Honeymoon of the Dead

by Tate Hallaway

“Breaking our contract demands sacrifice,” the voice said again. It was weird how Athena’s lips didn’t move, but I now knew the words came from Her.

  “What sacrifice?” I asked.

  “What is a Goddess worth to you, mortal?”

  That’s when Lilith kicked Athena in the shin. Goddess, I loved that . . . er, Goddess.

  “No blood shall spill today,” Lilith said. “Except yours.”

  It didn’t seem like a fair fight, a short, stocky woman with owl legs versus a fully armored warrior. Yet when Athena turned to face Her attacker, Lilith clocked Her with an undercut that snapped Her head back with an audible crack. It was satisfying to see the taller woman sent reeling.

  Athena recovered swiftly, though, and swiped at Lilith with Her lance. Lilith easily leaped over it, Her purple robe fluttering in the wind. I could see talon marks in the snow where She’d stood.

  “Uh, we need to chant or something,” Mátyás suggested nervously. “Pick a side. Help Lilith out.”

  I’d been so stunned to actually see my Goddesses fighting I’d totally forgotten that we could aid Lilith in Her battle. We just needed to weave a spell to banish Athena.

  I started a slow march in the counterclockwise direction. As for words, I decided to stick with the general rule of “Keep it simple, stupid,” so I said, “Lilith will stay; Athena will go.”

  Even though Mátyás rolled his eyes at my lack of poetry, he started moving in the same direction and at the same pace. Picking up my chorus, he repeated the words, “Lilith will stay; Athena will go.”

  William, alerted that something new was going on, joined in. Soon, we were slowly circling the battling Goddesses, chanting my simple phrases.

  Lilith made another attack. She jumped and tried to give Athena a kick to the head, but Athena brought up Her shield just in time.

  At that same moment, Athena lifted Her lance. I thought Lilith might be speared, but She spun out of its reach like some Hong Kong film star on wires.

  I might have been mistaken, but I think our words were giving Lilith extra speed and strength. Encouraged, I started stepping faster and spoke the chant a little quicker. William nodded, as though to let me know no matter whatever else he missed, he “got” this part. I smiled back at him. I had no doubt that he understood what we were doing, which was raising energy—a basic step in any working ritual.

  The only bad part seemed to be that the ghosts seemed affected by it too. Their soft moans increased to a howl. Wind whipped at my clothes as we continued to tramp around the circle chanting.

  Mátyás stomped his feet in rhythm with the chant, but started singing something else entirely, something in Romany. I hated when he went off script like that! The song was beautiful, haunting, and a little sad, but I had no idea what spell he might be casting.

  Athena seemed distracted by it as well. Taking advantage, Lilith managed to land another punch. It was supposed to be a sucker punch to the gut. But this time, Her knuckles grazed off Athena’s breastplate with a hollow clang. Athena didn’t even bother to look wounded. Her eye tracked Mátyás menacingly, but he only seemed to goad Her with whatever it was he sang.

  Oh, I was really annoyed now. I hated not knowing what was transpiring. That was it. After alchemy, I’d demand Sebastian teach me Romany.

  Lilith kept up the fight, but Athena seemed to have found another target. I increased the desperation of my chanting, but it didn’t seem to be working nearly as well as whatever it was Mátyás was saying to Her.

  When our circling brought him close, Athena raised Her spear and struck Mátyás through the heart.

  There was a deafening explosion. Bright white light flashed so brilliantly I had to turn my head.

  Mátyás stood stock-still, his eyes wide. Stiffly, he fell over backward, breaking the circle. William stopped moving so abruptly I almost crashed into him.

  “We are satisfied with the offer,” Athena’s noncorporal voice said, and then She vanished.

  Lilith, meanwhile, appeared at Mátyás’s side, at least the part of him that still lay within the circle—his feet. “Noble, foolish boy,” She said softly. She lay a hand on his boot. “But you are still my creature.”

  All the while, I scrambled to hastily uncast the circle. Lilith lifted her hand to stop me as I passed by Her.

  “Allow me,” She said. With a wave of Her hand the guardians disappeared.

