I guess this would be like Christmas, the Super Bowl and WrestleMania all rolled into one for a priest.
“Can you give us a few details? What exactly is going on?” Greg asked.
“Three corpses, all dead less than a month, have risen tonight alone.” Mike reached for the bottle, and I passed it over. He touched the neck to the rim of his glass, but his hands were shaking and he rerouted the bottle to his mouth. He glanced at me in apology and turned the bottle up. We’d been friends long enough that I didn’t begrudge him drinking from the bottle. It’s not like I was worried about germs.
“How many dead people are in your cemetery, Mike?” Greg asked.
“Hundreds, I guess, but what does that matter?”
“I’m wondering why only three have risen, is all.”
“Well, they were the most recently deceased. And all of their bodies were intact. One man, Alan Rice, who passed away in the same time period, died in a horrible automobile accident. He has yet to rise.”
“Or his body wasn’t chosen.” Greg mused. “Let me make a couple of phone calls.” He grabbed his phone and went into his bedroom. I heard one side of the conversations as he made a couple of calls in quick succession, asking the same questions each time.
“All right, I have a theory,” he announced, rejoining us and taking a healthy slug of scotch himself, “and if I’m right, we’re going to need more booze. And more ammo. And maybe an extra priest.”
Mike and I stared at him until he went on.
“I made a couple of phone calls to a friend at the county morgue and a couple of hospitals. These are not guys who get rattled easily, and they’ve seen enough of our world to believe in the unbelievable.”
I raised my hand. “Excuse me, Professor Doofenstein, is there a point coming anytime in the next week?”
Greg shot me the bird and went on. “You’re not the only one missing a bunch of dead people, Mike. The morgue has lost four corpses, the hospitals have lost three, and I’d be willing to bet that at least one more church has seen a rash of breakouts from the graveyard tonight. As far as I can tell, there are nearly a dozen dead people that decided to pull a Thriller on us, and they all made that decision about 11:30 P.M.”
“That’s when the graves at my churchyard began to cast up their dead. How did you know?” Mike asked.
“Because that’s when Jimmy and I set eleven angry souls loose on the greater Charlotte area.”
Suddenly a very, very bad light came on for me. “Oh crap. The girls,” I said in a very small voice.
“Yep, buddy. Free the girls, free what’s in the girls,” Greg confirmed.
“What girls?” Mike asked.
We told him all about fighting the little kidnapped girls, and the salt, and banishing them. “But we forgot one important thing,” I said. “We forgot to send the souls back to wherever they came from.”
“So when they got out of the girls, with no unoccupied bodies around, and no spell to bind them into a body, they went looking for bodies that weren’t being used and didn’t have salt handy,” Greg confirmed.
“They inhabited corpses,” Mike said.
He looked a little relieved and a little disappointed all at the same time. I suppose that’s how it would be for someone who believed they were about to meet their maker and had reason to look forward to the meeting, then found out that they weren’t getting that appointment after all.
“Yep, that’s what it looks like.” Greg looked altogether too pleased with himself for my taste, but I had to admit it was a brilliant bit of logic.
“Now what?” I asked my occasionally brilliant partner.
“I don’t know.” He sat down on the other side of Mike on the couch.
“We have to return these bodies to their proper rest,” Mike said. “We cannot stand by and allow this evil to be perpetrated.”
“Yeah, we got that, but it’s the ‘how’ we’re a little fuzzy on,” I told him.
“Oh.” Mike had another belt of scotch. He hadn’t quite moved back to drinking from the glass, and I decided to let the stereotype slide for once.
“Let’s look at what we know.” I started. “One, there are a total of eleven zombies running around the city. Two, if we don’t stop them, at some point between now and tomorrow night, these zombies are going to grab a kid and the demon that raised them is going to finish some humongous ritual that will mean very bad things for everyone in Charlotte. Three, the demon, named Belial, has possessed a woman who looks like a retro advertisement for cookware.
