by J. D. Monroe
“No,” Charity says. “It’s more fun to be pissed at you.”
Patience rolls her eyes and dabs gently at her temple, fingers pushing back her hair. “You okay?”
“Huh?”
“Are. You. Okay?” Patience says. She doesn’t make eye contact as she tilts Charity’s face back and forth. “I get it, you know.”
“Get what?”
“Hunting with Georgia,” Patience says. “It does you good to have someone to protect after following my lead for all those years.”
Charity shakes her head and pulls out of her sister’s grasp. “Is that what you think this is?”
“I think there’s not a whole lot of other reasons why you’d be hunting with her,” Patience says. “Do you want me to finish or not?”
“I think you should shut your pie hole about things you don’t understand,” Charity says. Even so, she leans forward and lets Patience finish. “And I didn’t just follow your lead.”
“Have it your way,” Patience says. “This is gonna hurt.”
“It’s none of your—”
Patience is suddenly in her face with a pair of tweezers. Something tears at her cheek, and then liquid fire pours over an already screaming wound. She tries not to make a sound, but a groan of pain escapes her throat. Patience immediately presses a clean towel to the side of her face, and for a moment, they are frozen that way.
Big dark eyes fixed on hers. Big sister and little sister together again. They’ve done this more times than she can count, shaking hands and clenched jaws and the unspoken got your back.
Patience shakes herself and holds up the tweezers. A ragged, filthy fingernail is caught between them. Oh, for shit’s sake. “That was in your face. Hold.” She presses Charity’s hand over the towel and goes into the kit again for butterfly sutures.
“That’s disgusting,” Charity says. “And Georgia’s not going to drag me down or get me killed. It’s just one hunt, anyway. My truck got trashed on my last job, and it was still being fixed when this case came up. Georgia’s a means to an end.” She huffs and checks the towel. A wide crescent of red is seeping into the clean white fibers. She hopes Georgia has a good stain remover somewhere. “Not that it’s your business.”
“Okay,” Patience says. She moves the towel and hands Charity the sutures. “Peel me one off.”
“I’m serious,” Charity says.
“I thought you didn’t care what I think.” Patience pinches together the open cut. It stings like hell, but Charity grits her teeth and peels off one of the adhesive sutures. They are anything but gentle, but her sister’s fingers are deft and practiced as she bandages the cut.
“Damn right,” Charity says.
“But you like her.”
“Well, she’s got cash, and she’s actually a decent person,” Charity says. “And she doesn’t treat me like an idiot. Maybe you could take a cue.”
“I never treated you like an idiot if you didn’t deserve it,” Patience says. “What, you want me to be nice and pretend you aren’t wrong about things just to spare your feelings? By all means—”
“Just stop. I’ve had six months without doing this, and honestly, it’s been nice.”
Her sister’s eyes widen slightly. Did she manage to pierce the thick stone wall and strike a nerve? Hope bubbles up in her. As angry as she’s been, if Patience said she was sorry, Charity would probably let all of it go in a heartbeat. “Well, I’ve had six months without having to clean up someone else’s mess.”
“Okay,” Charity replies flatly. She should have known. Patience narrows her eyes, like she’s waiting for the follow-up. But Charity Pierson is so far beyond tired, and she’s done every version of this dance with her sister. She swallows back the lump rising in her throat. “We both know where we stand. Let’s do this job and then we go our separate ways.”
32. FILL IN THE BLANKS
A HOT SHOWER HELPS, but one glimpse of her reflection makes Charity want to crawl into bed and not wake up for a week. One cheek all sliced up, deep purple bruising around her lips and her throat. She looks like a kinky encounter gone terribly wrong. Safe word, her happy ass.
It’s still dark out, crickets whirring a noisy night-song, when she emerges from the bathroom to the smell of strong coffee. At this point, she might as well start injecting the coffee directly.
Patience is already at the computer with a cup in her hand. Her hair is twisted up on her head, and she’s in dry clothes. “Nicky texted me back. He’s on duty in an hour,” she says without looking up. “We need to get our shit together and be ready to move when he calls me back. What do we know?”
