“How did he lure his brother here in order to kill him?” Julia said.
“He didn’t. He killed him in the sanctuary of Angitia at the lake. Easy enough to do for a man as expert with venomous snakes as this one. All he had to do was distract his brother, get him to look in the wrong direction, then jam the serpent’s head into some vulnerable spot. Quite ingenious, really. Pompaedius, did you actually use the sacred snake for this purpose, or did you catch a scaly accomplice in the marshes?” I was rather curious about this. Novel methods of homicide have always fascinated me.
“However it was done,” I went on, “he loaded the rapidly bloating corpse onto a wagon and brought it to Rome. The distance isn’t all that great. This shrine and its alley are so obscure that he could easily unload the corpse at night, without being seen. He left the snake there among its sculpted fellows, knowing that as long as it wasn’t hungry, it would not leave its cool, dark sanctuary with its familiar scent of cedar. That way he knew he could impress his highly placed Roman friends with his snake-charming skill. And indeed we were all impressed. With this done, he paid his call on Caesar, who sent him to me.”
“He is mad!” Pompaedius hissed. “What proof is there?”
“I don’t need proof,” I told him. “The question is, have I convinced Caesar?”
“He is correct,” said Caesar. “You will not be tried before a jury. I am Dictator and I can have you executed right here, should I choose to do so. Arrest him, Decius Caecilius.”
I reached for the priest without thinking and began the old formula, “Lucius Pompaedius Castor, come with me to—” Then he thrust the snake’s head at me.
Julia later told me that I leapt backward with a cry like a frightened girl, but I remember no such thing. Pompaedius began backing away, hissing in his reptilian fashion, holding the deadly head at arm’s length, threatening whoever stepped close.
“Lictors!” Caesar shouted. Instantly the doorway filled with his attendants, holding their fasces like weapons.
“Look out!” Julia cried. “He has a snake! And he’ll use it!” The lictors flattened themselves against the walls, eyes gone wide.
Pompaedius made a dash for the door. Just as he stepped through it a foot stuck out, catching his ankle. With a whoop, the priest went tumbling. I saw the soles of his sandals for an instant, and then he was gone. There came a meaty crash, then a howl of horrified agony.
“Nasty tumble, that,” I remarked. “Those steps are steep.”
“I don’t think the fall made him bellow like that,” Caesar said. “Let’s go see.”
We went to the doorway and then out to the portico. Hermes was nursing a sore ankle. “Haven’t done that since I was a boy,” he said, “but it still works.”
Pompaedius was still convulsing and flopping about, but he was probably already dead. His flesh was swelling and darkening, the skin beginning to sport huge blisters. The people who had been gawking panicked and jammed the alley with their bodies, trying to flee. They thought this might be some new and horrible disease, and they wanted no part of it. Several were trampled, but I think none fatally.
For a while we watched bemusedly. We could see about half of the snake protruding from beneath the body, wriggling weakly. Then it was still.
“It’s always about power, isn’t it, Caesar?” I said. “Whether you get it with politics, legions, money, or snakes, power is power.”
Hermes borrowed a lictor’s fasces and levered the body over. “The snake’s dead. He crushed it when he fell.”
“Bad luck for the Marsi,” I observed.
“I’ll have a lustrum performed and endow Angitia’s temple,” Caesar said. “That will satisfy them that the curse is lifted.”
“But their sacred snake is dead,” Julia said.
Caesar shrugged. “They’ll find another. There are always other snakes in the swamp.”
These things happened on two days of the year 709 of the City of Rome, during the third Dictatorship of Caius Julius Caesar.
IN RED, WITH PEARLS
by Patricia Briggs
New York Times bestseller Patricia Briggs is perhaps best known for the Mercy Thompson series, detailing the paranormal adventures of a coyote-shapeshifting car mechanic embroiled in the world of vampires, werewolves, and gremlins, and the related Alpha and Omega series, but she has also written traditional fantasy series such as the four-volume Sianim sequence (Masques, Wolfsbane, Steal the Dragon, When Demons Walk), the two-volume Hurog series (Dragon Bones, Dragon Blood), and the Raven duology (Raven’s Shadow, Raven’s Strike), as well as the stand-alone novel The Hob’s Bargain. Her most recent book is River Marked, a new Mercy Thompson novel.
