by Karen Chance
Dory gagged; it looked like her nose hadn't shut down, after all. Although she really wished it had. Oh, God.
She'd discovered the source of the stench: hundreds of dead fish washed up on the banks, and more in the water. It made the swim over just as much fun as the rest of this trip had been. But at least her other half was behaving.
It was probably off throwing up somewhere.
Dory could see the fish because the shack was brilliantly lit, with beams spearing out to illuminate the light rain that had started to fall, a small dock, and a speedboat. The boat was loaded down with familiar looking boxes. Dory climbed up a rusty ladder, and walked over to check one out.
It wasn't full of pills.
She pulled out a nice, thick glass bottle with a grinning death's head on the label. Or maybe not quite dead. Because the grin was a little too malevolent, and the eyes were a little too aware. And then a beam from inside the house lit up a name in brilliant acid green: Zombie's Bite.
Huh.
Dory opened it and took a sniff.
Rum.
She took a tiny taste.
Still rum.
She pulled open another box: twelve more bottles in between cardboard separations, so they didn't knock against each other. She assumed the rest of the boxes were the same, since they all bore identical labels. She sat on her haunches and thought for a minute.
Box after box of rum . . . in a swamp . . . full of dead fish and crazy gators.
Nope, she had nothing.
Better go ask somebody, then.
The shack turned out to be roomier than she'd thought, with an office type set up: desk, a few empty filing cabinets, boxes of empty glass bottles. And a label printing machine with a row of grinning death heads spilling out onto the floor. But no people.
There were none anywhere else, either, like in the two outbuildings she found on more solid ground behind the house. Just filthy wooden floors that would never have passed an inspection, rows of dusty barrels, a gas generator chugging noisily out back. And a big copper still, gleaming in the gloom, surrounded by a bunch of different sized tanks.
Looked like somebody was bootlegging.
Probably the guys who drove up in a large truck a moment later, rumbling down an old dirt road.
Dory quickly drew back into the shadows, because raindrops were visible on her suit. But it didn't matter. They were too busy arguing to pay any attention to her.
"-- the hell it have to be last night?" she heard someone say, before the truck even stopped rolling.
"Because we're done after tonight. And we still got a ton to do and I wanted to cross something off the list."
"So you flush all the wastewater?" a guy asked, getting out of the cab. "You couldn't have found anything else --"
"It needed to be done."
"Yeah, tonight. When we wouldn't have to smell all the fish it kills! God," the guy stared around. He was big, burly and wearing a sweaty Hawaiian shirt and an even sweatier baseball cap. He took off the cap and wiped his forehead, but it didn't seem to help. So he took it off again and smacked the other guy, who had just come around the truck, on the head.
"Cut it out!" the smaller man said, frowning. "Anyway, it turned out to be useful, didn't it?"
"Useful?"
"Yeah. The dead fish lured up a bunch of gators, so I used them to test the last batch."
"You gave rum to the gators?"
"Well, I had to make sure it wouldn't poison anyone, didn't I?" the little guy asked, working to get the chain off the warehouse door. "Too high of a concentration and you don't get zombified, you get dead."
"Bet the bokors'd like that," the third guy, tall and lanky and chewing tobacco, piped up.
Hawaiian shirt frowned. "Why would they like that?"
"Well, they like dead things, don't they?"
"So?"
"So then they'd be deader."
The big guy just looked at him for a moment.
And then the ball cap came into play again.
Dory stared at them. They looked like the three stooges, only not as bright. The bokors running this operation either hadn't arrived yet, or were long gone. But there was a better than average chance that these guys knew where they were.
She moved out into the opening between the house and the warehouses, which was maybe the size of a couple basketball courts. It was well lit, with the house lights spilling in from one side, and security lamps over the warehouse doors on the other, not that it mattered. They still weren't paying any attention to her.
But somebody else was. A prickle over her skin was the only warning she received before she was suddenly airborne. She went flying -- literally -- across the open space, landed hard, and rolled --
And was hit again before she could get back to her feet.
Only this time, the angle was different, the angle was down, and that left her prone and pummeled for a hellish few seconds -- which is a long damned time when something that feels like an industrial pile driver is smashing into you. But, like most dhampirs, Dory had her Sire's resiliency, along with a good deal of his strength. And five hundred years of dirty tricks to go along with them.