Charity pops another pod into the machine and leans heavily against the counter while it burbles noisily. “Let’s break this down,” she says. The coffeepot hisses its last, and she takes her seat at the dinette with her cup.
“Tell me what you know,” Patience says.
As much as she hates to admit it to herself, there’s something comfortable about this. A couple of notebooks, Patience at the computer while Charity thinks out loud. “Okay, let’s do this. Adam Keller is our guy. So he’s not only killing them, he’s controlling their corpses?”
“Whoa,” Patience says. “You lost me.”
“The revenants,” Charity says. “They were intelligent.”
“Agreed.”
“Something was controlling them,” she says. “The eyes. There was a flash, and then mine let me go all of a sudden and went for the water. Like something called it off. We saw it with Tommy Crane’s ghost, too.”
“The missing eyes,” Patience murmurs. “Lots of folklore about using flesh to control something through with sympathetic magic. So what, you steal an eye and use it to see through your corpse puppets?”
“Pretty smart trick. Lets Adam watch us without being close.” Charity makes a note on the legal pad. Adam—necromancer; stealing eyes?
“What else?”
“He’s targeting his friends,” Charity says. “Tommy Crane, Gabriel Mullins, and presumably Mike Wagner.”
“Who else?”
“There was Patrick Bell. And one other guy Calloway mentioned. I’ve got it in my notebook.” She flips through the pages. “Simon Collins. He wasn’t in the play, but he was in the homicide class with them.”
A creak betrays Georgia right before she creeps into the kitchen. She freezes, like a kid with her hand in the cookie jar, as Patience waggles her fingers in greeting.
“Well, good morning, sunshine,” Patience says. “You feeling okay?”
“World’s worst hangover,” Georgia mutters. She’s in clean clothes, a long-sleeved T-shirt covering the enormous tattoo.
“Blood loss’ll do that to you,” Patience says. “Drink some water and come sit down.”
Georgia takes a bottle of water out of the fridge and shuffles over to the couch. She hesitates at the strewn belongings there, then perches on the arm of the couch instead, arms folded over her stomach. Her eyes flit back and forth, sliding away from Charity every time she tries to make eye contact.
“So are we going to talk about you or not?” Patience says. Leave it to Patience. She walks right up and climbs onto the elephant in the room.
“What’s to talk about?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the fact that we’ve all met before?” Patience says. Charity’s eyes go wide. “John Edwin Mitchell ring a bell?”
“No way,” Charity murmurs. Shit, she’s right. “The electric chair? Florida, right?”
“That’s the one,” Patience says. Georgia’s face has gone even paler. “Browning was a good choice though. Like the guns, right?”
“I— How—”
“People give me a lot of shit for it, but I take notes on everything,” Patience says, glaring pointedly at Charity. She holds up a small, cell-phone-sized hard drive linked to Georgia’s laptop with a USB cable. “Especially the cases I work. So?”
She’d sit there for hours at night typing up those reports, asking Charity
to remind her exactly what the flesh-eating monster smelled like. Would she say it was more gray or green? Was English sufficient for the protection of the house, or did it take some high-powered Latin to evict the vengeful spirits for good? And she was always uncharacteristically solemn as she searched obituaries and news articles to document the people who lived and died on their watch. Somewhere in those files was one Georgia Browning. Or Masters, as it seemed.
“So, what else is there to tell?” Georgia says. Her jaw is set, face stone cold. “Yeah, we’ve met.”
“And you never thought that might be relevant information?” Charity asks. “Especially when I asked you every single day why you wanted to hunt?”
It was a particularly ugly case down in Tallahassee. They found an electric chair haunted by some of its nastier inhabitants. Some two-bit serial killer rode the lightning and came back for seconds. They saved Georgia and her dad, but they were too late to save the rest of the family. It was a bad one. Patience tried to resuscitate the younger sisters, leaving Charity to take out the ghost and protect the nameless oldest sibling. The police showed up almost immediately, and she and Patience hurried off the scene before they had to face questions they couldn’t answer. It takes a minute, but she imagines Georgia’s bright red hair as honey blond, chin length around a fresh face. Shave off four years, and it’s like it was yesterday. How could she possibly forget?
