2 Death Rejoices

by A. J. Aalto

  Batten's finger caught the hem of my shirt and tucked it up, revealing my belly full of spots. “And that?”

  “Okay! I've got it.” I tried not to display any panic: corpsepox wasn't fatal, it was just damned uncomfortable until the body fought it off. “Look, I can handle my pox better than most people. I'm a DaySitter. I share Harry's strength, his resilience.”

  I opened my mouth to advise letting Chapel feed Harry again, caught Declan staring at my face expectantly, and thought better of it; that was the last thing I needed showing up in Declan's book. Batten's hard jaw dared me to suggest it, for different reasons entirely.

  “Look, Chapel and I are not infectious,” I said. “Only the one doing the necromancy will be diseased enough to transmit.”

  “I don't have to quarantine you?” Batten asked.

  Declan spoke up. “No, but if her bumps turn green, we not only quarantine Dr. B. we arrest her for making zombies.”

  “Hey! It's not me, dillhole. I'm not the one running around with Datura in my doctor's bag,” I retorted, “maybe we should check you for bumps.”

  Declan lifted his t-shirt over his head and did a slow turn topless, arms out, shirt dangling from one fist, to display perfectly smooth skin. There wasn't a mark on him.

  Declan completed his display by firing a finger at me. “You and Chapel were both in close contact with Spicer.”

  “I don't see how that's possible. I haven't been around many strangers. I'd have noticed the signs on them.”

  Batten said, “Such as?”

  “It starts with fever and excessive sweating.” I thought about how I'd started feeling awful at Fur Con, sweating my ass off in the squirrel suit. “Sore throat. Headaches. Thirst. Then the rash comes, and that's when the bokor would have been contagiou… oh, shit.”

  My brain flashed on a sweaty forehead, a rash that I had attributed to an allergic reaction to yak hair used from a unicorn suit, and a sniffling, bearded pervert with his spotty dick hanging out. Chapel and I were both in the car with him for a good twenty minutes. Could it be him? Was that possible?

  “I think I've seen Spicer.”

  Batten knelt beside Chapel and felt his forehead. “He's burning up. Call an ambulance.”

  “Marnie?” Declan prompted.

  “An ambulance is not the way to go,” I told Batten, then pressed my fist against my lips. “Ben, the Unicorn Furry. The new Master of the Revels, Malas’ servant.”

  Declan tapped a bit on his iPad. “Just out of curiosity… is this the person you're talking about?” He turned the tablet to face me.

  A younger, smooth-faced Benjamin Sahelian in full paladin regalia, the white and red tabard of the Priory, stared out of the iPad at me, with a crew of scruffy-looking characters in similar dress. Massive, heavy silver crosses with rowan wood tips hung on their chests. I scanned the names under the photo, from left to right, and when I got to Ben's name, my breath whoofed out like I'd been punched in the diaphragm.

  “Holy shit,” I breathed, sitting on my heels. “John Spicer is Ben Sahelian.”

  “Are you sure?” Declan asked.

  “Oh, yeah. I'd know that face anywhere. Malas has John Spicer in his house.” We considered Chapel's sweaty form, digesting this. “We've got to get Chapel downstairs to Harry. Maybe he can help.”

  Batten swept Chapel up in his arms, no mean feat considering Chapel ran six-five, two-twenty, but Batten allowed Declan to come around and shift Chapel so Declan could carry his feet. Together, they managed to get him down two flights of stairs to Harry's room.

  We knocked, and the front of my skull felt squidgy again. I rubbed between my eyebrows with the heel of my palm. “How could a holy paladin rationalize using Haitian necromancy? Killing people. He's killed people.”

  From behind the door, Harry's smooth, amused voice offered, “Our paladin has been able to rationalize many dark deeds, my angel. Three murders is nothing to him. I told you, John Spicer fights evil with evil.”

  Harry opened the door and emerged from the shadows of his room looking more pale and drawn than usual, especially compared to the burly, vigorous bulk of the ogre half-breed at his heels; ever present, Viktor silently matched Harry's pace. Batten pushed past the revenants with Chapel held under the arms, and Declan stumbled forward with him.

