“Because Dad has seen the light,” I replied, dropping my bags in front of the couch and dramatically throwing myself on it so I could make sure I had my brothers’ attention. “Zombies are real. I was right. You all were wrong. Suck it!”
Redmond arched an eyebrow as he dragged his attention away from the large bag I left on his foot. “I’m sorry, but … what?”
“I was right.”
Redmond lifted his eyes to stare at Dad. “She was right?”
Dad shrugged as he dropped the rest of my “I’m sorry you were right and I should suck it” haul by my feet. “She might’ve been right.”
I extended a finger. “Don’t do that. I was right.”
Dad blew out a heavy sigh. “Fine. She was right. Zombies are real. They attacked at the voodoo shop.”
“Are you okay?” Cillian lowered the book he read, paying attention for the first time. “You didn’t get bitten, did you?”
I adopted a haughty expression. “They’re not that type of zombie.”
“There are different types of zombies?”
“Yes. There are the types we see on television, the ones caused by some sort of falling satellite or ancient ritual gone wrong, and there’s the type created by crazy voodoo people to steal books.”
“Steal books?” Cillian’s voice ratcheted up a notch. “What kind of zombie steals books?” He turned to Dad for help. “She’s making that up, right?”
“I wish.” Dad rubbed his forehead as he sank into the chair behind his desk. “Why do you think she got so much stuff?”
“Because she’s spoiled and you coddle her,” Braden answered.
“When I was just spoiling her it was ice cream and a new coat,” Dad said. “Once she was proved right and refused to shut up … it was all this.” He waved his hand at the bags.
“The cops followed us while we were shopping. I thought they were going to kill me at one point.” I smiled at the memory. “That was after Dad stabbed a zombie in the head while another one disappeared with something called The Book of the Dead.”
Cillian pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead. “I think someone should start from the beginning.”
I shot my hand into the air. “Me!”
“No, me,” Dad said. “You sort through your belongings and do … whatever it is you’re going to do with it.”
“I got gifts for all of you, too,” I said, smiling. I was nothing if not benevolent.
“You did?” Redmond was intrigued. “What did you get me?”
I dug in one of the bags and returned with a small package. “It’s a pen with a buxom woman on it. When you turn it upside down … her clothes come off.”
“Sweet!” Redmond happily accepted the pen.
“I got you a new iPad.” I handed the box to Cillian. “I got you a new leather coat, the one you had your eye on, in fact, and it’s right over there.” I pointed for Aidan’s benefit. “I got Griffin a new coat, too. He’s going to look very handsome.”
“Wait a second.” Redmond straightened his shoulder. “How come I only got a crummy pen?”
“I got you an Apple watch, too.”
“Yay!” Redmond clapped his hands. “Hand it over.”
“My credit card actually sighed at the Apple store,” Dad complained.
Braden, who hated being at my mercy, was caught in an uncomfortable position. I met his gaze with an arched eyebrow and an evil smile.
“Do you have something you want to ask me?”
“I haven’t decided yet.” Braden folded his arms over his chest. “Okay, fine. What did you get me?”
I rummaged in the bag and came out with a pack of gum.
Braden groaned. “I should’ve known.”
I stuck my hand back in the bag and came back with a large box. “And this.”
Braden’s face lit up when he saw the MacBook Pro. “I’ve been wanting one of these!”
“I know. I didn’t forget.”
“How much of your money did Aisling spend at the Apple store?” Cillian asked Dad, genuinely curious.
“Enough that I’m glad I have a black card.” Dad opened his top drawer and pulled out a bottle of bourbon. “Now, if you’re done comparing gifts, can we talk about something important?”
Cillian nodded. “I want to talk about the zombies.”
“Fine.” Dad launched into the tale, wagging a finger every time I opened my mouth to add a comment. He hurried through, refusing to embellish or take any verbal detours. When he was done, my brothers weren’t nearly as wowed as they would’ve been had I told the story.
“You’ve got to be kidding.” Braden was the first to break the silence. “So we’re really dealing with zombies? I know we kept saying that they might be zombies because we didn’t want Aisling to feel stupid, but now you’re saying they’re actually zombies.”
“I don’t know that I would call them zombies,” Dad hedged. “They’re clearly reanimated corpses. I don’t know how else to describe them – and trust me, I’ve tried to think of something for the entire hellish afternoon I spent shopping with your sister – so I guess we’ll have to use the Z-word.”
“And here I wanted to use the F-word,” I said, earning a glare from Dad. “For best father ever,” I quickly added.
“Shut up.” Dad sipped his drink. “I have no idea what’s going on. We’ve got book-stealing zombies. Weird symbols on bodies. It’s just … I don’t know what to make of it.”
“The important thing to remember is that not all of the zombies have gone after Aisling,” Cillian noted. “Before three days ago, she didn’t appear to be on anyone’s radar.”
“So who did you see that day?” Redmond asked.
“Just Angelina and Madame Dauphine.” I slid a sly look in Dad’s direction. “Speaking of Dauphine … .”
Dad cut me off before I had a chance to blab. “I think we need to look in a different direction, although what that direction is I have no idea.”
