by E. A. Copen
“Is that supposed to be a dog or a T-rex?” I asked, wiping away a tear.
Darius apparently didn’t think it was so funny. He motioned to his buddy who stepped forward. The fist came out of nowhere and plowed into my gut. If I hadn’t already been doubled over, it might have broken me in half. I collapsed against the goon’s arm, gasping to try and take in a breath. My legs suddenly didn’t work. Maybe mouthing off to the tattooed goon twice my size wasn’t the best idea. The goon let me crumple to the ground, making sounds that should be reserved for drowning fish.
“I want a refund, asshole,” Darius said, hovering over me.
“No…refunds,” I gasped out.
He drew a foot back and kicked me hard in the ribs. Stars flooded my vision as every major organ lit on fire.
“Tell you what.” Darius sighed and sank to one knee next to me. “’Cause I’m such a nice guy, I’ll give you twenty-four hours to think it over. Then, I’m coming back for a refund and an apology. If you don’t have what I’m looking for when I come back tomorrow night, I might not be so nice. You know the customer is always right, Laz. You should remember that.” He patted my side twice before standing, collecting his goon, and heading for the stairs.
I rolled over onto my back as soon as I could breathe and lay there for a while. Nothing was broken as far as I could tell, which was a plus, but I was going to have a nasty bruise that was going to put a serious damper on my night. With a groan and a hiss of pain, I pulled myself up using the wall as leverage and let myself in through the beat-up wooden door into my apartment.
Every wizard needs a sanctuary, and my apartment was mine. I’d lived there for just over eight months, and in that time, I’d made the place my own. Sigils carved into the door frame acted as wards. They wouldn’t kill anyone trying to break in, but the loud noise and rush of painful heat would be enough to deter them from entering.
I deactivated the wards and stepped into a simple room. A more generous person might’ve called the second-hand sofa, old horror movie posters, and TV trays a bachelor pad with eclectic decor. To me, it was just home.
I dropped my keys on the little cart in the kitchen next to the hot plate and dragged myself into the bathroom where I stared at my haggard face in the mirror. I’ve never been what most women would consider sexy. My facial scruff doesn’t grow in even, and my schedule is too hectic to get to the gym every day, a requirement for washboard abs. Don’t get me wrong; I’m by no means fat. If anything, I lean the other way, skinny as a rail and pale as death. I looked especially pale since Darius had his thug beat the snot out of me. The scuffle had somehow left me with a black eye, probably from when I fell to the floor and curled into a ball. I touched it and winced. That’d need some ice.
A firm knock at the front door made me lean away from the sink. Worried it might be Darius, back for another round, I went to the bedroom to grab my baseball bat before going to the door and peering through the peephole. The distorted face of a brunette in a low-cut dress shirt peered back. With a sigh, I put the bat over my shoulder and turned the knob. “Whatever you’re selling, I’ll take two.”
She eyed my face, then the bat and placed a hand on her hip. “Looks like you could use an upgrade to your home security system.”
“I don’t know.” I wiggled the bat resting against my shoulder. “Old slugger here was good enough for grandpa. Ought to be good enough for me.”
She put a hand on my chest and shoved me into the apartment. “Doesn’t look like it’s working too well for you now. Here I am, intruding on your space uninvited and that old bat of yours hasn’t done a thing.”
“Oh, well, you know I am a wizard after all. Magic powers and everything.”
“I heard you’re a necromancer, not a wizard.” Her hands trailed down my chest, and she gave me a sultry look with one raised eyebrow.
“I take offense to that, Odette,” I said in mock defense before lowering the bat and leaning it against the wall, eyeing the clock. If we were going to make it to Shel on time to keep our reservation, I’d have to get in the shower soon.
“What’s a necromancer but a specialized wizard?” she said, leaning against the back of my sofa.
“And what’s a werewolf but an oversized schnauzer?” I scoffed.
Odette sighed through her nose and stayed where she was as I went to the freezer in search of ice. The ice cube trays were empty, but I had some death by chocolate ice cream. Close enough.
“So who did you piss off this time, Laz?”
“Couple of gangbangers looking for their dead mom’s stash.” I grabbed the container of ice cream and held it against my eye, wincing. “But, hey, I got us reservations at Shel.”
“Maybe you should cancel that.”
“Why? Because I got beat up?” I lifted the ice from my eye and rubbed my injured ribs. “You should see the other guy. I thought you wanted to eat at that swanky place? Or are you just embarrassed to be seen with a necromancer?” Before she could answer, I turned away and closed the fridge. When I turned back, Odette stood there with her shoes dangling from two fingers, a sly smile on those full lips of hers.
“Actually, I was thinking we’d stay in tonight.” She dropped the shoes and walked over, sweeping the makeshift ice pack from my hands to plant a kiss there instead. “Maybe I can rub out some of those bumps and bruises, huh?”
“But it took me weeks to get these reservations and—”
She silenced me with another more urgent kiss. By the time she broke it off, I’d forgotten what I was going to say. “Forget Shel.” She gave my backside a pat and a gentle push toward the bedroom.
