Organ Grind (The Lazarus Codex Book 2)

by E. A. Copen

  “This Seth Emits,” he said, leaning forward slightly, “what do you want with him?”

  The carpet muffled my steps as I closed on the counter, finally moving out of the doorway. As I walked, I glanced around the shop. They had about what you’d expect an herb shop in a questionable part of town to have. Tobacco. Pipes, some loose tea, a couple of Buddha statues. What caught my eye was the weird Egyptian looking statue that stood on the desk next to the cash register. It depicted a shirtless guy with a crocodile head holding a staff. He had the biggest hat I’d ever seen, one that was probably at least as tall as the rest of him.

  The clerk’s eyes narrowed as I leaned on the desk. “You ever have problems with ghouls here? I mean, your back door looks like it leads right into Odd Fellows Rest and that place is crawling with them.”

  “Odd Fellows Rest is closed to the public.” He sighed as if he must speak that exact phrase a dozen times a day. “If you’re here to make a purchase, please do so. Otherwise, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  I pointed at him. “Am I supposed to not notice how you didn’t deny the existence of ghouls just now?”

  His mouth opened and then snapped shut. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  With a flourish, I pulled a business card from inside my coat and slid it across the counter to him. “Lazarus Kerrigan. Necromancer. You may have heard of me.”

  He frowned down at the card but didn’t take it. “What does a necromancer want from Seth Emits?”

  “I was told he could get me what I’m looking for. Rare ingredients for a rare ritual.” I looked left and right before leaning in, placing one hand on the side of my mouth. “Something that isn’t strictly legal.”

  His fingers plucked the business card from under my hand. It couldn’t be that easy. Just walk in and drop a name? I supposed maybe the right name was the most difficult part. But he didn’t offer me anything in return.

  “Mr. Emits isn’t in,” he said, his voice still formal. “However, I will tell him that you called and asked about the…ghoul problem.”

  “And about my rare ingredients?”

  He glanced around before turning and grabbing a magazine from a stack, rolling it up and holding it out to me. “This catalog contains everything we can special order. If your rare ingredient isn’t listed, I’m afraid the shop can’t get it, and you will have to take your business elsewhere.”

  I took the magazine and unrolled it, expecting to find a secret message written there, or maybe a spell etched on the page that would rearrange the letters with directions to the market. Instead, it was just a vaping and medicinal herbs catalog. There wasn’t anything special about it at all. When I looked back to the clerk at the counter, he was studying my face, as if he were waiting for something to happen. I didn’t know what he was waiting for though, so I just rolled the catalog back up and used it to give him a mock salute. “Thanks for nothing then, I guess. Just make sure Seth gets that business card.”

  He pressed a hand to his chest and bowed his head. “Consider it done.”

  Something about the way he said it unsettled the hell out of me. Or maybe it was the smug smile. Whatever it was, it made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I didn’t like turning my back to him, but that was the only way to get out of there.

  On my way out, he called after me, “Make sure you don’t lose the catalog!”

  ***

  It was after sundown when I got out of the shop. I didn’t think I’d spent that much time inside, but I had lost a lot of time when I met with Beth. Coffee with your ex always gets complicated.

  I paused outside and looked up and down the street. There were no public entrances or exits from Odd Fellows Rest, so it seemed reasonable to assume I could walk down the street without getting jumped by a ghoul. It was also just barely after sunset. Maybe they’d sleep in.

  But as I stepped away from the shop toward my car, I caught sight of movement in the corner of my eye. A shadowy, humanoid shape shifted against a section of the iron gate, balancing low as if squatting. When I noticed it, it stood, revealing the shape to be much less humanoid than it originally looked. Long arms with fierce claws unfolded along with long legs to match. The torso appeared more like an emaciated corpse, gray skin pulled tight against the ribcage. Pointed ears twitched at the sound of a distant siren, and red eyes lit like a match, peering straight at me. A ghoul. Lucky me.

