by P. N. Elrod
“I?” the woman said. “Nothing.”
Murphy’s face flushed. “Yet.”
The woman let out a smoky laugh, toying with Murphy’s hair. “We’re getting to that. I only shared the embrace of the god with her, wizard.”
“I was going to kick your ass for that,” Murphy said. She looked around, and I noticed that a broken lamp lay on the floor, and the end table it had sat on had been knocked over, evidence of a struggle. “But I feel so good now. . ..” Smoldering blue eyes found me. “Harry. Come sit down with us.”
“You should,” the woman murmured. “We’ll have a good time.” She produced a bottle of Mac’s ale from somewhere. “Come on. Have a drink with us.”
All I’d wanted was a beer, for Pete’s sake.
But this wasn’t what I had in mind. It was just wrong. I told myself very firmly that it was wrong. Even if Karrin managed, somehow, to make her gun’s shoulder rig look like lingerie.
Or maybe that was me.
“Meditrina was a Roman goddess of wine,” I said instead. “And the bassarids were another name for the handmaidens of Dionysus.” I nodded at the beer in her hand and said, “I thought Maenads were wine snobs.”
Her mouth spread in a wide, genuine-looking smile, and her teeth were very white. “Any spirit is the spirit of the god, mortal.”
“That’s what the psychic conduit links them to,” I said. “To Dionysus. To the god of revels and ecstatic violence.”
“Of course,” the Maenad said. “Mortals have forgotten the true power of the god. The time has come to begin reminding them.”
“If you’re going to muck with the drinks, why not start with the big beer dispensary in the arena? You’d get it to a lot more people that way.”
She sneered at me. “Beer, brewed in cauldrons the size of houses by machines and then served cold. It has no soul. It isn’t worthy of the name.”
“Got it,” I said. “You’re a beer snob.”
She smiled, her gorgeous green eyes on mine. “I needed something real. Something a craftsman took loving pride in creating.”
Which actually made sense, from a technical perspective. Magic is about a lot of things, and one of them is emotion. Once you begin to mass-manufacture anything, by the very nature of the process, you lose the sense of personal attachment you might have to something made by hand. For the Maenad’s purposes, it would have meant that the mass-produced beer had nothing she could sink her magical teeth into, no foundation to lay her complex compulsion upon.
Mac’s beer certainly qualified as being produced with pride—real, personal pride, I mean, not official corporate spokesperson pride.
“Why?” I asked her. “Why do this at all?”
“I am hardly alone in my actions, wizard,” she responded. “And it is who I am.”
I frowned and tilted my head at her.
“Mortals have forgotten the gods,” she said, hints of anger creeping into her tone. “They think the White God drove out the many gods. But they are here. We are here. I, too, was worshipped in my day, mortal man.”
“Maybe you didn’t know this,” I said, “but most of us couldn’t give a rat’s ass. Raining down thunderbolts from on high isn’t exclusive territory anymore.”
She snarled, her eyes growing even brighter. “Indeed. We withdrew and gave the world into your keeping—and what has become of it? In two thousand years, you’ve poisoned and raped the mother earth who gave you life. You’ve cut down the forests, fouled the air, and darkened Apollo’s chariot itself with the stench of your smithies.”
“And touching off a riot at the Bulls’ game is going to make some kind of point?” I demanded.
She smiled, showing sharp canines. “My sisters have been doing football matches for years. We’re expanding the franchise.” She drank from the bottle, wrapping her lips around it and making sure I noticed. “Moderation. It’s disgusting. We should have strangled Aristotle in his crib. Alcoholism — calling the god a disease.” She bared her teeth at me. “A lesson must be taught.”
Murphy shivered, and then her expression turned ugly, her blue eyes focusing on me.
“Show your respect to the god, wizard,” the Maenad spat. “Drink. Or I will introduce you to Pentheus and Orpheus.”
Greek guys. Both of whom were torn to pieces by Maenads and their mortal female companions in orgies of ecstatic violence.