  The ghosts broke through the remains of the weakened sphere and darted around Lilith, like moths to a flame. They reached out and stroked Her hair and face, and tugged at the hem of Her gown. She kissed each as it passed, and so doing, dismissed it.

  I suppose I should have been afraid or horrified or both, but the intention of my ritual stayed with me. As I watched Her lovingly embrace the dead, I felt a strange sort of pride. She was the Goddess who had chosen me, and now, I freely chose Her.

  William rushed past me to check on Mátyás.

  I should do the same, but first I opened my arms and welcomed my Mother.

  She stepped up to me and placed Her palms against mine. We stared eye to eye, and I realized we were the same height. She wasn’t perfect, but She was perfect for me.

  As though that thought were a signal, Lilith took a step forward and melted into me. I felt Her instantly settle “home” in my abdomen.

  I quickly joined William at Mátyás’s side. He was already sitting up, shaking the snow out of his long stringy hair. “I hope that worked,” he was saying.

  “What did you do?” I demanded.

  He coughed and patted his chest in the spot where the divine spear had pierced him. Once he cleared his throat, Mátyás said, “I gave Her what She wanted, a sacrifice.”

  “What who wanted? Lilith or Athena?” William asked. “Were those ghosts I was seeing?”

  “What did you sacrifice?” I asked, ignoring William for the moment.

  Mátyás gave me a weak grin, as William and I helped him to his feet. He brushed the snow off his butt and said, “My immortality. I told Athena she could have the damn ‘gift.’ Maybe now I can be a real boy, Geppetto.”

  I was about to tell him how stupid he’d been when a gunshot rang out.

  9.

  The Star

  ASTROLOGICAL CORRESPONDENCE:

  Aquarius

  Like the urban guerrillas we were not, we all stood around stupidly looking for where the shot had come from. It never occurred to any of us to duck or drop to the ground for cover. Instead, we scanned the hills and the rows of stone markers. Luckily, the sound of shouting helped pinpoint the activity to just beyond the street on the other side of the large willow tree.

  “Stop!” someone masculine yelled, quickly identifying himself by adding, “FBI!”

  Dominguez crouched behind the thick trunk of a tree and peered out in the space between it and a six- foot-square gravestone with the name Harper. I followed his gaze to where he seemed to be staring and finally spotted three boys crouched behind a row of graves marked with Chinese characters. I strained to recognize them, but my only response was, “Who the hell are those guys?”

  I’d been expecting to see the guys who attacked me in the parking lot, perhaps decked out in their shapeless parkas, but instead there were two dudes I didn’t know. Though I thought maybe one of them might be the cute waiter from Susan’s. I did notice, however, that one of them had a gun in his fist. And he was turning it in our direction.

  Finally, it occurred to me to duck.

  Grabbing Mátyás and William, I pushed us all to the ground just as something whizzed past my ear.

  “Death to vampire witches!” one of the men shouted.

  We landed in a heap. We’d been standing in a slight depression, but I still felt horribly exposed. Worse, my leg sprawled over my stepson’s butt and my breasts pressed against the ribs of my best guy friend, but I didn’t dare move. My heart beat double time. We were all breathing heavily as we waited for another bullet to sail past.

  “Garnet,” William whis
pered, “your ear is bleeding.”

  I reached up to touch the ear he stared at, and sure enough my fingers came away bloody.

  “Too bad Papa isn’t here. He could clean that up for you,” Mátyás muttered, edging out from under my body. I clutched at his coat. Even though it made no sense, I didn’t want him to stray too far away from us. It was like in a horror film: If you separate, you die. He seemed to understand my desire and huddled close, though not near enough to touch.

  “Fine time to give up your immortality,” I muttered. The cold seeped into the front of my coat. “We could really use a little vampire invulnerability right now, all of us.”

  “No shit,” William agreed, with his chin pressed into the snow. “Or projectile magic.”

  That gave me an idea. I couldn’t exactly throw magic at the kidnappers, but what about a few ghosts?