So she threw a handful of mud in her assailant's eyes, stabbed him in the neck when he reared back, and then kicked in the side of his head on the way back to her feet --
And hesitated, because she finally caught a glimpse of his face.
The master.
Oh, holy shit.
And then she was airborne again.
"Did you hear somethin'?" the short guy asked, right before Dory smashed down onto the barrel he'd been rolling. "Woah!" he sprang away. "Woah! What was that?"
The barrel rolling over me, Dory thought blearily, from under a couple hundred pounds of liquor.
"What's the matter? You hit something?" the big guy asked, from inside the cab of the truck, which he was trying to back up to the door.
"No, something hit me!"
"Ghosts," Lanky said, staring around, wide-eyed.
"Don't start," Hawaiian shirt warned him. "You know damned well --"
"If there's zombies, why can't there be ghosts?" Lanky demanded. "It's the same thing in'it?"
"It is not the same thing!"
"How you figure that?"
"Because necromancy is based on known magical principles. It's like science, right? Ghosts are just superstition. Stories for the weak minded."
"Well, I believe in 'em," Lanky said, as Dory pushed the barrel off her, causing it to roll back up the ramp.
"I rest my case."
"I . . . think I saw something too," Short Stuff whispered, his eyes on the gravity-defying barrel.
"What the hell did I do to get stuck with you two?" Hawaiian shirt demanded.
And then someone snatched Dory off the ground.
Wonder who, she thought blearily, and plowed a fist into his face.
She actually tried to plow it through his face and out the back of his head. Which might have worked if he was human, considering the power she put behind it. But, of course, he wasn't, and it mostly just seemed to piss him off.
Because the next few second's beating was right up there with the worse she'd ever had. One shoulder went numb, her already rattled head was rattled some more, and she possibly broke a rib or three. Which was a good trick considering that hers had the tensile strength of tempered steel.
But then, so did the fist bashing into them.
At least it was until she grabbed the barrel the two guys were still staring at and smashed it over the madman's head, drenching him in 150 proof and sending him stumbling backwards into the clearing.
And then threw on her lighter.
"What the -- what's going on back there?" Hawaiian shirt demanded, leaning out of the cab, trying to see.
"Ghosts!" Lanky said again, staring at the flaming barrel.
The short guy didn't say anything; he just stood there with his mouth hanging open.
"Damn it!" Hawaiian shirt told them. "The boss'll be he
re any minute and you two are horsing --"
Dory stopped listening. Sorry buddy, she thought, bending over and clutching her stomach, while watching the vamp go up in flames. But if it's you or me, it's gonna be you.
Of course, she could be wrong, she thought, as the barrel suddenly exploded outward, sending pieces of burning wood flying in all directions. And leaving a vamp standing there in an incandescent mass of blue fire. And fury.
Okay, you don't see that every day, Dory thought, and moved.
Up the ramp, to where a bunch of barrels on a rack were waiting to be loaded. A shove sent it tumbling over, and they hit the dirt, some falling out and one of them busting open. And one is all it took.
The gushing alcohol hit the burning shards, and a moment later, the whole area went up with a whoosh. The men started screaming and running around, except for Hawaiian shirt, who gunned the truck, and only made things worse when he forgot it was in reverse. He plowed into the fire, panicked, and then shot back the other way. And smashed into a dark blue Mercedes that Dory hadn't noticed because it had arrived in the midst of the chaos.
The bokors, she thought, and started for the car --
And the next thing she knew, she was in the water.
It happened exactly that fast, between one blink and the next, although the water wasn't exactly close. But a motivated master can cross a lot of ground in a hurry. Even while carrying a woman that he clearly intended to drown.
Or maybe the plan was to beat her to death; Dory couldn't really tell. Or maybe he just didn't care at this point. And ding, ding, ding, we have a winner, she thought, as her head and the bottom of the river came into brutal contact -- repeatedly.
But the river bottom, while muddy and horribly full of fish guts, was not actually lethal. Not even when the master found one of those damned roots to slam her head against instead, with the enthusiasm of someone trying to drive it right on through. But that didn't work either, which would have had Dory pretty smug except that he didn't have to kill her.
He just had to keep on trying until she ran out of air, because the fish soup they were swimming in appeared to have smothered the flames.
Like it was about to do to her.