  Harry went directly to the bed where they set Chapel down. “Oh, dear,” Harry said, and the back of his hand fell lightly on Chapel's sweaty, speckled forehead.

  “Corpsepox,” I said, in case Harry couldn't tell.

  “Yes, I see. How long has he been thus?”

  “He didn't complain of many symptoms but we found him passed out this morning after his text.”

  “He's been sweaty,” Declan noted, “but what mortal among us hasn't been? It's been ninety-five degrees out until today.”

  “His fever's got to be a hundred and five,” I said. “He said he had a summer cold.”

  Harry's voice dipped to a hushed whisper. “He's not entirely unconscious, and your fretting is disturbing him. He is frustrated that he cannot help. I think you should take your discussion upstairs so that he may rest.” At Batten's open mouth, Harry waved a soothing hand in the air. “I will care for your fallen comrade, Mr. Batten.”

  “Shouldn't he go to a hospital?”

  “There's naught to be done for him,” Harry said. “ ’Tis best that he sleeps through it, if at all possible; the chills will set in next, and then comes the itch. It shall be, in a word, unbearable.”

  I tucked my t-shirt in around my waist and Harry flicked me a look. “For you, too, my dove, although my immunity to such afflictions will offer you some resistance.”

  “Some?”

  “I'm taking him to a hospital,” Batten repeated.

  “There's no one at the hospital that can care for him better than Harry,” I said.

  “I assure you, lad,” Harry said, though his tone said his words may fall on deaf ears, “I will see that no further harm befalls him.”

  Batten cut his eyes at me, and I said, “I might not trust Harry to take care of you, if you were sick, but Chapel? Come on. You know they're tight. Trust Harry.”

  Batten gave me the this-bitch-be-crazy look, and repeated, “Trust Harry,” as though I'd just suggested we spend the evening playing tiddlywinks with the Loch Ness Monster.

  I nodded. “Trust Harry.”

  Declan's fingers never stopped moving on his iPad while he watched Batten's glare bounce between Chapel and me, finally settling on the revenant on the corner of the bed.

  “No feeding,” Batten said, aiming a stern look directly at my Cold Company.

  Harry showed his surprise, and I felt pleasure slip through the Bond like body-warmed velvet brushing against my skin. “Thank you, Mark,” Harry cooed, using the hunter's first name for the second time.

  “What the hell for?”

  “Faith, my indomitable jugulator.” Harry smiled, sans fang, and then motioned to the stairs. “You honor me with this display of faith. Upon no account shall you regret it.”

  Batten's lips curled into an unpleasant facsimile of a smile that had more snarl and rictus to it than good humor. “If I regret it, bloodsucker, so will you. Believe it.”

  “I do, indeed. Stay a moment, my dove,” Harry requested of me.

  I watched them go. Viktor withdrew to the corner and sat, which made him about my height. Harry drew a blanket over Chapel's prone form and took out a white cotton handkerchief to dab at Chapel's sweaty brow.

  When Batten and Declan were gone, he said, “I had a dream, love.”

  “You almost never dream when you're in VK-delta.”

  Harry beamed at me. “Oh, how I do so enjoy when you teach me about my own self.”

  “You're your favorite topic,” I agreed.

  “Here, take this. You may need it today.”

  I looked down at Malas’ creepy tooth in my gloved hand. It had somehow stopped stalking me and wound up in Harry's pocket. “You think I'll need Mal
as’ help?”

  Harry's gaze stole over Chapel's restless figure, and his lips pinched unhappily. “Help, no, my love, but I do believe you will seek out Malas in the flesh. I cannot be there when you do.”

  I bounced the tooth in my palm. “Why not?”

  “That, I cannot say.”

  “How irritatingly mysterious of you,” I sighed.

  “I dreamed of you, and of Malas, and of my maker. You have two gifts, ducky, and you shall use them both, this I know.”

  “So, I'm going to go to Malas. Where?”

  “If my dream is truthful, you shall summon him at the Pantheon of the Dead.”

  “Can I find that on Google maps?”

  Harry's lips squeezed into a tight line. “Try not to be ridiculous, my angel.”

  “Fine. So I'm going to some mausoleum?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “For fuck's sake, Harry.”

  Harry's smile was feral around his cigarette.

