Dead of Night (Ghosts & Magic #1) (2 page)

I let Caroline hold him for a few more beats. In the end, it was the shoes that made up my mind. Shiny black shoes belonged to dealers and salesmen. In a past life I'd preferred sneakers; simple and functional. Now I wore matte black boots, because anything else stood out too much in the shadows. Shiny was ostentatious. Shiny drew attention. Shiny made you look like you were bragging. I resented people like that, because they thought they had something I didn't.

A future.

"I'll take the job," I said, holding out my hand.
 

"Forty-eight hours. Call the number. If you don't, a kill team will be on you, and they won't give a shit that you can raise the dead."

I glanced over at Caroline, who let go of Gucci's arm. He brushed his sleeve and reached out, wrapping his meaty fingers around my flesh coated bone.
 

"When you call, give them your number and your handle. Mr. Black can use-"

His eyes widened, and he looked down at his hand, still in my wasted grip. He could feel it now. The death of my flesh, the poison that I carried. I had been sentenced a long time ago, and it had made me what I was today. I had learned to fight, and to cheat, and to survive.
 

I couldn't kill with a touch.
 

I needed to keep contact.

He tried to pull his hand away, but my grip was a vice. I'd always had strong, nimble hands. Doctor's hands. He tried to call on his own power, if he really had any, and was silenced when Caroline shoved her fist into his mouth and held fast. He could gnaw her fingers off, she wouldn't notice, and the voice was how the energy was released. He tried to kick and flail, so she used her other arm to brace him, her deadness not understanding the limits of living muscle.
 

"I prefer to keep my anonymity," I said, trying to explain to him why he needed to die. "Those shoes tell me you talk too much."

He couldn't do anything else, so he began to scream, the sound dampened by the hand in his mouth. We watched the necrosis travel up his arm, turning it a sick shade of green. Blood started to run from his nose, and he began to convulse and gasp.
 

It wasn't a pretty thing, death. It didn't spare your dignity, or your feelings. It just took you; sometimes by surprise, and sometimes with plenty of warning. If you were lucky, you had time to prepare yourself, to prepare your family and your loved ones, or in my case to spare them from the ugliness. If you were unlucky, like Gucci, you just dropped. Then again, maybe it was the other way around. Maybe he was the lucky one.

Either way, maybe the world would hear about your passing, and maybe someone would care.

Or... maybe not.

CHAPTER TWO

Sweet Caroline.

I dropped the body to the floor and then turned to Caroline, pointing at the watch hanging from her pale wrist. "Ten seconds. You almost got me killed."
 

Double lightning was a stroke of luck. Not all of the rolls were as effective or immediate.
 

"Mmmfffrrpfff." Without her jaw, she wasn't going to be saying anything intelligible.

"It's just so typical, Caroline. I should have expected you'd come in too soon. You always want to be the center of attention."

"Mmmmrrrrpppffff."

"Just stop trying." I walked over to the two brutes, bent down and picked up the dice. They were still warm. I blew on them once and put them back in my pocket. "Help me roll them over."

She shambled up to Rodge and bent over, grabbing his arm and lifting. As he rose from the floor, I could see the plastic card laying in a pool of his filth.
 

"Put him over there." I waved towards the window, and she complied, but not without a grunt of opinion. "Just put him over there."

I tried to take a deep breath and wound up coughing. I could feel the disease churning in my stomach, the malady that was going to take my life one of these days. That was the ultimate downside to being a necromancer, and the reason there were so few of us.
 

To wield the power of death, you had to be dying yourself.

Rodge's body thumped back to the floor.
 

"Get the card, and wipe it off."

"Mmmrrrrffff."

"Just get the card."

She came back over and picked it up, holding it gingerly between her thumb and index finger, like any of the bodily fluid clinging to it could hurt her. She brought it over to the other brute, wiped it clean on the back of his jeans, and then handed it to me.