“Now let’s take a look at what we don’t know. We don’t know what they’re trying to do in the first place. We don’t know if the ritual requires a specific site. We don’t know where the zombies are now. We don’t know which little girl they’re going to kidnap to finish their baker’s dozen. And we don’t know who the crazy lady with the bun is.”
“Now that we’ve established we don’t know anything helpful, where do we go from here?” Greg asked.
“I have no idea.”
“I do.” We both looked at Mike, who looked a little embarrassed. “I have a friend who practices a religion that the Church . . . um . . . frowns upon. She may be able to be of assistance, at least in the matter of the ceremony and those questions.”
“Mike, are you consorting with Wiccans again? You keep this up, and I’m going to put a COEXIST bumper sticker on your station wagon.”
“Not consorting. Comparing. She’s a local high priestess. She’s part of a comparative theology breakfast I attend each month. We’ve gotten to be fairly friendly over the years.”
I looked over at Greg and his jaw was as close to the floor as my own. In all the time we’ve been friends with Mike, and he certainly shows the years a lot more than we do, we never would have believed that our straightlaced buddy would have breakfast every month with a real live witch. Of course, most of his parishioners would have a harder time believing he was drinking scotch in the basement of a halfway house with two vampires, so I suppose that was only fair.
“Do you think you could call her tonight?” Greg asked. “I know it’s getting late, but this is pretty important.”
“She once told me that I could call her anytime if I had issues that needed her assistance,” Mike assured us.
Greg and I exchanged a glance, and I bit back any comments I might have thought about making regarding Mike’s vows of celibacy. He went upstairs to get a signal and make the call, which took only a few minutes. He came down the steps holding his cell phone over his head like he was going to spike a football.
“I assume that means she’s on her way?” Greg asked.
“Yes, boys, it does. She’ll be here in fifteen minutes. I hope you don’t mind meeting her here. After all, the whole ‘invite me in’ thing could become awkward if we went to her apartment.”
“Fair enough, I suppose. Greg, you wanna tidy up a bit before we have another guest?” I asked from my seat on the couch.
“Um, no. Those are your socks, bro. You pick up the toxic waste. I’ll give the kitchen a lick and a promise, but the footwear funk factory is all you.” He headed off to wipe down the counters and put the blood in the crisper so our culinary restrictions wouldn’t be immediately apparent while I got to work straightening up the den.
My idea of straightening up was to pour all the half-drunk beers down the sink and put the bottles in the recycling bin. Not much, but it made the den look better. Then I policed any inappropriate magazines and DVDs that Greg might have left lying around, and threw them all in his bedroom. Mike straightened up the video-game equipment, and actually found a scented candle to put out on the coffee table. After about ten minutes, the place smelled significantly less like a locker room, and Mike had ceased to make comments about us having the hygiene of a pack of feral dogs.
I looked around and nodded to my friends. We were ready to welcome a witch into a vampire lair.
Chapter 22
A knock at the top of the stairs announced
the arrival of our guest, followed immediately by a trim pair of legs coming into view on the steps. The legs were, as is par for my course, attached to a woman who looked nothing like my mental picture of an overweight gypsy woman with three teeth and a mole on her nose that had its own zip code. Instead, the woman in our living room was medium height, slim, with straight blonde hair that hung halfway down her back. She was younger than I expected and very pretty in a blonde Sandra Bullock kind of way.
She wore Birkenstocks, but they were the closed-toe type and that was her only concession to my mental image of an earth-mother type. She had on jeans that hugged some pretty nice curves, and a bulky tan sweater that looked like it came straight out of an L.L. Bean catalog. “Hello,” she said, her warm voice filling the room with a sense of well-being. “I’m Anna. How are you, Mike? You sounded worried on the phone.”
“I was worried, my dear, but I feel much better now that you’re here.” Mike’s accent had slipped, and a little of the old South he grew up in had dropped into his words as he gave the pretty witch a brief, and chaste, hug. Good to know my old friend was celibate, but not blind. He turned to us. “These are my friends, Jimmy and Greg.”
