

  Ouch. I’d really touched a nerve. “I’m not pretending,” I said gently, “but I know nothing I say will ever convince you, so I thought maybe he could.”

  I still didn’t know who he was, just that whoever he was, he was very important to Knight.

  Knight blinked back tears, but said nothing, opting to turn back around in her seat and cross her arms.

  I turned to Moses to plead.

  He held up a hand. “If you think you’re gonna lay a head on my shoulder and imitate my granddad, you got another thing coming. You want to swing by the fire and see what’s up? Be my guest.” Moses flipped on a siren and flashing lights before stomping on the gas.

  “No matter what he pulls, we’re not uncuffing him,” Knight snarled.

  I nodded. Guess that was as good as I was going to get.

  It took twelve grueling minutes to drive to the scene, but I could see the smoke as soon as I searched the sky. It curled up over the rooftops, thick and black. When the car rounded the intersection and drove down to the next street, the house came into view. It was a big, double-gallery house with six white columns out front. Rose-colored siding and cream shutters would’ve made it look like a dollhouse if not for the flames jumping from the front windows. Now, it might pass for a dollhouse in Hell.

  A throng of onlookers had gathered in front of the house, many with their hands pressed to their faces, staring at an upstairs window. Smoke billowed from the window, broken by a waving white sheet. A call for help.

  Knight pressed the button and got dispatch back on the line. “How far out are those fire trucks?”

  “ETA twelve minutes,” dispatch replied.

  “They don’t have twelve minutes.” Knight unbuckled her seatbelt and threw open her door. She was pushing her way through the crowd toward the door before the car even stopped.

  “Goddammit, Knight.” Moses sighed and leaned forward to follow her with his stare.

  I frowned. “She do this sort of thing often?”

  “Run into burning buildings? Not so much. Jump into the fray without thinking first? That’s typical Emma Knight style.” He put the car in park. “Suppose I ought to get out in case she needs me.”

  “Not running in after her?”

  Moses snorted. “I got bad knees. I don’t run nowhere.”

  I wriggled toward the door. If he left me in the car, I fully intended to make my escape while the going was still good. Unfortunately for me, Detective Moses was smarter than the average cop. He got out of the car and walked around to the rear passenger side to open the door, urging me to get out.

  “Don’t want you kicking out a window or something stupid and taking off now,” he drawled and put his hand on my shoulder, guiding me to the front of the crowd where we waited.

  And waited.

  The minutes ticked by with nothing changing but the wind and the direction of the smoke. The sheet hanging from the window turned coal black from the smoke before eventually catching fire, transforming it into a flag of embers.

  I shifted my weight forward onto my toes, wriggling my fingers in their cuffs. For a second, I considered running into the house after Knight and the other women trapped there. I hated the idea of burning alive as much as the next guy, but I’d had this vision for a reason. And Pony Dee’s words ate at me. He still thought of me as a common criminal, just like these cops. I’d say I had nothing to prove, but that wasn’t true.

  “Dammit, Knight,” Moses ground out again. “Where the hell are you?”

  I turned to Moses. “Uncuff me.”

  He raised an eyebrow and eyed me askance.

  “If I wanted to run, I’d have run by now,” I said. “You can’t go in after her, and these people sure as hell aren’t. I will. If I’m lucky, I might even be able to bring someone back out with me. If not, then what’s the worst that can happen? A con-artist and suspected murderer dies in a fire, right?” I offered him my hands still cuffed behind my back. “So uncuff me already! We’re wasting time!”

  Moses grabbed my hands and jerked them away from my back.

  I winced at the pain of moving my bullet-hole ridden hand.

  “You’d better not run, or I’ll put another bullet in you.” He slid the cuff off my right wrist.

  I wrenched the left side free and took off, racing up onto the porch and into a burning building to save the cop who’d arrested me for murder.

  Chapter Five

  I’d seen people charge into burning buildings before in movies. Head down, one arm up, trudging forward through black smoke while the crowd at their backs either cheered or waited with bated breath for the conquering hero to return, his arms full of children or puppies. It’d always looked pretty epic.

