by Angela Henry
“There’s some Vicks VapoRub on the counter behind you if you need it, ’cause I know it’s bad.” He laughed softly.
“How can you stand it? It’s worse than troll farts.” She smeared a thick layer of the Vicks under her nose. It only managed to cut the pungent odor in half, and she feared she’d never get it out of her clothes.
“This is nothing. You ain’t smelled bad until you’ve smelled a corpse that’s been marinating in Lake Pontchartrain for a week. Or one that’s been slow roasting in the trunk of a car in hundred-degree weather or . . .”
“Okay. I get it,” she said before he supplied her with another mental image she didn’t need. “What have you got for me?”
“This here is Mr. Alastair Duquesne, and I’m hard-pressed to decide just which one of these catastrophic injuries actually killed him, though I hope to hell it was a heart attack. And this,” he said, gesturing toward the body on the second examining table, “is most likely Mr. Duquesne’s killer, though we’ve yet to identify her.”
Desi walked over and looked down at the second corpse, which was covered almost head to toe in gore. Only a few clean patches on the hem of her dress showed that it had been white. A cheap-looking blonde wig hung crookedly on the dead woman’s patchy head, making her look almost comical. But there was nothing funny about the neat round bullet hole in the middle of her forehead, courtesy of Xavier Knight. The back of her head was half-gone where the bullet had exited. Her eyes were a cloudy blue and still open, and Desi got the strangest feeling that she was watching her. So much so that she waved her hand in front of the sightless eyes. A belching noise from the dead woman made her gasp and jump back as a thin stream of blackened phlegm ran from the corner of her slack mouth. Morel laughed hysterically.
“That’s not funny!” said Desi, taking a tentative step back toward the examining table and looking down at the body, which was no more alive than it had been when she’d arrived.
“It’s just gas. Don’t worry. She’s good and dead.”
“Are you sure? Don’t act like she couldn’t up and walk out of here. Have you forgotten where we work?”
“She may have had zombie brain matter running through her veins, but she was still as susceptible to bullets as any other human . . . or zombie.”
“Were they both on the drug? And I found out it’s called NeCro by the way.”
“So it’s got a name, huh? Good. Naming an enemy is the first step in destroying it. And, yes, they were both users, though the female had been using for much longer; hence her condition and taste for human flesh. I examined a sample of her blood, and she had no healthy blood cells left. They’d all been cannibalized. She couldn’t have lasted much longer. This would have most likely been her last meal.”
“Is there a chance Duquesne could reanimate?” asked Desi, cautiously looking over at the other body for any signs of life.
“Well, the finger we found in the alley is still good and dead. But we’re keeping an eye on it just in case there’s some kind of incubation period involved. Any luck on tracking down the rest of the real Vic Buchard?”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?” Morel asked, his scalpel poised inches above the ruined chest of Alastair Duquesne.
Desi should have known that with two brand-new specimens to dissect, Morel would have been too preoccupied to hear about David Granger’s vanishing act. She filled him in and watched as the expression on his face turned from incredulous to gleeful. He laughed so hard he fogged up the plastic shield covering his face. Finally, he removed it and leaned against the nearest counter to catch his breath, while she patiently waited for him to compose himself and willed herself not to laugh since one of them needed to be alert enough to keep watch over the bodies.
“I bet she made him disappear,” he said as he peeled off the latex gloves. “I always knew that woman could make a man disappear in sixty seconds flat.”
“What I’d really like to know is why she didn’t realize what he’d done during his PPT.”
“As good as that boy was at magic, I bet he already knew a thing or two before he got accepted into the training program. Maybe he used a masking spell.”
“Kale is good, Morel. She would have been able to see through a masking spell.”
“No matter how good you are, there’s always someone better, always. And if an individual is motivated and driven enough, there’s no end to what they can do and who they can get past to get to what they want. And whoever that boy really is, I can tell you one thing.”
“What’s that?” Desi eyed her old friend curiously.
“He really wanted to be here, and he was damned good, too.”
Desi thought about what Granger had told her before she left him in the interrogation room. Was it really as simple as he’d claimed? A stupid mistake made by a desperate young man, or had he infiltrated the Equinox Agency for a reason? She knew she could find out from the real Vic Buchard, but tracking him down was going to be damned impossible, especially in the state he was in. But she knew she’d never find him unless she got her ass in gear. She heard Morel clear his throat and looked up.
“I don’t mean to add to your troubles, but there’s one big question that needs answering and pronto.”
“And that would be?”
“Whoever is making this drug is using zombies, right?”
“Yeah,” she said in exasperation.
“So, who’s making these zombies? Your average Joe wouldn’t know how to resurrect the dead. Either there’s a new unregistered necromancer in town, or one of our own is creating an undead drug supply.”
It wasn’t like Desi hadn’t been thinking the same thing. She just wanted to envision a time in the near future where she might be able to catch some damned z’s.
