Precinct 13 (24 page)

The funeral home was actually one of the nicer ones I’d seen. It was an old house, a stately Victorian, painted white as though to match the church. It had a turret and a large portico over a driveway, probably originally used for receiving carriages. The name on the front read: M
ILLER
. What
really caught my attention, however, was the hearse parked there, as if ready to receive a coffin in a few hours.

Though it was true that on an average day, worldwide, 10.8 people died per second, that number reduced radically the smaller the population pool. I could imagine that one to two people might die every day here, depending on the median age of Pierre. Still, what were the odds that someone other than our zombie was having a funeral today?

Could this be the funeral home that the zombie had come from? The easiest way to find out was to go online. At least my phone managed to pull up the
Capitol Times
. I checked the obituaries. Many of the online entries were frustratingly sparse—no pictures and only the barest information about when memorials would be held. Only a couple mentioned visitations at funeral homes and none listed for today or last night at Miller’s.

This was probably a dead end. Still, the presence of the hearse kept niggling at me.

I should check it out.

I tried Jones, but got voice mail again. I left him a message telling him that I was following a hunch at the Miller Funeral Home. Just as a precaution I read the cross-street signs and reminded him that I was utterly and hopelessly lost.

And on my own.

Standing by the church sign, I wavered in my resolve about going in alone. I had just decided it was too risky when a young woman came out the front door of the funeral home. Blond and petite, she had a broom in her hand. She had on a thick wool sweater and jeans, a knit scarf wound around her neck, and matching thin gloves on her hands. She began sweeping the floor of the open-air porch. When
she noticed me, she gave a little wave of hello. “Beautiful weather, isn’t it?”

“Yes, very,” I said, feeling emboldened to cross the street and walk up the front steps to join her on the porch. “Are you expecting business today?” I gestured at the hearse with my thumb.

Her smile faltered. It took me a second to realize that she must have noticed the snake on the back of my hand. Her hands gripped the broom handle tighter. I anticipated the sudden swing, but not the muttered Italian or Latin that came with it. I was similarly unprepared for the explosion of light before everything went dark.

I woke up in the dark. At first, I thought that I’d been dreaming. After all, it was warm and sort of comfortable with the silk pillow under my head and velvet all around. When I tried to roll over to go back to sleep, however, I couldn’t. The space was too small to do it easily.

I was in a coffin.

I could only pray that I wasn’t already buried.

I felt my pockets frantically. My phone was still there. I pulled it out. The light of the display showed the white cloth of a much-too-close ceiling. I closed my eyes when I felt myself hyperventilating. Panicking was the worst thing I could do. I touch-dialed Valentine’s number from memory. The silence of the lack of signal was loud in the confined space. Even though I hadn’t been able to get through, I put the phone back carefully. I would try again if everything else failed.

Pulling my elbows in, I awkwardly tried to push the lid off. I couldn’t get enough leverage. I began to inch myself over onto my stomach, with the thought that if I could get my back into it, I might have enough strength.

I was almost in position when I heard a female voice with a trace of a Southern accent. Given the steel and padding between us, it was surprisingly clear. “You’re a cooler customer than most. By now, people are usually screaming their fool heads off.”

Wasting oxygen,
I thought. But, at least it seemed as though I was still in the funeral home. That could be either good or really bad news—depending on whether or not they were also a crematorium.

“You smell like a witch,” she continued. I could imagine her bent over the coffin, her ear pressed close to hear any answer I might give. Though, she could just as easily be using magic to throw her voice from somewhere far away. For all I knew, she’d gone back to sweeping the porch. “But I haven’t seen hide nor hair of a familiar. Yet you’re strong enough to steal my brother’s protection talisman.”

So that was what the snake was? That explained why it had acted the way it had in the apartment when the spiders had attacked.

“Stupid boy,” she muttered to herself. “He’s messed everything up.”

I arched my back experimentally. It would be hard to get my knees under myself, but I had to give it a try. From what I remembered from a PBS special on the subject, I had only about two hours or so of usable oxygen.

“Still, the snake charm should have easily defeated most witches,” she continued. “Unless, of course, you’re one of
those unfortunate unnaturals who are fettered by that disgusting half-fairy.”

Despite myself, my breath hitched at the mention of unnatural.

