by Jim Butcher
Detective Prieto unsettled me, too. He was about my father’s age, stern and possessed of one stony expression as far as I could tell. He didn’t like me, and he didn’t like what he was doing. He gave me the paperwork, I read and signed, and he checked all of my credentials again before leaving the room to standing in the viewing area.
I pulled the sheet back on the corpse and there, lying pale and still in front of me, was Andrew Toland.
He looked damn good, for having been born in 1843, and especially since he’d died in 1875. By rights, I should have been looking at a skeleton, not a fresh corpse—like last time we’d been through this, another witch had produced a copy from his genetic template. It was known as a homunculus, in the trade. How such things were made was a closely guarded secret, although I knew the body would contain some kind of tissue or bone from the original corpse to hold the link. I wouldn’t have known how to begin to conduct that kind of operation, but then again, the witch who’d made the mortal clay couldn’t have breathed life into it, either.
Specialists.
I’d been here before, in this very room, with Andrew. One year ago, almost to the day—my first disposable. I’d been nervous, and excited, and thrilled at the prospect of meeting the man who’d made history. I hadn’t been prepared, then, for the idea that I would like him.
And that I would mourn him when it was time to let go.
I didn’t want to do this. It had hurt too much, been too intimate. I wanted to walk away from all of it... but if I did, someone else would be standing here within the hour. Someone like Lottie, who would turn something wonderful into something horrible.
I had no choice.
Andrew Toland looked peaceful, frozen at that moment of death. He no longer had the wounds that had killed him; the last witch had repaired that as part of the reconstruction. He was just... dead. All I had to do was bring him back.
And once again, I had to wonder: why him? Lottie had wanted him, specifically. It could have just been her one-two punch of hating me and wanting the prestige of running a disposable, but I couldn’t believe that. There were easier ways to hurt me, and Andrew Toland was nobody she’d want to mess with. She knew his story, just as I did.
Andrew had lived a hard, interesting life, and he’d earned himself a reputation, in his thirty-two short years, of being one of the toughest men of a rough and ready period of American history. A resurrection witch, like me, he’d gone down fighting during one of the worst zombie wars ever conducted in the Southwest. From time to time, a resurrectionist goes bad, and when that happens, the results are massively dangerous. Get three or four of the bad ones together, and you have the makings of an unstoppable army of the dead.
Andrew Toland had gone up against that, and earned himself a broken neck. Then, by prior agreement with his friends, he’d had himself resurrected to fight again.
He’d won. Most of his allies had been taken out, and in the end he’d carried on by himself—a gritty two-week campaign of attrition against the toughest opponents imaginable. And even when his resurrection witch had been killed in the last critical moments, he’d still managed to stay alive long enough to take out the enemy. It had been unheard of then, and it was still without parallel, and in the textbooks apprentices studied, he was an entire chapter all his own.
You just don’t get badder-assed than that.
I knew Prieto was watching, and the last thing I needed was to lose my objectivity at a time like this. I put all my feelings away in a lockbox, bent down, and opened Andrew Toland’s death-filmed eyes.
I parted his clay-cold lips and poured in the first, massive dose of the potion. It pooled in his mouth, liquid silver, and then I performed the part that nobody else could do.
I kissed him, very gently, on the lips, and completed the last step of the preset spell. I felt a line of power spooling out of me, traveling through the dark and connecting, with a jolting snap of power, with the spirit of Andrew Toland.
The last time I’d done this, Andrew’s power and strength had overwhelmed me. This time, it felt oddly soothing. Like being folded in warmth and light.
Andrew coughed, swallowed, and blinked. His skin remained pasty white for a few seconds. The cataracts on his eyes faded first, fainter with each blink, and then his skin took on color.
He wasn’t back, but he was breathing.
I took his hands and poured more power into him, raw and wild. It was sweaty work, bringing back the dead, and it required me to be vulnerable in ways most witches weren’t willing to attempt. I had to touch his soul, and let him touch mine. I had to not just taste death, but drink it down—accept it as a lover.
