by L. EE
Nia scowled sullenly, but didn’t argue.
Gail followed them as far as the kitchen door. As the woman placed a kettle on the stove, Gail glanced into the trash barrel wondering if that was the source of the meat smell, but except for a napkin and a bit of old bread, the barrel was empty. She poked her head out into the hall again and sniffed. Nope, the stench was definitely coming from upstairs.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” she said as Nia sat down at the table. “Could I use your bathroom?”
“Of course! It’s up the stairs and to the left,” the woman answered with a smile that looked a bit painted on. Either she was still frazzled at being woken from her nap or she was hiding something. Gail was starting to tend toward the latter. First of all, who took a nap at one in the afternoon complete with curlers and a nightgown? Maybe this lady worked nights, but then why did she have all her lights on? Something was off.
“Thanks.” She waited until the woman started chattering nervously at Nia – mostly about the weather, which was never a very interesting topic in New Crossbridge – then stepped out into the hall. Keeping one ear cocked back toward the kitchen, she mounted the stairs.
The rotting smell was definitely stronger on the second floor. She looked to the left and right, trying to decide where to start. She told me to go left, she thought, so I might as well go right. She walked slowly down the hall, listening for a moment at each door. Finally, near the end of the hall, she found one that had been left slightly ajar. She pushed it open a little wider to peer through the crack and saw –
A little boy playing with a toy train. He didn’t seem to notice her intrusion and just kept pushing his train across the floor, humming tunelessly to himself. Rolling her eyes at herself, Gail tried to back quietly out of the room, only for her heel to come down wrong on a creaky floorboard.
The boy turned.
Gail stumbled backwards, catching herself against the opposite wall. “Oh my god…”
The boy’s eyes were huge and brown in his half-rotted face. There was a gaping hole in one cheek and when he smiled, the grin stretched up to his ear. He got slowly to his feet, the train falling from his hand.
Taking a deep breath through her suddenly tight chest, Gail managed to get out, “What the hell –” before the boy dashed across the room with terrifying speed, slamming through the half-open door and fastening his hands on her coat. His ruined mouth stretched wide in a deafening shriek.
Mind still moving a fraction too slowly, she didn’t immediately respond as the boy began to climb up her torso, grabbing at the lapel of her coat as his feet scrabbled on her knees.
She brought up her elbows to push him away, but he hardly seemed to feel the shove. Instead, he grabbed on to her arms, using them for leverage as he scrambled up her chest. One small hand closed tight on her collar while the other reached for her throat, nails scraping across the skin under her chin –
Then someone shouted her name and time seemed to speed up again. Wrenching one arm out from between her body and the dead boy, she grabbed the collar of his shirt and yanked him off. The boy shrieked as his fingers were torn loose from her shirt like he’d been denied a favorite toy. For another instant, Gail stared into his wide brown eyes then she threw him away from her.
He thumped onto the floor and lay there like a doll.
Pushing herself away from the wall, Gail looked at Arthur, who was standing a few feet away, staring at the dead boy.
“Thanks,” she said, pushing a sweaty strand of hair off of her forehead. “I was a bit – surprised.”
“I can see why,” Arthur replied in a small voice that startled a shaky laugh out of Gail. When he stared at her, she shook her head and turned back to the boy.
“I think I found the magic. We should –”
With an ugly creak, the boy’s head snapped up and, using the wall for leverage, he got unsteadily to his feet. For a moment, he just stood there, swaying slightly like it was only a freak twist of balance keeping him upright.
Then he flew at Arthur with another glass-shattering shriek.
He hit him hard in the knees and they both crashed to the floor. Arthur threw up an arm to defend himself and the boy sank his teeth into the heel of his hand. Arthur’s cry of pain was drowned out by another of the boy’s piercing screams.
Gail grabbed the boy by the shoulders – under the cloth of his pajama shirt, it felt like touching naked bone – and dragged him off. The boy landed on his face on the carpet and immediately began crawling toward them.
