by E. A. Copen
He eyed Emma and then Moses and Grammy in the back. “All right, but I’ll have to bring you to the morgue, which means taking you beyond this gate. Your friends will either have to wait here or surrender their weapons and consent to a search. I ain’t takin’ no chances.”
I twisted in the seat to look back at Moses and Grammy. They were the backup. If I walked into the heart of Ikelos’ territory, I didn’t want to do it without them.
Grammy elbowed Moses. “What’s he sayin’?”
Moses patted her hand and nodded to me.
“They’ll consent,” I promised the warden. “And I’ll need candles, chalk, and something sharp enough to draw blood.”
The warden nodded, stepped back, and gestured for us to step out of the car.
They lined us up like criminals along the side of the Escalade even after they collected our weapons. The pat down didn’t bother me as much, having gone through it a million times before, but it irked Emma to be treated as anything less than a cop on the up and up. She bit her tongue and let the officer do his job.
Grammy snickered.
“What’s so funny?” asked the warden.
“Child, this is the closest thing I’ve had to any action since the eighties!” She turned her head and smiled at the officer. “Whatcha doing tomorrow, good lookin’?”
“Assuming there is a tomorrow.” The search on me complete, I pushed away from the van and adjusted my jacket.
The hardened correctional officer cringed and backed away from Grammy without answering.
Satisfied, the warden had us pile into two golf carts and drove us through the compound under guard. Snipers walked along rooftops, watching. The sun shimmered, edging toward the horizon and dusk. Nothing else on the compound so much as twitched.
Kane, who’d taken the passenger seat in front, grabbed one of the golf cart supports and held tight. “If you’re able to do what you say you can, and I believe you, what is it you need?”
I nodded to the paper bag at his feet. “I’m going to need that back for one, and my friends will need their weapons back to protect my body while I do the magic part.”
“Which is?” He twisted around to give me a heavy look.
“You’re going to put me in an empty cell where Emma will handcuff me to a bunk. I’m going to take a little nap and make use of some new powers when I hopefully run into this thing. The dream catcher will keep it from feeding on me—I hope. But whatever I do, it’s going to piss it off. Things will get worse before they get better. It’ll probably take control of the inmates, and maybe the officers, too, this time.”
Warden Kane frowned. “The prison is on lockdown. The prisoners can’t get out of their cells.”
“They can if one of the officers is compromised,” Emma said.
Moses nodded. “Someone opened the door to that office and let those five guys in to beat us up. Only one who could’ve done it was another correctional officer. I’d wager that he’s gotten to at least a few by now.”
Kane turned around and shook his head. “Lord Almighty. I’ll just be glad when you lot go away and quit complicating my life.”
“Trust me, Warden, we’ll be glad for that too,” I said.
The golf cart stopped in front of the same building I’d been to on my first trip to the prison. This time, however, the building was empty. No staff, no prisoners, not even any officers. It was dark and dead inside as if the place had been abandoned. He would’ve pulled all the non-essential staff and sent them home during a lockdown. Any correctional officers not already assigned to a cell block would’ve either been put at a choke point or given a temporary cell block assignment. He ran a tight ship, Warden Kane. Better than the warden at my prison. He was a tough man, but fair. It made me like him, even if he was a hard-ass.
He and two correctional officers showed me to the morgue. Our group filed into the tiny, dark space, everyone but me crowding the walls. I walked to the middle of the room and eyed the cold storage on the wall, wondering which one my father’s body was in.
Kane flipped the light switch. Fluorescent lights inside wire cages buzzed to life above us. The warden walked over and opened a drawer, sliding it out just enough to check the toe tag. Once he’d verified the identity, he slid the slab all the way out.
My father’s body was covered by a white sheet that had gone stiff in the cold. A handwritten addition to the toe tag noted tomorrow’s date and my phone number. If I didn’t pick him up by then, they were probably just going to inter him on prison grounds. The warden had assumed I wasn’t coming for him.
