Staying Dead

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “We were already on the road when the call came in,” one of the men said, exchanging a glance with his companion that clearly indicated his opinion of the man in front of them.

  Prevost, already leading the way through the house to the command center, didn’t notice. “Well, as you can see, on the surface everything is working, but someone managed to break through nonetheless. And I refuse to sleep here until it’s all been checked out, and fixed!”

  “I don’t think that will be a problem, sir,” one of the nameless men said, as he took a soft cotton scarf from his pocket, and looped it around Prevost’s neck, yanking the unsuspecting man backward with one jerk of his arms.

  The other man took a large curved knife from his toolbox, and stepped in front of the struggling Prevost, calmly slicing open his throat, a wide gash from one corner of his jawline to the other, with one slash of the blade. Prevost’s body arched forward, so the blood spurted on the ceiling in an artistic spray, only a few drops landing on his assailant’s face and coverall. Then Prevost slumped forward, collapsing to his knees as his assailant let go of the scarf. “You’ve become the problem. Sir.”

  The knife-wielder wrapped the blade in a cloth also taken from the toolbox, and replaced them both carefully, locking the lid. Only then did he pause to wipe the blood from his face with his sleeve, the crimson fading into the deeper blue of the fabric.

  “Get started down here,” the first man said, rolling up his cloth and replacing it in his pocket. “I’ll go check out what’s upstairs, see if there’s anything they want back, now that we’ve found him.”

  “Right. Give a yell if you find anything—I’ll only be a few minutes down here.” He picked up the box and went back out to the truck, leaving Prevost behind on the parquet floor, gaping like a fish as he died.

  Ten minutes later the house was in flames, and an unmarked blue van was making its way through the streets of the nearest town.

  thirteen

  Sergei was waiting for her at her apartment when she finally got home, two hours after dawn the next morning. The stolen car was abandoned in the driveway of an unsuspecting suburban household an hour’s drive west of the estate. She had walked through the predawn gloom several miles to the local Greyhound station, catching the next bus south to D.C., where she had paid cash for a seat on the first Amtrak express train back into Manhattan. By the time she arrived, the sweats she had put on in the car looked far worse for wear, and she could have easily passed for one of the discharged mental patients who wandered the streets waiting for a medication time that never arrived. She came in the door like a load of walking lead, hands outstretched for the mug of coffee he had ready for her. It wasn’t well-made, but it was hot, and it had caffeine in it, and it was manna from the gods.

  What day was it? Saturday? No, Sunday, that was why the trains had been few and far between. God, she needed to sleep. “I’m not getting paid enough for this.”

  He pushed her down the hallway toward the bathroom, turning the shower on and shoving the knob all the way to hot. She took another gulp of coffee, and felt some of her synapses start to fire up again. “I’m really not getting paid enough for this. How much am I getting paid again?”

  “You want to check your balance again?”

  “Couldn’t hurt. Might help.”

  He took the mug from her, and when she might have made a whimper of protest, placed it on the counter and tugged at her sweatshirt. Her arms went up, and he pulled it over her head, dropping it on the floor. She took the hint, shucking out of shoes, socks, and sweats in short order. Bra and underwear followed, any sense of modesty in front of him long gone in her exhaustion. She managed another gulp of coffee before he was moving her into the shower. The hot water and steam hit her at the same time, and all she could do was moan in gratification. Her hair plastered to her head, she leaned into the jets, feeling the grime and dust and dirt washing away. It was almost always the same way after a Retrieval, this bone-deep, beyond-exhaustion weariness. Hot water helped. She wasn’t recovered, not by a long shot, but now she finally felt like she might be able to sleep, at least.

  The shower curtain pushed aside, and Sergei handed her the coffee mug, freshly topped off.

  Or not.