Drawing her pistol, Gail shot him point blank between the eyes. The boy gave a violent shudder before falling motionless on to his face. She waited a few seconds to see if he would move again, then she holstered her gun and turned back to Arthur, who was still lying on the floor, gasping for breath.
“What the hell just happened?” And there better be an explanation better than ‘I just shot a six-year-old’ in the face.’
“Magic,” Arthur answered as he got shakily to his feet. “Bad magic.”
“Bad” seemed like a hell of an understatement. Gail knelt beside the dead boy and put a hand on his soft hair. “Who the hell would do this to a kid?”
“It’s not just the kid,” Arthur answered. “It’s the whole damn house. I was waiting outside when a dead cat crawled by me, so I came inside –”
Gail looked up. “Weren’t you supposed to go for help if you noticed anything wrong?”
Arthur shifted guiltily, but met her eyes dead on when he said, “I didn’t know anything was wrong. Anyway, I couldn’t just leave Nia.”
“Well, that kind of defeats the whole purpose of the leaving-someone-outside to get help plan,” Gail grumbled as she straightened up. “But fine. What happened after you came inside?”
“I heard a scream from up here, but before I could get up the stairs I was almost torn apart by a dead man in his underpants.” Arthur shuddered as he relived the memory. Then he looked down at his bleeding hand. “I should really disinfect this.”
Leaving the dead boy where he lay, Gail came over to look at Arthur’s chewed hand. “That doesn’t look good, but Nia said you’re a surgeon. Ever had to deal with dead people bites before?”
“Yes and no,” Arthur replied. “But even if it’s worse than it looks, Nia can –” His eyes widened. “Where is Nia?”
“What do you mean ‘yes and –’ Wait, you didn’t see her?”
“No, I came straight up here after I heard the screaming. Where is she?”
“She’s –” It’s the whole house, Arthur had said. And that sickly sweet perfume, the kind of smell you would use to cover up the stench of something rotting. “She’s downstairs. With her.”
“With who?”
The floor under their feet trembled violently as though a great hand had reached up and given the house a shove.
“What the –”
Gail’s question was interrupted by a scream.
7
Gail Lin
By the time Gail and Arthur burst into the kitchen, the floor was already slick with blood.
“Nia!” Arthur cried, catching himself on the edge of the table as he slipped in a red puddle.
“Get back!” she replied in a sharp, commanding voice.
The woman in the floral nightgown was slumped against the counter. Her hair had fallen half out of the curlers to hang in clumps around her face. Her head twisted toward Gail and Arthur as they entered the kitchen. Her eyes – brown eyes, Gail saw, like the boy’s – stared blankly at them as her lips moved slowly in some silent word.
Nia, picking herself up from where she had fallen in the corner, brushed off the front of her dress and fixed the woman with a glare. “How dare you?”
Startled by the hostility in her voice, Gail said, “She’s not –”
“She knows,” said Arthur. “She’s talking to the magician.”
“What magician? Connery?”
“Maybe. Whoever did this.”
The woman in
the night gown lurched away from the counter. As she faced Nia, Gail saw that her bathrobe had fallen open. The nightgown underneath was soaked in blood, turning the pink and white flowers a uniform crimson.
“Shit.” She could hear Arthur echoing her sentiments over and over under his breath.
But Nia didn’t flinch. She knelt on the kitchen floor and began running her fingers through the blood at her feet. All the while, the woman stalked slowly toward her, her head lolling limply on her shoulder.
Gail grabbed for her gun, hoping it would be enough. Sure, a bullet had put down the kid, but this woman was bigger and didn’t seem to care nearly enough about the guts sliding out of her belly. She clicked back the safety, but before she could fire, Nia said, “Don’t! I have everything under control.”
“It doesn’t look it.” But the certainty in Nia’s voice made Gail hesitate.
The magician continued tracing shapes in the spilled blood, not lifting her head even as the woman loomed over her.
“Nia, hurry up,” Arthur said, voice tight with fear.