  Maybe a few specters could act as a distraction to the gunman until Dominguez could reach him and take him down or whatever it is that brawny FBI guys did in situations like this. Thank Goddess Dominguez was psychic, I thought in his general direction, so he’d know what the plan was!

  “You’re doing something, aren’t you?” William said, apparently noticing my face scrunched up in concentration.

  “I’m thinking really hard at Dominguez,” I said. “Then I’m going to try to see if I can sic a few ghosts on the kidnappers.”

  “We might as well help,” Mátyás said, offering me his hand and, I sensed, his magical energy.

  “Yeah,” agreed William, taking my other gloved hand in his.

  Did I have the best friends, or what?

  Ironically, I knew there were restless spirits close by. I mean, the bodies of the Vatican witch hunters may have been relocated after their discovery, but they say traumatic events can trap a soul near where it died.

  In my mind’s eye, I went back to the night Parrish and I drove his van in through the gate near closing time. It had been autumn, and the trees had looked much like they did now—skeletal, bare, stark and black against a darkening sky. Sitting in the passenger seat, I remember I was in shock, muttering, “Oh God, they’re dead. My friends. They’re really dead.”

  Parrish had been like an anchor, holding me steady. He asked no questions, only providing answers and constant reassurances that everything would be okay. We’d stopped the van just over there, on that side of the lake opposite where we were now. He’d taken the bodies we’d wrapped in garbage bags with gravel for weight, and walked them one by one into the cold, black water of the shallow lake—sinking lower and lower until they disappeared forever from sight.

  I asked them to rise up now. Haunt me.

  William scraped snow up into his gloves and padded it into a ball. Once he had a good-size snowball, he set it aside and began making another. Mátyás gave him a wan smile and started doing the same.

  In the center of the lake, I heard something splash—a fish jumping through the ice? I turned to look. Wisps of something like steam roiled over the ice sheet heading in this direction.

  Ever sensitive, Mátyás turned to watch the smoky creatures’ progress, their tendrils snaking out like probing hands. He shook his head at me, disapproving. “Myself, I’d have picked something a little less angry.”

  William glanced back, doing a classic double take. “Uh, yikes?”

  “We’re going to send them after the bad guys with the guns,” I told the boys.

  “If they’ll go,” Mátyás muttered.

  I jabbed him in the ribs with my elbow. “Think positive, damn it.”

  Faces had begun to emerge, ghastly open maws stretched into silent screams. Like clouds, the images melted into nothing, then reconstituted into even more frightening visages.

  Part of me wanted to panic, but I remembered the way Lilith kindly treated the ghosts that had been attracted to Her before. These were the ghosts I had made. Like Lilith was the Mother of Demons, I had birthed these.

  I would and could and should control these ghosts. If I accepted the fact that Lilith was the reflection of my inner Goddess, then the full implications of that meant that my core magic happened in places like this: dark alleys, pits of hell, and graveyards.

  No fluffy unicorns for me.

  Just then, the twisting cloud shapes surrounded us. Swirls of smoke snatched at my face. Wetness slid across my cheek. Cold seeped deep into my skin. The certainty I felt about my plan slithered into the mist. Voices whispered in my ear, “Killer.” They moaned. “Murderer.”

  Each word slid, like a finger, over my flesh, raising goose pimples in its wake. I gritted my teeth, shivering. I had murdered these men when Lilith took over my body, but I still hated to hear it. I wanted to scream a denial.

  Before I could open my mouth, Mátyás put a hand on my shoulder. Just feeling the pressure of his touch helped focus my mind, which threatened to spin off into guilt. I took a deep breath, swallowing my desire to run screaming, while brushing the ghost hands off me like so many spiders’ legs. The spirits continued to churn the air around us making it hard to breathe. We needed to do something soon, or the ghosts would overwhelm us regardless of our intentions.

  Mátyás placed a snowball into my gloved hand, like he was handing me a clue. I blinked at it stupidly.

  “Let’s throw them,” Mátyás said when it was clear I didn’t get his meaning. “You know, focus a ghost on it, and pelt the bad guys with ’em.”

  “Dude!” William said cheerfully. “Now you’re talking.”

