by Lara Adrian
Past that, I was stupidly hazy on the details, like who was part of the circle, how many people worked for them, how much power they had, and how quickly they could turn my life to utter shit if I pissed them off. The circle doesn’t shine a very strong light on its activities, but my ignorance was mostly my own fault. I’d never been much for paying attention to local politics, and my understanding of our laws was pretty much at a kindergarten “white magic good, necromancy bad” level. But I wasn’t living in abject ignorance—at least I did know that Benedict Jordan was their leader.
Mr. Jordan pretty much owned Columbus. He was a direct descendant of the two most powerful Talented families who’d founded the city, and he had been head of the governing circle for at least twenty years. He was also the controlling partner of the Jordan, Jankowitz & Jones law firm downtown and sat on the city council. Rumor had it that he was worth billions; he owned the high-end clothing store chain The Exclusive, and it seemed like he owned half the buildings in the trendy Short North.
So, I figured with so much trouble downtown, and him having so much money tied up in it, he would be bound to send the cavalry out to help us tout de suite. Yeah. I seriously needed to work on my clairvoyance.
Smoky had smashed through the plate-glass doors; vines were devouring the glass where his blood had smeared.
I stared down at the shotgun in my hands. It was like trying to stop a forest fire with a can of gasoline. And unless I found a piece of rope or a good intact spiderweb, another try at a binding spell would probably be useless. What on Earth could I use to stop Smoky that wouldn’t involve him shedding more blood?
Gee, maybe if I swore real hard he’d faint, I thought darkly. Or maybe I could jump into his mouth and hope he chokes on me?
Then my mind flashed on Cooper’s brief lecture on the uses of goose droppings. Offal could always be used to control the creature that produced it … if you could just figure out how. And Smoky had left plenty of fur on the car seats and some hide on the grass.
“I’m an idiot.” I ran back down the stairs.
The lights went off just as I entered the tunnel leading to the garage. I hunted vainly in my thigh pockets for my penlight, found nothing but a wad of dryer lint. Fortunately, Cooper had showed me lots of dryer lint tricks during our hours of shame at the Laundromat. I used the wad and a dead word for “cold flame” to light a green faery fire in the palm of my left hand. It didn’t cast much illumination, but it was enough to let me hurry through the dark and tremendously forbidding garage.
Cooper wouldn’t need to use these crappy little props for rinky-dink spells, Old Lady Mabel complained as I skirted the starving thatch of Smoky’s vines. He’d be calling down the ghost of Thomas Edison to juice the whole building and light it up like Christmas. He’d have shrunk Smoky right back down before he left the park. We’d be at the Panda Inn by now.
As I emerged from the garage, I realized something was terribly wrong with the sky. The slate-gray clouds had become a pearly white flatness streaked with ruby highlights. The air hung still and dead. The white of the sky cascaded down like an ethereal waterfall at the edge of the Grove; I could barely see the trees beyond.
“Motherfucker,” I whispered, shivering with a mixture of frustration and fear.
Someone—presumably a wizard employed by the governing circle—had cast an isolation sphere on the entire downtown area. I’d done a paper on isolation spheres in my freshman enchantments class at OSU, so I knew in painful detail what kind of trouble I was in. The sphere would be invisible to any mundanes outside it, but anyone attempting to approach the barrier would find himself with a sudden compulsion to turn around and go back the way he’d come. Inside, the sphere was much like trapping a spider under a jar, and I the unlucky cricket trapped with it.
The white color of the sky meant we were totally locked down. Nothing could get in or out, not man nor spirit nor spell nor electrical signal. But that wasn’t the bad part.
The ruby highlights meant the governing circle mages had hugely sped up time within the globe. And that meant that the governing circle had sensed the reality tear and had decided the easiest way of dealing with it was to isolate it, time-accelerate it, and wait an hour to see if whatever was causing trouble starved or died in the years that had passed within the globe. They’d be able to call a tornado in to mask any magical destruction to the city. Apparently Mr. Jordan had decided to go for an insurance write-off.