Murphy was breathing heavily now, sweating, her cheeks flushed, her eyes burning with lust and rage. And she was staring right at me.
Hooboy.
“Make you a counteroffer,” I said quietly. “Break off the enchantment on the beer and get out of my town, now, and I won’t FedEx you back to the Aegean in a dozen pieces.”
“If you will not honor the god in life,” Meditrina said, “then you will honor him in death.” She flung out a hand, and Murphy flew at me with a howl of primal fury.
I ran away.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve faced a lot of screaming, charging monsters in my day. Granted, not one of them was small and blond and pretty from making out with what might have been a literal goddess. All the same, my options were limited. Murphy obviously wasn’t in her right mind. I had my blasting rod ready to go, but I didn’t want to kill her. I didn’t want to go hand-to-hand with her, either. Murphy was a dedicated martial artist, especially good at grappling, and if it came to a clinch, I wouldn’t fare any better than Caine had.
I flung myself back out of the room and into the corridor beyond before Murphy could catch me and twist my arm into some kind of Escher portrait. I heard glass breaking somewhere behind me.
Murphy came out hard on my heels, and I brought my shield bracelet up as I turned, trying to angle it so that it wouldn’t hurt her. My shield flashed to blue-silver life as she closed on me, and she bounced off it as if it had been solid steel, stumbling to one side. Meditrina followed her, clutching a broken bottle, the whites of her eyes visible all the way around the bright green, an ecstatic and entirely creepy expression of joy lighting her face. She slashed at me, three quick, graceful motions, and I got out of the way of only one of them. Hot pain seared my chin and my right hand, and my blasting rod went flying off down the corridor, bouncing off people’s legs.
I’m not an expert like Murphy, but I’ve taken some classes, too, and more important, I’ve been in a bunch of scrapes in my life. In the literal school of hard knocks, you learn the ropes fast, and the lessons go bone-deep. As I reeled from the blow, I turned my momentum into a spin and swept my leg through Meditrina’s. Goddess or not, the Maenad didn’t weigh half what I did, and her legs went out from under her.
Murphy blindsided me with a kick that lit up my whole rib cage with pain, and had seized an arm before I could fight through it. If it had been my right arm, I’m not sure what might have happened—but she grabbed my left, and I activated my shield bracelet, sheathing it in sheer, kinetic power and forcing her hands away.
I don’t care how many aikido lessons you’ve had, they don’t train you for force fields.
I reached out with my will, screamed, “Forzare!” and seized a large plastic waste bin with my power. With a flick of my hand, I flung it at Murphy. It struck her hard and knocked her off me. I backpedaled. Meditrina had regained her feet and was coming for me, bottle flickering.
She drove me back into the beer-stand counter across the hall, and I brought up my shield again just as her makeshift weapon came forward. Glass shattered against it, cutting her own hand—always a risk with a bottle. But the force of the blow was sufficient to carry through the shield and slam my back against the counter. I bounced off some guy trying to carry beer in plastic cups and went down soaked in brew.
Murphy jumped on me then, pinning my left arm down as Meditrina started raking at my face with her nails, both of them screaming like banshees.
I had to shut one eye when a sharp fingernail grazed it, but I saw my chance as Meditrina’s hands—hot, horribly strong hands, closed over my throat.
I choked out a gasped, “Forzare!” and reached out my right hand, snapping a slender chain that held up one end of a sign suspended above the beer stand behind me.
A heavy wooden sign that read, in large cheerful letters, PLEASE DRINK RESPONSIBLY swung down in a ponderous, scything arc and struck Meditrina on the side of the head, hitting her like a giant’s fist. Her nails left scarlet lines on my throat as she was torn off me.
Murphy looked up, shocked, and I hauled with all my strength. I had to position her before she took up where Meditrina left off. I felt something wrench and give way as my thumb left its socket, and I howled in pain as the sign swung back, albeit with a lot less momentum, now, and clouted Murphy on the noggin, too.
Then a bunch of people jumped on us and the cops came running.