  I supposed I could walk away and pretend I hadn’t seen it, but then it might bother the next guy. Besides, as much as I’d wanted to avoid the ghouls, I did have questions they might have the answer to.

  With another look up and down the street, I stepped away from my car and up to the cemetery gate. “Hey buddy, you mind crawling back into the hole you burrowed out of? You’re scaring respectable citizens with the light show.”

  The ghoul blinked. I could tell only because the red glow disappeared for a second and came back. “We see no respectable citizens. Only the Dead One.”

  I assumed I was supposed to be the Dead One. Everybody’s got to be a smartass. “You want something? Or you just sightseeing?”

  He tilted his head and lifted one finger to tap on his fangs. “We have a message for the Dead One. Those who make the dead sing wrong have come through our palace of bone.”

  Ah, ghouls. This was why I hated to talk to them. They weren’t undead in the true sense of the word, more like carrion feeders, but they weren’t really alive either. They shared a sort of hive mind in their colonies, which I guess messed with the language centers of their brain over distance because they always seemed to speak in riddles. Talking to a ghoul gave me headaches trying to figure out precisely what they meant.

  “Those who make the dead sing wrong? Can you describe them?”

  The ghoul blinked again. It was only the second blink since our conversation had begun. “Old ones.”

  “Gods?” I asked.

  The ghoul didn’t answer. He probably had no concept that matched the word. While the ghouls had their own culture and way of living, I don’t think it included any sort of religion that worshipped gods, at least not in the human sense.

  That left the palace of bone to figure out, which wasn’t hard. I’d been in the ghoul stronghold once before, and it really was a palace of dirt and bones, human bones they’d picked clean and stacked in high piles.

  “Okay,” I continued. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “We want food. Old ones bring food. Sour food. We bury. Since then, the dead do not sing for us.” He unfurled a palm. “We are hungry.”

  If I was guessing correctly—and at that point, I was so lost, all I could do was guess—then a couple of gods had shown up at Odd Fellows Rest, tried to leave a body for the ghouls, but the ghouls turned their collective noses up at it.

  Now, that was odd. Ghouls were like goats, except for the dead. They ate everything but the bones, even digesting any steel plates or toxins in the body. Almost nothing bothered them. For them to not want to eat a body meant that body had to be really messed up.

  “Where?” I pushed, chancing a step closer to the bars. “Where did you bury the body?”

  “Trade for food?” A pale tongue ran over the ghoul’s ashen lips.

  I shivered. Just like goats, ghouls could eat anything. It didn’t have to be dead; they just preferred it to be. In a pinch, a ghoul would attack the living, and while most survived the initial encounter, a ghoul bite was one hundred percent fatal. How long it took to kill you depended on many factors, but I’d never seen someone last more than a week. This foolish ghoul had just asked me to bring him someone to eat, and that was a mistake.

  My hands shot through the bars and wrapped around his spindly arms. I tugged him forward hard enough that when his head struck the iron bars, it was with a satisfying metallic kong. “That’s for suggesting I let you kill an innocent person.”

  The ghoul scrambled back, rubbing its head. “No kill. Only eat.” Apparently, it didn’t understa
nd that they were one and the same.

  “Tell me where you put the body or I’ll find someone to fill in that tunnel you guys dug into St. Roch.”

  His eyes widened, and he waved his arms. “No bury! Tell! We tell!”

  I figured that’d get them going. Nothing spoke to a ghoul like threatening his favorite hunting grounds. St. Roch was one of just a few places in the city where the dead were still being interred, and I happened to know they’d only recently burrowed into it.

  The ghoul limped forward, stopping just out of arm’s reach. “The sour body lies near the river, at the place where the dead president still rides.”

  Jackson Park, I realized. There was a big, bronze statue of Andrew Jackson on a horse right at the center of the park.

  “You give us food now?” The ghoul extended his hand as if I had human flesh just lying around in my pockets.