The cavalry wasn’t coming to save me or anyone else.
“Goddammit, this isn’t fair! I need help down here!” I screamed at the blank sky.
“Be quiet,” the ferret fussed. “They’ll hear you.”
Palimpsest was sitting on the hood of the Dinosaur. I hurried across the street.
“ ‘They’? It’s a ‘they’ now, for certain?” I asked.
“I thought you didn’t want my help,” Pal replied crossly.
“Mostly I need your nose. Help me find where Smoky left his skin. This”—I shook the shotgun at him—“was a very, very bad idea. I need to work an old-fashioned control spell.”
“I might not know everything—”
“No! Really?”
“—but I don’t think you’re ready for an incantation of that complexity, which is why I suggested the shotgun in the first place.”
“And your suggestion got us this lovely bit of helpful intervention from the local pointy-hats.” I jabbed my middle finger toward the sky. “So if I can’t take care of this my ownself, you’re going to be here for a very, very long time. So try to be a little supportive, please?” I asked.
The ferret seemed to shrink into himself. “I’m sure now that Smoky is tracking something, but I don’t yet know what it is. I caught smells of rage and pain and hunger … I think it did kill those men in the garage.”
“How?”
“Malevolent spirits will often attempt to possess the bodies of weaker creatures. But if the spirits are especially powerful and uncontrolled, the hosts often experience violent, fatal physical reactions.”
I paused, wincing as I thought of the men. “You mean they explode.”
“Yes, that would be one such reaction.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay. We’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. I’m sorry if I’ve been a horrendous ungrateful bitch, but this whole thing has me royally freaked. So can we start over, and try to get ourselves out of this mess?”
“I accept your apology. And yes, I’d quite like to get out of here as well. I’ll find that hide you wanted.” He hopped off the car and scurried over to the grass where Smoky had made his transformation.
I followed, and soon we’d gathered a good handful of fur and limp, bloody, stinky hide. I wished I’d thought to bring along some hand sanitizer.
I’d never tried a control spell, and had only seen Cooper do them a few times. In theory it was all pretty straightforward: I just had to get inside the target creature’s head and take command.
Yep. Straightforward like busting through a brick wall with your bare hands. Hell’s bells.
I gingerly squeezed the handful of bloody hide and glanced at Pal, who was sitting on the picnic bench. “If I start barking, don’t you dare laugh at me.”
“Perish the thought,” he said.
“Okay then.” I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.
I started a simple divination chant, asking the spirit residue on the hide and blood to lead me to Smoky. Palimpsest had told me the truth about the dog body being a mere puppet; though the flesh and blood was real, it felt as spiritually dead as a discarded Halloween mask. I focused on the faint, darker, alien essence that curled around the cells like aether.
Ancient words for “hunt” spilled from my lips in a dozen languages I could never name. I felt rather than saw Smoky standing on a deserted street, belching fire.
I knew his true name, his true nature. Kyothalahüi, Servant of Flame.
“Become!” I barked in Smoky’s ancient, secret language
.
I felt myself slip into his scaly skin, into his fragmented mind. My senses were crippled by his anger and pain, drowned by the ocean of information from a dozen too many legs and a hundred too many eyes. I couldn’t control it, couldn’t understand it. The fire stopped, and the body stumbled.
I saw a dark, twisted form. Smoky’s faceted eyes wouldn’t focus for me. What was it?
The twisted thing darted forward. I felt a slashing pain at my throat, my belly. The thing was digging inside me, and I couldn’t stop it—
—I broke the connection, collapsing back onto the grass.
“Oh hell,” I gasped, rising onto my knees. “I messed up. Oh God, I messed up …”
“What happened?” asked Pal.
“There was this thing. A demon. Smoky was attacking it when I entered his mind, and the demon … I think it killed Smoky.”
A brief blast of cold, sulfurous wind rippled across the landscape. In its wake, the trees and grass lost their color. In the white light from the blank sky, the world suddenly looked as though it had been carved from bleached bone.