Dory thrashed and fought and kicked and tried to bite. She tried every damned trick she knew, and invented a few new ones on the spot. She got his testicles in a clench once, but he slipped out of it before she could rip them off. And he wasn't just fast; he was strong and determined, and didn't seem to care how much damage he took, since he'd heal in time. Time she wouldn't have, because her struggles were getting weaker and her vision was getting darker, to the point that all she could see above her were the silhouettes of floating fish, dancing flames, and an agitated surface she was never going to reach again because she couldn't break his hold.
She couldn't break it.
The realization sunk in like a stone in her gut. Along with the fact that her bag was back in the clearing where she'd dropped it, and didn't contain anything likely to work on this son of a bitch anyway. And she was getting tired, while he had a whole family to draw strength from and --
And it was going to be her, wasn't it?
And then he released her.
It took Dory, who was more than half drowned, a few seconds to realize what had happened. And then another few to orient herself, and thrash back to the surface. And some more to gasp air into oxygen-starved lungs, while they simultaneously tried to cough up mud and muck and freaking fish guts --
And what the hell?
She didn't know. She stared around, bleary eyed and disoriented, still gasping for air. But all she saw was a merrily burning warehouse, a bunch of dark figures running around backlit by the flames, and one lone man standing on the pier, his arms raised --
And a speedboat that almost took off what remained of her head.
Dory dove, feeling the rush of water as it sped by, missing her by inches. She swam back to the surface a moment later, in time to see the boat disappear around a bend in the river and be hidden by a clump of trees. But not before she'd glimpsed the crazed master at the wheel, blackened and bloody and almost bald --
And speeding away from her.
For a moment, she just stared after him blankly.
Had he thought she was dead? She'd still been fighting. How had he missed that? And where the heck was he going?
Dory decided she could figure it out later. Like after she dealt with this, whatever the hell this was. She swam and then waded back on shore, pausing only to take stock.
It wasn't encouraging. Unless you'd just come to terms with your own mortality, that is. In which case, every pain, every dislocation, every sharp, stabbing sensation -- hell, even the smell -- was suddenly okay. Was better than okay. Was pretty damned amazing, in fact, and where the fuck was that bokor?
She rounded the house again, limping and still breathless, but didn't find him. The sleek Mercedes was gone, and the man she'd briefly seen on the pier must have gone with it. Because all she saw was his henchmen, still at work, now all but throwing whatever booze they could find into the back of the truck.
Dory jumped up onto the hood, the cab and then the back. Lanky was coming around the side at a jog, until Dory reached down and plucked him up by the ponytail. Leaving him dangling off the edge of the truck, three or more feet off the ground, and probably in considerable pain.
For some reason, she wasn't feeling too sympathetic.
"Oh, God," he whispered, pale blue eyes darting around, but utterly failing to see her.
"Not quite," Dory snarled, and jerked him up to her face.
"Oh God!" he repeated, looking seriously panicked.
"The bokor," she demanded. "Where did he go?"
"Wh-who are you?" he whispered. "Wh-what are you?" And then, before she could answer, one of his arms stopped flailing long enough to pull a little bag out of his shirt and thrust it at her.
Dory looked at it. "What's that?"
"G-goofer dust."
"What?"
"Graveyard dust!"
Dory looked at it some more. "What?"
"And . . . and angelica root! And Devil's Dung! And ginseng and bluestones and salt and whiskey!"
"Well, at least I can get behind that last one," Dory said dryly.
The man blinked, his eyes still searching fruitlessly for whatever held him. But he appeared to be farsighted, because even this close, he never focused. And then he scowled. "That damned Lulu! She charged me fifty bucks for that bag! Said all malicious spirits, plus the evil eye, plus --"
"Is Lulu one of the bokors?"
"What?" He frowned.
"The people running this operation. I only saw a guy --"
"No, that was the Reverend. But he doesn't have time to make gris-gris anymore. He's busy."
"I bet. So where'd he go?"
"B-back to Nawlins. They got a thing tonight --" he frowned some more. "Hey, why do you care? You're a ghost."
Dory pulled him onto the roof of the truck, slammed him down and whipped her face screen off. Leaving him staring up in alarm at a disembodied face floating in the air above him, and glaring down malevolently. "Which is what you're going to be unless you start talking," she told him. "Fast."
Chapter Ten