Normally, I didn’t much care for being told what to do and would’ve made a point to argue with her, if only over the principle of the thing. In this case, however, and after the day I’d had…who was I to argue?
I woke to the sound of my phone buzzing on the nightstand. Groggily, I pawed at it, my eyes little more than slits that flinched away from the light filtering through the blinds. Odette’s arm tightened around my ribs, and I winced. Yep, definitely bruised. My fingers closed around my phone just in time for it to stop buzzing. For a minute, I debated just letting go of the phone and going back to sleep. What good was owning my own business if I didn’t get to open late?
Odette decided for me when she tightened her vice grip on my ribs. I sat up, forcing her to pull her arm away. I felt like I’d been run over by a steamroller and knocked into the path of a city bus. My face ached, but no worse than if I were hung over. It was the ribs that were killing me, no thanks to Odette.
I glared at her from the edge of the bed, considering yanking the blankets away, but she mumbled something and turned away, her dark curls forming a shadowy halo around her bare shoulders.
Yeah, I guess it was my fault I was a little sore, too.
The phone buzzed again. With a sigh, I retrieved it from the nightstand and squinted at the parade of numbers marching across the screen. It was a local number, but not one I recognized. Fearing it was another unsatisfied customer, I rejected the call and found there were twelve more missed calls from the same number. That couldn’t be good.
Might be Darius, I thought. He seemed like the kind of guy who’d remind me about a past due payment. Past due, my ass. I turned the phone off. He’d given me twenty-four hours, and I’d be damned if I didn’t take every last minute of his time I could. Not that I planned on refunding his money. His forty bucks wouldn’t mean jack to him. What he really wanted was access to his mom’s buried savings. If I got him that, not only would he get off my back, but he’d owe me one. Maybe he’d send a few more clients my way, and I’d be able to keep the lights on another month.
I got out of bed and did a small stretch, wincing when the muscles in my ribs pulled. Navigating around all the fallen clothing on my bedroom floor, I plodded to the bathroom and turned on the shower. Odette wouldn’t be up for another hour or two, long after I had to go and open the shop if I wanted to make anything today. Satu
rdays were my best days.
After showering and dressing, I scrawled a quick note to Odette telling her to meet me later, grabbed my keys and headed out the door.
Everything went as normal on a Saturday morning until I came around the corner in front of my shop and nearly slammed into two police cars blocking the road. The front of my car veered right when I slammed on the brakes, and the back went left. Behind me, a horn blared until the car following too close finally managed to inch around me. A uniformed officer approached my car, hand on the gun in his belt.
I rolled my window down.
“Sorry, sir,” said the officer. “Street’s closed.”
I surveyed the scene. A whole gaggle of officers stood outside my office with notebooks and coffee cups along with a woman in black pants and a dress shirt. A detective? What was a detective doing…
Oh, shit.
“Tell me there’s not a body over there, Officer,” I said.
“I’m not at liberty—”
“That’s my shop, man!”
“Well, now it’s a crime scene.”
I put the car in park, yanked out the keys, and threw open the door.
“Excuse me, sir, you can’t—”
I paused halfway out of the car while he finished telling me I couldn’t just barge into a crime scene, and not because I was suddenly struck with the overwhelming urge to do as I was told. A spirit hung over the shoulder of this cop like a dark shadow.
Normally, spirits aren’t that easy to see, not even for me. It takes effort on my part to open a channel with the dead. On rare occasions, the dead muster up the courage to make themselves known to me without invitation, and when that happens, I pay attention because they usually have something to say.
I focused on the spirit, trying to make something out of the vague shape and form, a name, a date, a gender…anything could be helpful in determining why this spirit was attached to this man as it clearly was. The thing had no interest in anyone but him, just floated over his left shoulder with a general air of sadness and regret. I took in a deep breath through my nose. Under the normal salty bog smell of the city, I caught another whiff, one that told me everything I needed to know.
“You need to see someone about your drinking problem,” I said and shut the door.
The cop in front of me started, his eyes wide. This close, I could make out the dark circles of a late night under his eyelids. “Excuse me?”
“Your ex-wife is worried about you. She says lay off the booze before you kill yourself.”
His jaw shook. “My ex-wife’s been dead three years. How’d you…?” He shook his head. “Never mind. You said that’s your shop? The detectives will want to talk to you.”
“Good, ’cause I want to talk to them.” I barged into the crime scene, making a beeline for the chick in the dress pants with the alcoholic officer trying to chase me down. He had no chance of catching me; my strides were longer than his, and I wasn’t fighting a hangover. Although the sore ribs slowed me down a little, my determination to reach the detectives first almost won out.
Then I saw the body.
When you work with the dead, you get over being squeamish pretty quick. Not all spirits appear as they were in life. Some choose to appear twisted, broken as they were at the moment of their deaths, or rotten as they were in their graves. The worst spirit I ever dealt with was a shotgun to the face suicide. Guy regretted pulling the trigger just a millisecond after he did it and his family had me call him up to explain himself. Messy picture. I was just glad I’m the only one who had to look at him. It left me with nightmares for weeks after.
But dealing with a physical body is different. Spirits don’t have fluids. You can’t step in their blood spatter. And best of all, when dealing with spirits, there’s not usually a smell.
