“Yeah, yeah. I’ll see you then.”
“Thanks.” Veruca hung up as she hit the door. “Come on, I need a ride to a funeral home.”
“First to meet a demon who can raise the dead, now to find a missing corpse? This is becoming a theme with you,” Donald quipped, following her out.
****
The werewolf was still in the running, though just barely. His skin was hanging in tatters, his left arm wouldn’t respond to any of the commands Finn was giving it, and the lamia seemed irritated by the attacks rather than genuinely threatened.
But Finn figured having the some sort of distraction was better than having her keen claws aimed his way. At a loss for how to handle the lamia at the moment, Finn shoved the bulk of his focus into the last corpse and took off to the far end of the cage.
He’d never seen a yeti before, but he had confidence he would have been able to peg the giant, hairy creature as such even if he hadn’t had the benefit of its memories in his own head. The pixie, however, wasn’t recognizable as anything other than a grapefruit-sized ball of flab dressed in bird feathers. In no universe would Finn have seen the androgynous, obese, triple-chinned little fae as a pixie. Pixies were supposed to be delicate and pretty, sprinkling glittering dust everywhere and maybe giving gifts of candy and cookies to children.
This creature looked more like it would hoard the candy and cookies for itself, fighting off any kid who happened to notice the sweets.
Finn could feel the greasy remnants of the creature’s personality like they were scrabbling at the insides of his skull trying to grab hold and take over. The pixie’s soul was no longer inside its body, but apparently not entirely gone. Finn was sure, even if the pixie’s soul hadn’t been trying to slap him away like a child fighting to keep her sibling out of her candy stash, being in the head of an unfamiliar creature that had died within an hour of being raised would’ve been disorienting.
“What the hell?” Finn yowled, flailing his arms uselessly. He was no stranger to finding it difficult to raise a corpse, but it hadn’t quite felt like this. Usually the difficulty was his own fault—his own hesitation, his own fear, his own lack of skill. This was something different. This was like running repeatedly into a door you swore was wide open. He could see where his power needed to go, feel the emptiness there sucking at him eagerly like a lonely lover.
It was getting in that was the problem.
Something scalding hot and bristling like a threatened porcupine was keeping him out of exactly where he needed to go. It would catch his power, flinging him away and making him feel for a split second like he’d been punched in the stomach. There had to be another way. This was a corpse, an empty vessel waiting to be jam-packed with Finn, and he was nothing if not happy to slide himself eagerly into tight places.
“You know you want it,” Finn cried, making the lamia pause in her brutal assault of the downed werewolf to glance his way. “Just lay back and let me in.”
The lamia’s empty gaze spurred him on, making Finn feel especially determined—or maybe terrified, he would have admitted to either—and with one last shove he forced his power forward, figuring he could take whatever was blocking him right off its metaphorical feet. Something else happened instead, and the usual disorientation Finn felt from sliding into a dead creature’s head hit him twice as hard.
“Can’t even wait until I’m gone, you stupid necromancer?” Finn found himself saying, echoing the tiny voice shrieking in his head.
“What?” he said, trying to shake out the disgust he felt with himself. Or with part of himself. He couldn’t really tell anymore. There was someone in his head who shouldn’t have been there.
“I’m not in your head,” he said, hearing his own voice, knowing it was coming out of his throat but feeling confused as to why. “You’re in mine.”
The lamia had finished breaking the werewolf into small, useless pieces and had finally decided that Finn was worth her time. The voice in his head, the one that had—he thought—come through his lips twice already cackled as the lamia unceremoniously dropped the broken corpse and slithered over it, aiming herself directly at Finn. Panic, something Finn knew better than he knew himself at times, flared like the sun within him and awareness crystalized, illuminating the other voice for what it was, and letting him see exactly what he hadn’t realized he was capable of.