In the thriller that follows, we accompany werewolf private investigator Warren Smith, who will be familiar to readers of the Mercy Thompson series, as he races to crack a case involving zombies, witches, and lawyers. Just another day at the office.
I’M REAL GOOD AT WAITING. I RECKON IT’S ALL THE TIME I SPENT HERDING cows when I was a boy. Kyle says it’s the werewolf in me, that predators have to be patient. But Kyle knows squat about herding cows. I’d say he knows squat about predators, too, but he’s a lawyer.
I stretched out my legs and put the heels of my boots on the desk of Angelina the Receptionist and Dictator of All Things Proper at Brooks, Gordon, and Howe, Attorneys at Law. Angelina would have thrown a fit if she’d seen my feet propped up where anyone could just walk in and see me.
“Image, hijo,” she’d said to me when I started working for the firm. I kinda liked it when she called me hijo. Though I was a lot older than any son of hers could possibly be—she didn’t know that.
She’d given me a disapproving look. “It is all about image. Your appearance must be just so to get the clients to spend their money, Warren. They like expensive offices, lawyers in suits, and private detectives in fedoras and ties—it tells them that we are successful, that we have the skills to help them.”
I’d told her I’d wear a fedora when the cows came home wearing muumuus and feather boas. I consented, however, to wearing ties to work and to play nicely during office hours, and she was mostly happy with that.
Office hours had been officially over for a good while, the tie was in my back pocket, and Angelina was gone for the day. I’d have been gone for the day, too, but one of Kyle’s clients had come bursting in all upset and he’d taken her into his office and was talking her down.
Kyle was usually the last one out of the office. This time it was a sobbing client who suddenly decided that the jerk who’d slept with her best friend was actually the love of her life and she didn’t really want to divorce him, just teach him a lesson. Tomorrow it would be a mound of paperwork that would only take him a few minutes to straighten up and a few minutes would stretch into a few hours. He tended toward workaholism.
I didn’t mind. Kyle was worth waiting a bit for. And, like I said, I’m pretty good at waiting anyhow.
A noise out in the hall had me pulling my feet off the desk just before the outer door opened and a young woman in a sleek red dress with a big string of pearls around her throat entered the office in a wave of Chanel No. 5; she was stunning.
“Hey,” she said with a big smile and a dark breathy voice. “Are you Kyle Brooks?” Her ears had pearls in them, too. Her hands were bare, though I could see that she’d recently been wearing a wedding ring. Dating a divorce attorney makes me notice things like that.
“No, ma’am,” I told her. “After hours here. Best you try him tomorrow.”
She leaned over Angelina’s desk and the low-cut dress did what sleek little dresses are built to do in such circumstances. If I ran that way, I might have counted it a treat for the eyes. “I have to find Kyle Brooks.”
She was close enough that the feel of her breath brushed my face. Mostly mint toothpaste. Mostly.
“Well now,” I said, standing up slowly and sauntering around the desk as if I found her all sorts of interesting. Which I all-of-a-sudden surel
y did. “Just what do you want with Kyle, darlin’?”
Her smile died and she looked worried. “I have to find him. I have to. Can you help me?”
Kyle’s office was down the hall and in the back. I could hear the woman he was with talking at him as she had been for the past half hour.
“Think I can,” I said, and led her the opposite direction, to the big conference room at the other end of the offices. “Stay right here for a couple of minutes,” I told her. “He’ll be right in.”
She’d followed me docilely and stopped where I told her to. I shut the door on her and hightailed it back to Kyle’s office.