I had put it off too long. Though I despised the man and the role he had played in my life, everyone deserved a burial.
Kane moved to lower the sheet.
“That’s not necessary,” I said, stepping up on the other side of the slab. “All I need is a circle and the ingredients I listed for you earlier.”
“And his body will sit up?” The warden gave me a skeptical glare and crossed his arms.
I sighed. “No. I’m going to raise his ghost. You won’t be able to see it at first, but once I touch him, you will. It’ll take a lot of concentration, so I’d appreciate it if you and the other officers didn’t panic when you saw it.”
His answer was a grunt and a nod to one of the officers. The officer stepped into the room and barred the door, leaving another officer on the other side. He opened a locked cabinet and retrieved the supplies I asked for, including one of those glucose stick pens diabetics used to check their blood sugar.
I laid out the circle, adjusting for the fact that the body was four feet in the air and not grounded in any way by extending it partway up the wall. There was no way to stick candles there, but I got them as close as I could before lighting them. The last ingredient I needed was my blood, and I got it by pricking my finger and squeezing until I had a good-sized drop to press to the edge of the circle. A wall of magic sprang up, sealing me inside with the body, and everyone else outside.
Sweat beaded on my forehead. I extended my hands over the body, blew out a breath and closed my eyes. “William Kerrigan, I summon forth your ghost. Come to me and commune in the land of the living.”
“I don’t see anything,” Warden Kane grunted.
“Patience,” Emma urged. “Let the man work.”
I repeated the command twice, infusing it with my will, but nothing happened.
I don’t want it enough, I realized, gritting my teeth. A spell would only work if there was enough desire to make it a reality. I didn’t want to see my father’s ghost again, and it was creating a mental bock I couldn’t get past. It was either work through that block or walk away and let Ikelos win. But how? I couldn’t forgive him and just pretend like all the abuse never happened.
“You have to forgive yourself,” Nate had said, and I knew what he meant. I needed to forgive myself for not living up to my father’s impossible standards. Nothing I could’ve done would’ve made him love me. That wasn’t how parental love worked. A child shouldn’t have to earn their parent’s love, no matter how rotten a kid they were. On a cognitive level, I understood it, but I didn’t believe it. There had to have been something I could’ve done to make things better.
There wasn’t. Nate was right. I had to be the better person. All this time I’d been saying I hated him, but I barely knew him. All I knew was the memory of a man consumed by hatred and anger, but at some point, he must’ve been someone else. He was complicated, my father, as all fathers were. But I had to let go of that hatred, to put it where it belonged. It was time to stop hating the man for what he’d done. He was dead, after all. There was nothing he could do to me now.
I bit my lip and pulled my fingers into a fist. I had to, but I didn’t want to. Holding onto all that hate and anger, blaming him for all the bad shit that’d happened to me was easier than letting it go. But since when was anything worth doing easy?
I pushed more will into the spell. “Come on, Dad. Talk to me.”
My father
’s ghost faded into existence over his body, arms crossed, his face drawn in a pouty sneer. “So it’s Dad now, is it?”
I lowered my hands. “I don’t want to fight with you. I need for the warden here to see you so that he’ll let me fight Ikelos.”
Dad’s eyes widened. “You know how to kill it?”
“Maybe,” I answered with a nod. “That is what you wanted me to do, isn’t it? Why you had me come all the way up here?”
He frowned. “You’d never have come when I was alive. I wasn’t even sure you’d come if I was dead.”
I almost hadn’t.
Warden Kane hooked his thumbs in his belt. “I’m waiting.”
I held my hand out to my father. “I need you to take my hand.”
He stared at it, frowning. “I wasn’t good to you. Wasn’t good to anybody. I made some bad decisions and you and your sister had to pay for ’em.”
“Then make the right decision now. Help me. All I need is your hand.”
He reached for my hand.
My fingers closed around his. He was like ice. The chill of the grave. Magic flowed out of me and into me, making his translucent body glow brighter.