“Now it killed Smoky,” Pal replied. “And the demon is changing the reality in our isolation sphere.”
My brain was just beginning to process what I’d sensed inside the dragon. “He never meant to hurt us—he was always focused on killing the monster that came into our dimension, but we all looked so alien to him, he couldn’t really see that we were his friends. Oh hell.”
Smoky might have calmed down once the demon was dead, and I had no doubt that the demon would be dead if I hadn’t interfered.
I swallowed down the sick bile rising in my throat. I wanted to cry.
“Did he wound it?” Pal asked.
“I—I think so. He was burning it. But it was still strong enough to tear him up.”
“Let’s hope he weakened it. Because … well, you know what we have to do now,” Pal said.
We had to do what strong, terrifying Smoky hadn’t quite managed: kill the demon. And hope it didn’t kill us first.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LUCY A. SNYDER is the Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Spellbent and Shotgun Sorceress, as well as the story and poetry collections Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Hellbound Hearts, Doctor Who Short Trips: Destination Prague, Chiaroscuro, GUD, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. A Texas native, she lives in Worthington, Ohio, with her husband and occasional co-author, Gary A. Braunbeck.
www.lucysnyder.com
Chapter One
71:59
I don’t recall the first time I died, but I do remember the second time I was born. Vividly. Waking up on a cold morgue table surrounded by surgical instruments and autopsy paraphernalia, to the tune of the medical examiner’s high-pitched shrieks of fright, is an unforgettable experience.
I vaulted off the table, my mind prepared to execute a move that my chilled body hadn’t quite caught up to, and promptly lost my balance. My knees didn’t bend; my ankles stayed stiff. I landed on my bare hip, earning another shock of cold and something quite new: pain. Sharp and biting, it lanced up my hip and down my thigh, orienting me to two facts: I was on the floor and I was completely naked.
Something metal clanged to the floor, rubber squeaked on faded tile, and the screams receded. Far away, a door slammed. The soft hum of machinery mingled with the hiss of my ragged breathing. Fluorescent light glared down from gray overhead fixtures. I smelled something sharp, bitter, and completely foreign.
My bruised hip protested as I sat up. The room tilted. A sheet dangled from the edge of the table I’d fallen from. I wrapped the thin, papery material around my shoulders. It did little to cut the chill.
Coroner’s table. Naked. Scalpel on the floor. What the holy friggin’ hell?
I searched my addled memory, hoping for an explanation as to why I was bare-ass naked on a morgue floor.
Nothing. Zilch. Awareness wrapped in cotton batting. No cinematic instant recall for me.
My chest seized and I began to cough—a wet rasp from deep inside my lungs. I spat out a wad of phlegm and continued coughing until I thought my chest would turn inside out. When the spasms ceased, I grabbed the side of the table and pulled. My feet responded. Knees bent. I managed to stand up, using the surgical table as a crutch, and found myself staring down at its shiny surface.
And a stranger’s face.
A curtain of long, wavy brown hair framed a curved chin and high cheekbones. Not mine. A smattering of freckles dotted the bridge of her nose. Definitely not mine. I touched my cheek, and the stranger touched hers. All wrong. I was pale, with blond hair, blue eyes, and no freckles. And younger. The dark-haired woman with track marks inside her left elbow and an open, but healing, gash down the inside of her forearm was not Evangeline Stone. She was someone else.
Another sharp tremor raced down my spine, creating gooseflesh across my back and shoulders. Wyatt. I was on my way to see Wyatt Truman. We’d agreed to meet at our usual spot by the train yards. I arrived. Waited. And then what?
Something bad, apparently.
I gazed around the small autopsy room with its plain gray walls and yellow tiled floors. Two identical beds lay on either side of a floor drain. An instrument tray lay upended on the floor. A wall of doors, roughly three-foot-by-four each, had to be where they kept the bodies. How long had I been in there?
Why had I been in there?