Count of three and I’m firing. One. Gail’s finger slid over the trigger. Two.
“It’s done.” Sitting back up on her heels, Nia looked up at the dead woman. There was no fear in her face, just sadness. “I’m sorry.”
The woman blinked her empty eyes, stretched out her hands toward Nia’s face – then froze. She stayed standing for a moment longer, then slumped down to the tile. Her eyes continued to stare at the ceiling until Nia gently closed them.
Gail waited another few seconds then slowly lowered her gun.
“What – what did you do?” Arthur asked, coming another careful step into the room.
“Just a little dispelling magic,” Nia answered as she got to her feet. “This spell wasn’t particularly strong, just ugly.”
That was one word for it. Gail knelt beside the dead woman. Her eyes kept being drawn to the blood staining the flowers on her nightgown. “So this was a trap.”
Arthur, who was looking dangerously queasy at this point, stared at her. “What?”
“Someone was expecting us – or expecting someone anyway.”
“You’re right,” Nia said as she washed her bloodstained hands in the sink. “The spell was designed to keep her acting normally until she was triggered.”
“And she was triggered by us showing up?”
Nia nodded. “Or more precisely, she was triggered into triggering herself. She was making tea when she broke a tea cup and cut herself on a shard of porcelain. Then her stomach opened up.”
For a sheltered bookworm, Nia sure dealt with a spontaneous disembowelment with more serenity than Gail would’ve expected. In fact, she seemed to be handling it better than Arthur, the resident doc. “Are you sure you’re all right?” She noticed the question came out sounding more accusatory than concerned, but fuck it, really. “Most people would be a bit shaken after seeing something like that.”
Nia looked back at the dead woman as her hand brushed across the flame on her lapel. “I’ve seen worse.”
“There were at least two others,” Arthur said before Gail could ask the obvious follow-up question. “A man and a little boy.”
“A child?” Nia breathed with what Gail finally considered an appropriate amount of disgust.
Arthur nodded. “They both attacked us right away, though.”
“They were deeper in the house. They probably weren’t supposed to show themselves until –” She looked back at the woman – “after.”
With effort, Gail pushed the horror of what she had just seen to the back of her mind. It’s just another crime scene, she told himself. All at once, several things occurred to her. “So this was a trap, but who was it set for? It was only luck that you noticed it.” She looked at Arthur. “That you both noticed it.”
Arthur made a face. “It would have been hard not to. My magic sense isn’t as good as Nia’s, but even I knew something was wrong straight away. Any magician would have.”
“So the trap was likely set for ‘any magician’ then.”
“That seems obvious,” Nia agreed as she wiped her hands dry on a dishtowel.
Gail got to her feet and looked at Arthur again. “You said there was a man. Where was he? How did you get away from him?”
“He was in the basement. When I heard the scream I ran straight to the stairs, but when I was going, I heard someone banging on the basement door and thought maybe it was one of you. I opened it and –” He hesitated for a moment and Nia pulled in a sharp breath.
“Arthur, you didn’t –”
“Nia, my magic is bound, remember? I couldn’t have used it even if I tried to, which I didn’t, but I appreciate the show of trust, truly.”
“There are examples of bound magicians who in moments of great stress were able to – at any rate, I wasn’t accusing you of anything, Arthur.”
Arthur’s eyebrow seemed to believe otherwise, but he didn’t say anything more on the subject. “Anyway, I pushed him down the stairs. I think he probably hit his head or impaled himself somehow. He didn’t come up after me at least.”
Nia hummed thoughtfully to herself. “I should take a look anyway to make sure the magic has been fully dispelled.” She shook her head with a soft sigh. “But I should see to the child first, the poor thing.”
“He’s upstairs.” Gail thought of the kid lying motionless on the carpet, a bullet in his half-decayed skull. “I’ll show you.” She didn’t want to look at the kid again, but she couldn’t let Nia go alone, magician or no. The boy had been a lot faster than the woman and if he got up again, he might very well take her by surprise.