  “Sorry, pal. Fresh out of ghoul treats. You’re on your own for dinner tonight.” I left him roaring in frustration and hurried back to my car. When I reached it, I jerked open the door and shouted back at the ghoul struggling to fit between the bars of the cemetery gate, “If any weird bites or bodies show up in the news, I’ll know who to blame. Don’t make me come back here because if I do, it’ll be with a blow torch and I’ll roast your ass.”

  All that tough talk didn’t stop me from speeding away from Odd Fellows Rest at full speed. Last thing I wanted was to still be standing there when the ghoul came back with twenty of his buddies.

  On the way home, I called Emma who sounded even more exhausted than before. “You’re going to love what I’ve found.”

  “Please tell me it’s a lead,” she said.

  “Maybe. I can’t say how I know this, but if you send a couple of uniforms down to Jackson Park looking for some disturbed dirt, you might find a body.”

  Emma let out an unladylike curse that made me smile.

  “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger,” I continued. “Also, I can’t guarantee this has anything to do with your missing organs, but it might.”

  “That’s a very non-committal answer, Lazarus.”

  I shrugged before I remembered I was on the phone and she couldn’t see me. “I’ve always been sorta afraid of commitment, you know. I am chasing a lead, but I won’t know more until tomorrow night.”

  There was a slight pause on the other end before Emma said, “That’s not good enough.”

  “Not good enough?” I shifted the phone between my ear and my shoulder so I could drive with both hands. “I’m doing my best here, dammit. I can try to speed up that timeline, but not by much.”

  “There’s been a death every night for the past few nights,” Emma said, a new edge to her voice. “If we don’t get an answer in the next few hours, someone else is going to die and show up in the morgue with missing organs.”

  “I thought you said all the deaths were accidents?” The guy in front of me slammed on his brakes, so I did the same, prompting the driver behind me to honk his horn. I flipped him the bird and took the street on my right.

  “I said all the deaths looked like accidents. I can’t prove homicide, not yet, but I’ve got a gut feeling something is connecting these victims. I just can’t find what it is.”

  I sighed. It was getting late, and I was really looking forward to getting a little sleep, but if lives were on the line, I’d push through it. Even pulling an all-nighter though I didn’t think I’d find Emma’s missing organs before the deadline. But I wouldn’t tell her that. She was already stressed enough.

  “I’ll keep working on it,” I promised. “You should get some sleep. You sound awful.”

  “Plenty of time to sleep when I’m dead,” she said and hung up.

  I took a left at the end of the next street and drove down another block and a half. I was almost to the bar when something heavy landed on the trunk of the car. In a panic, I swerved to the right and slammed on my brakes thinking maybe a bird had dive-bombed the car. It was only too late that I realized it wasn’t a bird that had slammed into the back of my car, it was the biggest damn gator I’d ever seen.

  The gator chomped onto the hood and tore it back like a can opener before wriggling inside and hissing at me.

  Some days, it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed.

  Chapter Eight

  I scrambled to unbuckle my seatbelt as the gator wriggled into the back seat, rocking the entire car with its movements. Halfway through unbuckling, I took my foot off the brakes and realized the car wasn’t in park when it rolled forward. Alligator teeth snapped at my hand when I reached for the gearshift. On instinct, I flinched away, the movement severe enough that it knocked me into my door. My fingers twisted around the handle and pulled. The door sprang open, and I was dumped onto the pavement of an empty street.

  The mangled car inched forward with the gator inside. Unfortunately, since it’d ripped the top off the car, it was only a small matter for the gator to lift its snout free of the vehicle and then throw itself clear. It landed on the pavement not five feet from me, big reptilian tail waving back and forth. Well, at least that proved one thing. The giant gator falling on my car wasn’t by chance. It was specifically targeting me. That meant someone had sent it to do their dirty work.

  I didn’t have time to think back on who because the gator lunged at me, moving stupid fast. I rolled to the right and looked up and down the street, hoping another car would come that way and bring someone to my rescue. No such luck. I was on my own dealing with the stupid thing in a narrow street with tall brick buildings on either side.