WHILE THEY WERE arresting me, I managed to convince the cops that there was something bad in Mac’s beer. They got with the caterers and rounded up the whole batch, apparently before more than a handful of people could drink any. There was some wild behavior, but no one else got hurt.
None of which did me any good. After all, I was soaked in Budweiser and had assaulted two attractive women. I went to the drunk tank, which angered me mainly because I’d never gotten my freaking beer. And to add insult to injury, after paying exorbitant rates for a ticket, I hadn’t gotten to see the game, either.
There’s no freaking justice in this world.
Murphy turned up in the morning to let me out. She had a black eye and a sign-shaped bruise across one cheekbone.
“So let me get this straight,” Murphy said. “After we went to Left Hand Goods, we followed the trail to the Bulls game. Then we confronted this Maenad character, there was a struggle, and I got knocked out.”
“Yep,” I said.
There was really no point in telling it any other way. The nefarious hooch would have destroyed her memory of the evening. The truth would just bother her.
Hell, it bothered me. On more levels than I wanted to think about.
“Well, Bassarid vanished from the hospital,” Murphy said. “So she’s not around to press charges. And, given that you were working with me on an investigation, and because several people have reported side effects that sound a lot like they were drugged with Rohypnol or something—and because it was you who got the cops to pull the rest of the bottles—I managed to get the felony charges dropped. You’re still being cited for drunk and disorderly.”
“Yay,” I said without enthusiasm.
“Could have been worse,” Murphy said. She paused and studied me for a moment. “You look like hell.”
“Thanks,” I said.
She looked at me seriously. Then she smiled, stood up on her tiptoes, and kissed my cheek. “You’re a good man, Harry. Come on. I’ll give you a ride home.”
I smiled all the way to her car.
Jim Butcher enjoys fencing, martial arts, singing, bad science-fiction movies, and live-action gaming. He lives in Missouri with his wife, son, and a vicious guard dog. You may learn more at www.jim-butcher.com.
DEATH WARMED OVER
RACHEL CAINE
I HATE RAISING the dead on a work night.
My boss Sam Twist knows that, and so it was a surprise when I got the e-mail on a Monday, telling me he would need a full resurrection on Thursday.
“Short turnaround, genius,” I muttered. It took days to brew the necessary potions, and I’d have to set aside the entire Thursday from dusk until dawn for the resurrection itself. Not good, because I knew I couldn’t exactly blow off Friday. I had meetings at the day job.
Sam, who ran the local booking service for witches, was usually somewhat sympathetic to my day job–night job balancing act, mostly because I was the best resurrection witch he had—not that being the best in the business exactly pays the bills. It was a little like being the best piccolo player in the orchestra—it took skill, and specialty, and not a lot of people could do it, but it didn’t exactly present a lot of major money-making opportunities.
Then again, at least resurrections were a fairly steady business. Some of the other types of witches—and we were all very specialized—got a whole lot less. It was a funny thing, but so far as I could tell, there had never been witches who could do what the folklore claimed; those of us who were real worked with potions, not words. We couldn’t sling spells and lightning. Our jobs—whatever our particular focus—took time and patience, not to mention a high tolerance for nasty ingredients.
I contemplated Sam’s message. If I wanted to, I could turn down the assignment—I wasn’t hurting for money at the moment. Still. There was something in the terse way he’d phrased it that made me wonder.
So was I taking the job, or not? If I said yes, prep needed to start immediately after work. Part of my mind ran through the things I might need, and matched them against the mental stock list I always kept in my brain. The bowls were clean and ready, I’d put them through the dishwasher and a good ritual scrub with sacred herbs just a week ago. I’d need to put a fresh blessing on the athame. I had most of the other things—rock salt, sulfur, attar of roses, ambergris, and a whole bunch of slimier ingredients. I might be running low on bottled semen, but the truth was, you could always get more of that.
I fidgeted in my chair as I stared at the message. Sam wasn’t telling me much—just timing and a dollar amount, which while considerable wasn’t enough to pay my mortgage. On their own, my fingers typed my reply: I might be interested. Who’s the client?