"Thank you." I shook my head and rolled my eyes. She smacked me on the shoulder and grumbled her complaint. "Noted, and ignored." I put the card in my pocket with the dice.

It was a bit of good fortune that the glasses hadn't gotten crushed in the fight. I found them laying a few feet to Tim's right, waiting patiently on the carpet.
 

I held them out in front of me, remembering the first time I had owned a similar pair. They had been pretty new at the time, a marvel of technology that nobody really saw much of a need for, and only the truly bold had the guts to wear in public. Mine had been foisted on me by the medical director, who thought it would be a great idea for all of the surgeons to wear them in the operating room. Not only could we record the surgery, both for posterity and in the event of litigation, but we would have instant access to our charts, notes, and surgical plans. Never mind that you had to talk to it like it was a precocious two year old to get it to do what you wanted.

Seven years had passed, and the things had evolved the way all technology did, even though the market for them was still shaky. There wasn't as much interest in recording your life as the makers had assumed, probably because most people weren't billionaires who could do exciting things whenever they wanted to. For some of us, our lives were living hells that we'd never want anyone to have to suffer through.

Even so, the glasses were common enough for the Houses to parse their jobs on. They could preload any info the ghost might need and give them quick and easy access to schematics, dossiers, schedules, and whatever other intel they had gathered on the target. Even better, there was no more speaking involved. They could essentially read your mind.

"MMmmmrrrfffrrrmmm."

I looked at my watch. It was a classic Rolex, a heavy lump of metal with a mechanical movement and softly ticking hands. My mentor had given it to me the day I'd finished my residency. "You're right. Let me just take care of the body and we'll go."

It wouldn't do to leave Gucci laying there, his flesh rotting and covered in gangrene. It would be too obvious how he had died, and the last thing I wanted was obvious. It was a good thing I kept the right kind of equipment for this situation.
 

I reached into a pocket and pulled out a stainless steel flask. I uncapped it and took a whiff of the kerosene, and then spread it across Gucci's body. Once it was good and wet, and the flask was empty, I took out a match. It wouldn't do much more than burn off the clothes and toast the flesh, but it didn't need to. The odds were good that they'd believe a pyro had done the dirty work. Like the man had said, necros were rare.

"Mmmmrrrfffmmm."

"I'm coming."
 

I lit the match and tossed it onto the corpse, waiting a few seconds to make sure it caught. Satisfied, I followed her to the window. Gucci would have had a monitor implanted near his heart that would tell someone in Mr. Black's chain the moment he ceased to be alive. While I wasn't too concerned that they would know I was the one who ended him, I was concerned about that information being discovered so soon. It was better to do the job and call it in, and let them learn about me that way. If the job was important enough, and for two million up front it sure seemed like it was, this particular sin would be forgiven.

We descended the fire escape that Caroline had been waiting on for the last sixteen hours, out of view of the window. The dead were perfect for stakeouts, or for anything that required waiting extreme amounts of time without a twitch. That's why it twisted me that she couldn't wait an extra ten seconds. That's why I knew it had to be intentional. Even so, it was going to be a shame to have to retire her before I went home. She had been a good night's digging, a fortunate gem in a pile of trash. Too many people didn't die pretty, and were too damaged to work with, their bodies desecrated in any number of ways. I'd needed someone who could walk out into a crowd, and in the end I had come to enjoy her company.

That was the thing about animating the dead. They weren't like zombies in the movies, or the people who got cursed with the Rot. They weren't mindless bodies following some programmed command to eat brains. When you brought a corpse back to life, you were pulling their soul from wherever it was souls went and forcing it to re-inhabit the flesh, no matter what condition that flesh was in. You were putting the person back in there, albeit with a reduced ability to express their own free will. Reduced, not gone, and it was the strength of the summoner's will, and the will of the soul, that determined how much control you actually had. Caroline was a stubborn one, and while my will was strong enough to get her to do what I wanted, it wasn't strong enough to keep her from bitching about it.