I rubbed my thumb over my lip as I regarded him. He was trying to keep me from opening my mouth about Dauphine – I wasn’t stupid enough to miss that – but he had to know there was no way I could keep that to myself.
“Well, while you were showering Aisling with enough affection to make the rest of us hate her forever, I managed to come up with a few things.” Cillian rested his new iPad on the end table as he turned his attention back to his laptop. “I scanned that symbol and performed a search. It came back with a ton of results, although most of them weren’t in this area.
“When I narrowed the search to the Detroit area, I came up with some interesting findings,” he continued. “As far as I can tell, that section of Eternal Sunshine Cemetery is the only one in this part of the state that caters to voodoo enthusiasts.”
“What does that mean?” Dad asked.
“I’m not sure,” Cillian replied. “The mausoleum at the center of that parcel belonged to an Oscar Santiago. I decided to run him because we didn’t have much else to go on ̶ and I like research.”
“We know,” Braden intoned. “You’re such a geek that we’re still floored that you’re the one with a steady girlfriend.”
“Women like men with brains,” I countered. “They also like his hair. It’s … fancy.” I fluttered my fingers for effect, basking in Cillian’s grin as he turned back to the computer. “Oscar Santiago arrived in the Detroit area in the mid-1800s. There is some dispute over when. I couldn’t figure out why at first, but I think I have now and I’ll get there eventually.
“Oscar bought a barber shop in downtown Detroit not long after arriving. He worked for two years before sending for the rest of his family,” he continued. “They were in Louisiana, for the most part, although a few were in Haiti.”
“That would further the voodoo tie,” Dad said. “Voodoo is accepted in much of New Orleans.”
“And I think it was even more popular back then,” Cillian said. “So Oscar opened a business and moved his wife and kids to the area. Because
no one kept really good records back then, it’s hard to keep track of all of his kids. He had at least eight, although four of them are believed to have died while under the age of ten.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “Believed?”
Cillian nodded. “No one kept proper birth and death records back then. It’s difficult to be certain. The mausoleum was built for Oscar, but his children started getting placed inside of it long before he died. Apparently they didn’t rate names on their final resting places.”
“Okay, he lost a bunch of children,” Dad said. “Why is that important?”
“I’m getting to it.” Cillian shot Dad a quelling look before continuing. “Oscar’s wife made money for the family on the side. She was considered a high priestess, and doled out curses and holistic medical remedies for believers. All the believers congregated in the same neighborhood, by the way, so the Santiagos prospered in their new home.
“Oscar’s shop was powerful, drawing everyone in the neighborhood for appointments or just to gossip in the middle of the day, and he worked for a long time,” he continued. “In fact, some people claim that Oscar cut hair for more than one-hundred years.”
“How is that possible?” I asked.
“Supposedly Oscar told people that he was going to live forever,” Cillian replied. “He didn’t hide his ambitions. He claimed his wife had the power to prolong his life as long as he wished. To do that, he had to drain the life essence of others.”
Dad tilted his head, intrigued. “A wraith?”
“Not unless he was a different kind of wraith than what we’re used to,” Cillian replied. “No one ever described Oscar as looking different. He didn’t have long talons for fingernails. He wasn’t chalky white. Some people claimed he had a weariness in his eyes – and others swore that sometimes his eyes glowed purple – but otherwise people said he looked normal.”
“That right there should be a hint that something was going on,” Redmond pointed out. “The guy supposedly lived to be one-hundred and people said he looked normal. I don’t think a lot of people lived to be one-hundred in those days.”
“Here’s the thing,” Cillian said. “Oscar either moved to the Detroit in 1850 or 1900. No one can agree. His age was consistently called into question.”
“Okay, why is that important?”
“Because he died in 2000,” Cillian replied. “In fact, he died three minutes past the stroke of midnight on the first of January in 2000.”
“Is that date significant?” I asked.
“A lot of religions attached power to that date,” Dad supplied. “Some people thought the end of the world would happen when the clock struck midnight and the century marker rolled over.”
“In which time zone?”
Dad shrugged. “I don’t know that anyone ever said. It’s not that important in hindsight. Back then it was a big deal.”
“I was only eleven,” I mused. “All I remember is everyone freaking out about Y2K.”
“Which could’ve been a manifestation of the bigger religious fears,” Cillian said. “By the time he died, Oscar had outlived his wife and children. Half of his children reportedly died before reaching adulthood. The other half lived long enough to procreate, but the limbs on his family tree are short lived.”
I understood what he was getting at. “Was he killing his family members to prolong his own life?”
“Blood magic in voodoo culture is supposedly strong, so that’s my first guess,” Cillian said. “This obviously wasn’t legitimate voodoo, though. They cherry-picked the voodoo tenets they liked and then added their own stuff. With his wife’s help, Oscar killed his kids and grandkids to stay alive, living until he was more than one-hundred and fifty years old.”
“That has to be bunk.”
“I’d agree, but the books say otherwise,” Cillian countered. “He lived exactly three days longer than his wife, who was also ridiculously old when she died. She didn’t die of old age, by the way.”
“What did she die of?”
