Back from the Undead

by DD Barant

  “So … what exactly do you do with all this freedom?”

  “Whatever we want, Jace. Whatever we want.”

  I think about that. “Well, I can tell you one thing—given unlimited freedom, the Roger I knew wouldn’t be spending it in an idyllic little village smelling wildflowers.”

  “I’m not the man you knew, Jace. But I think I understand why you’re supposed to talk to me.”

  I shift on the bench to study him. “Why?”

  “Incentive.”

  “Incentive to do what? Die? Now, that’s a strategy I haven’t seen before: Go ahead and get yourself killed, it’s not so bad.”

  “I don’t think that’s it. I think maybe you just need to believe in redemption.”

  Maybe he’s right. Maybe this Roger being here, now, is supposed to show me that people can change, that there’s some good in all of us.

  Yeah, sure. Except that the person who brought me here is not a good person, and never will be. In fact, I’m amazed he can come within a thousand dimensions of this place without bursting into flame, let alone be able to set foot here. I have no idea what Isamu is trying to pull—maybe it’s some sort of bribe instead of a threat? If so, I’m still not getting it.

  I guess I’d better go ask him.

  * * *

  It doesn’t take me long to trudge back up the hill. Isamu’s sitting cross-legged beside his bell like some kind of busker with the world’s most inappropriate instrument.

  “Okay, I’ve been to town and seen the sights. What’s your point?”

  He gets to his feet with one smooth, fluid motion. “You talked to Mr. Trent?”

  “I did.”

  “You believe he is who he says he is? That this place is what he claims it to be?”

  I sigh. “I grilled him pretty thoroughly on how he died. He had all the details right. And this place—well, if it’s not Heaven, it’s a damn good imitation.”

  “It is exactly what it seems to be, Ms. Valchek. I am a powerful man, but surely you do not believe that even I could create an entire plane of reality simply to fool you?”

  “Okay, I’ll grant that this seems to actually be some sort of … other-dimensional realm populated by spirits. So I’m going to say it again—what is your point?”

  His answer is to turn and strike the bell again.

  Once more, everything starts to vibrate. I’m a little more prepared this time, but it’s still unpleasant and disorienting and goes on for far too long.

  We’re back where we started, beside the pond. I shake my head, trying to clear it, feeling slightly nauseous.

  “Here is my point, Ms. Valchek. You are interfering in matters that do not concern you, and this is complicating things that should remain simple. I can forgive the attack on my blood farm, because you were obviously duped into it by Aristotle Stoker. What I cannot countenance is your meddling in the affairs of the Hemo Corporation. It is simply a business, one poised to become quite profitable through entirely legitimate methods, and your blundering about has the potential to disrupt delicate negotiations now under way. I will not have this.”

  He turns to me, his hands clasped behind his back. “You will leave this city, this province, this country. You will abandon your investigation. Or I will bar you from Heaven for eternity.”

  I have to hand it to him; as far as overreaching, grandiose threats go, this has to be near the very top. “And how do you plan to do that? You expect me to believe you have some kind of deal with—”

  “It is not a question of any sort of ‘deal.’ I used the principle of Cosmic Harmonics to bring you to Heaven, and I used the same method to bring you back. But the return trip was not quite the same, was it?”

  I don’t answer. But he’s right—it felt different, subtly wrong, like hearing an instrument that’s out of tune. I can still feel it, actually, a kind of subliminal vibration in my body and brain.

  “I altered your essential being,” Isamu says. “On an extremely basic level. Your spirit cannot return to that place, not ever—it will reject your very soul. Your own shamans will verify your condition. It is one that will last for the rest of your life and even beyond … unless, of course, you do exactly as I say.”

  SIXTEEN

  The cops drive me back to the downtown core. They even give my scythes back. I don’t say much during the trip, and neither do they—not until the very end, after they’ve let me out of the car. Before he gets back into the passenger seat, the pire says, “Word of advice? Whatever he wants, let him have it. Nobody crosses this guy and lives to talk about it.”