I opened the door without knocking and ignored Kyle’s frown. “Would you do me a favor?” I asked tossing him my cell phone. “Call Elizaveta—her number is under w.” Under witch; he’d figure it out, he was a smart man. “Tell her we have an incident, a her kinda incident, we’d like some help with. ’Scuse me, ma’am.” I tipped my nonexistent hat to his indignant client before turning back to Kyle. “Might be the kind of thing we should clear the offices for.”
“Your kind of thing?” Kyle asked obliquely. Something supernatural, he meant.
“That’s right.” I ducked out of his office and ran back to the conference room.
“One minute seventeen,” the beautiful woman was saying when I rejoined her.
She stopped counting when the door opened, her body tense. When she saw me, she frowned. “I need Kyle,” she said.
“I know you do,” I told her. “He’ll be right here.” Hopefully not until after he got his client out safely and called Elizaveta Arkadyevna, my wolf pack’s contractual witch.
I heard the front door of the office close and thought that I should have done something to make Kyle leave, too. But I hadn’t known how long our guest would have stayed put—probably exactly “a couple of minutes” from the sounds of it. Not enough time to get Kyle to do anything except call Elizaveta—which he’d done because I heard Elizaveta’s cranky voice; my cell phone distorted it just enough that with the door between us, I couldn’t tell what she was saying.
I wasn’t the only one who heard it. The zombie turned its head to the door.
My first clue about what the woman was had been that her breath had come out smelling fresh and oxygen-rich instead of dulled like someone’s who was really breathing would have. A vampire’s did the same thing, but she didn’t smell like a vampire, not even under the rich scent of the Chanel. The second was the way she’d obeyed what I’d told her. Zombies are supposed to be really cooperative as long as what you tell them doesn’t contradict what their master tells them to do.
“Yes,” Kyle said from the hallway, closing in on the conference room. “This is Kyle Brooks. We’re at my offices. Fine, thank you.” The door popped open. “What’s—”
The zombie launched itself at him.
I knew it was going to do it as soon as Kyle named himself. I was ready when he opened the door. I’m damned fast and I thought I had a handle on it, but that thing was faster than I’d thought it would be. I grabbed its shoulders and yanked it back, so it missed its target. Instead of nailing Kyle’s throat, it latched onto his collarbone.
“Sh—” he cried out, jerking back.
“Stay still,” I told him sharply, and he froze, his eyes on me and not on the zombie gnawing on him.
I don’t often use that tone of voice on anyone, and I hadn’t been sure it would work on a human. But if he tried to pull himself away, he was just going to do more damage to himself.
I tried not to think about the blood staining his shirt because I didn’t know if the witch needed the zombie still up and moving to tell who sent it after Kyle.
And I was damned sure going to get whoever had sent it after Kyle.
If I couldn’t tear the zombie apart, I had to avoid looking at Kyle’s blood. He helped. He didn’t look like a man in pain; he looked thoroughly ticked.
“Get her off,” he gritted, while trying to do it himself. He may be slightly built, but he’s tough, is Kyle. But it had locked its jaw good and tight, and Kyle couldn’t budge it.
I’d always assumed that taking on a zombie would pretty much be like fighting a human—one that was relentless and didn’t react to pain—but basically a human. When it moved on Kyle, it was moving a lot faster than I’d seen any mundane human move and now it was proving stronger, too.
It didn’t so much try to get away from me as it did to get to Kyle. I’d have thought that would make it easier to subdue. Finally I got an arm wrapped all the way around its shoulders, pulling it tight against me. Then I could put my other hand to work on prying her teeth apart. Its teeth. Its jaw broke in the process—and I got my thumb gnawed on a little.
Kyle staggered back, white to the bone, but he stripped off his shirt and wadded it against the hole she’d dug in him. “What is she?” he asked. “Why isn’t she bleeding more?”
He was looking at it in quick glances. I understood. It wasn’t pretty anymore with its jaw hanging half off.
“Zombie,” I told him a little breathlessly. It was now trying to get away from me, and that did make things a bit more difficult, but at least I wasn’t trying to pry it off Kyle.
“Your business, then?” he said.