He gasped when I made contact, and the shine in his eyes shifted from mere existence to real life. Real consciousness.
I heard the first slow thud of his heartbeat, then the second. Then the rhythm falling into place.
And despite all the drugs cushioning his fall, I saw the agony hit him—I felt it, too, dim but strong, through our link, and had to breathe deeply to control the pain. He didn’t scream. Some did, but not Andrew; he hadn’t screamed when I’d revived him last year, either. His hands tightened on mine, brutally strong, and I tried not to wince. It’ll pass, I told myself. Breathe. Breathe, dammit.
I was doing fine until he met my eyes, and he whispered, “Holly. Wasn’t it finished? Didn’t we get him?”
Holy hell. He remembered.
For a frozen second I couldn’t think what to say, but training came back to me in a rush. Establish control. Guide the dialogue.
“Andrew,” I said, and my voice was low and gentle and soothing, entirely steady. “Andrew Toland. Do you hear me?”
He nodded. He hadn’t blinked since focusing on me.
“I need you to sit up now,” I said. “Can you do that?”
He could, and he did. He swung his legs over the edge of the cold morgue table and came upright, and I stopped him long enough to adjust the sheet over his lap. I wasn’t usually so fussy, but Andrew had thrown me off; I couldn’t see him as a tool. He was a man, a living, vital man.
He hadn’t looked away at all from my face. There was something very unusual about him. I’d brought back hundreds of dead, and I couldn’t think of a single one who’d begun the process with a question like that. It takes time for the personality to reassert itself, for memories to come clear.
He had been crystal-clear from the moment our souls had touched.
“Holly, you must tell me the truth,” Andrew said. “Did we kill that bastard?”
How could he possibly remember who I was? I’d had one other soul I’d brought back twice, the CEO of a major corporation who’d forgotten to pass along the passwords to some vital corporate accounts. I’d had to do it twice because the Board of Directors wanted to be sure they had everything from him, and that man, young and fit as he’d been, hadn’t recognized me at all. Hadn’t remembered a thing from one resurrection to the next.
“Holly!” His tone was sharp with concern. He was concerned. About me. I focused from about a thousand miles away and realized that he was frowning, totally focused on me. “Can you hear me?”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It came out a strained, strangled gasp. “Yes,” I managed to say. “I hear you, Andrew. We stopped him.”
“Then I expect there’s a tale to be told about why I’m back here.” He released me from his stare to turn it on the room around us. “Well, this place don’t get any prettier.”
He remembered that, too? Unbelievable. “How do you feel?”
“Feel?” His gaze came back to me, electric and warm, and his lips curved into a smile. “Alive would say it fine. But I’m not alive, I know that. You’ve brought me back again. Why?”
I turned away to pick up a stack of clothes from the pile nearby. Hospital scrubs for now, nothing fancy. I handed them to him, and he frowned down at them for a few seconds.
“Clothes,” I said. It was unnecessary; he clearly knew what they were, but I was rattl
ed. I was all too aware of Detective Prieto at the viewing window, seeing me lose my cool.
That earned me another fey smile from Andrew. He had a nice face—a little sharp, with a pointed chin. In certain lights, in certain moods, he would look sinister, except for the humor in his eyes. “I know we’re well acquainted, but a bit of privacy...?”
I turned my back. I heard the faint sound of his bare feet slapping the cold floor as he stood, and the rustle of fabric moving over skin.
He was way, way too fast. Too well adjusted, for any newly revived corpse. He had continuity, and that meant he remembered all the trauma of the first resurrection.
“How long?” he asked. “How long have I been away this time?”
I cast a look over my shoulder, and found he was adjusting the fit of the pants on his hips. Except for the slight, indefinable distance in his eyes, he could have been any hospital attendant. He looked completely... alive.
“About a year,” I said. “Andrew—”
“Feels like yesterday,” he said, and looked down at his hands. He flexed them, frowning. “Awful strange, not knowing that.”