  That almost makes me laugh. Almost. “Funny. It’s not the living part I’m worried about.”

  The pire gets back in the patrol car, and they drive off. Guess I can’t count on backup from local law enforcement.

  I have a lot to think about on my walk back to the hotel. I call Charlie and Eisfanger on the way, tell them I’m all right and that I need Damon to do a thorough check on the status of my soul. He says he’ll have everything set up by the time I get there.

  It’s still dark, but dawn’s not far off. It’s probably stupid of me to even be on the street at this time, but I don’t want to take a cab. I need to keep moving. And frankly, I feel sorry for anyone foolish enough to try to mug me right now.

  Heaven. No Jace Valcheks allowed. What does that even mean? Do I go straight to the other place, or does my condition keep me out of there, too? Do I spend eternity pinballing back and forth, or do I wind up like a metaphysical bug squashed against God’s windshield or Satan’s grille? Is there some kind of bargain-basement afterlife I could get into instead, maybe a place with harmonicas and roller skates instead of harps and wings?

  Maybe there’s an appeal process. I mean, how does an evil piece of crap pire get away with dictating terms to the Almighty, anyway? Can’t I lodge a formal complaint? Or just march into a church and demand to speak to a supervisor?

  Oy.

  This is too big to wrap my brain around. I don’t even know if Isamu’s telling the truth yet; I’ll have to see what Damon says. In the meantime, I’m determined to treat it the same way I treat any threat to my personal safety—ignore it, put my head down, and charge straight ahead.

  When I get to the hotel, I go right to Eisfanger’s room. He and Charlie are waiting for me; Damon’s already got the bed shoved against the wall and a warded circle set up on the floor.

  “That’s it,” Charlie says. “I’m getting a pair of bracelets with a nice thick chain, and one of ’em is going around your wrist.”

  “Do me a favor and lock the other one to an angry wolverine, would you? I could use the peace and quiet.”

  Eisfanger tells me to sit inside the circle. He holds a small metal bowl level with my breastbone and runs a stubby finger steadily around the rim. An eerie tone rises up from the bowl, then starts to pulse. Eisfanger stops what he’s doing. He looks worried.

  “That’s—not good,” he says.

  “So Isamu was telling the truth?”

  “I need to do more tests.”

  Which he does. He draws blood, he chants, he taps away on his laptop. He raps a tuning fork in the vicinity of my chakras and listens carefully to the result. He burns some herbs, rubs the soot into my spine, and makes me spit in a copper goblet.

  Charlie watches all this with his arms crossed, leaning against the wall. I can’t tell if he’s angry at me, at Isamu, or himself. Probably all three.

  “It’s not your fault, Charlie. It was a total fluke that I wound up in the hands of two corrupt cops.”

  “Uh-huh. So how’d your middle-of-the-night meeting in the graveyard go?”

  “Um … fine.”

  “Get your little ammunition problem cleared up?”

  “Well, not really. Turned out to be sort of a dead end.”

  “Much like the fate of your immortal soul?”

  “Maybe. Ask Eisfanger.”

  Eisfanger looks up from his laptop. “I can tell you this much for
sure: Yes, you’ve had your harmonic balance altered. I can’t reverse the situation, and I doubt anyone but Isamu can. And yes, the spell seems to be keyed to a particular dimensional frequency, and structured to resonate just out of sync with it. Wherever he took you, you’re not going back.”

  “That much I figured. The real question is, was that Heaven or not?”

  Eisfanger looks deeply troubled. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? You’re a shaman and a scientist—you took readings, you measured things, you studied the data. How can you know the dimensional frequency of someplace and not know whether or not it has Pearly Gates at the entrance?”

  Eisfanger shakes his head. “For one thing, because there are a lot of spiritual realms. For another, information on any sort of afterlife tends to be contradictory, incomplete, and impossible to quantify. It’s nothing but a collection of personal experiences that rarely mesh with one another. Most people agree there’s some kind of existence after death, but exactly what kind is highly subjective. About the only thing that’s anywhere near consistent is cultural influence—people from the same ethnic background tend to have the same kind of experience.”