Wyatt would know. He had to know. He knew everything. He was my Handler; that was his job.
Did he know where I was? Or who I was, for that matter?
Opposite the refrigeration unit was a desk and beyond that a door marked PRIVATE. I stumbled toward it, clutching the sheet around my shoulders, still having some trouble with my extremities.
I limped into a small bathroom containing a sink, two stalls, and a bank of four gray lockers. I tried each one. The last opened with a sharp squeal, and the eye-watering stink of old tennis shoes wafted out. My stomach churned. Inside I found a pair of navy sweatpants in XXL and an oversized white T-shirt. Nothing else useful.
I dropped the sheet and tugged the shirt on, not surprised that it swam all over my thin frame. I was a few inches taller than I’d been. Bigger breasts, rounder hips—less the blond waif, and more the curvy woman. Definitely an upgrade. I rolled up the extra material and knotted it around my torso. The sweatpants went on next, and even with a drawstring, they were ridiculously huge.
It didn’t matter. The clothes just needed to get me out of there. I blotted my hair in the sheet, removing some of the excess moisture now that it was starting to thaw. The pants slipped, and I hiked them back up. A red hole peeked through the top of my belly button, hinting at a vanished piercing.
Voices bounced through the other room. I tiptoed to the door and pulled it open just far enough to peek outside. The technician was back, waving her hands wildly. Short, red hair bobbed around her shoulders each time she turned her head. Her companion was an older man, white-haired and wrinkled, dressed in surgical scrubs. He picked up the chart hanging from the end of the bed I’d previously occupied and skimmed the contents.
“Dead bodies don’t just come back to life, Pat,” the man said.
“I know that, Dr. Thomas, but she was dead. I was here when she was brought in early this morning. I pulled out the drawer when her roommate came to identify her.”
Roommate? My roommates were gone. I didn’t even have a couch to crash on anymore, now that the Owlkins were dead and their apartment building razed.
“She was still dead when Joe put her on the table for me,” Pat continued, “but then I got a phone call. When I got back and pulled the sheet, she was pinking up. I swear, I thought I was seeing things, but then she sat up.”
“I see,” Dr. Thomas said, in a tone that clearly indicated he didn’t believe her. “The physical examination showed that she died of acute blood loss. How do you think a dead bo
dy without blood sat up and walked out of the room?”
Pat gaped at him, her mouth opening and closing, but producing no response.
“The last thing we need,” Dr. Thomas said, “is a lawsuit from that girl’s family, because we misplaced the body. So I suggest you stop acting hysterical and find her, or you’ll be looking for another job.”
Dr. Thomas spun on his heel and stalked through a pair of swinging doors, leaving Pat behind. She stared at the settling doors, hands limp by her sides.
“I’m not crazy, you son of a bitch,” she said in a small voice. Not much of a fighter, that one. Then her entire body went rigid. Slowly, she turned in a small circle, eyeing the room. Her head snapped toward the far corner, as though she’d heard a noise. I held my breath and waited.
“Hello?” she said. “Chalice? Chalice Frost? Are you there?”
Chalice Frost? I could only imagine the sort of teasing she’d endured as a child. Probably why she (I?) had turned to drugs. Not that I possessed any memory of such a thing; I only had the track marks on my arm as proof. The gash, too, and the longer I stared at it, the more convinced I became that the exposed flesh had knitted, drawing the skin closer together. Healing.
“Get it together, Pat. It’s your blood sugar, that’s all. It’s off, so you’re seeing things.”
It was just too painful. I stepped into the autopsy room, still clutching the front of my borrowed sweatpants in an ongoing attempt to protect my modesty. The door shut with a solid thump. Pat jumped and spun around. Her mouth fell open, eyes widening to impossible proportions.
“If it helps,” I said, the voice strange to my ears, “you aren’t really crazy.”
She adopted an unhealthy pallor, then fainted dead away. Her head bounced off the tiled floor with a sickening crack. I winced. She lay still, her chest slowly rising and falling.