He pointed to each of us in turn, and I stepped forward to shake her hand. I was surprised when she pulled back, reaching quickly inside her sweater to drop a pentagram necklace out into view. It began to glow, and I took a quick step back. “Hey now, no need to get all magical in my den, lady,” I exclaimed.
“I know you, vampire,” she said, and when I looked up at her eyes, they were a cold blue, staring right into my soul. If I had one left. The jury’s been out on that one for a while.
“Nope, pretty sure we’ve never met. But if you want to get together sometime for a quick bite, let me know.”
I bared a little fang at her, and heard Greg moving up behind me. His pistol cleared the holster and I knew that he had my back. As long as I kept her attention on me, my partner could keep her covered. “Mike, you want to explain to Mrs. Broomstick here that we’re the good guys?”
“It’s true, Anna. These boys have been friends of mine since before I entered the seminary. I’ve known them since we were boys in school together, and they’re good lads. They have their problems, sure, but good lads nonetheless.”
“Mike,” the witch said, keeping her voice level and her eyes locked on me, carefully not looking in my eyes, “This good lad, as you call him, is a vampire.”
“And you’re a witch,” I said. “And by the way, you can look me in the eye, our mojo doesn’t work with your necklace in the way. Now, can we get past our little stereotypes and species bias and work together to deal with a body-snatching demon and the zombie infestation?”
“What does my necklace have to do with anything?” the witch asked.
“The boys have some issues with religious symbols, holy ground, that sort of thing,” Mike said. “I, for one, believe these issues to be more psychological than pathological.” Mike was getting on a roll now, so I went to the kitchen for another beer as he explained one of his pet theories of vampirism to his witch friend.
“The discomfort that they experience around objects of faith is dramatically different from the type of pain that is inflicted by sunlight, and the nausea they experience on holy ground is nothing like the barricade they experience when they attempt to enter a dwelling uninvited. So it’s long been my theory that there is no reason that Jimmy and Greg can’t touch a cross, for example, or enter a church without any ill effects.”
“So why do I feel like barfing every time I go visit you at work?” Greg returned to his spot at the computer.
Mike ignored the interruption and went right on. “No reason other than their own subconscious fear that they may have lost their souls when they became vampires, that is. And after these past years of working alongside them, helping people at every opportunity, I can assure you, they have every bit as much of their souls as you or I have.”
I went back to my spot on the couch and took a seat. Anna followed me with her eyes, then made her way to the armchair and sat facing me. She wasn’t paying any attention to Greg.
“Are we good?” I asked as she got settled. “We wouldn’t have called you over here, to our home, unless we thought we could trust you, and unless we needed you. Mike was pretty convincing on the first count, and the situation pretty much covers the second.”
“What’s the situation?” She pulled a MacBook out of her backpack. “Is there Wi-Fi here?”
“Yes,” said Greg from where he suddenly stood right behind her chair. I almost fell off the couch laughing as Anna jumped about eight feet straight up. His vamp-speed from his desk to right behind her got the desired reaction.
“The password is TruBlood. Capital T, capital B,” he said as she glared at him. I shot him a look, too, but that was for picking a dorky password.
When I looked back to Anna, the exasperation on my face was from real irritation. “Seriously? You’re just going to Wikipedia ‘zombies’ or something? Any of us could have taken that brilliant first step.” I leaned back on the couch, not just to get further away from her glowing necklace, but also because I think she might have caught me checking her out. She’s hot. I’m not dead. Well, I am dead, but I’m not dead and blind.
“I’m not just going to Wikipedia it. I have a group of friends I can contact online that may have some firsthand knowledge in the area.”
“You know people who have their own pet zombies?” I marveled. “Now that’s cool.”