Magic was mostly a foreign concept to Finn. Past his own necromancy he knew very little about it. There were witches, fairies, and a lot of people out there who had some form of fae ancestry and therefore had gained abilities above those of a normal human. But casting spells and laying glamour, controlling weather and influencing minds seemed like something straight out of a comic book. The pixie was no fairy lady, but she had a decent amount of oomph packed into her blubbery, little body. Working her deceptively delicate wings to bring her across the expanse of the cage toward him, Finn grabbed hold of the reigns of the pixie’s power and tried to pull the right strings.
She fought him, of course, an experience Finn was quite familiar with. This was worse than ever, though, mainly because Finn had never been crammed in a corpse with its original soul before.
“You’re gonna get me killed,” Finn spat, hearing the pixie laugh inside his skull. The tail end of her amusement slipped out his mouth and he found himself giggling.
“Serves you right, fae spawn. Who’re you, just taking over corpses?”
“I didn’t know you were a corpse! I can’t believe I’m yelling at myself!”
The lamia was almost on him, her fingers flexing menacingly, and Finn found himself whimpering at the cracking of her knuckles. Whoever thought of giving snakes knuckles anyway? They were scary enough without having hands.
Finn was running, having taken off without really considering whether or not it was smart. There was no thinking at this point, not for Finn. He was stuck reacting, and there was no way he was going to have time to plot or plan or find a way to fashion a white flag of surrender. He was out of distractions, out of things to throw at the lamia.
Or was he?
His soul—mashed right up against the pixie’s, so close that her every thought was sliding through his lips before he realized what was going on—realized there was another option. He’d never be sure if the glamour was his idea or something the pixie had let him have out of pity, but the feeling of pulling a power he’d never had out of his hat left him breathless and stumbling regardless.
The world around him warped slightly as Finn tripped over his own feet and went down. As his chin hit the ground, reality wavered like heat rolling across the desert. Stars exploded out of his jaw, flashing across his vision. The pain was briefly too much to comprehend and Finn squinted, trying for just a moment to figure out how he’d been transported from the ring to a lush backyard full of flowers, shaded benches, and a picnic table packed with sweets and booze.
“It’s not really there,” the pixie spat from within the back of his mind, but damn, did it look like it was.
Thrown off by the change, the lamia tensed, whirling around to inspect the new environment. The screaming Finn heard earlier, the high-pitched wail that had threatened to turn the insides of his skull to mush, got louder, varying in pitch here and there. Finn winced, focusing on the lamia’s mouth as he realized it was her. She was making the sound herself.
“It’s how she sees,” the pixie said through Finn’s damaged mouth. No one but him would have been able to understand his garbled speech, and the words made his jaw ache, but it was interesting nonetheless. “Echolocation.”
The lamia’s tail was thrashing, beating against the useless corpse of the werewolf like fingers drumming impatiently on a table, and Finn pulled his awareness completely into himself, figuring the wolf had no working limbs anymore anyway. What good was it to see the world through its eyes?
The wailing stopped as he abandoned the corpse and its superhuman senses, and Finn watched the scene around him pale further, leaving it a light s
hade over his eyes. The lamia whipped around suddenly, shoving off toward the picnic table, flipping it in a rage, and jolting, confused, as its contents scattered along the perfect grass.
“But it’s not real,” Finn whispered, realizing the lamia was seeing what he could—however that was possible—but in a much more concrete way. The pixie’s scene was fake, a hologram over reality, but it had thrown off the blind creature as if it had substance and form. If she couldn’t see without something for her echoes to bounce off of and locate, what was she experiencing?
“You dolt,” the pixie mumbled through Finn’s stiff mouth. “You don’t even understand my power and here you are trying to control it? Disgusting. Even in death, I deserve more than you!”
Finn’s voice went up with the pixie’s outrage, ringing out through the arena and catching the lamia’s ear. She whipped about, her empty eye sockets fixed his way, the shape of her open mouth changing slightly.
“Oh shi—”
The lamia’s tail whipped around, catching both his feet and squeezing until the bones in his ankles seemed to grind together through his skin. Finn cried out, watching himself through the pixie’s eyes and feeling her amusement as he was yanked upward, upside down and dizzy, held aloft by the eager and victorious lamia.