  I wasn’t quite sure that one could “focus a ghost” onto a snowball like the game of pinning a tail on the donkey, but, what the heck, I didn’t have any better ideas. And maybe it would stop the infernal moaning in my ears.

  I reached up my hand with the intention of just grabbing one of the spirits out of the air and threading it into the snowball. Lilith rose up in me, adding Her power. She was the Mother of all the things that went bump in the night, and so I felt Her love course through me like a wave. “Come, my children,” I heard myself say with Her voice.

  When I felt I had something, I pulled it down and jabbed it into the center of the ball. Sitting up just enough to take aim, I tossed it.

  The ghost looked like a streamer flowing off the back side of the ball. It spattered to the left of where the kidnappers crouched. Before I hit the ground again, I saw them aiming their gun. But that was when William and Mátyás let loose a barrage of balls. And ghosts. Pretty soon everything around where the Illuminati Watchers/vampire hunters hid was a vortex of white: ice, snow, and spirit bits.

  “Help,” we heard them shout. “We’re being attacked by . . .” and “what the hell is this?”

  “Snow ectoplasm!” William suggested helpfully. We laughed.

  Suddenly, a whole herd of cars descended on us, brakes screaming, doors slamming, as men and women in trench coats jumped out, brandishing weapons and shouting, “FBI!”

  Wow, so this was what the cavalry looked like.

  “You’ve got a little ghost there.” Dominguez frowned and hooked a finger through my hair, as though pulling something out. We both stared at the wispy thread of smoke that he dissipated with a shake of his hand.

  I shivered. I was going to be feeling their creepy crawliness all over me for a week.

  “Ectoplasmic snowballs?” Dominguez said. “This is a new one, even for me.”

  “You’re turning into a regular Fox Mulder,” I teased him with a poke of my finger.

  “Perish the thought,” he said with a grimace.

  A group of well- armed FBI agents, including Special Agent Peterson, hauled the surly youths into nearby cars. The waiter I’d found so charming at Susan’s spat in my general direction and muttered something about witches and whores that he was lucky I didn’t quite catch.

  “Who are those guys, anyway?” I asked Dominguez as the door slammed on the waiter’s face.

  Dominguez looked at me as if to ask if I was kidding around. “Your kidnappers, right?”

  “U
m, wrong,” I said. “My kidnappers were nerds with positive political message shirts and curly hair. Kind of cute in their own gawky way, but not ruggedly handsome like that guy.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Well, actually, I wasn’t. “Okay, actually, I never saw my kidnappers. I had my eyes closed. But I assume they were the same guys that jumped me in the parking lot, although, honestly, other than their shirts, I didn’t really get a good look at them either.”

  “So what you’re saying is that these could be the guys.”

  I looked over to where William and Mátyás sat in William’s car, and sighed. “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right.”

  “Don’t give me that mumbo-jumbo. These are the guys I’ve been after,” Dominguez said matter-of-factly. “These are the people running the vampire- hunter front that are working with James Smythe. You’re not going to have any trouble from that quarter anymore.”

  He sounded so convincing that I didn’t have the heart to disagree. I shrugged. “Okay.”

  “Oh, I almost forgot to tell you. Sebastian is out on bail. He’s waiting for you.”

  We met Sebastian at a Jewish deli across the street from a Catholic women’s university.

  The restaurant was at the back of the store. A husky guy took us to a seat in a narrow room. The tabletops were Formica and the chairs could have been taken from a cafe in the 1950s. On the walls were oversized pictures of someone’s family, presumably the owner’s, in various professionally done photos.

  Sebastian looked a little rough around the edges—a bit too thin, with dark circles under his eyes—but his expression brightened when he saw us. Mátyás, William, and I wrapped him in a giant bear hug.

  Over several cups of coffee, we caught up on everything. Turns out Sebastian’s lawyers convinced James to confess. Between that and the concealed weapon and the antistalking laws in Minnesota, he’d been extradited to the U.K.

  He was a little shocked at what we’d been up to, though.

  “Shot at you?” he repeated, and then he said something in Romany that made Mátyás chuckle.