Usually I’d agree; not even shark-sharp lawyers like Kyle were so exotic as to call for assassination by zombie—it was too flamboyant, too blatant. The witches and supernatural-priest types who could create zombies had never been hidden the way the werewolves used to be, but they lived among the psychics, Wiccans, and New Agers where the con artists and the selfdeluded provided ample cover for a few real magic practitioners. They didn’t give up that cover lightly. Somebody would have had to have paid a lot for a zombie assassination.
I shook my head. “Don’t know. Seems awfully set on you, either way.” The zombie hadn’t managed to get a limb free for the past few seconds, so I chanced turning my attention to Kyle. His wound worried me.
“You get out Howard’s good malt,” I told him. “He keeps the key behind the third book on the top left shelf. Clean that wound out with it. It’s liable to have all sorts of stuff in its mouth.” I didn’t know much about zombies, but I knew about the Komodo dragon, which doesn’t need poison to kill its prey because the bacteria in its mouth do the job just fine.
Kyle didn’t argue, and took himself out of the conference room. As soon as he was out of sight, the zombie started crying out something. Might have been Kyle’s name, but it was hard to tell what with its jaw so badly mangled.
I held on to it—by now I’d gotten a hold that prevented it from hitting me effectively or wiggling loose. That gave me the leisure to be concerned with other things. Kyle had shut the door gently behind him. I tried not to speculate about Kyle’s reaction, tried to wrap up the panic and bury it where it could do no harm. He’d seen weird things before, even if none of them had drawn blood.
I could have destroyed the zombie and left it in the conference room for later retrieval with no one the wiser; could have hidden all of this from my lover as I used to do. But it had been different with Kyle from the beginning. The lies I’d told to him about who and what I was, lies that necessity dictated and time had made familiar, had tasted foul on my tongue when spoken to him. Now he knew my truths and I wouldn’t hide from him again. If he couldn’t live with who and what I was, so be it.
But none of that was useful, so I forced my attention to the matter at hand. Who would send a zombie to kill Kyle? Was it something directed at me? The zombie was pretty strong evidence that it was someone from my world, my world of the things that live in the dark corners, and not Kyle’s; he was as human as it got.
Still, I couldn’t think of anyone I’d offended so much that I’d made Kyle into a target. Nor, with the possible exception of Elizaveta herself—who was, as Winston Churchill said of her mother Russia, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”—could I think of who could even create a zombie in the Tri-Cities. Eastern Washing
ton State was not a hotbed of hoodoo or voodoo.
Maybe someone had hired it done? Hired an assassin, and the assassin had chosen the manner of death?
Kyle had a lot more enemies than I did. When he chose to use it, his special gift was to make the opposing parties in a courtroom look either like violent criminals, or like complete idiots—and sometimes both. Some of them had quite a bit of money, enough to hire a killer, certainly.
Maybe it wasn’t my fault.
A zombie hit, though, screamed expensive, a lot more expensive than someone like Kyle would normally command. Which meant it was probably my fault.
I heard Elizaveta arrive and stride down the hall to the conference room. The lack of talking led me to believe that Kyle was still cleaning up.
Elizaveta opened the conference room door and entered like the Queen Mary coming to port in a wave of herbs and menthol instead of salt water, but with the same regal dominance, a regality accompanied by enough fabric and colors to do justice to a gypsy in midwinter—and it was hotter than sin outside.
I’d always thought that she must have been beautiful when she was young. Not a conventional beauty, something much more powerful than that. Now her nose looked hawkish and her eyes were too hard, but the power was still there.
“Warren, my little cinnamon bun, what have you found?” She never spoke to me in Russian as she did Adam, who understood it; instead she translated the endearments that peppered her speech—probably because they made me squirm. Why would you compare a grown man to a sweet roll?
I responded to her overblown presentation as I usually did, dipping down into my childhood accent—added to a bit by Hollywood Westerns. “Ah reckon it’s a zombie, ma’am, but I thought you oughta take a good look first.”
She smiled. “What was it doing when you found it?”
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