Death Warmed Over

by Kevin J. Anderson

  The sow blinked her dark eyes at me, then grunted.

  I did my best to sound reassuring. “You just let us handle that. Robin will know how to respond.”

  Robin stood with a pencil stuck behind her ear, preoccupied with rereading the letter. She looked up at the dejected witch, and I could see the wheels turning in her mind. “Don’t be surprised or disheartened. I told you to be prepared for a blanket denial in response to our demand letter.”

  Mavis lovingly patted the sow’s broad head, scratching her behind the ears. She tossed one end of the starry blue scarf over her shoulder. “We’ll try to be strong.”

  Robin continued, “This is just standard procedure. Every publishing house has boilerplate letters, and they respond to complaints with categorical and vehement denials. It doesn’t mean you have any less of a case just because they say so, but they hope you’ll give up. We are not going to give up.”

  The sow grunted and snorted as if reciting a long paragraph in pig language. Mavis interpreted. “I know we have to pursue this case, Ms. Deyer, but my sister and I are just two witches trying to get by. We don’t have the money for a protracted legal battle.”

  “Don’t you worry about that a bit. If necessary, we’ll finish your case pro bono.”

  “She means on a contingency fee basis,” Sheyenne interrupted, rising from her desk. “One-third of the monetary award, plus costs, but only if we win.”

  “We’ll fight for Justice, “Robin said. “Alma has been wronged, and you have been wronged. The publisher’s mistake caused your suffering, and I won’t stand for that.” Robin put her arm around the witch’s shoulders. “Come and sit down, and we’ll talk about the next step.”

  With a wan, stiff-upper-lip smile, Mavis trundled toward the conference room with a swish of her black gown. The door to the room wasn’t wide enough to accommodate the large sow and the large witch at the same time, so Mavis let the pig walk in ahead of her. After they invited me to join them, I moved one of the chairs away from the long table so that the pig would have a place to stand.

  Alma was Mavis’s sister, just as largely built, although she’d had blond hair (with occasional black roots, which might be the reason for the dark spots on the sow’s hide now). The two witches had bought a new book of obscure spells released by Howard Phillips Publishing—“We Love Our Craft.” But due to an unfortunate typo in the incantations, one of the spells had gone horribly wrong: Instead of turning the two rather homely witches into svelte Aphrodite look-alikes, the spell backfired and transformed Alma into a fat sow. She’d been that way ever since. All of Mavis’s attempts to reverse the spell had failed.

  I remember how distraught the witch was when she first led the large pig into our offices, weeping. This was exactly the type of case that got Robin’s passion. “A spelling error in a book of spells is a clear example of gross negligence,” she said. “Look at the damage it caused! The publisher hasn’t even offered to correct their mistake. We have to stop this before others suffer the same fate.”

  “I don’t think the book had a very large printing,” Mavis admitted. “We had to special-order it.”

  “They could at least have used a spell check,” Robin said.

  I offered, “Let me make some calls, put you in touch with witchcraft troubleshooting organizations that could help you find a reversal of the spell.”

  “Sheyenne will get you a list of support groups, too,” Robin added.

  Once the Wannovich sisters became our clients, I did some investigating, discovered that Howard Phillips Publishing specializes in collectible editions of arcane works, and they have offices here in the Quarter. So far, their largest seller has been an annotated but abridged edition of the Necronomicon bound in alligator skin (they had announced, but never published, an extremely limited numbered edition bound in human skin). Recently, the company had begun to offer publishing services, for a substantial fee, to print and distribute the memoirs and ruminations of unnaturals. Everybody, it seems, wants to write their life, and death, story. Most of these memoirs were available only in e-book formats and print-on-demand. Despite their fancy logo, Howard Phillips Publishing was little more than a vanity press.