ELEVEN
I’d been listening to the kid babble nonstop for half an hour, and my head was starting to ache. His name was David Granger, a mage in training with the Equinox Agency. That is until they’d found out he’d used someone else’s identity on his application, that someone being Vic Buchard, the owner of the finger I found in the alley with Anton DePreist’s body, most likely ripped off during the frenzied attack by Anton himself. The kid had been so scared and pissed off during his interrogation that he’d literally prayed himself somewhere safe and ended up in the back of the Range Rover.
Had I been something other than an angel in my former life, I’d have figured the kid for a nut job and dropped him off at the nearest psych ward. But I’d seen firsthand the power of prayer, though I had to wonder why in the hell the answer to his prayer had been me. But then again, the Range Rover belonged to Minx, not me. Maybe Minx was the answer to this kid’s prayer. She’d sure saved my bacon enough times. But Minx was an ocean away. I was all that was standing between David Granger and whatever the EA had planned for him once they caught up with him. It was suddenly quiet, and I realized the kid had stopped talking. I looked over at him, and he was staring at me.
“Well?” he asked, with big panic-filled eyes that made me nervous.
“Well, what?” I snapped.
“Can you help me find the real Vic Buchard? It’s the only way I can prove my innocence! You gotta help me, mister!”
The only thing I wanted to do was ditch this kid as soon as possible so I could find Crystal Sneed before her hunger grew and she moved up the food chain from cats to their human owners.
“I don’t gotta do shit. Look, I feel for you but—”
“Oh, my God! They found us!” he said, looking over my shoulder. “Get down!” He grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me down with him as he ducked out of the black SUV’s line of sight.
I jerked out of his grasp and peered out the driver’s-side window. Through an opening in the bushes, I saw the black SUV as it idled about a hundred feet away by the side of the road. The dark tint on the windows made it impossible to see how many people were in the car. The overgrown bushes and fallen tree we were parked behind ensured
that they hadn’t spotted us yet. But there was no way I could drive off without them spotting us, and the memory of the needle of the Range Rover’s gas gauge being a notch above empty ensured there was no way in hell I could lose them again. I had a good mind to cut my losses and shove Granger out the door and be on my way. After all, this wasn’t my problem. But despite the lovely Ms. West’s assertions to the contrary, I had a pretty good idea how the EA rolled, and I didn’t want to see the kid locked away to rot in their underground jail as some Sasquatch’s bitch.
The kid huddled against the dash, trembling so hard that I could actually see and feel his fear. It vibrated and crackled and hummed like an electric charge, jittering and jerking and yellow like thin tendrils of lightning during a summer thunderstorm. It wasn’t until I tried to unbuckle my seat belt and got shocked that I remembered I wasn’t an angel anymore and could no longer see or feel people’s emotions. The electricity wasn’t a manifestation of Granger’s fear. It was real. He was performing a spell. Sweat coated his upper lip, and his eyes were squeezed shut. His brow was furrowed in concentration as his lips moved in a near-silent recitation of words that I used to know but made no sense to me now. Latin, maybe, or Greek? He rubbed his hands together as if he were trying to warm them, and when he pulled them apart, a long thick, white band of electricity appeared between his palms, twisting and folding like taffy on a pull. Then his eyes flew open as he let fly a string of unintelligible words and smacked one hand against the dash and another against the passenger-side window just as two men in black suits and sunglasses pushed their way through the thick bushes. EA agents. They were standing right beside the Range Rover. Only they couldn’t see us. The kid had performed some kind of masking spell.
The interior of the Range Rover was bathed in bright white light, giving the windows a frosted look and making everything beyond them blurry and as distorted as fun-house mirror images. I was frozen and couldn’t move or make a sound. The only noise was a low hum so I couldn’t hear what the men were saying, but I knew they were talking because of the movement of their cartoonish mouths. They scanned the area one last time before making their way back through the bushes to their car. A minute later they were gone. The kid let out a moan, pulled his hands off the window and dash, and opened the car door just in time to vomit into the bushes. Everything instantly went back to normal as sound, color, and heat flooded my senses.
“Jesus.” I fell back against the driver’s seat, feeling as limp and wrung out as a dishrag. I had no energy and could have slept for a week.
“Sorry,” said Granger, getting back into the Range Rover as he wiped his mouth on his sleeve. All the color had drained from his face, but his eyes were bright and feverish. He pulled a pack of cigarettes and a plastic lighter from his pants pocket and shakily lit a cigarette.
“Masking spells take a lot of energy, and I’m just an apprentice. I had to borrow some of your energy to make it work on such a large vehicle. Just drink some juice, and you should be okay in an hour or two.”
“And what the hell was with all the electricity?”
“It’s my element. All mages draw their power from the elements; mine’s electricity. But I have a long way to go before I’ve mastered it enough to become a full-fledged mage,” he concluded sheepishly.
Apprentice or not, this kid had one hell of a power, and it suddenly occurred to me that in helping him track down Vic Buchard, I could not only use his magic skills to help me track down Crystal, but maybe even lead me to who’s making the NeCro.
“Okay, kid,” I said, looking over at him and holding out my hand, “the name’s Xavier Knight, and I’ve got a proposition for you.”