“She was hit by a car. It was a hit and run. The perpetrator has never been found.”
“Oh, well … huh.” I scratched my nose as I absorbed the story. “You’re basically saying that the wife kept both of them alive, and when she died – not by natural means – no one had the ability to keep Oscar alive, so he died.”
“Pretty much,” Cillian confirmed.
“So how does that help us?” Aidan asked. “We don’t know that what’s going on now has anything to do with Oscar.”
“No, but he had that snake symbol carved on his tomb,” Cillian pointed out. “I don’t know for certain that he holds answers for us, but I don’t know where else to look.”
“So how do we use Oscar?” Dad asked.
“For starters, I’d like to look inside his vault,” Cillian said. “I want to see if he’s … um … preserved.”
Gross. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“He wasn’t embalmed,” Cillian replied. “Supposedly, Oscar left specific instructions to be embalmed because he wanted his body to hold together when he rose again. It didn’t happen because the few people he left behind – the ones he didn’t kill – didn’t want him to rise again.”
“Do we think he’s going to rise again?”
“Not particularly, but I still want to see.”
“Well, I can tell you right now that Griffin is not going to partake in a family outing that involves opening someone’s final resting place to see if he’s embalmed,” I argued. “I’m pretty sure he’ll draw the line there.”
“That’s why you’re going to have to stay here and distract Griffin,” Dad said.
“I won’t lie to him.”
“Then don’t lie,” Dad said. “I’ll lie to him.”
That was a much better option, but I wasn’t keen to be a part of it. “He might understand,” I hedged, earning incredulous looks from my father and brothers.
“He won’t understand,” Aidan said. “Listen, I don’t want to break into a vault and look at an old guy either. If Cillian thinks it’s necessary, I don’t see where we have a lot of choices. You’ve crossed paths with three zombies and had a fourth wind up dead in your backyard. That seems to indicate an escalation.”
“He’s correct,” Dad said. “I still don’t understand how looking at Oscar Santiago’s body will help us, though.”
“I want to see if he has the mark on his skin,” Cillian explained. “Like I said, the voodoo community is really small in this area. If someone is really raising the dead – and it looks like they are – we should be able to track down the right community with a little legwork.”
I remained dubious. “And Oscar’s body helps us how?”
“He was supposed to rise after his death,” Cillian replied. “I initially wanted to suggest it to see if he was there. If he’s not, perhaps we have our culprit.”
I snorted. “What? He came back from the dead to go after me?”
“No, but maybe someone brought him back from the dead to find a reaper,” Cillian suggested. “One thing I haven’t told you about yet is the fact that Griffin emailed me a list of property where the afflicted bodies were found. All of them were within a block or two of reaper households.”
“What?” Dad yelped, leaning forward. “Talk about burying the lead.”
“It’s still a theory,” Cillian cautioned. “It could be nothing.”
“Or it could be everything,” I mused. “So you think someone – maybe someone related to Oscar Santiago – is trying to find a reaper to help prolong life?”
“It makes as much sense as anything else we’ve got,” Cillian said. “It wouldn’t be the first time. Wraiths believe that we prolong their lives.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed, but I couldn’t think of another direction to go, so I ultimately conceded. “Okay. I’ll keep Griffin busy.”
“And I’m sure you’ll do it in a PG way,” Braden teased.
“Shut up, Braden,” Dad warne
d. “We’ll tell him we’re going to the movies after dinner. You can say you don’t want to go and entice him – not by doing anything lewd, mind you – to stay behind while we check the vault.”
“What if he asks questions? I promised I wouldn’t lie to him.”
“I’ll leave that to your discretion,” Dad replied. “As of now, all we need to do is get out of the house. He might try to stop us before we leave, but I doubt very much he’ll chase us.”
“Okay. It’s a good thing I have a lot of new toys to distract him with. That shopping trip was a great idea.”
Dad scorched me with a glare. “You’re my least favorite child right now.”
“Just wait until I break out the disco light bubble machine you bought me and show it to Jerry.”
“Oh, geez.” Dad slapped his hand to his forehead. “Could this day get any worse?”
As if on cue, the butler picked that moment to arrive in the doorway.
“Mrs. Grimlock is here,” he announced.
I shot Dad a dirty look as I shook my head. “You totally jinxed us.”
“I really did,” Dad muttered. “Next time I’ll glue my mouth shut before I ask that question.”
“That sounds like a fabulous idea.”
25
TWENTY-FIVE
“What is she doing here?” I turned an accusatory look to Braden. “Give me back that computer.”
Braden clutched the new laptop to his chest. “I didn’t invite her.”
“No one invited me,” Mom announced, breezing past the butler and into the room. “I invited myself.”
“Why?” Dad asked, reaching for the bottle of bourbon to top off his drink.
“Because I miss my children.” Mom sent a twisted, although somewhat warm, smile in my direction. “Who spoiled the crap out of you today?”
Everyone pointed at Dad in unison.
“Of course.” Mom made a disgusted sound in the back of her throat. “What brought this on?”
“She’s my daughter,” Dad replied without hesitation. “I love her.”
Grim Rising (Aisling Grimlock Book 7) Page 24