Anyway, she looked like any other corpse now. Bodies like that were a dime a dozen, and despite my attachment she was too unreliable to be worth keeping around. She'd need to be replaced at some point.
 

Not tonight. I was too tired tonight.

We reached the alley, and I told her to wait while I walked across the street to the public lot where I had left my van. It was a large, white delivery van, an old thing with rust eaten corners and 'Flowers by Jack' in large, faded blue script along the sides. It got me where I needed to be and had plenty of room in the back for a couple of big coolers.
 

That was the other thing about the dead. Bringing them back didn't change the chemistry of a rotting corpse. If the day had been warm and sunny, Gucci would have smelled Caroline long before she had gone through the window.

I hopped in the van and closed the door, pausing once to cough my lungs up before I started it up and drove over to the alley. I checked the mirrors a few times for onlookers before backing it in, climbing to the rear, and opening the receiving end.

"Come on." I extended my hand, and Caroline took it, her flesh cold in my grip. I pulled her up, and then leaned out to swing the doors closed behind her.

"MMmmmffffff."

She had lifted the lid of one of the coolers, and was standing at the edge.

"Not tonight, Caroline," I said. "If you had come in on time, maybe you wouldn't have gotten your jaw blown off."
 

Or maybe that was the point. I didn't know if the souls I called back
liked
being back. They didn't seem to be capable of answering that question. Sometimes I wondered if it just depended on where their soul was otherwise. Other times, I just wondered where otherwise was. The only thing I knew for sure about the beyond is that when whatever lived in the dice claimed its prize, there was nothing I could do to get a refund.

That was one of the things that drove me to stay alive. Fear, the great motivator. I knew some of the secrets of death. It didn't make it easier to accept. It made it harder. I didn't want to be ping-ponged back and forth between otherwise and my wretched corpse, or eaten by whatever evil thing had been spelled into the bone dice. I didn't want to think that there was no final resting place, no comfortable end to existence. Yes, I was aware of my hypocrisy, but knowledge and fear had moved me from Jeckyll to Hyde.

Caroline tried to sit shotgun, and I had to urge her out of sight. I could only imagine how the police would react to seeing a woman with half a face. I was playing with corpses. I had no desire to show off that skill set. She settled for the floor right behind my seat, her stream of satisfied mumbles doing their best to reach through my deadened heart and make me feel guilty for both keeping her around, and for planning to bury her again.

I coughed long and hard enough to leave myself gasping. Touching Gucci had been a risky proposition all the way around, and now I would need another hit of meds much sooner than I had noted in my calendar. It was going to cost me half the haul from Grey's payment.

 
I rolled the van out of the alley at the same time I leaned over and opened the glove box, pulling out a thin sliver of clear substrate with a small bit of aluminum at the bottom. I slid my finger up along the surface, and it turned into an opaque screen.
 

"Call Danelle."

The phone began to ring, and I placed it on the dash and hit the speaker button. A moment later, she answered.

"How'd it go?"

"No pleasantries? No, 'how are you feeling', or 'hey, it's good to hear from you'?"

"Cut the shit. Did you finish the job?"

Danelle was my agent, my business partner. She handled the negotiations. She was also my alter ego, the person who the Houses thought they were hiring when they called in about getting an assassin or a thief.
 

She had been one, once upon a time. She had taught me everything I knew about this life, introducing me to this career back when I was nothing but a lost soul trying to escape the pain of what I had been forced to do, and making every effort to forget that I was dying.
 

Then a pyro had toasted her legs and left her in a wheelchair.

"Call it in," I said. "Two dead ogres, one dead fixer."

"The dice?"

I sighed. She had a strange fascination with the dice that she refused to let go of. "Happy. I can't say the same for myself. I had to touch the fixer."

A pause at the other end. "You need more meds?"

"Yes."

"Christ! By the time I cover everything else we'll be lucky to eat this week."

I let out a weak, fake laugh. "If it's any consolation, I don't eat that much. Especially after the meds."