  When she got out of the shower, a towel was waiting for her. Sergei wasn’t. She wrapped herself in the terry-cloth, squeezed the excess water out of her hair and finger-combed it, then went in search of her partner. He was sitting in the main room, occupying the one chair. The stereo was on, playing music she didn’t recognize. Low bluesy sound, and a woman singing like a prayer, in French.

  Always a bad sign, when Sergei went to Paris.

  She left him there, and went into her bedroom. A quick rummage through her dresser turned up underwear and a pair of jeans. A sweatshirt left at the foot of the bed smelled clean enough, and she slipped it on, pulling her wet hair out from under the collar. Fortified, she went back to the main room, and sat down cross-legged on the carpet across from him. He tapped the remote, and the music shut off.

  “Okay. What?” Yeah, his jaw was way too squared for it to be anything other than ugly news.

  “The spell returned the cornerstone to its proper location, as per our agreement. However, the client claims that we did not finish the job.”

  Wren blinked. Thought. Looked up at her partner. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with a ghost, would it?”

  Sergei’s face went through a sea change of expressions, from perturbed to disconcerted to resigned. “Start from the beginning. All the gory details.”

  It took almost as long to tell as it had to perform, with Sergei constantly interrupting and asking for more, more specific details. But finally Wren got to the point where the wand struck the cornerstone.

  “What happened to the stone then?”

  Wren shook her head, tracing her fingers along the design of the rug. “Damned if I know. The smoke was everywhere, I could barely see an inch in front of me. But I know where you’re going with this—I thought about it a lot on the way home. Yes, I think the ghost came from the stone. No, I have no idea how it got there.”

  “It was part of the spell.”

  Sergei’s voice was dry. She looked up at him in disbelief, half expecting a joke. But while his finely-drawn lips were curved in a smile, there was no real humor behind it.

  “What?”

  “The ghost was part of—”

  “I heard you, I heard you. They tied a person into a spell? I mean, a real live person?”

  “A dead person, actually, otherwise it wouldn’t be a ghost.”

  “No, Sergei, you don’t get it. If there was a ghost trapped in there, I think they—the person who cast the spell—had to have used the person. I mean, the living person. Who then became a dead person.”

  “Murder.” He didn’t say it like a question. “They couldn’t have, I don’t know, called up a ghost from someone already dead?” Sergei offered the possibility without any real sense of optimism.

  “Maybe. Hell, I don’t know a damn thing about raising the dead, or using spirits in magic at all. Not exactly in the playbook, if you know what I mean.” Not in the playbook at all. Not any one Neezer had ever told her about, anyway. Then again, Neezer had been a pretty straight arrow. That didn’t sound like anything he’d want to talk about—or want her to know about. Admirable, but a real pain now when the info would be useful.

  Wren got up, pacing the length of the room and then back again, gesturing with her hands while she thought her way through the problem, like a professor lecturing before a class. “Okay. Work it through. According to most magus theories, spirits are pure energy tied to flesh for the duration of a life. Where that energy comes from, you’re moving more into religion than magic, and a whole different headache. Now, I was taught that at the moment of death, the energy, or spirit, dissipates, goes back to the elemental flow.”

  “In which case, no ghost.” Sergei leaned back into the chair, managing to look totally re
laxed even though she could feel the alert tension in his half-lidded gaze.

  “Normally, yeah. But that’s why I think this person had to be alive. When the spell was cast, anyway. I’m not sure exactly when they’d have to kill him. If they could catch the spirit as the flesh died, and trap it then—” Wren shuddered. “That’s nasty. That’s really, really nasty. Killing’s one thing. Trapping something like that—what if it was claustrophobic? Ick.”

  “It gets worse,” Sergei told her. “According to our client, we were hired to retrieve the entire cornerstone—the spell contained within the stone, as well as the stone itself. We failed. He is therefore refusing to pay the final installment of the fee.” That fact clearly angered him more than the fact of a generations-dead murder victim, however tragic.