I rarely asked, because most of the time that fell under need-to-know, and I didn’t. So long as the client paid Sam, and Sam paid me, we were all good. But this time—this time I felt like it was worth the question.
I went back to my regular work—tonight, that meant straightening out a worksheet the experts in accounting had completely trashed—and was a little surprised when Sam’s e-mail came so quickly. Then again, it was a short answer.
PD. Police Department.
My hackles went way up. The police didn’t part with their money willingly for resurrections. The testimony of the resurrected had been thrown out as inadmissible five years ago, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, and the land-office rush for witches to bring back the dead had dried up just as fast. Some of the richer cities still managed one or two resurrections a year for particularly cold cases, just to generate leads, but I hadn’t seen one in Austin for a while.
So if the Thin Blue Line was knocking, something was up, and it was big. Very big.
Why? I wrote back, and hit send.
It didn’t take long to get my answer. Four minutes, to be exact, give or take a few seconds, until my cheery little you have mail chime dinged.
They need a disposable, he wrote, and this time, I sat all the way back in my chair. And rolled my chair back from the computer. Tried to talk them out of it. Told them you wouldn’t want in. You can pass on it, H.
In technical terms, a disposable is a long-term resurrection—counterintuitive, but that’s police parlance for you. Most resurrections last no more than a few minutes, maybe an hour—you really don’t need that much time to do whatever needs to be done. It’s mainly finding out the name of their killer, or where they stashed the family silver, or where the bodies are buried if your deceased soul is the one who buried them in the first place. Holding them longer is brutally hard, and gets harder the longer it goes on. When a police department requests a long-term resurrection, it’s almost always specific—there’s a situation that requires a particular person to resolve, or a particular skill. When the cops ask for a disposable resurrection, well, you know it’s going to be bad.
I knew it better than anyone.
I typed my reply back in words as terse as Sam’s had been to me. Bet your ass I’m passing.
I hit SEND, feeling only a little wistful twinge of regret at all that virtual money disappearing from my future, and began to shut my computer down.
I’d just picked up my purse when my cell phone rang, and I wasn’t too surprised
when the screen’s display told me it was Sam.
“Hey,” I said, shouldered my bag, and headed for the elevators. “Don’t try to talk me out of it. I don’t do disposables. Not anymore.”
“I know that,” Sam said. He had a deep, smoky voice, the kind that implied a cigarette-and-whiskey lifestyle. I didn’t know that for sure; for all I knew, Sam might have lived prim as a preacher. Sam and I didn’t exactly hang out; he kept himself to himself, mostly. “Not trying to talk you out of it, H, believe me. I’m glad you turned it down.”
“Shut up,” said a third voice, male, grim, and completely unfamiliar.
“Who the hell is that?” I blurted. “Sam—”
“Detective Daniel Prieto.”
“Sam, you conferenced me?” He’d never put me on the spot before.
“Hey, they’re the cops. I got no choice!”
“Hear me out.” Prieto’s voice rode right over Sam’s. “I’m told you’re the best there is, and I need the best. Besides, you have a prior relationship with the—subject.”
My mouth dried up, and I stopped in midstride to lean against the wall. A few coworkers passed me and gave me curious looks; I couldn’t imagine what was on my face, but it must have been both alarming and offputting. Nobody stopped. I tried to speak, but nothing was coming out of my mouth.
“Holly? You there?” That was Sam. I could still hear Prieto breathing.
“Yeah,” I finally managed to say. “Who?” Not that there was really much of a question. I had a relationship with only one dead man. He was the only disposable I’d ever brought back.
And Prieto, right on cue, said, “Andrew Toland.”
I felt hot and sick, and I needed to sit down. Never a chair around when you need one. I continued walking, slowly, one shoulder gliding against the wall for balance. “Sam, you can’t agree to this. You can’t let them do it again. Not to him.”
“What can I say? I’m just the dispatcher, H. You don’t want to take it on, that’s just fine.” The words sounded apologetic, but Sam didn’t do empathy. None of us did. It didn’t serve us well, in this line of work.