Warden Kane’s eyes widened. He unfolded his arms and drew a hand over his face as if wiping something away. “Oh, Lord. He’s still there.”
My father beamed. “Hiya, Warden.”
Kane blinked. “Lazarus, you got yourself a free cell in whatever block you need it.”
Gunfire erupted in the hallway followed by a scream cut short. Something wet slammed against the door.
The officer in the morgue turned his gun on everyone gathered in the room, grinned like a madman, and opened fire.
Chapter Thirty
I let go of my father’s ghost, and my concentration on the spell faded along with my father.
Before anybody else could react, Warden Kane launched himself across the room, springing up as if he were a ballerina and not a man pushing three-fifty. The correctional officer’s bullets slammed into Kane’s gut with a rhythmic thump instead of hitting me and he hit the floor.
Grammy, who was closest to the armed officer near the door, grabbed him by the ear and yanked, sending the next couple of shots to the ceiling. He grimaced and swung at her but got only air. Moses pulled off his hat and flung it like a frisbee. The bill hit the officer in the bridge of the nose, not hard enough to do any damage, but enough to stun him momentarily while Emma rushed in to deliver a kick to his groin. He went down and she pried the gun away.
I knelt next to the warden who lay on his side, wheezing. I’d expected to find his white shirt soaked in blood, but there was nothing there.
He blinked away tears and rasped out, “God…damn…rubber bullets!”
He’d have some nice bruises, maybe a cracked rib or two, though I doubted it. Kane had plenty of padding. Bet it hurt like hell though. He wasn’t getting up to be useful anytime soon, but at least he’d live.
“Tie ’im up!” Grammy urged. Somehow, she’d gotten the officer’s gun passed to her while Emma was searching the unconscious officer.
“With what, Grammy?” Emma asked as she finished the search. “There’s nothing in here.”
Something hit the door and she jumped.
“Well, we’re not going out there.” I grabbed the paper bag from the floor near where the warden had been standing and stepped over him. “Ikelos knows we’re here and he’s about to throw everything he’s got at us. We do it here. One of you help me get onto this table.”
Emma stuck the taser she’d taken off the guard in her back pocket and brought the nightstick, which she handed off to Moses on the way. Moses took one look at the nightstick, frowned and tried to trade with Grammy. She swatted his hand away from the gun.
I slid onto the exam table in the middle of the room with a little help from Emma.
She looked over, under, and all around the table, frowning. “There’s nowhere to secure you.”
“Guess we’ll have to play with the handcuffs later.” I pulled out the dream catcher I’d made.
It was an ugly thing, in no way fit to sell in a gift shop. With the pacifier in the center, the crooked lines weaved in the webs, and the pathetic looking feathers hanging limp like tentacles on a dead squid, it looked like I’d pulled it out of a garbage heap rejected by other garbage heaps. Ugly or not, I could feel the magic humming in the thing.
I handed it to Emma.
She lifted it with a finger. “And where am I supposed to put this?”
I shrugged.
The pounding on the door increased both in ferocity and pace. There had to be more than one of them out there now.
She finally settled on just letting it hang from my foot, since there was nowhere else nearby to attach it without a ladder.
The last thing I needed was the plastic baggie full of sleeping sand at the bottom of the paper bag. I brought it out and studied it a moment. Even through the plastic, the sand was warm in my hand. It sparkled like gold, shifting unlike any sand I’d ever seen before, more like water than sand.
“How does it work?” Emma asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I assume I just put it in my eyes and then…fall asleep?”
“With that racket?” Moses cringed. “You’d need earplugs or something.”
“Or magic.” I waved the baggie of sand. “If it works.”
Emma tilted my face up and brushed her lips against mine. “Go kill this asshole, Lazarus. We’ll stop anything that comes through that door for as long as we can.”
The warden sat up with a grunt. “Nothing is coming through that door. It’s pure steel and bolted from the inside.”
Something struck the door so hard, the hinges rattled.