The body sprawled over the steps to my shop smelled terrible, and there was enough blood splatter that I thought maybe she’d exploded from the inside out. She was flat. I don’t mean lying down flat, I mean crushed with a steamroller flat. It was as if someone had dropped an enormous weight on top of her. Parts of her were disconnected at the joints, leaving a big red space between where one joint ended and another began. Her face, though, was left intact, allowing me to recognize her. It was the blonde from the day before who’d been asking for my help.
I took one look at the scene, down at my shoes, lifting them out of the sticky, drying blood, and then turned my head to heave into the bushes.
“Lazarus Kerrigan?” The detective at least had the decency to let me finish before she said my name.
I spat and wiped my mouth with my sleeve. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“This is your shop?” She pointed a pencil toward the door and read aloud what was written in gold lettering. “Medium and occultist?”
“What happened to her?”
The cop lowered her pencil. She wasn’t much younger than me. Big, dark eyes behind which lurked the ferocity of a dragon and the wit too many people were lacking. Her short, dark hair hung in tight ringlets, like springs about to bounce away. “Let’s start off again. I’m Detective Knight with the New Orleans Police Department. You’re standing in the middle of an active crime scene. You want to tell me what you’re doing here, Mr. Kerrigan?”
“I was trying to go to work.” Don’t look down, I thought. Don’t look at it. Pretend you’re just having a nice, relaxing conversation with Detective Knight. Routine. It wasn’t working.
I debated mentioning I’d seen the dead woman the day before but held off. Knight looked like she might be more interested in arresting me than hearing my side of the story.
“Do you recognize the victim?”
I took a deep breath and shook my head.
Knight raised an eyebrow. “You sure? Take a good look, Mr. Kerrigan. Go on.”
My stomach churned. “I’d rather not if it’s all the same to you.”
“Maybe this’ll jog your memory. One of the neighbors said he saw you outside yesterday afternoon arguing with a woman that matches the victim’s description. Remember now?”
Shit. Someone must’ve seen her chasing me down. To an outsider, I supposed it might’ve looked like an argument, which meant I was in deeper trouble than I thought.
I held up a hand. “She came by the office yesterday. I tried to give her a ride to the police station, but she turned and stormed away.”
“What’d she want from you?” Detective Knight put the pencil to her tiny pad of paper.
I sighed. There was no good way to put it so it wasn’t incriminating. Might as well be honest. “She offered me a handful of cash in small bills to protect her from something. Something magical she said was after her.”
“Something magical?” Knight crossed her arms. “What, like a vampire or a wizard?”
Just my luck she’d be a skeptic. The world was full of people like her that claimed they couldn’t believe what they didn’t see, smell, touch, or taste, yet magic was all around them. Non-believers only saw what they wanted to see. A world without magic was a world full of logical explanation, which our world most certainly wasn’t. We all want to believe things happen for a reason when ninety percent of it is random chance. Sometimes, humans just kill each other because they like it. Nothing makes them evil. Not even magic can change that. Arguing with Detective Knight about it wasn’t going to change her position on it either.
I shrugged. “I’m just telling you what she said. I told her I didn’t do that sort of thing and offered to take her to the cops. Next thing I know, she’s gone. That’s all I know.”
Knight glanced at my shop door and then back at me. “Don’t suppose you can just ask her who killed her?”
With a sheepish grin, I replied, “And do your job for you? If I could use magic to solve all my problems, why would I need to pay my taxes? Thanks, but no thanks.” I saw her open, glazed over eyes and quickly looked away. “Who was she?”
“Thank you, Mr. Kerrigan. That’s all I need from you. Don’t leave
town in case I have more questions.” She nodded to the drunkard cop from before behind me, and he stepped forward.
“Let’s go, pal.”
I took a step away but paused when a cold wind swept by that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. At first, I chalked it up to the spirit following the alcoholic cop around. Sometimes spirits trip that sense in me, but not often, not if I’ve already sensed them. When I paused, I heard a faint voice calling my name.
I turned back and saw her kneeling there over her body, as real and solid as the detective, a sad look on her face. Her fingers reached out to brush some hair away from her body’s death-clouded eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I offered to the spirit, but she acted as if she could neither see nor hear me. “I should’ve done something for you. Not that it means much now, does it? An apology after the fact isn’t much good.”
Knight frowned. “What are you going on about?”
I raised a finger to silence her. The victim and I had a connection, though it felt faint. One wrong move and I’d lose the signal without getting anything useful.
The spirit stood and put a hand in her pocket, mimicking movements she would have made while alive. She drew out a small white rectangle and leaned against the porch railing, scribbling something on the back of the card. About halfway through, her head jerked up, and she focused on the front door.
I was seeing our meeting the night before. Where she stood, I wouldn’t have seen her when I first glanced outside.
The spirit tucked the card she’d been writing on back into her pocket and started up the stairs.
Alcoholic cop’s hand closed on my shoulder, and the connection broke. The girl’s apparition faded from existence as if someone had unplugged the projector.
“There’s a card in her right jeans pocket,” I said, shrugging his hand off. “It’s important.”