  Wren stared at him, thinking it through as quickly as she could. “And if they used the energy of the death to create the spell, somehow, or activate it, or whatever…which means it’s probably tied to the ghost…”

  “Then if the ghost isn’t recaptured, our contract is technically void, and they have every right not to pay us.”

  Wren threw up her hands in disgust. “Christ on a Popsicle. You couldn’t have told me that little detail before?”

  Sergei met her eyes squarely, not a little irritated. “I didn’t know that little detail before. And even if I had, what could I have said? I’m not the one who’s the expert on magic here, am I?”

  Wren ran her hands through her hair, pulling at the ends in her frustration. He was right. Damn him. That was one real and dangerous flaw in their system. Sergei didn’t know enough, couldn’t, for all his reading and questioning, know enough about magic, or current, to know when he was being yanked around in negotiations. “Okay, new rule number one. We know all the facts before we take a job. No reconnoitering after the fact. Even if that means you have to put them on hold and call me if something—anything—seems hinky. Okay?” He hesitated. “Okay?”

  They stared at each other for a long, drawn-out moment. Then Sergei exhaled, nodded. Wren snorted. Great going forward. But for now…

  “I suppose bowing out of the contract is a no-go?” His glare was answer enough. Screw up one job, and your reputation was shot. Especially when the screw-up was through your own stupid fault.

  “Right. All we have to do is figure out how to track down a ghost and shove it back into the marble, and we can collect our paycheck. Piece of freaking cake.”

  As though to mirror the mood inside, the day turned overcast early on, and before midday, the faint patter of rain began hitting the roof and windows. It was a mild front, nothing brewing in the clouds, but it brought a pleasantly fresh smell to the air, of ozone and clean dampness that Wren appreciated.

  Wren turned on every light in the third bedroom, which she used as the library/storeroom. Every wall was covered with bookcases that went to the ceiling, and the floor had boxes filled with things magical and inert from past jobs and research that she didn’t know what else to do with. Half, maybe more of the books, she’d never read past the cover flap, just shelved for a possible need later on. Well, later was now. She rummaged through the bookcases for any title which might possibly touch on the subject of ghosts, while Sergei sat in her office and ran through search engine after search engine, bookmarking any site that looked as though it had potential.

  “At this point,” Wren directed him, “we don’t pass anything up, no matter how crazy it looks.” Much to her surprise, death current was a well-researched, if frowned-on topic. Weird that she’d never heard about it before. Or then again, maybe not so weird. You sort of had to have a specific question to go looking for these answers.

  The real problem, they quickly discovered, was that even within reputable magical sources ghosts were mostly a theoretical debate. There was no way to prove that an alleged encounter was a spirit, or merely the effect of a subconscious magic-user, or even a deliberate hoax by a trained mage.

  “Or,” Wren said glumly, “a wizzart just losing his mind.” She looked at the piles of books and printouts surrounding her, spread out all over the music room’s floor. Sergei had kicked her out of her own office when her running commentary on the idiocy of several writers had become too much for him to concentrate.

  The truth was, most written texts on the supernatural were completely useless. Ninety percent of anything people believed grew out of their own fears and superstitions, not reality. Historical figures like John Dee and Agrippa Von Nettesheim, alchemists and scientists and self-proclaimed “magicians” rarely if ever touched on the truth. And those who did know rarely—call it damn near never—felt the urge to share that knowledge with outsiders.

  Oh, there was some truth to the “other magics,” as the texts called them. Herbal craft. Faith-based “miracles.” It was as real as current, but with far less reliability. Sometimes they worked. Sometimes they didn’t. Less to do with ability than sheer luck, really. There were speculations, ranging from alternate world power bleeds to Divine intervention, but for the most part it was left to folklore and Nulls trying blindly to create what was beyond them.