  Robin passed me the response letter, which was written in flowery legalese on formal stationery. The publisher’s legal department—probably one guy in a back room somewhere—insisted, “Witchcraft is a dangerous hobby, and every practitioner should use appropriate caution. The spells in our spell books are intended for entertainment purposes only. The publisher accepts no liability for any misuse or inadvertent accidents that may occur as a direct or indirect result of our books. We make no warranties, express or implied, about the accuracy of our content. Any damages are the sole responsibility of the user.”

  “Reads like a form letter,” I agreed and handed it back to Robin.

  “We’ll file a suit against them,” she said. “In order to protect other users, our first course of action will be to demand that they withdraw all copies of this spell book from the market until the typo is corrected. In fact, I can probably get an ex parte injunction by showing irreparable harm to the user—i.e., being turned into a sow.”

  “But how long will all that take?” asked Mavis. The sow let out a squeaking snort, then sat on the carpet.

  “I’m afraid it’s going to require some time. First, we have to serve the complaint, and they have thirty days to file an answer. If they don’t agree to take the book off the market, I have to file papers and go through written discovery, after which we take depositions, move for a trial date.” A glint appeared in her deep brown eyes. “As another possibility, we can go directly to the media. Obviously, one interview with you and your poor sister, and our case is won.” Robin leaned over to gaze at the mournful sow, and she put both her hands on the table. “But we are going to win this one. We’re going to win!”

  “I believe you, but my sister’s a sow!” Mavis’s lower lip trembled, and I could see she was about ready to unleash a hurricane of tears and sniffles. “I always wanted to work in publishing. I even applied for a job at Howard Phillips, offered to help with proofreading. They never responded. And now . . . my poor sister!”

  Alma nuzzled up against Mavis’s dark skirts. The witch straightened her back, and her expression darkened. As she rose from her chair, Mavis’s black gown seemed to grow more voluminous, her hair standing out like a big curly thundercloud. “If we can’t find a way to fix this, then I want to nail that publisher to the wall!”

  Robin sounded cheery. “We can help you with that, too, if you like.”

  CHAPTER 14

  After I ushered the witch and the sow out of the offices, walking them down the hall to the elevator, Sheyenne was opening the day’s mail at her desk. She tore open an envelope and looked at the results with a disbelieving grumble. “You gotta love the post office.” She held up the paper. “This letter to me—important chemical results—took weeks to be delivered, even though I filed all the change-of-address forms as soon as I came back from the dead.”

  Sheyenne had experienced a lot of trouble getting her mail forwarded. Since she was a ghost and gainfully employed, she used the Chambeaux & Deyer offices as her new physical address, but glitches still happened.

  I plucked the paper from her ghostly hands. It was some kind of lab report, a spectrometer trace, tables of numbers and lists of complex compounds that I didn’t understand. While working on other cases, I had seen blood tests and DNA matches for paternity suits, but these results didn’t look familiar. “What is this?”

  “Back at Basilisk I sneaked a bottle of Zom-Be-Fresh perfume that Brondon Morris was showing off around the club, but when I tried the stuff, it gave me a horrible allergic reaction—I had hives all over my skin, and they itched like crazy. I was miserable, and I told Brondon he shouldn’t leave dangerous chemicals lying around.”

  “Funny, he just told me about that last night. If you stole the sample, he didn’t exactly leave it lying around. And if yo
u didn’t follow the directions—”

  She grimaced. “I know it’s not designed for or marketed to humans, but JLPN is peddling that stuff all over town. I sure was sorry I tried it!”

  I let out a wistful sigh. “Your skin looked just fine during our night together.”

  Sheyenne laughed. “It was dark, and the rash was mostly gone by then.” We both paused for an awkward moment, reminiscing.

  She turned her attention back to the chem analysis. “Brondon was panicked about a PR debacle, slobbered apologies all over me, but I sent the sample off to a lab anyway.” She looked up at me, her eyes bright. “I had connections at the university through the med school.”

  I looked down at the sheet again. “These numbers make about as much sense to me as rap music. What does it mean?”

