A Kiss Before Doomsday

by Laurence MacNaughton

  Rane seemed impressed. “So these are like, what, Neanderthal bones?”

  “No, I doubt that. But if Salem is using red ochre, he’s done his homework. I never thought of using it to immobilize the undead.”

  “How about your galena magnets?” Rane nodded her chin at Dru’s silvery crystals. “What do you use them for?”

  “Mostly, sticking shopping lists to the fridge.” Dru dropped them back into her purse. “Let’s look around and see what else we can find. We absolutely need to figure out why Salem has these bones, and what he’s planning on doing with them. But let’s do it fast. If he comes back, I don’t want to explain to him why we broke into his place. Again.”

  “Because he’s being a jackwad, that’s why.” Rane made a face and tapped on the side of the tank holding the skull.

  “Don’t do that!” Dru whispered.

  “Why not? Let’s see if it’ll do anything. This thing is freaky.” She tapped it again. “Hello, Mr. Bones.”

  “Will you stop that?”

  “What’s it gonna do, bite me?” Rane leaned forward until her nose almost touched the glass, staring back at the skull.

  Dru watched, expecting the skull to come alive, jaw snapping. Expecting it to come shooting out of the tank, maybe crashing through the glass, to clamp onto the end of Rane’s nose.

  But as the seconds crawled by, nothing happened. Finally, Rane shrugged and started wandering around the room, picking up things at random. She frowned up at a black-and-white Sisters of Mercy poster and sniffed. “Look at all this crap. You think his new girlfriend is actually living here? Got enough clothes lying around, anyway.” Rane picked up a slender lace-up black velvet blouse and waved it like a flag. “So, do you think she’s getting fat?”

  Dru paused in the middle of surveying a shelf full of creepy statues and dead insects to shoot Rane a puzzled look. “Who, Ember?”

  At the mention of her name, Rane’s expression darkened. “Yeah. Little Miss Skunky Junk. You know, the problem with these indoorsy type of sorceresses, they don’t get enough cardio. Tend to pack on the pounds.”

  Dru took off her glasses and polished them on her striped shirt. “This is probably pointless to mention, but I will take a moment to point out that I’m the indoorsy type. You do realize I have to spend all my time reading books and brewing potions, right? That’s my job.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t have a muffin top like she does.” Rane tossed the blouse over her shoulder. “Probably why she’s not wearing this. Can’t fit into it anymore.”

  “Oh, don’t be mean. I don’t think she has a muffin top.” Dru settled her glasses back on her nose. There was nothing more she could glean from the floating bones unless she was willing to pull them out of the tanks. And she certainly wasn’t. “See if you can find Salem’s notebook, or lab equipment that’s been used recently. Anything that’ll tell us what the heck is up with these vats of bones.”

  Rane dug through piles of stuff, humming to herself. “Muffin top city,” she sang softly. “Ooh, look, he kept my old party beads. We got these in New Orleans.” She held up strings of shimmering green and purple beads.

  But Dru’s attention was inexorably drawn to Salem’s wall of newspaper clippings, maps, photos, and all the other details he had amassed about the Harbingers and their plans to bring about doomsday back in the 1960s. Decades later, their plan was actually working, judging by the appearance of the Four Horsemen and now the undead.

  One drawing in the lower right corner of the wall stood out. It was tacked on top of a stack of other papers, indicating that it had been added recently, possibly since the last time she was here.

  It was a ragged square of aged paper, torn out of a centuries-old notebook or journal. It contained an intricately inked drawing of a sinister-looking black urn, its sealed cap crowned with twelve wicked spikes. All around its plump middle, the urn was decorated with elaborate illustrations of destruction.

  Horrific creatures clashed with ranks of spear-wielding soldiers, crushing them underfoot. Oceans boiled and swallowed entire mountains, tidal waves seethed beneath a hail of falling stars. The base of the urn was ringed by throngs of the dead and dying, bony arms feebly reaching up from heaps of bodies.

  The sight of it all unsettled Dru. She’d seen plenty of horrific drawings in her books, but something about this one bothered her to the core. Mostly because it looked disturbingly familiar.