Ah, shit. No wonder Georgia slapped the hell out of her. Poor girl. Charity knew something must have pushed her into hunting, but she couldn’t have guessed it was this bad.
“Like I said,” Georgia says. “Didn’t want to talk about it. Still don’t.”
“Georgia—”
“You can keep your secrets,” Patience says. “I understand. Get some coffee and help us.”
“But—” Charity sputters. She saved Georgia’s life that night, but the girl lost most of her family. How could they not talk about it?
“Gladly,” Georgia replies. She avoids Charity’s eyes as she sinks into the seat of the dinette. “You said your mom mentioned a mark on the hand.”
“We’re really not—”
“Charity Lee,” Patience snaps. “Let it go.”
“The mark,” Georgia says gently.
Charity shakes her head. Unreal. She sketches the triangular mark on her legal pad, then turns it toward Georgia. “That’s been bothering me. Adam’s hands weren’t marked.”
“But we talked to him not long after Tommy died,” Georgia said. “I assume it happens when they start killing?”
“I still don’t think Tommy counted,” Patience says. “Did you talk to him before or after Gabriel Mullins died?”
“Before,” Georgia says quietly, shaking her head. “And we haven’t seen him up close since then.”
“Regardless, how does it help us find Adam?” Charity asks.
“It doesn’t,” Patience says. “He knows something is up, so he’s gone to ground. Now we see if Nicky comes through.”
It’s just past one in the morning when Nicky calls with an address. All three of them reach for the phone, but Patience gets there first. “Hello? Hi, Nicky,” she purrs. “You have a location for me?” She makes a gesture for the pen and paper. “Twelve Forty-One Winter Terrace. Don and Cindy Keller. Uh-huh, I got it. Thanks, big guy.”
Patience hangs up the phone. “We got him. Shacked up at a house belonging to—”
“We heard,” Charity says. “What’s the plan?”
“We go in and stop the murdering necromancer?” Patience says. “You need more than that?”
“Yes,” Georgia says. “What if he’s already gone after Patrick?”
“I’ll go after Adam,” Patience says. “You guys go pick up Patrick for protection.”
Charity shakes her head. “No. We’ll get Adam, you go get Patrick.”
“Oh, so you can claim—”
“Patience, seriously? Because you can handle yourself alone better than I can,” Charity says. “If he’s already going after Patrick, you can handle him alone. If he’s still at his folks’ house, me and Georgia can take him.”
Her sister’s mouth drops. “Fine.”
“Are you sure it’s Patrick?” Georgia asks. “What about Simon Collins?”
Charity sighs. “Patrick seems like the more likely target. It’s bad enough to split up this way. We’re not doing a three-way.” Patience giggles, and Charity stops to stare at her. Then the laughter bubbles up as she realizes her unintended innuendo. “You’re the worst.”
Patience just smiles serenely. For a moment, it’s like the old days, and Charity wishes she could freeze the moment. “I know.”
Georgia snorts a laugh and shakes her head. “So when do we do this?”
“About ten minutes ago,” Patience says. “Get your shit together.”
Charity wiggles into a pair of comfortable jeans and a snug black T-shirt under her heavy khaki jacket. A pocket knife, lock picks, holy water, and a lighter go into the inner pockets, and she wraps her holster around her waist. Her hair is still damp and messy around her face. She fumbles to twist it into a bun.
“You want me to…” Georgia trails off. Her hair is neatly braided and coiled, and she’s all in black like a ninja. It’s kind of badass.
“Sure,” Charity says. Her scalp tingles as Georgia combs back her wavy hair with her fingers. One of the few things she truly misses about Patience is the way her sister had a thing for hair. They’d sit there watching TV in a shitty motel room, and Patience would perch on the edge of a chair with Charity leaned against her legs, blissed out while her sister twisted and braided until she looked like a white trash Princess Leia.