They were about halfway up the stairs when a loud bang! stopped them in their tracks.
Gail reached for her gun, but Nia held out a hand.
“Wait a moment, it may just be –”
There was another bang, this one accompanied by the sound of splintering wood and the violent thud of running footsteps. Nia pushed Gail out of the way, pulling a piece of paper out of her pocket just as a heavy-set man dressed only in his underwear and a threadbare bathrobe charged around the corner. His head had been caved in at one side, but that didn’t seem to slow him down any.
Nia brandished the paper and shouted something.
The floorboards beneath the man’s feet undulated like waves and he pitched forward, but as he fell he caught hold of Arthur’s coat and dragged him down the stairs.
“Damn it.” Gail swung over the bannister and grabbed the dead man by the shoulders. She pulled back hard, but the man kept fighting to lock his bloody hands around Arthur’s throat.
Drawing back her arm, Gail slammed her elbow down on to the back of the man’s skull. The bone gave a bit beneath the blow, but the man didn’t seem to feel a thing.
Somewhere beyond the stairs, Gail could hear the frantic scrape of chalk on the floor, but Gail didn’t wait to see if Nia would finish the spell in time. With no options left, she threw herself on top of the dead man and used her weight to roll him off of Arthur.
Her left shoulder hit the floor hard. She tried to roll right back to her feet, but the dead man was on her too fast, grabbing her hair and slamming her head onto the floor.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Arthur turn on to his side, coughing violently. Then the dead man put his hand over her face. As she fought to get a knee up into his stomach, she felt warm fetid air on her exposed throat.
Even a moment of panic would have meant a death that would’ve made Connery’s look tame, but Gail didn’t make a habit of panicking. Before the dead man could bury his teeth in her throat, she grabbed him by the hair and yanked his head back. He twisted both arms back to claw at her hands, which was just what she had hoped he would do. She took advantage of the tiny bit of space this gave her to draw one leg up to her chest and kick the man hard in the gut. He didn’t seem to feel pain, but the force of the blow knocked him back far enough for Gail to get her feet under her again.
“Dete
ctive Lin!” Nia called. “Get down! I –”
But Gail didn’t intend to wait for magic this time. As the dead man stumbled to his feet and charged her like a bull, Gail pulled out her gun and put a bullet in his head. The man staggered, missing her and hitting the banister instead. Ramming him hard with her shoulder, Gail sent him sprawling to the floor.
“Here!” Nia cried from the stairs, almost bouncing as she strove to get Gail’s attention. “Put him here!”
Gail looked up and saw that Nia had somehow managed to draw a complex circle that ran up and down several steps.
Okay, so that was pretty impressive.
“Put him on here, so I can dispel the magic! Quickly, before he gets up again!”
Nia’s urgency was not misplaced. The dead man was already clawing at the floor with his fingers. Though he seemed to have momentarily forgotten how to turn himself over, it probably wouldn’t be long before he figured it out. With a growl, Gail leapt over his head and grabbed him by the shoulders, dragging him toward the stairs.
Now, the body of a full-grown rather stout man wouldn’t have been easy to drag up a flight of stairs at the best of times. And considering this body of a full-grown rather stout man was trying to bite her, this definitely wasn’t the best of times. Gail managed to get him up two steps, only to almost lose her grip when he thrashed wildly and almost slapped her in the face.
A moment later, Nia was beside her, grabbing one of the flailing arms. Gail appreciated the thought, but she had seen Nia’s slender wrists and doubted she would be much help in dragging two-hundred pounds of squirming corpse.
As it turned out, however, the problem was quite the opposite. Whatever spell made dead man’s body both mobile and homicidal apparently hadn’t slowed the decaying process any and when Nia gave the arm in her hands a particularly rough yank, it came off at the shoulder with a wet pop.
Nia blinked down at the limb in her hand. “Oh.”
Then Arthur, apparently recovered from his throttling, grabbed hold of the dead man’s kicking legs and shouted, “Lift him up!”