  “So I went to Heaven, but not the only Heaven?”

  Eisfanger hesitates. “Yes, but—”

  “But what?”

  “There’s a good chance it was, in fact, your Heaven.”

  “Why?”

  “The way you were brought there. I can’t be sure without examining the bell itself, but considering the principles involved, he most likely focused the bell’s vibrations through you. He was driving, but it was your essence that told him where to go. That’s how I would have done it, anyway.” He frowns. “Did you see anything familiar there? Somebody you know, maybe?”

  I let out a long, slow breath. “Just a guy I watched die once.”

  “Oh.”

  “Wait. I’m not from here, right?” I say. “Shouldn’t I go to whatever afterlife exists in my own reality?”

  “Actually, no,” Eisfanger says. “Souls don’t automatically cross the dimensional divide on death. You’d stay in this universe—it’s just a question of which sub-dimension.”

  First time I’ve ever heard of Heaven and Hell referred to as sub-dimensions. Kind of like the suburbs, only with a longer commute.

  Nobody says anything for a long moment.

  “Well,” says Charlie. “Guess it’s a good thing Heaven was never really an option for you in the first place, right?”

  I give him the best smile I can muster. It’s not very good.

  “Don’t take it so hard,” Charlie says gruffly. “You’re not gonna die for a long, long time. I guarantee it.”

  I almost believe him.

  * * *

  I lie in the darkness, staring at the ceiling, and think.

  What’s really interesting is that Isamu didn’t just kill me. The only reason for that is because he can’t, and that means that killing me would cause more trouble than scaring me off. Whatever he’s up to, he wants me out of the way with the minimum of fuss—which means no investigation into the murder of an NSA agent.

  Gashadokuro certainly seemed to be doing his best to kill me, but he didn’t strike me as a professional assassin. And the two cops who took me to Isamu didn’t seem like they were there specifically to target me; more like they were part of a larger effort and just happened to get lucky. That means there’s another player in all this—and somehow, I don’t think it’s “the fishies.”

  Isamu mentioned delicate negotiations. With who? Potential investors? Possible, but the Yakuza has plenty of cash; if it’s trying to woo financial partners, an enormous amount of money must be at stake. Government-level funds, or at the very least multinational corporations.

  Or maybe the negotiations aren’t strictly about economic considerations. Maybe they have to do with alliances, agreements. Hemo is in the midst of brokering deals with an uncountable number of Kami, and those are exactly the kind of talks that can easily break down—trying to hammer out a contract with, say, the Spirit of Thunderstorms might mean dealing with abrupt flashes of anger and/or bouts of weeping. So it could be that Isamu doesn’t want to risk ticking off a particular spirit by simply eliminating me—though I have no idea which one would be put out by me meeting an intimely end. Is there a Kami of Unreasonable Stubbornness?

  I turn the facts over and over in my mind, looking for the thread that links them all, the pattern I know is there. I can feel it, but it won’t materialize. Something else is there, blocking the way, distracting me. I know what it is, but I don’t want to admit it.

  I’m scared.

  Fear is nothing new to me, or any cop. We just find ways to deal with it, live with it, acknowledge its presence without letting it interfere with our work.

  But this is different.

  For all his threats, Isamu never really scared me. I don’t care how long he’s lived or how many terrible things he’s done, in the end he’s just another bad guy who thinks he can beat the system. He’s wrong—they always are. They make a mistake and then I get them. It’s really that simple.

  But this situation has me spooked. It’s easier to risk death when you don’t know what’s on the other side, and now I do: a big sign reading DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT YOUR ETERNAL REWARD. Suddenly, I have a real, genuine reason to not want to die.

  Okay, that sounds a little nuts. What, before this happened I didn’t care if I lived or died? No, of course not.

  It’s just that now, I care more.