  The gator’s paws slapped loudly against the pavement as it skittered toward me, mouth open. I found my feet and scrambled for the car still rolling down the street. The car veered to the right and onto the narrow sidewalk before smashing into a standing street light. A busted bumper and bent up hood were the least of my worries after what the gator had done, but that meant the passenger side door was inaccessible thanks to veering too close to the building. I darted to the left, intending to jump into the driver’s side, but found the alligator suddenly in my path. Damn thing. I’d never seen such a persistent alligator. In fact, I’d never seen one at all outside of the zoo.

  It snapped at my leg, so I jumped back, but part of my coat billowed forward. The gator’s powerful jaws clamped down on the fabric, and it did a quick roll. The move jerked me forward and flat on my face, leaving me blinking away stars. Now that I was on the ground, I was at the gator’s mercy as it charged, jaws open for my torso. I swung out a leg and struck it square in the snout. It backed away, shaking its head, which gave me just enough clearance to slam my hand into the pavement and unleash a spell.

  After nearly destroying a door when I tried to use magic to unlock it, I’d been working on refining my aim. Offensive spells like the one I’d just unleashed necessitated being able to hit a target with accuracy to reduce collateral damage. But I’d been using my staff as a focus through which I directed my attacks, and my staff was lying across the rear floorboards.

  The spell carved a wide fissure through the asphalt, widening as it moved away from me so that by the time it hit the alligator, it was more of a wide arc than a straight line. With the energy spread over a wider area, it wasn’t as effective as it otherwise might have been. All the spell managed to do was knock the gator back a few feet, but that was enough for me to make another mad dash toward the car.

  I reached the back door just as the alligator shook the confusion from its head. It was already barreling full speed toward me when I jerked the back door open. My staff lay wedged against the opposite door. I reached down to pull it free and glanced behind me. The alligator was just steps away. No way I’d get it free in time. I winced and pulled on the staff, bracing for impact.

  Something whizzed past me and landed in the gator with a wet, meaty thunk. I popped open one eye to see the gator rear up with a roar and swing its snout from side to side. In the early evening shadows, I could only barely make out the inky black dagger
sticking out of the alligator’s snout.

  Osric?

  No time to look around for him. I had to take advantage of the gator’s momentary distraction. I pulled the staff free, pointed it at the gator, and let loose the same spell I’d tried earlier. A blinding white light shot out of the end of the staff and slammed into the alligator’s waving tail. The shot was a little high and to the left from where I’d been aiming, but close enough. When the light died down, the alligator’s tail was a good half foot shorter and spouting green blood.

  Green? That wasn’t right.

  Before I could get off another shot, another dagger whizzed by and caught the gator in the right eye. It roared in pain and flung its head to the side. The dagger flew out and clanged against the brick. But instead of retreating or charging, the damn thing reared up onto its hind legs. A pair of scaly wings shot out from its back. It flapped them once, sending a whirlwind through the alley, and then the alligator took to the air as if it were a one-pound canary and not a five-hundred-pound alligator.

  I stood in the middle of the street, staring up in awe. I might never have seen an alligator before, but I was damn sure they didn’t just sprout wings and fly away when they were injured.

  The gator disappeared over a rooftop and out of sight, leaving me at a complete loss for words.

  “That was weak, even for you.”

  I turned my head to see Osric hop down from his perch on a second story balcony. He dug his fingers into the wall and sparks flew, but I didn’t see any metal. Nevertheless, it worked to slow his descent so that he made a flawless touchdown.

  “I would’ve had him,” I lied and crossed my arms. “And besides, didn’t your queen say you’d only be in town sunup to sundown? It’s after sundown. Better scamper home, fairy boy.”

  Osric walked over to pick up his fallen dagger, tossing it lightly by the blade so that the handle landed in his palm. “Lucky for you she also ordered me to keep you alive.” He dropped the dagger into a slot on his belt.