  Doing it myself was a different story.

  Stepping onto the porch was like stepping into an active volcano. The wall of heat hit me several feet out along with a heavy curtain of smoke. I paused, gasping and coughing as my lungs tried to acclimate to the contaminated air. My eyes watered and the skin on my cheeks stung like I had a sunburn.

  A scream from inside urged my feet forward against the advising of my brain, which commanded them to stay where they were. The struggle made my legs leaden, every step more difficult than the last. The door was on fire when I pushed through it, singeing my palm.

  Inside, smoke had turned the air murky enough I could barely see. Red debris floated up and down, moved by the fire as if gravity suddenly didn’t work. The fire itself was everywhere and nowhere. I could hear it crackling and raging all around me, and see the black smoke it gave off, but aside from the initial flames I’d encountered at the front door, I didn’t see any fire.

  A staircase stretched up in front of me on the left. I staggered to it. If the cops had given me time to put on a shirt, I’d have pulled it up over the lower half of my face to filter out the smoke, but I couldn’t get so lucky. They’d tossed me in the back of the cruiser without shirt and shoes, so there I was, trudging half-naked up into thicker and thicker smoke.

  “Detective Knight!” My call ended in a sputtered cough.

  No one answered.

  I took another step, blinking tears from my eyes. “Call out, and I’ll come get you!”

  “We’re here!”

  The voice that answered wasn’t Knight’s, but I didn’t have time to be picky about who I rescued. A new wall of flame shot out of the doorway to the right at the top of the stairs. Thankfully, the voice had come from the door on the left. I grabbed the knob. Cold, but locked.

  “Unlock the door!”

  “It’s barred from the outside,” called a smaller voice. Someone else was sobbing behind the door. Two victims, locked inside and still no sign of Knight.

  Dammit, I hate it when my visions are right.

  “Step back. I’m going to break down the door.” Or try to. With no shoes and a bum hand, I wasn’t exactly in prime condition to go busting down doors, but what else was there to do? The lock looked like it required a key, which I clearly didn’t have. The only way in was to break it down.

  I took a step back and rammed a shoulder into the door. Pain surged through my shoulder and into my back, but the door barely rattled. It was moments like that I wished I was a big, buff guy who could rip doors off hinges.

  The door wasn’t going anywhere with me slamming my body weight into it, so it was time to try a different tactic. I closed my eyes and focused my will, drawing it into the fingers of my good hand. As someone who specializes in death magic, I’m not really great with other types of spells, but I did have a basic understanding of how they worked. Like the hex I’d worked earlier in the police car, I could do a basic charm. A heavy gust of kinetic magic through the keyhole might move the lock mechanisms in place, unlocking the door, and I was pretty sure I could pull that off at least.

  The spell slammed into the lock and bored through the wood, ripping apart the doorknob and blasting wood splinters everywhere. Oops. Too much power. At least the door was open.

  Cough
ing, I shouldered the door open on what looked like a bedroom. A series of bunk beds lined the far wall with a big footlocker at the end of each. A petite blonde in a white cotton dress limped toward me, her arms around a pre-teen girl with soot streaks on her face.

  She shoved the girl at me. “Take her! I’ll follow!”

  The girl all but fell into my arms. She didn’t look injured, but her breathing was raspy, her face ashen, and her lips blue. Not getting enough oxygen. I scooped the girl up in my arms and turned back to the hallway.

  Fire had crawled out of the left room and onto the banister. It licked at the wooden steps, threatening to shut off our escape route. It nipped at my heels as I passed the halfway point on the stairs and I yelped, hopping down two more stairs to avoid a big tongue of flame that shot across the stairs. The woman followed behind me with a leap over three stairs.

  Just as we reached the door, the stairway collapsed, sending a cloud of debris, dust, and ash to scorch my back. The woman emerged, stunned but unscathed, and we shot for the door.

  Detective Moses was waiting for us at the bottom of the porch. I shoved the girl at him, wheezing out a breath. “She…needs oxygen.”

  “Paramedics are here. What about Knight?”

  “Be right back,” I huffed and stumbled back into the burning house.