  It’s a brilliant strategy. Guaranteed to make me nervous, insecure, prone to second-guessing myself. Even if I don’t knuckle under, Isamu’s got me at a definite disadvantage. Forget menacing my life, or even my friends and family—here’s a nice existential crisis to slow me down.

  There’s a knock at my door. “Jace? You still awake?” It’s Eisfanger.

  I get up, throw on a robe, open the door. “What’s up?”

  “With all the excitement, I forgot to tell you—Stoker had this delivered to the front desk.” Damon’s holding a cardboard box with a folded piece of paper on top. “I’ve already examined it, but I thought you’d want to, too.”

  I take the box and step back into my room, motioning Damon in with a jerk of my head. “What is it?”

  He steps inside and closes the door. “Possessions of one of the pire kids that disappeared—that’s what the note said, anyway.”

  I unfold the note and read it. Jace: This belonged to one of the missing children, a pire named Wendell—I managed to track it down in a pawnshop. Don’t know if your shaman can pull any psychic traces off it, but thought you should have the chance.

  I put the box down on the bed, open it, and peer at what’s inside.

  It’s a baseball glove.

  “I’ve run all the tests I can think of,” Eisfanger says. “Couldn’t find anything that will help us locate the owner, but I can verify it belonged to a pire boy named Wendell.”

  I pull the glove out. It’s a soft, faded brown, the gilt lettering of the brand name almost completely worn away. It smells like old rawhide and linseed oil. This was a glove that was well used. And well treated, rubbed with oil to keep it supple. An outfielder’s glove, it looks like.

  “How long did he own it?” I ask, turning it over in my hands.

  “Thirty-four years,” Eisfanger says quietly.

  Thirty-four years. Three and a half decades of playing catch, laughing with friends, snagging pop flies out of the air. “The boys of summer,” I murmur. “Except this little boy didn’t play in the sun, did he? Nothing but night games for him.”

  “He played center field, if it makes any difference.”

  “It did to him,” I say. “Any idea how it wound up in the pawnshop?”

  “I talked to the spirit of the glove, and all it remembers is how long it’s been since Wendell picked it up—a few weeks.” Eisfanger pauses “It … misses him.”

  “I’ll
bet you do,” I say to the glove. “Thirty-four years. That’s not a possession, that’s a marriage—ending in a very sudden and unexpected divorce.”

  I toss the glove back in the box. “Well, no way Wendell sells this glove or leaves it behind on purpose. He’s either dust or a captive.”

  “Kind of what I thought. But it still doesn’t prove Stoker’s telling the truth.”

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  I give the box back to Eisfanger, thank him, and tell him good night. Then I go back to bed and resume not sleeping.

  I haven’t really thought about the victims in this case. I’ve been so focused on Stoker that I haven’t connected with the reason I’m here. My own drama is getting in the way—and that has to stop.

  A profiler needs to know the victim of a crime as well as the criminal. The victim tells you many important things, from why they were picked to where the perp will strike again.

  But there’s more to it than cold, hard facts. Knowing the victim connects you to the case in a very intimate way. It gives you resolve. It gives you motivation.

  It gives you anger.

  I lie in the dark and forget all about my hypothetical problems with some presumed afterlife. I focus on what I know for sure.

  I focus on Wendell. And his glove.

  What seems like years later, I finally fall asleep. Except I don’t, quite. I’m in that zone where dreams and reality collide, where you think you’re still awake but you’re really not. I keep coming back to something Isamu said. Something he asked me.

  Surely you do not believe that even I could create an entire plane of reality simply to fool you?

  My eyes snap open. I sit bolt upright.

  An entire plane of reality, no.

  But an entire virtual reality?

  Hell, yeah. Heaven, too.

  I get up and throw open the curtains. The sun is just starting to peek over the horizon. It’s going to be a good day, after all.

  But not for everyone.

  * * *

  If you’re going to break into a business run by pires, the best time to do so is high noon; even the ones that work late and always pack a protective daysuit in their briefcase tend to be home and asleep in a very dark room by then.