“We have work for you,” I said. I was sticking to my script, even though Andrew had lost his. “I’ll help you understand what you need to do. How do you feel?”
“Holly, my sweet, I’m annoyed you’re not listening to how I feel.” He frowned, and I was right, he could look menacing. “Which shouldn’t be true, I think. No corpse revives so quickly as to be annoyed over such minor things.” Andrew should know. He’d been a better witch than I ever could be.
“You’re no ordinary person,” I said. My heart was pounding, my palms were sweating, but I sounded as cool and soothing as any clinical practitioner. “Are you in any pain?”
“No.”
“None at all?”
“Miss Holly, I’ve been in your shoes.” His gaze moved to focus on them for a second, smiling. “Never ones so dainty, maybe. But there’s no need to treat me like an invalid. I’ll let you know when I start feeling it.”
I stared at him. He stared back, challenge in those bright blue eyes. He was an average looking guy in a lot of ways—pleasant features, except for that sharp, aggressive chin; sandy brown hair that had grown into a style that seemed both modern and antique—shaggy, certainly. He had a sharp ridge and twist to his nose, as if he’d broken it early in life.
I tried to get my mind back to business. “If you start feeling anxious or drifting, tell me. I don’t know what the police need you for, or how long it will take, but you need to have a dose—”
“Each hour, yes, Miss Holly. I’m the one who wrote up the damn rules. Police, you say?” That seemed to give him pause for thought. “Why us, again?” Us, not just him. Andrew assumed instantly that we were a team.
I didn’t want to be a team. It had hurt so much the last time around, I couldn’t imagine how bad it would be this time, when I knew him. When I cared.
I opted for neutral topics. “Detective Prieto is waiting to brief us.”
Detective Prieto entered the room, and both of us turned to look at him. “Mr. Toland,” he said, and nodded stiffly. “I won’t say thanks, since I know you didn’t really have a choice in coming... here.” Nice way to avoid the whole death/life conundrum. “But I’m giving you a choice for the job. If you don’t want to do it, we’ll end this right now.”
Andrew had lost his smile. His eyes were narrowed, hard-focused. That was how he looked when he fought, I thought. And yes, he could be intimidating.
“It’s no small matter if you picked me,” he said. “I slept a hundred and thirty some-odd years before Miss Holly here brought me back the first time, and I’ll allow as how that job was worth the trouble. I expect this one’s just as raw.”
“Yes,” Prieto said. Now that he was face to face with the soul he was about to send into torment, possibly horrible death, he seemed deeply uncomfortable. “I need you to help us save lives.”
“Didn’t expect you brought me back for a pony ride, mister. Fine. I’ll do it.”
“Andrew,” I said quietly. “Hear him out before you agree to anything.”
“Don’t need to. Like I said, I wouldn’t be back here if it wasn’t bad.”
“All right,” Prieto said. “We have a credible terrorist threat against a protected group of individuals here in Austin. Four are already missing, and we’ve got intel about the next one to be abducted. We think these people are being killed, but we haven’t found remains yet.”
Andrew studied him for a moment in silence, then said, “I understood little of that, ‘cept you have four missing and some dead. I ain’t equipped to solve your crimes, so I don’t think that’s what you need me for, is it?”
“We need you to protect one of the people on the list of potential victims.”
“Wait a minute!” I blurted, horrified. The resurrected—even disposables—weren’t bodyguards, they were weapons—point them at a clearly defined objective, and let them go achieve it no matter what the damage. Disposables didn’t have a self-preservation instinct, so they were perfect for sending in on suicide runs.
Bodyguarding was completely different. For one thing, it was likely to be long-term, much longer than a disposable ever lasted. Days. Weeks. Months, even. “Wait a minute,” I repeated. My voice was loud enough to ring off the morgue steel. “What the hell? Since when did the resurrected join the force? This is something any cop in Kevlar could do, right?”