  “Nothing.” She frowned. “The perfume is perfectly harmless. No hazardous substances whatsoever.” She drifted behind her desk, and with a poltergeist harrumph scattered some of the other envelopes, letters, and bills that she had placed there.

  I wanted to wrap my arms around her waist, let her rest her head on my shoulder and stay that way for about an hour . . . which is tough to do when you can’t touch the other person. “At least now you know there was nothing to worry about.”

  “I would have pestered the lab about it, but I was too busy with other things . . . like dying in a hospital bed.” She hung her head.

  “Sorry,” I said, not really sure what I was apologizing for, but just generally sorry about everything that had happened. Even though I can see her ghost every day, the pain is still fresh, a sick burning in the center of my chest like the indigestion after eating three chili dogs and two pepperoni pizzas.

  “Thanks, Beaux,” she said. “That was a rough time.”

  “An understatement.”

  After we met at Basilisk, we spent more and more time in each other’s company, growing close, and then we had our one night together. It should have been a lot more than that.

  We’d gone back to her apartment. She and I each had that unspoken hunger, the magnetism that almost never happens, where two people click with a spark that both can see but nobody else notices. Pulse increasing, throat dry, accidental touches and then not-so-accidental ones, and a rising heat where you both know that this might not be the smartest thing in the world to do, but it’s best not to ask too many questions.

  I’ve had one-nighters before. In my line of work, you bump into a lot of desperate people, and more than half the time they’re women. Sometimes they’re pulling strings to encourage me to work harder on their cases; other times the ladies want to show their gratitude in some way besides just paying the bills.

  With Sheyenne, though, it wasn’t like that. Usually, when I hooked up with someone, client or otherwise, I’d have a queasy feeling afterward. Not guilt, really, just a general disappointment in myself. What I had with Sheyenne did feel good afterward—good enough that I didn’t want to ruin it. Something that could have been a real relationship.

  And so I did the instinctive thing, the male thing . . . the wrong thing.

  I knew that Sheyenne’s parents were killed when she was just a teenager by a man in a business suit talking on a car phone, having an argument about a Chinese to-go order. She’d had to be strong, raise herself. She got a succession of jobs, always learning, never giving up on the chance to make something of herself. She seemed to take her independence as a badge of honor.

  When I asked whether there was anyone who could have helped her out, she had said, “Problem is, when somebody helps you, they think you owe them. I wanted to avoid that.”

  So I didn’t want to scare her off by being clingy and obsessive, didn’t want her to think I had fallen head over heels for her, because surely that would spook her. So I retreated and kept myself busy, trying not to think of her too much. I stayed away for four days.

  How could I not realize that she must have assumed I’d abandoned her, brushed her off—“Slam bam, thank ya, ma’am. Don’t worry about breakfast in the morning.”—when of course I thought about her every moment for four days?

  When I thought I had waited long enough, I called her, but I got the unexpected message that her phone had been disconnected. Bad sign. I stopped by Basilisk, and Fletcher Knowles said that Sheyenne hadn’t shown up for work in two days. Ivory insisted she hadn’t seen the girl, suggested that she must have run off somewhere. The big vamp singer didn’t seem terribly disappointed.

  Finally, I went back to Sheyenne’s apartment. Though no one answered my knocks, neither the polite one nor the louder one, I thought I heard a groan from inside. Using an old private investigator’s trick, I pulled out the lock-picking tools I always keep in my pocket. I fiddled with the lock, but she had installed heavy dead bolts for additional security (a good idea, considering the part of town), and the reinforcement was too much for me. So I tried another PI trick and threw myself against the door, attempting to break it down. I nearly dislocated my shoulder, but I couldn’t smash the dead bolts.

  By now, I was positive I’d heard another groan, a weak cry for help inside the apartment. So I turned to my last and best trick and went down to the manager’s apartment, slipped him a twenty, and talked him into letting me inside. He didn’t seem convinced about any emergency, wasn’t happy with Sheyenne at all. Apparently, she’d been late on her last month’s rent.

  I made him get his priorities straight.