  She took off her glasses again and peered closer. “Now, where have I seen you before?” she asked herself. “Death, destruction, foul creatures of darkness.”

  “What, Mardi Gras?” Rane appeared suddenly at her side, making her jump, and played with the strings of beads she now wore around her neck. “Oh yeah, that was a hella crazy time. Especially when that giant albino snake got loose, tried to eat some people. Everybody was freaking out.”

  “Not Mardi Gras. This drawing.” Dru pointed with the earpiece of her glasses. “This doesn’t look like the depraved hallucination of some random madman. It looks intentional. And eerily familiar.”

  “Huh.” Rane glanced at the drawing, then shrugged. “All this freaky old stuff looks the same to me.”

  As hard as Dru tried, she couldn’t remember where she’d seen this style of illustration before. It nagged at her, frustratingly out of reach. “Do you remember seeing any other urns like this one recently?”

  “Nuh-uh. Maybe it was in one of your books?”

  “Maybe.” Dru stared hard at the picture, mentally sifting through the thousands of occult books she’d read, the untold multitude of drawings and illustrations she’d seen, trying to zero in on this particular image. She pressed her fingers into her temples.

  Rane looked at her. “So does that head-squeezing thing really help?”

  “Well, I don’t know. But . . .” Just then, it hit Dru with a flash that sent a chill down her spine. “That’s it! It wasn’t in a book after all. We saw this in person.”

  “We?” Rane sounded dubious.

  “Remember that ancient tube we found in the desert, at the base of the archway? The one that supposedly held the apocalypse scroll?”

  “News flash. It didn’t.”

  “Well, I know the tube was empty. But it was covered with identical illustrations,” Dru said, tapping the drawing. “Just like this. About the end of the world.”

  “Don’t get too excited.” Rane pointed with a chipped pink fingernail at a line of penciled notations beneath the urn, written in sorcio glyphs. “What about the fine print?”

  Dru squinted, puzzling out the enigmatic language of sorcery.

  The first symbol was a diamond with one line extended like a tail. Then a pair of concentric boxes, followed by a circle with a segment taken out of it. More symbols followed. She racked her brain, struggling to remember what each symbol meant in connection with the others. “This could take some time. The exact sequence and proximity of the symbols can change the meaning dramatically. It’s not as easy as it looks.”

  “Really? Because it looks like cake.” Rane yawned. “Hey, you know who’s really good at this stuff? Not me. Let’s go get something to eat.”

  Dru considered snapping a picture with her phone, but magical scripts rarely came out in photos. With some misgivings about stealing, Dru unpinned the scrap of paper and straightened up. If she was right, this scrap of paper held clues that were too important to leave behind. “I’m pretty sure the diamond here means tenas, or ‘the act of holding.’ The boxes mean sirmi, or ‘protection,’ or they could mean that something is literally under guard. This broken circle refers to a piece of something larger or more important.”

  Dru traced her finger across the line of sorcio symbols, some of them utterly unfamiliar to her, until she reached two words that stopped her cold.

  “Apokalipso voluta.” Dru met Rane’s puzzled gaze and felt a wave of excitement. “The apocalypse scroll.”

  “For real?”

  “For real.” Dru studied the paper before
carefully folding it up. “If we can find the scroll, we can break Greyson’s curse and stop the undead. We can stop doomsday.”

  11

  STRANGE KIND OF LOVE

  “Come on,” Dru said, just as eager to get out of Salem’s creepy place as she was to get back to the shop and translate the symbols on the scrap of paper. “Let’s go.”

  But Rane stopped in her tracks, fixated on a charred iron sphere about six inches across that sat atop a crowded shelf. She picked it up and ran her fingers around the rough seam that encircled it. “My cannonball. I can’t believe he kept this.”

  “Your cannonball? I don’t even want to know.” Dru waited impatiently, but Rane obviously wasn’t going anywhere. Against her better judgment, Dru finally asked, “Why? Does he have some artillery in here somewhere that we should be worried about?”

  “No, dummy.” Rane clasped the heavy cannonball to her chest like a teddy bear and sighed. “You remember last October I went on that trip with Salem?”