  But the one thing Wren had gotten from her rather reluctant attendance in college—two years, associate degree, and gone, and only because her mother insisted as part of her going to work with Sergei right out of high school—was the fact that you could sometimes find useful information in unexpected places. Placing aside an old text on necromancy, she instead picked up a modern paperback on spectral visitations, a pop science book written by a popular “ghost hunter,” who claimed to have the reports of over five thousand sightings in his files. Bypassing the section on haunted houses, she went straight to the back of the book, to the chapter on the ghosts of murder victims. Unquiet haunts, they were called.

  Most of the chapter seemed to focus on ghosts that were merely reliving—so to speak—their deaths, or haunting the specific area of their demise.

  “Not the case here, more’s the pity.” The apparition she had encountered was clearly aware of itself, and just as clearly no longer bound to the stone. Might it return to the actual site of the murder? But they had no idea where that might have been: a drawback, not knowing the spell used to create the protection. And somehow Wren didn’t think that the Council would give that detail up, even if Sergei hadn’t specifically said they’d purged that file. Would the ghost think to return to the building? And even if it did, what would it do there, haunt the lobby? Wren smirked at the thought of Rafe and his buddies trying to escort an unruly ghost out of the building.

  A pain started, just behind her left eye, and Wren winced. Closing her eyes to rest them for a moment, she did a few deep-breathing exercises, trying to chase down the pain and squash it. Although she had met a few people who could use current to heal serious wounds, she had never been able to pick up more than the basics of burn-ease and pain-reduction—nothing a few aspirin, a cool compress or a good massage couldn’t do just as well.

  And asking Sergei for a quick massage was out of the question, too. Normally he’d oblige, but recent events had made her shy away from asking for physical contact. She shoved her hair out of her eyes, impatient both with it and herself. Although even without that she might not have bothered him. Her partner was tense about something, too. Wren didn’t want to ask; if it was job-related they’d just start feeding into each other worse, and if not…if not, then it fell outside the established partnership rules, and that led back to her own reasons for not wanting him to touch her and…God, what a freaking mess.

  A twitch of the energies flowing through the apartment, and the stereo came on, thankfully set low from Sergei’s use. Another twitch, and the dial moved until it hit the local soft jazz station. She caught the tail end of a commercial, then the music came back, a horn instrumental with a light, catchy repeat to it. Nothing that demanded her brain pay any attention to it. Wren let herself float along with the sound for a few moments, then pried her eyes back open and refocused on the page.

  Sergei
heard the music come on, and paused a moment to listen, then put it into the background, barely audible to his working brain, and went back to his Web-surfing. He had three windows open at once, running down links as swiftly as he could. Wren’s refusal to spring for a DSL line was a sore point, although he couldn’t fault her desire to save money.

  Links that led to Web sites that looked reasonable on the crank scale he bookmarked, the others he shined on. This sort of skimming was a strange type of research, and one he had come relatively late to, but it suited the way his mind worked on several different tracks at once.

  And while one track was dedicated to the job at hand, another segment of his mind was replaying the conversation he’d had, unwillingly, the night before. He had been working late in his office—dithering, he admitted to himself—while waiting for Wren to contact him, and let him know everything had gone off as planned, or not. But shuffling invoices and re-plotting gallery displays would have been preferable to having his cell phone ring and picking up to hear, not his partner’s voice, but a masculine tone from years in the past. Matthias. North American branch coordinator for the Silence. The man who used to hand down Sergei’s orders. Emphasis on the used to.

  “We’re taking the matter out of your hands.” A protest, barely formed, was overrun. “You’re not impartial in this anymore.”

  Douglas had promised to consider his offer, himself, his abilities, in exchange for Wren. Was the old man not as powerful as he’d once been? Or were things that urgent, that promises made to their own people now meant nothing?

  But then, he wasn’t one of theirs, was he? Not now. Not until he folded himself back into the mix officially. If he ever did—if his half-spoken promise to the old man wasn’t just a bluff to gain more time, the way they both half suspected it might be. And until then…until then he was just a chess piece like everyone else.