  With the staircase collapsed, going back upstairs was impossible. The room on the left had been engulfed in flames anyway, so I hoped Knight hadn’t gone that way. If she had, she was already gone by the time I got out of my cuffs. That left the downstairs to search.

  A hallway shot straight through the path by the collapsed staircase, barely passable thanks to the burning rubble. I didn’t see any sign of her in the front room after a quick check, so I stormed down it. Above, the roof groaned. In a few minutes, it would probably come down on us too. I had to find Knight before then, or else make it back out of the house myself.

  I crept down the hall, keeping as low as possible. Smoke rolled heavy along the high ceiling, and the heat inside was dizzying. Sweat stung my burning eyes even as I blinked away smoke and soot. The ambient temperature was already cooking me. That meant I had minutes, maybe seconds until flashover. I cast a glance back at the front door, a yawning space clear of smoke. A section of the upper floor collapsed, blocking my view. The odds were not in my favor.

  “Knight!” I choked out, my voice strained from swallowing so much smoke. “Where the hell are you?”

  By chance, I stubbed my toe on a fallen bit of timber and nudged it aside revealing a hand. Frantic, I knelt and pulled away more of the rubble, cringing when I had to use my injured hand. It was mostly numb now, and only hurt when I bumped it. Detective Emma Knight lay under the fallen staircase, face down, protected from the worst of it by the way one section of the stairs had fallen over her. It looked like she’d been traveling around behind the staircase, maybe coming from the opposite hallway, when it came down on her.

  I cursed and pulled her out of the rubble, dragging her to the back door. My vision was blurry, but I could just barely make out the shape of a kitchen as we passed through it. The walls had charred black inside it and were still burning. Large portions of the kitchen seemed untouched, but that wasn’t so odd. Fires burned in weird patterns. What made me glance up and take notice was the heavy smell of gasoline in the air.

  No time to consider the implications of that, I thought and hauled my ass through the back door, dragging Knight by the arms as I went.

  The back door took us onto a wooden porch. I tripped off it, somehow pulling Knight down with me. She landed beside me on the grass and didn’t move while I lay there, gasping for air. There were no crowds out back, which meant no one was immediately available to jump in and check her over. Guess that was up to me.

  I knew something wasn’t right when she didn’t get up. That fall should’ve jarred her. Maybe she was just unconscious though. She’d probably taken a good knock to the head when the staircase came down on top of her. But when I put my fingers to her neck to check for a pulse, I found her body ice cold. It shouldn’t have been cold.

  A chill ran through me as I recognized the touch of the grave. If Knight wasn’t already gone, she was headed there fast.

  I jumped up and listened for breath, trying to recall my first aid course from high school. It’d been a good ten years since I’d almost failed that class, and since I wanted Knight to fare better than the dummy in class did, I decided against CPR and rescue breaths when I realized she wasn’t breathing. I had a different trick up my sleeve.

  Being a necromancer was never glamorous, but I could do without the misconception that all necromancers ever did was play around with dead things. The most powerful spell in my arsenal—and by virtue of that, one of the most dangerous—could be used to revive the recently deceased as if they’d never died in the first place.

  There were drawbacks to using the Kiss of Life, of course, the least of which was that it was fueled by my own life force. That alone made me reluctant to use it. Slinging that spell around would also forge a psychic connection between me and whoever I cast it on. I barely knew Detective Knight. Siphoning my own life to revive her, and forcing a psychic connection that neither of us probably wanted didn’t sound appealing. But if I did nothing, she’d stay dead, and I’d be in even deeper trouble when they discovered me half dressed, sprawled over a dead woman. Especially considering my history.

  “Okay, Knight.” I straddled her and grimaced at the thought of someone coming around the back and seeing us like that. They’d definitely get the wrong impression. I sighed. “Just don’t shoot me when you come back.”

  I closed my eyes and pulled her face closer to mine, stopping short of any lip locking, and tilted her head back so her mouth opened. The world around me went blizzard white as I summoned my power, calling all of it to gather in my chest. It marched through my veins to the staccato beat of my heart, piling up until the pressure was almost too much to bear.