  Dru nodded meaningfully at the cannonball. “That right there is a lovely memento, I’m sure. Can we go now?”

  Rane cradled it in her hands. “We found a ghost ship. Under a blood moon.” She apparently mistook Dru’s irritated stare for interest, because she went on. “Duh, a blood moon makes ghosts go solid. You should know that. And when they’ve got swords and blunderbusses and everything, that shit gets real.”

  Dru pointed toward the door. “Yes, I’ve read about that. Now, can we—”

  “Yeah, well, you’ve read about it. I lived it, dude.” Rane held the cannonball aloft with one hand, muscles flexing. “This old pirate ship damn near killed us. Me and Salem went all Apocalypse Now on them. He used his magic to snap the main mast right in half. We ended up fighting the pirates on deck, and it got brutal. Pirates coming at us every which way. Then I look up and see behind him these two pirate dudes are rolling out a cannon, and they get it aimed right at his back. Dead center. He’s so busy casting spells, he doesn’t even see it. I see them stick that red-hot wire down the thing to fire it. . . .” She stared off into space, obviously reliving the moment.

  As much as Dru wanted to leave, she didn’t interrupt Rane. This was a side of her that Dru so rarely saw, and strangely enough, it felt precious and delicate. For once, the woman stood stock-still, deep in memory, and it would have seemed like a crime to intrude.

  When Rane spoke again, her voice was unusually soft. “I was in stone form, but, dude, even I didn’t think I could stop a cannonball. Guess I didn’t even think about it at all, really. I just jumped. Pushed him out of the way.” Her fingers tightened around the iron ball. “When the cannon went off, it was like getting hit by a rocket. Hit me so hard I thought I was dead. Knocked me clear off the deck. By the time I came to, Salem was levitating me out of the water, and the ghost ship was blown to pieces. Burning. Sinking. The fight was all over, and I came this close to drowning.” She blew out a long breath.

  Dru put a hand on her arm. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Good times.” She turned the cannonball to show Dru a flat dimple the size of a thumbprint. “See that? That’s the impression my ass makes at eight hundred feet per second.”

  Dru winced. “Did Salem say thank you, at least?”

  A flicker of sadness flashed across Rane’s face, but it disappeared under a thick layer of bluster. “Nah, he was too busy bawling. Like a baby. Thought I was dead. So sweet. I told him, ‘Suck it up, dude, I’m fine. Besides, I’m the one that got spanked by twenty pounds of supersonic iron, and you don’t see me crying about it.’ Here, check it out.” She dumped the heavy cannonball in Dru’s hands.

  “Oof.” She wasn’t kidding about the weight. Dru tried unsuccessfully to hand it back. “Okay, can we go now?” she croaked.

  Rane’s forehead wrinkled. The hurt was plain on her face. “D, why did he break up with me after that? Did he ever say anything to you? Why did he end something that was so good?”

  Dru’s sympathy warred inside her against her burning desire to get out of this place. “I don’t know. Truly.” Her heart ached for Rane, but her anxiety was beginning to overwhelm that. “Here. Let’s take this with us.” She dumped the cannonball back into Rane’s hands, silently grateful that she hadn’t dropped it on her toe.

  “You know what? You’re right. Let’s just grab all this bad mojo crap and take it back to your place.” Rane nodded her chin at the aquariums. “Might have to make a couple trips.”

  “No, no, that’s not what I meant.” Dru shook her head violently. “There is no way on this planet that we’re driving any of this undead stuff back to my place.”

  “Why not? Time to get your detective groove on, D. You can CSI the crap out of Mr. Bones here and figure out what the hell our boy’s been up to.” Rane hefted the cannonball from one hand to the other, as if it were a toy. “Is this because Opal won’t let us put any bones in the car?”

  Dru nodded, deciding to play along. “Yeah. Let’s say that’s it. Ready to go?” She turned toward the door.

  And just as quickly, she stopped. A lone figure stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the steel-gray sky. Her long black hooded coat hid almost everything except the eyebrow piercings that flashed above her thick black Egyptian eye makeup.

  Ember.

  “You.” Rane’s features darkened into a murderous scowl.