Prieto gave me another look. This one was blank and cool. “We’ve tried that,” he said. “Didn’t go so well, which is why we decided to go with somebody with nothing to lose, like your friend here. Our intel says the attack’s going to come in the next few days. Fact is, when we booked the job in the first place, we were planning to protect a completely different person. While you’ve been preparing we lost two more of the targets, and the teams of cops assigned for protection. So I don’t give a shit about your problems, lady. I lost four of my own police officers protecting these—people. Least you can do is your job.”
“But you can’t—”
Andy interrupted me. “Who’d I be protecting?”
Prieto had been waiting for the question, and he seemed to take a special kind of pleasure in saying, “It’s her. Holly Anne Caldwell. These fucking freaks are taking out witches.”
~
We left the viewing room to go down the hall to a small, airless conference room, where Prieto had set up shop for the night. He had folders.
He had a lot of folders.
I knew every one of the victims. Shayle Gallagher had been the first—he’d been taken right out of his flower shop (like me, he only moonlighted at the resurrection business), and there had been signs of a vicious struggle. Could have been robbery or a hate crime, so that hadn’t raised too many unusual flags at first, especially with no body found.
Two weeks ago, though, Harrison Wright had failed to show up to work at his medical practice, and his multi-million dollar estate showed signs of the same brutal attack as at Gallagher’s store.
Lottie Flores had been the next victim, and she’d disappeared the day after I’d taken the case from Sam.
“We kept it out of the news,” Prieto said. “Wasn’t easy. Oh, and Sam agreed we shouldn’t interrupt you while you were working.”
Sam agreed? I was going to have a talk with Sam. One involving a punch in the mouth.
“You said there were dead peace officers,” Andy said. Prieto nodded.
“My officers had missed a scheduled check-in. When backup arrived, their car was empty. They were found in the Flores house.”
“Why not bring one of them back, find out just what went on?”
Prieto looked grim. “We thought about it, but the families wouldn’t sign off, and by then, we were knee-deep in missing resurrection witches. Didn’t think we should waste the time trying to convince anybody.”
I looked at the photos of the two dead police officers, and felt my stomach twist. The
y’d been beaten to death. That wasn’t easy to do with any officer, but you could at least see how the five-foot-five, petite woman could have been overpowered. Not her partner, six-foot-four and big enough to intimidate pretty much anyone. He looked like he chewed nails as vitamins.
“Neither one got a shot off,” Prieto said. “No sign of Flores in the house, but we found blood and the same smash-up indicating a struggle. Blood in the bedroom turned out to be hers.”
Lottie’s house was neatly kept. Most of the damage was confined to her bedroom—bed pulled sideways, covers wrenched half off, blood smeared on the sheets and floor, leading down the hall. She’d been dragged out.
I hated Lottie. I had good reason; I’d been her apprentice for three resurrections, before I’d transferred to Marvin Jones, my permanent instructor. I’d hated every filthy second of being around Lottie and watching her work. I’d lodged a complaint against her with the Board of Review; nothing had come of it, of course. There weren’t so many resurrection witches running around that they could afford to turf one just because she was—let’s face it—a psychopath.
Even with all that, it still made me cringe to think about what that had been like... and what might still be happening to her.
The next file was even worse, because I had no reason at all to dislike Monica Heitmeyer; she was a nice older lady specializing, like me and Lottie, in resurrections, but she mainly did family gigs, reconciling loved ones. As far as I knew, she’d never done any work with the police. She was in the feel-good business.
Two more dead officers at her house, these two killed in the back yard. One had a snapped neck. The other looked like a sack of raw meat. Someone had used him for punching practice. Monica, like Lottie, was missing, but she’d left behind a lot of blood.
Andrew hadn’t said anything. His eyes had gone dark and cold, and whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself.
“What makes you think I’m next on the list?” I asked.
“Not a hell of a lot of witches in your line of work in Austin,” Prieto said. “Most of them are already gone. It’s down to you and the other one.”