Hysteria gripped him, dulling his thought process even further and forcing him to grasp for the only power he had. Terror seemed to make the pixie’s soul a non-issue, leaving Finn in full control, too focused on survival to be shrugged aside by the dead. Aware the glamour wasn’t enough, Finn tore blindly through the pixie’s abilities, hoping to pull something useful out of its bag of tricks.
Under full control of Finn and his frenzy of stupidity, the pixie wobbled forward, her path clumsy and dipping like a housefly that’s been whacked one too many times. She paused for a moment, every muscle in her small body tensing, before she shook herself out over the lamia.
Pixie dust sprinkled lightly downward, starting for an infinitesimal span of time as a glittering, beautiful cloud and turning immediately to a sticky, sparkling sheen that caked the lamia’s face so completely, she shrieked through closed lips and dropped Finn right onto his head.
****
“Serena, hello. I’m Veruca, this is Donald.”
A young woman with apple cheeks and striking eyes looked up to smile as Veruca spoke, but Veruca could tell it was an automatic reaction to being addressed, a habit formed by being in customer service. When recognition seemed to hit a split second later, Serena’s smile became warm instead of plain.
“Oh, hello. I was filling out some contracts, I lost track of time. Hi,” she said again, turning her attention to her desk and staring at it intently for a moment. “Oh, here. Here, I have the paperwork. Okay.”
Veruca stood quietly next to Serena as she held the file out, gesturing to it fitfully as if unsure what part of it she was supposed to be addressing.
“Garrett was pretty mad I didn’t get this into the file earlier, but it was on my desk. I didn’t think it would be such a big deal, but I’m sorry.” Licking her lips nervously, Serena splayed her hand, tapping the top page lightly. “So, as you can see, The Poseidon Society sent over a transfer order. It happens a lot, I know the people there. They—well, it looks like Carol sent over the pickup order. The van was here and everything.”
“The Poseidon Society?” Donald asked, though Veruca already knew what she’d meant.
“Yeah, they’re a mortuary a bit north of here. They do sea scatterings, mainly.”
“You verified they were picking her up? You called them and everything?”
“Well, not … I usually don’t have to.”
“Garrett did impress upon you the importance of this decedent, yes?” Veruca asked, glancing up at Serena before going back over the paperwork. She wasn’t familiar with how it should look, but it all seemed official to her. The letterhead looked legitimate, and the signature at the bottom wasn’t just a giant X.
“Oh, yes, but we’ve had transfers with,”—she wiggled her fingers to indicate quotation—“important decedents before. I just figured it was another one of those, and Garrett was with a family when the fax came over, so … so yeah.”
Veruca closed the folder, lifted her gaze to the ceiling, and took a moment to think before asking her next question, wanting to make sure no curse words or insults slipped through. Serena hadn’t lost Amanda’s body on purpose and seemed to think she was doing the right thing. She didn’t know there was a corpse thief running around robbing banks and killing people.
“So you got the fax, you prepared the body, and then what?”
“Well, she was already prepared, really. I just made sure to double-check everything when they got here and then let them in the back, like we always do. They loaded her, but I didn’t stay around. Am I in trouble?” Serena winced, nerves jangling through her tone. “Am I going to be fired?”
“You did fine,” Donald said, placing his hand softly on her bare wrist. His voice was soothing, as if his tone alone could grab hold of her anxiety and pull it loose, though Veruca could see it was actually his empathy at work. She relaxed easily while Donald plucked her worry as gently as one might brush an eyelash off a loved one’s cheek. “You’re not in trouble, it sounds like you were taken for granted.”
“Yeah, okay,” Serena said casually, her mind no longer able to form concern over the situation. “Garrett said you wanted to see the video, right? I’m supposed to show you that too.”