****
In the basement embalming room of LeBrun Funeral Home, Zander Ptolemy had just put the finishing touches on Mrs. Abigail Beaufort when the pounding from behind the wall started up full force once again. Zander’s shoulders slumped, and the migraine that had been threatening to overtake him all day flared up behind his eyes. His fragile nerves, which had been fraying by the minute, had finally come undone. He’d been working for twenty-four hours on a woman who should have had a closed casket, which had pushed other, more important work back by a day. Eighty-five-year-old Mrs. Beaufort had died quietly and peacefully in her sleep like all good, old, God-fearing, Southern ladies should. But the fact that she’d lain dead in her bed undiscovered for a week with a house full of hungry cats had done her earthly body no favors and had made Zander’s work nearly impossible. Much like a woman with short baby-fine hair expected to leave the beauty salon with a headful of Shirley Temple curls, families of the bereaved expected morticians to work miracles with their loved ones remains. But only so much could be done with dead flesh, and he’d done all he could with Mrs. Beaufort’s.
Pulling off his latex gloves, he tossed them on the tray next to Mrs. Beaufort’s mahogany casket and leaned against his worktable with his head in his hands. He could barely distinguish the pounding in his head from the pounding coming from behind the padlocked door just outside the room. It wasn’t just the pounding that was the problem but the cause of the pounding. Vic was hungry, again. Zander had at least five bodies in the freezer, two of which had no families, that he could have used to feed Vic, but he didn’t like dead flesh. His food had to be fresh. Alive. Corpses wouldn’t do for a man who was little more than a corpse himself. And Zander couldn’t risk letting him get out again.
The last time Vic had gotten loose, he’d come home missing a finger and covered in blood and gore. Zander had frantically scoured the newspapers and the TV news for any reports of a murder, but there had been none. Zander prayed that Vic had simply gotten hold of some dog or possibly a deer or raccoon in the woods. But he knew better. And he also knew how Vic had gotten out. The padlocked door to his room had become suspiciously unlocked after Dr. Langdon Grace’s last visit. Now Grace demanded that Zander kill Vic. And killing him would sure solve a lot of Zander’s problems. But how could he kill his own little brother when Vic’s condition was Zander’s fault?
When Langdon Grace had been looking for an unlicensed necromancer to help him create a special drug, Zander had jumped on the chance to prove himself. He’d show those other necromancers, the ones who wouldn’t give him a chance and refused to take him on as an apprentice. He’d show them what he could do, and when this drug got out and the Nephilim took over the world, they’d all be sorry they hadn’t taken him seriously. And the fact that he was self-taught and not skilled enough to reanimate an entire corpse made little difference to Dr. Grace. He didn’t need whole corpses; he just needed organs, brains specifically, and what better way to get them than from a funeral home? Loud guttural moans accompanied the pounding. Vic was so far gone, he could no longer speak. He’d chewed his own tongue off a week ago in a fit of frenzied hunger. Until recently, Zander had been able to keep Vic quiet by injecting him with a powerful sedative. But the sedatives no longer worked, and Vic was so violent that he’d become too much for Zander to handle. To Vic his big brother wasn’t his brother but meat.
“Shut the fuck up!” screeched Zander.
He hurled his mug of steaming hot coffee at the padlocked door, and the noise stopped but only for an instant, and in that instant Zander could hear the insistent ringing of the doorbell. He had no intention of answering the door. He was in no shape for visitors, but after five minutes the ringing of the doorbell turned into knocking, and he reluctantly pulled himself out of his seat and trudged up the steps to the first floor. All the shades were pulled and the funeral home dark. Zander wondered wearily why his unwanted visitor thought anyone was at home, and then he remembered his station wagon still parked in the driveway. Shit. He’d forgotten to park it in the garage, just as he’d forgotten to put the closed sign on the door. No sooner had he unlatched the front door than a large middle-aged woman pushed past him into the funeral home’s foyer.
“Where’s my mama’s ring? I know you took it, you thieving bastard!” exclaimed Mildred Modine.<
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LeBrun Funeral Home had handled the arrangements for Cora Modine, Mildred’s late mother, a month ago, during which time Cora’s cocktail ring had come up missing. Of course, he’d taken it, but he’d never admit to it. Zander loved pretty shiny things, and Cora Modine’s three-carat diamond and emerald cocktail ring in its platinum setting was about the prettiest, shiniest thing he’d seen in a long time. He didn’t need the money. He wasn’t planning on selling the ring, either. He just couldn’t help himself. It was a compulsion. An obsession. The ring had called out to him, twinkling and flashing under the funeral home’s soft lighting until he’d finally relented and slid it off Cora’s stiff ring finger and slipped it into his suit pocket before he even realized he’d done it. But now there was hell to pay because Cora’s not-so-little girl wanted her mama’s ring back.
“Ms. Modine, please,” sighed Zander. “As I’ve already told you, I do not have your mother’s ring. I buried it with her because she wanted to be buried with it.”
“Like hell you did!” Mildred’s hands were planted firmly on her wide hips, and her double chins wagged indignantly.