She sat there for a few minutes typing and muttering to herself and generally looking way hotter than any woman that had been in our tomb in a decade. Or ever, for that matter. After a couple of “hmmms” and the odd “mmmm-mmmm,” I got bored and went to the fridge for a snack. Greg immediately plopped down in my seat on the couch and yelled over to me “You keep eating this late at night, you’re gonna get fat.”
“We can’t get fat, dork. You want anything?”
“Yeah, throw me a bag of B-Neg.”
I tossed him the bag and hopped up on the bar that overlooked the living room, my own blood bag in hand.
“Either of the humans want anything to drink?” I asked our guests. “We don’t have any food, for obvious reasons, but we’ve got a couple Cokes—”
“Not so much,” Greg corrected.
I tried again, “We had a couple Cokes, but we’ve got beer, ginger ale, and a lot of booze. There might even be some orange juice left.”
“Again, not so much,” my gluttonous partner added.
“Jesus Christ! Do you ever replace what you drink?”
“Heh heh. Nah, I usually count on the marrow to do that for me.” We both laughed, because sophomoric vamp humor never goes out of style. It’s like a fart joke, only different.
When I realized we were the only ones amused, I sobered. “Anyway, either of you want a drink?”
Anna and Mike replied in the negative. Greg and I drank our blood in silence while Anna worked. Mike looked a little unhappy about us drinking in front of his friend, but she already knew what we were. No point in hiding it. Besides we weren’t slurping.
Cold blood is kinda flat tasting, but it’s better than room temperature. Obviously it tastes better at body temp, but I didn’t want to offend Greg or Mike by going off to hunt. So it was O-positive flavored with plastic and anticoagulants for me. Yippee.
While Anna was hacking away, I turned to Mike. “Hey, Dad? Did you ever find anything more out from the possessed girl?”
“Oh yes,” Mike said. “Michelle was her name. What do you want to know?”
“Well, let’s start with how she was planning on cursing Tommy Harris and his whole family into oblivion.”
“Oh, that.” Mike actually sounded amused. “That was actually a mistake.”
“What do you mean, a mistake? She didn’t mean to curse him?”
“Oh, no. She definitely meant to curse him, she just didn’t know how.”
“But she did i
t. I don’t get it.”
“The little girl had dabbled in some witchcraft, but was by no means a skilled enough spellcaster to actually make a curse stick.”
“You’re saying she didn’t curse Tommy?”
“Not with anything meaningful, no.”
“He was never in any danger?”
“Not until you confronted the possessed child with him in tow, no. She was not focused on him any longer, but then you showed up.”
“Great. I love my life. This little girl just happened to be the one possessed, and it really has nothing to do with our case at all?”
“Well, it may certainly be the case that her experimentation with magic made her more attractive to outside influence, but that is generally the case.”
“This was all a mistake, and we were never needed in the first place?”
“Basically, yes.”
“Story of my life.” I went for another drink and sat down on the couch to wait for the hacker witch to finish. I leaned over to Mike and spoke in a low voice.
“What do you think, Dad? Is your witchy woman going to be able to tell us how to send zombies back to Hell?”
“Actually, James, we want to be very careful about that. We only want to send the inhabiting souls back to Hell. The bodies we very much would like to return to their resting places,” Mike told me.
“Fair enough, Padre. But I’m not digging. I not ruining this manicure digging graves.” I was half joking. I’ve never had a manicure. But I was serious about the no digging part.
“Well,” Anna said, finally looking up from her keyboard and stretching her arms over her head. “You’ll have to get your hands dirty if you want this to end. My coven is gathering at the fountain in Marshall Park. If we can get all the zombies there by dawn, we can banish the spirits in a sunrise ceremony.”
I choked a little at the s-word, but she didn’t even slow down.
“Let’s go. Get the zombies, incapacitate them, and drop them at the park with my coven. They can bind the creatures long enough for us to exorcise them, for lack of a better term.” She looked apologetically at Mike, who gave a little nod. No one wanted him to think we were stepping on his theological turf, but he wasn’t terribly well equipped for this sort of thing, dogma-wise.
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