  “I'm going to use the tooth to call him?” I asked. “Why would I do that?”

  “The tooth does not call Malas, my love, it merely calls his phantasm, and he vowed that he would always answer your call,” Harry corrected, “so he must. Will you remember that minor detail?”

  “Sure.” I shrugged, tucking the tooth in my pocket.

  “MJ,” he said gravely. “Will you kindly mark this distinction? Please. It is important.”

  I watched his face for clues. “Is this another one of your annoying tests? I'd rather not risk my frigging life to prove something.”

  “Promise me.”

  “Pantheon. Tooth. Phantasm. Gotcha. Will I know when to do it?”

  “Oh, yes.” Harry's low chuckle was sad. “I am positive that you will. Trust your knee-jerk reactions, sweet love, and all will be well.”

  I turned to go, and hovered by the threshold. “Are we in some big trouble, Harry?”

  “Isn't your concern for me just as sweet as nectar,” he said pleasantly. I wasn't fooled.

  “We are in trouble,” I diagnosed from the slight tremor through the Bond. “Can we handle it?”

  Harry's smile was deceptively serene. “I guess we shall find out.”

  CHAPTER 49

  “WITH CHAPEL DOWN, we need a leader,” I told the gathered few.

  Declan and de Cabrera reluctantly motioned across the kitchen table at Batten with voting fingers. Batten accepted his new role with a blank-faced nod, and took his Taurus out of an innerpants holster to check the clip.

  “Come on. Batten can't be in charge.” I implored, indicating the gun. “He gets all his best ideas from stuff in his pants.”

  Batten slammed the clip home. “And you don't?”

  My mouth snapped shut so hard my molars clacked. Most of my best ones start there. “Fine, smartass, you're in charge of your agents, I'm in charge of Declan. Deal?”

  “Bollocks,” Declan said, almost too low for me to hear it.

  Again, Batten gave a solemn nod. “I heard from the hospital. The security cameras showed someone in the morgue with Cosmo Winkle's cadaver, shortly before the body got out of the drawer and walked out.”

  I nodded. “Spicer and his Vodou and his Bluetooth rig.”

  “I thought a zombie army would be uncontrollable,” de Cabrera said.

  “He could easily control any zombies that he raised, shamblers. That's simple. Give commands, it follows them,” Declan said. “Butyou're right. Type C zombies, raised by contagion, would not be easily controlled.”

  “So we're assuming he has some control over the Type C, albeit iffy control,” I said, writing this on the white board. “Declan, what do we have on John Spicer? Any recent activities?”

  “The Grand Priory of St. John is active in Haiti with reconstruction efforts after the earthquake, and had made headlines in Europe recently for helping to rebuild a hounfour, which is like a Vodou temple where the people serve the loa.”

  “Strange thing for so-called paladins to do,” Batten muttered.

  I explained to Batten's deepening frown and de Cabrera's puzzled look, “There's a relationship between Vodou and Catholicism. In the eighteenth century, the French Christians who ruled Haiti would punish any African slaves caught conversing with the loa; the vodouisants incorporated European saints into their practices to hide their true beliefs and disguise their worship, and Vodou in Haiti became a syncretic religion.”

  “According to this article,” Declan continued, “the Grand Prior, George Ansell, denied knowledge of this hounfour-building activity, claiming his focus was building hospitals, but we know John Spicer's reputation. He isn't a white knight by any stretch of the imagination. If there's a left hand path to follow, he'll do it with both feet and both hands.”

  “This explains why Spicer was giving me garbled French nonsense on the phone. He's fighting between three worlds: our Earthly realm, the spirit realm of the loa, and demons like Asmodeus, who will definitely be trying to take advantage of a tainted paladin opening himself to the dark side of magic.”

  I watched Batten attempt to digest this with his mundane mind, falling back on his normal methods of logic, observation, deduction, and a healthy dose of ignoring anything he didn't want to buy because it was spiritually or metaphysically inconvenient. “I'll have Spicer's movements traced to ascertain if he was in Haiti, or in contact with any known bad actors there.”

  “So Malas’ new Master of the Revels is a paladin for the Grand Priory of the Knightly Order of St. John.” My mind whirled. “That means that Kitty Kat Furry staked her own father in the shoulder? She must have known it was him, the helmet of his costume was off.”