  I didn’t know what it looked like to an outsider, giving the Kiss of Life, because I’d never seen it recorded. Oh, someone had tried alright. With all the cell phone cameras and traffic cams, it was inevitable. But that much power being expended all at once tended to destroy most fragile electronics, and there wasn’t a portable electronic yet that had managed to withstand it.

  To me, however, the world glowed. Every blade of grass lit up with the silver essence of life. Crickets and beetles crawled around in it, their little insect hearts beating off rhythm to each other and sending fuzzy ripples of sound out through the air. Knight, whose spirit was already fading beyond redemption, looked a faded gray, the outline of her features a dim charcoal against slate. My hands were visible on the other side of her, as if I were seeing through her physical form somehow. I didn’t buzz with the lively color of silver, however. My hands were pitch black and rotten in my vision, the side effect of embracing death.

  I drew in a breath through my nose, infused it with power from my core, and slowly breathed it out through my mouth. The power traveled out in the visible trickle of my breath, transforming from black to white in the process. The spell oozed in through Knight’s open mouth and down into her lungs. The fading silver form inside her body pulsated brighter, gaining power. It was working, so I repeated with another breath, fully focused on my work. Like I said, the Kiss is a dangerous spell that literally takes years off my life, more so if it’s mishandled. If interrupted, it could backfire horribly.

  So, of course, that’s what happened.

  “What the fuck?” came Moses’ stunned voice a few yards away.

  I finished the breath and turned away. Moses stood to my right, his body a lackluster gray. In the center of his chest, I could make out the outline of his heart thumping away, but part of it was black. Dead.

  I blinked away the Sight when Knight sputtered out a cough in my arms.

  She repeated Moses’ question and fumbled for her sidearm, so I promptly dropped her. Her head hit the soft groun
d and bounced, but she was alive to grimace about it at least. Knight scowled at me. Guess that’s the thanks I get for saving her life.

  “Your face.”

  I turned my attention back to Detective Moses whose face had turned ashen. Impressive for a guy with a complexion as dark as his. His hand shook as it rested on the holster for his gun. He hadn’t drawn it, but he must’ve been thinking about it.

  “You looked like a demon. What the hell did you do to her?”

  Before I could offer him a satisfactory answer, I collapsed, shivering. My teeth chattered too hard for me to get a word out even if I’d wanted to. The muscles in my shoulders, arms, and legs spasmed, leading my limbs to curl up tight. The next breath escaped my lips condensed, cold enough to frost the grass under my head. I was suddenly acutely aware of every cell in my body twisting, shifting, shedding a layer. At least, that’s what it felt like. I had no idea what actually happened to me on a cellular level after performing the Kiss, especially since I’d only tried it one other time.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Moses exclaimed and knelt by his partner, hardly noticing me.

  “I’m okay.” Knight waved him off as some paramedics came around the corner.

  “C-c-cold,” I managed as Moses touched the side of my face.

  He promptly pulled his fingers away and shouted something at the paramedics. Something I didn’t recall because I was already fading in and out of consciousness.

  Chapter Six

  “So, how long’s it been?” asked the dark-haired demi-goddess sitting next to me.

  As far as I knew, she was my reaper, and I’d been seeing her ever since I was eleven years old. Of course, back then, I’d been much more confused about waking up in a plush red armchair at the foot of an empty stage in an empty jazz club that didn’t exist every time I over-exerted my magic. That’s to say nothing of the normal confusion of a pre-pubescent boy looking at someone as supernaturally good looking as Persephone.

  It was about that age when my necromantic powers began to manifest. Of course, I hadn’t known that when I accidentally raised the family dog. Me, I’d just been happy to have Buddy back, even if he was half-rotten and hairless after being in the ground two days in the Louisiana summer heat. My dad beat me half to death out of a drunken mix of anger and fear when he found out. Or I guess it was all the way to death if Persephone showed up. Aside from the social workers and the nurses, she was the only person to ever visit me in the hospital while I recovered. That was, until Pony showed up and informed me he’d be my new foster parent, but only if I’d call him sir and stop slouching.