  Ember slammed the door and approached, holding her flexed hands out to her sides like a gunslinger about to draw. She didn’t have any visible weapons, but that didn’t matter. Her magic was deadly enough.

  “You have no right to be here,” Ember said, her Arabic accent thick with barely contained rage. “Leave my home at once. Or I will remove you myself.”

  “Your home?” Rane slowly tilted her head side to side, making the bones in her neck pop. “Go ahead, Lily Munster, try it. The only thing you’ll be removing is your face. From my fist.”

  “Okay, not helping,” Dru said, putting a hand on Rane in a vain attempt to get her to shut up. She smiled at Ember as innocently as she could. “Ember, hi! This is so funny. I didn’t know you lived here. We were just looking for Salem, because we found his hat, and—”

  “Shut your mouth, shopgirl.” Ember slowly circled to the side, keeping about twenty feet between them.

  “Shopgirl? Seriously?” Dru said. For an astonished moment, she entertained the notion of letting Rane teach Ember a lesson after all.

  Then she watched Rane turn to square off against Ember, stance wide, ready for a fight. This situation was seconds away from turning violent. Dru cleared her throat. “Okay, obviously, this looks bad, us being here uninvited. And I’m happy to explain.”

  Ember’s heavily lined eyes flashed with fury.

  “Or we could just leave!” Dru chirped. “Okay, time to go. Rane, come on.” When Rane didn’t budge, Dru added, “We can work this out later. And we will, I promise. We all want the same thing.”

  The corner of Ember’s mouth curled up in a cruel smile. “Yes, of course,” she said to Rane. “You want him back, don’t you?”

  It took Dru a second to catch up and realize Ember was talking about Salem. “No, no, nobody wants Salem.”

  Rane shot her a withering look.

  “That’s not what I meant.” Inwardly, Dru cringed. “Gah. This is not the direction this conversation needs to be going right now. Okay? Everybody just cool it. Let’s just walk it off.” She motioned toward the door with both hands. “Walk it off, people. Outside. Right now.”

  In the tense silence that followed, neither Ember nor Rane blinked. The tension built in the still air.

  “He does not miss you,” Ember said to Rane. Her syrupy voice held a dangerous edge. “It does you no good, chasing after him like this.”

  “Yeah? How about like this?” With a long metal grinding sound, like a knife edge being honed across a sharpening stone, Rane’s muscled body turned the scorched gray color of raw iron. She slapped the cannonball between her hands with a bone-ja
rring clang.

  “Sorry,” Ember said with a shrug. “But I am simply unimpressed.”

  Rane bared her metal teeth. “I’ll leave you with an impression, all right.”

  Dru’s knees went rubbery. “Oh, fudge buckets,” she breathed. Then, with every ounce of courage she had, she walked into the open space between the two of them, snapping her fingers to get their attention. “Hey! Heads up. Don’t do this. No fighting. Nobody’s getting hurt. Nobody’s getting killed. We’re all on the same team, here.”

  “Really?” Ember said to Dru with mock sweetness. “I always thought your girlfriend here played for the other team.”

  At that, Rane shrugged.

  Ember turned back to Rane. “The sad fact is you have always failed with him. And you always will. The sooner you learn that, the better.”

  Dru’s mouth dropped open in shock. “Oh gosh, you did not just say that.” She turned, seeing the twitch in Rane’s eye, and her breath caught in her throat. Even on the best of days, Rane was one eye twitch away from a rampage.

  Dru tried to place a calming hand on Rane’s arm, but she was too late.

  As soon as she took a step to the side, Rane’s iron muscles flexed. With blinding speed, she twisted and launched the cannonball right at Ember.

  12

  LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD

  In the blink of an eye, Ember swirled her voluminous black coat around her body and disappeared, leaving nothing behind but a twist of inky black smoke. The iron cannonball streaked through the air where she had stood, blasting a head-sized depression in the concrete wall.

  If the cannonball had actually been fired out of a cannon, it probably would have blown a hole in the wall and kept going. But instead it bounced off the concrete and ricocheted back toward Dru. She instinctively covered her head as the bouncing cannonball whizzed past.