  “Spicer jumped in front of Malas when she threw that stake,” Batten said quietly, his face displaying the same confusion as I felt. “And then he laid there and watched us kill his daughter.”

  “Great family, huh?” I said, then thought about my own, and figured I shouldn't talk. “Why would the world's greatest vampire tracker prevent the staking of a revenant Malas’ age?”

  Declan suggested, “He needed Malas alive?”

  “What the hell for?” Batten demanded.

  Declan shrugged. “Maybe Malas knows something about this so-called abomination Spicer is tracking?”

  “Does Malas know that Ben is really John Spicer?” Batten asked.

  I snorted. “I doubt it. If he did, Ben wouldn't last long.”

  “How could a revenant not know that Ben was lying about his identity, his intentions?” Declan said. “How could he not taste every single deception?”

  Batten said, “Spicer must be a damn good liar.”

  “His life depends on it,” Declan agreed.

  I asked myself, what would Chapel do, if he was in his right mind? I wondered if Harry had been right to test Chapel, if he had sensed something fogging Chapel's mind, both the messed-up dhaugir bond and the fever of corpsepox confusing matters, making him sluggish, less effective.

  “Chapel would examine victimology; he would ask ‘why now’? What's changed, and when did it change?” I thought aloud.

  Batten nodded. “Look at the victims first.”

  I nodded, and wrote this on the whiteboard. “Dunnachie almost certainly was Spicer's first zombie here, unless our bokor has older ones we haven't seen yet. Stuart the DaySitter, for example, or the first Master of the Revels, the guy Ben replaced.”

  “Let's assume the attack on the Furries by the lake wasn't an accident.”

  “According to Anne's report, Zombie Dunnachie pushed Cosmoand first bit her. Roger ran. Cosmo helped Anne, and was disemboweled for his trouble. Then we know Dunnachie chased Roger into the shed and beat his head in.”

  And ate his brain. His whole brain. And even still, Roger Kelly got up and walked away from the fish camp… I wrote this down on the grease board without speaking it out loud.

  “It's possible Dunnachie saw Cosmo first,” de Cabrera said, “and that attack was a lack of control brought on by hunger.”

 
I flashed back on the bulging black buboes in Anne's armpits, the swelling pregnant tummy; I thought about the baby and had to do some square breathing to calm myself down.

  “What if Dunnachie was after Anne, primarily?” I said. “What if Cosmo and Roger were collateral damage?”

  Batten said, “We need to go back to Malas’ house.”

  “And do what?”

  “That thing that was Anne Bennett-Dixon is dangerous. You saw that. It attacked us. It killed two people in the hospital.”

  “She's under Malas’ control now. Besides, you'd have to get past Malas, and you can't take Malas by yourself. You've seen what he can do with telekinetics.”

  “Do we think Roger Kelly has gone to Spicer?”

  “Roger Kelly, the last we saw, was not wearing a Bluetooth device. Nor did he have a cell phone; we checked his pockets for ID at the crime scene and found nothing on him but a billfold.”

  “Where would Kelly go, after the shed, if he was not being controlled by the bokor?”

  Before anyone could respond, something dark dive-bombed Batten's face; he smoothly back-handed the bat and sent it tumbling claws-over-ears into the kitchen sink with a fur-muffled bong.

  De Cabrera said, “You've got a strange life, woman.”

  “Don't even get me started. Look at that disgusting rodent.”

  “It's a bat.”

  “It's a vector of disease.”

  “It's a vampire bat.”

  “That's what he wants you to think.” I glared at the swooping brown fur-ball as it vaulted out of the sink and fluttered up above the fridge, colliding with cereal boxes and the Kermit cookie jar, whapping the ceiling, to go bumping and wheeling into my bedroom. “You stay away from my bunny slippers, you pervert, or I'm telling mom!”

  Declan rubbed a weary hand over his face. “Something for you, Dr. B.”

  “Is it a zombie-proof suit?”

  “No.”

  “Is it battery-operated?”

  “No.”

  “Chocolate-covered?”

  “No.”

  “Rapidly losing interest,” I warned.

  “E-mail from Agent Golden. She's got a clean bill of health and is returning today.”