There’s a faint sniffle behind her. “I used to braid my little sisters’ hair all the time.”
“I’m really sorry about them,” Charity says.
“I told you, I don’t want—”
“I know,” she says. “You don’t have to say anything else about it. I just wanted you to know. I’m not warm and fuzzy, but if you ever want to talk about it, I’ll listen. And get you drunk if you want.”
Georgia laughs a little. “Okay,” she says. There’s a long silence as she works her fingers through Charity’s hair. “Do you think we’ll get him?”
“I hope so,” Charity says. “It’s the best lead we’ve got.”
Patience walks out of the bathroom, her own dark hair twisted into a neat bun at the back of her head like a ballerina. They learned a long time ago that long hair was an open invitation to get pulled and yanked out by anything with half a brain cell. She freezes for a moment, and her brow creases as she watches Georgia. “You almost ready?”
Charity raises her eyes. “Almost.”
Her sister drains the remains of her coffee. “When we find Adam, we don’t kill him.”
“Patience—”
“Promise me,” Patience says. She secures a matte black gun in a hip holster and covers it with an oversized black jacket. Her impractical heeled boots have been traded for a pair of steel-toed shitkickers.
“Since when are you Miss Sanctity of Life?”
“Since I know how this thing works now, and I know that Adam Keller isn’t responsible for what he’s doing,” she says. “Please. You owe me.”
Charity huffs. “I don’t owe you shit.”
“How can you say that, after everything we’ve dug up on this thing?”
“This is not the time for this conversation,” Charity says. Georgia tucks the end of a neat braid over her shoulder and waits behind her as Patience glares. “I’ll try not to kill him. But if it comes down to it, I’ll choose the same. Every time.”
“We’ll have this conversation eventually.”
“Of that I have no doubt,” Charity says. “Now you make me a promise.”
“What?”
“When we find the knife, you don’t touch it,” Charity says.
“What, you think—”
“And neither do I,” Charity interrupts. She gestures o
ver her shoulder. “Georgia puts on my gloves and seals it up until we can meet up with Christina and destroy it. You and I are too close to it. She’s the best chance at the three of us not ending up dead like the rest.”
“Fair enough,” Patience says. “Let’s roll.”
33. HOT PURSUIT
THE HOUSE ON WINTER TERRACE doesn’t look like the den of a foul necromancer. It looks like the den of a Martha Stewart devotee. It probably smells like gingerbread and angel dust. The lawn is perfectly manicured, a sparkling ribbon wreath with a cursive wooden K hanging on the front door. A rust-patched blue sedan is parked on the curb, marring the otherwise perfect tableau.
“That’s his car,” Georgia says.
“Duh,” Charity replies. “Hand.” She holds out her hand, and Georgia doesn’t protest before slapping her hand into it. You can do this, Charity tells herself. “Dear Lord, we pray for your protection,” she murmurs. As she prays, Georgia clamps down. “Amen.”
The neighborhood is eerily quiet in the late night stillness. Charity slides out of the car and feels for the cold weight of her gun. The Kellers’ driveway is empty, and the house is dark. If he’s not actually here, they’re screwed. She gestures for Georgia to follow her. They move quietly up the front yard and pause on the porch. The rest of the street is peaceful. There are no lights flicking on, no nosy neighbors.
She hangs at the door and listens. There’s no sound inside; no blaring TV, no voices on the phone. She pulls the gun and slowly flicks off the safety, keeping it hidden between her body and the door. “Knock,” she whispers.
Georgia reaches over her shoulder and knocks. Charity’s heart thumps almost in rhythm with the rapid knock, and she brings the gun up to eye level.
She almost screams in surprise when Georgia knocks again. No answer. No creak and bump of someone running downstairs to answer a door.
The house looks normal, and that worries her. There should be signs of Adam’s presence, especially if he’s controlling the kind of dark energy he needed to send the revenants to them. But Ma Keller’s flowerbeds are flawless, and she smells only fresh mulch with not a hint of rotting corpse beneath.