“Yes, he did mention surveillance,” Veruca said, considering. “If you can show us whichever parts show Carol—”
“Oh, Carol doesn’t come out,” Serena pointed out, as if she suddenly thought of something mildly interesting. “And you know what? I think it was a new girl.”
“You think what was a new girl?” Donald asked.
“Who came by, who picked up the body.”
“Can you show us the new girl?”
“I mean, I can.”
Veruca waited, hoping she would elaborate or lead them to a security room or row of high-tech surveillance monitors that would show exactly what had gone down across every inch of the mortuary at the exact moment Amanda’s body had been taken. Instead, she just stood there, at a loss for motivation or worry for her job.
“Please do,” Veruca said, making a mental note to ask Donald to hold back his empathy tricks next time they needed information. Sometimes a little fear helped things along.
“Oh, yeah, sure. It’s this way.”
They followed her down the hall, past the other offices, stopping at a desk at the end of the hall with a large monitor mounted above it and a smaller one standing below it. Twelve small boxes with different video feeds spread across the wider screen, showing off many different parts of the mortuary, including the back door. Serena hummed a tune while she fiddled with the keyboard, wiggled the mouse, and brought the smaller monitor to life.
“Here I am—oh, jeez, I didn’t realize how bad those pants make my ass look. I’ll have to burn those when I get home. So there’s the new girl coming in. She looked really sick, you know?” Turning to look between Donald and Veruca with confusion naked on her face, she shifted her stance and crossed her arms. “Skinny, though. I bet if I was skinny, those pants wouldn’t make my ass look so big.”
Veruca ignored Serena’s commentary, leaning in to inspect the small screen as intensely as was possible. The resolution was poor and the recording wasn’t a smooth flow, but a series of images taken every few seconds pasted together into a jerky feed. She could see the girl well enough to know she was dead, though. It was like the necromancer wasn’t even trying to hide it.
She was criminally skinny, pale, and bony, with messy, dark hair squishing out from under a baseball cap that hid her face from the ceiling-mounted camera. Her movements were slow and awkward enough that Veruca wondered if the necromancer had found a way to cause zombies pain. The girl looked as if every flex of malnourished muscle was a difficult strain. Veruca
made a note to have someone look into the other mortuary, to ask if anyone there had gone missing, but she was already sure the answer would be yes.
When she sighed, frustrated and disappointed that their quarry seemed two steps ahead of them at every turn, she felt Donald give her shoulder an encouraging rub.
“That good?” Serena asked, still placated by Donald’s tricks. “I told you I did good. If you keep watching over here, you can see her load up the dead girl.”
Veruca did as she said, watching the feed of the back door as it displayed a van backing up near it, blocking most of the view into the mortuary, and staying there for a few minutes. Once all doors were shut and the dead girl with her clipboard and official paperwork was buckled into the driver’s seat, Veruca watched as her only lead was driven away in what was most likely a stolen van.
“Yeah,” she said, resignation making her feel heavy. “That’s … you did nothing wrong. I appreciate your time.”
“Sure, no problem,” Serena said. She waved her hand vaguely, her eyes drifting toward a closed door at the end of the hall. “Did you guys want some jelly beans? I’ve been thinking about them all day. We’ve got a bunch in the supply cabinet and they’re probably Jessica’s and I wasn’t gonna eat them, but I just really want them. Did you want some?”
Veruca glanced up at Donald, finding her melancholy losing its grip when she saw the small smile on his face. Sometimes his empathy would open up unpredictable avenues in a person’s brain, and he seemed to think jelly bean theft as a response to having no anxiety was a pretty funny one.
“We’ve gotta go, actually,” he said, reading Veruca without her having to explain they’d gotten all they could out of the mortuary for the time being.” But you should probably call Jessica and ask about those if you want some. Just in case she doesn’t want to share.”
“She might get mad, but that’s okay. They’re in the supply closet so they’re like a supply. It’s like pencils.”
“Okay then,” Donald said, amused. “Thanks for the help, Serena. You have a nice evening.”
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