  After he used his key to unlock her door, I pushed my way inside to see Sheyenne lying on the floor, already on death’s doorstep. Her skin was pale and grayish, her eyes half-open, her breathing heavy and wet, her pulse thready. She had vomited several times. I could see she had tried to crawl across the floor, but couldn’t get anywhere.

  “Call an ambulance!” I yelled to the manager, who seemed more worried about the mess on the floor than about the dying young woman. I picked Sheyenne up and carried her down the stairs and out the front door to the sidewalk. The paramedics arrived a few minutes later and rushed her to the hospital.

  She’d been poisoned—a high concentration of the alkaloid toxin distilled from the “death cap” toadstool, Amanita phalloides. Even if the poisoning had been caught early, the mortality rate was greater than 50 percent . . . and no one had found Sheyenne in time, because I was stupid and stayed away to give her space. By now the toxin had done its work: severe liver damage, renal failure . . . nothing the doctors could do to save her.

  It was long and painful, a horrible, lingering way to die.

  I never left her bedside in the hospital. Sheyenne wavered in and out of lucidity, but she always knew who I was. “I thought you wouldn’t call me back, Beaux. Thought I’d . . . scared you off.”

  “Never,” I said. “Just waited too long.” Then I let out a long sigh. “I wish I could find some way to help you, Spooky.”

  Shadowy hollows surrounded her eyes, but her smile was the same. “You’re doing it, just by being here. I’ve got no one.”

  “You’ve got me.”

  “I wish I could stay with you, Beaux. But someone wanted me dead. You’re the private detective. Find out who did this to me. For me, please?”

  “I promise I’ll solve this case. I’ll find your murderer, if it’s the last thing I do.”

  “You’re so sweet,” she said in a breathy voice. “Have a good life.”

  She died an hour later, but I never forgot my promise to her.

  One of her last acts in the hospital had been to scrawl a note, a holographic will, granting me custody of her meager worldly possessions—nobody really cared, since she didn’t have any living relatives. When her ghost did not appear immediately after her death, I thought she was gone for good.

  Weighed down with grief and anger, I went to her apartment to clear out Sheyenne’s stuff and was surprised to discover that her snotty building manager was already intending to sell her possessions in order to recoup his lost rent. I had no intention of letting him do that, and we ended up in a
shouting match. As a favor to me, Robin drafted and signed an impressive-looking legal document that intimidated the manager, and I hauled out the boxes myself, put them in the storage unit that we retained for holding old case records.

  Feeling lost and alone, I dropped all my other cases to work on hers, to track down who might have poisoned my Sheyenne. But my other cases didn’t forget about me, and I should have paid more attention to the fact that a cocktail waitress/nightclub singer/med student wasn’t the only one with enemies in the Quarter.

  Less than a month after she died, there I was late at night, minding my own business—or Sheyenne’s, actually—when one of those cases caught up with me in a dark alley not far from Basilisk. I’d taken the same shortcut back to the office that I always do. Someone came up behind me, put an antique Civil War pistol to the back of my head, and fired a round through my skull.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t one of those cartoon villains who likes to gloat and gab and explain every little bit about his dastardly plan. No, this time it was just the gun, then the bang....

  Now, as I stood in front of her desk reminiscing, Sheyenne crumpled the chemical analysis report and tossed it across the room with a swirling breeze of ghostly annoyance. “So much for sticking it to JLPN. I was so sure there’d be some contaminant or hazardous component, something that was a factor in my poisoning. But I know the lab guy, and this is for real.” She looked fiercely determined. “I have half a mind to manifest before Brondon Morris, chew him out, and give him a wedgie in front of his zombie ladyfriends.”

  “You’re a ghost,” I said. “He knows you can’t touch him.”

  “Oh, I can still make him miserable.”

  No doubt she was right. “I really think I could have loved you, Spooky,” I said, startling her.

  “Oh, Beaux, under normal circumstances you would have forgotten about me in a few weeks,” she teased.