Emma held a tiny container of mace out to the warden. “You were saying?”
“Make sure nothing comes through that door,” I shouted to everyone. “And remember not to kill anyone if you don’t have to. These guys aren’t in their right mind. Ikelos is controlling them. Once he goes down, they should return to normal.”
Emma nodded and moved Grammy and Moses into defensive positions, all covering the door.
I opened the baggie and scooped out a handful of sand. Here goes nothing, I thought and tossed the sand in my eyes.
If you’ve ever had sand thrown in your face, you know that it not only stings like hell, but it temporarily blinds you. I blinked on instinct after some of it went in and winced at the gritty feeling under my eyelids. My eyes watered to get the sand out.
When I opened my eyes, the prison morgue was a hazy version of itself. Fluffy pink clouds layered over the floor like cotton candy. A rainbow fog rolled over everything blocking Emma, Grammy, Moses, and the warden from view. Behind it, a soft blue light danced and the dulcet tones of George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” played on an invisible stereo. I sat up and coughed as I choked on something. A tiny rainbow frog jumped out of my mouth and hopped off into the fog, croaking.
What the ever-loving fuck was in that sand?
The thumping at the door had stopped, so I swung my legs over the side of the metal slab and found soft ground underneath, not the concrete slab floor that was there in reality.
I’m asleep. That was fast. I scanned the fog, the light, and frowned at the song. I didn’t even like that song. Okay, so I didn’t like it that much. It’s just one of those songs everyone knows the lyrics to, right?
I rubbed my forehead. What the hell is wrong with me if I dream about this? If I was asleep though, then I was where I needed to be.
I turned back to the metal slab and found a white unicorn with a Jolly Roger tattooed on its ass. It stamped its feet, tossed its curly, snow-white mane, and snorted fire.
I frowned. “And what are you supposed to be? My Little Apocalypse Pony?”
He narrowed his blood-red eyes at me. “I’m the manifestation of your inner rage and childhood trauma. Now get on, bitch, and let’s go murder something.”
I stared at th
e unicorn, dumbfounded. Somewhere, a psychologist was having a laugh at my expense. But hey, if I got a fire-breathing murderous unicorn out of it, who was I to complain?
Though I didn’t know how to ride a horse, I apparently knew how in my dream and climbed right up into the saddle like I knew what I was doing. The unicorn took off, hooves clip-clopping through the fog. Something thumped against my leg and I looked down to see my bag of sand hanging from the saddle.
“Do you know where we’re going?” I asked the unicorn.
He snorted. “To stomp on small woodland critters, I hope.”
“What? No!”
“Maybe there’ll be some Smurfs.”
I tugged on the reins. “No! Bad unicorn! Smurfs are peaceful creatures. We need to find Ikelos and kill him.”
He stopped and flicked his tail. “What’s an Ikelos?”
“He’s a Titan. About this tall, bug wings, long proboscis it uses to feed on magic, makes a freaky buzzing sound and wants to kill everyone?”
“Oh. You mean that thing?” He gestured toward the sky with his snout.
I looked up. The sky was a hazy bloody red with thin, shadowy clouds drifting back and forth. Lightning flashed, illuminating an ominous figure just as I had described, except he was a hundred feet tall and had six arms. Each arm ended in a human-like hand wrapped around a sleeping man. His long, straw-like tongue stabbed into one of his victims’ chest and pumped the life out of him as if he were sucking up a milkshake.
Sheer, irrational terror coursed through me at the sight of Ikelos. I fought the urge to turn the unicorn around and flee to safety, knowing there was nowhere I could go that Ikelos wouldn’t see. I’d been expecting the seven-foot tall version, not a giant monster. How the hell was I going to kill this thing?
I swallowed my fear and doubt. “Yep. That’s him.”
My murder unicorn snorted a small stream of fire, scorching the candy-colored fog floating around us. “Finally, something worth my time and effort.” He took off at a gallop, leaving me scrambling to hold on.