“Oh?” She sounded both delighted and curious. “Perhaps we won’t have to waste your talents, after all.”

That sounded promising. Maybe I could just agree to go to the Dark Side long enough to get released from this coffin. I’d gotten my knees up as far as they could go in the cramped space.

“You know, of course, everything they told you is a lie,” she purred. “Unnatural does not necessarily equal evil.”

Coming from a woman who clearly had a skewed sense of right and wrong, this would be ironic, if I hadn’t already heard this from Jack. Still, I played along. I put a mix of skepticism and surprise into my voice. “Really?”

“Careful,” she hissed. “Don’t waste your breath. Just listen.”

I could get behind that. Speaking of, mine was ready to try a big heave-ho. I waited, not wanting to squander my one chance with bad timing. If she was going to release the casket’s seals for me, I could surprise her with a big push, maybe even knock her back a step or two.

“Good,” she said to my silence—or my plan, but she didn’t seem particularly adept at reading minds. “The other thing they lied about was that the power source treats us equally. Think about it. They’re so fond of the river metaphor, let me use it as well. Tell me, which generates more power: an inner tube floating with the current or a dam that forces water to spin its turbines?”

“B” was the obvious choice. However, there was a flaw in her analogy. While floating created no energy, it also used none.

“Have you ever noticed when they have to do something big, they start talking about actions and reactions?”

I did remember Jack worrying about “devilry” he may have unleashed after trying to pull the snake from my arm.

“It’s because they can only do so much before they have to start tapping the unnatural. The polarity shift causes a ripple.”

I’d felt that. Jack had called it a shift, I think.

“They’re so high and mighty, yet they use the same energy in the same way we do.” I could hear the hurt in her voice. It reminded me of Devon’s anger, and, if I was honest, my own.

Even though it meant using a bit of oxygen, I had to ask, “Your solution for bigotry is reanimating corpses?”

She laughed; it was a light, genuine sound. “No, that was my stupid brother’s idea. He was obsessed with breaking the fourth wall, thought it would give him unlimited power. Just got him dead, didn’t it?”

I would have agreed if I had any idea what she was talking about. My muscles were starting to cramp up, and I felt a little light-headed from claustrophobia. I was ready to break when my phone rang. Because of the odd way I was wedged, I almost couldn’t pry it from my pocket in time to pick up. As it was, I answered on the last ring. “Hello?”

“If you called to have me take out more garbage I will grow very tired of you.”

Valentine!

“A phone?” I heard my captor shriek. “No!”

Before I could begin to explain the situation to Val, I heard the hiss of the seals being broken. With all my strength, I pushed my back against the lid of the coffin. It popped upward. As soon as I could see a sliver of the outside,
I tipped to the side and let gravity pull the heavy steel to the floor.

I heard a shriek, but I had no idea if I managed to knock down my captor or not. The sudden influx of air to my lungs and light to my eyes completely disoriented me. My arms and legs shivered with exertion.

Tinny and distant, Valentine’s voice from the iPhone speaker asked, “What’s going on?”

“It’s okay,” I panted. “I’m okay.”

“Not for long,” the necromancer’s sister snarled.

This time, I moved fast. I didn’t know if you could actually dodge magic, but I was sure as hell going to try. As blind and clumsy as I was, the best I could do was bail out. I tumbled onto the floor, arms and legs thrashing. My graceless exit from the coffin sent a number of other display models rolling. One of the carts must have hit a wall of urns, sending ceramic explosively crashing to the floor.

Despite the chaos, I didn’t manage to do much to stop the necromancer’s sister. When I finally blinked the tears from my eyes, I discovered her standing over me. Her face was flushed red with anger, and her long hair was disheveled. She muttered in Latin and her hands massaged the air as if kneading invisible bread.

I had a feeling I was about to get a serious magical smackdown.

Closing my eyes, I cringed, waiting for the inevitable. “Ah, fuck all,” I muttered.

A clap of thunder forced my eyes open. A burst of light blasted the necromancer’s sister off her feet. She was thrown backward, and tumbled up and over a mortuary table. I heard a crash as she knocked into a medical cart. Steel instruments rained down on top of her.

When she didn’t get up right away, I struggled to my feet. I glanced around to see who it was who had come to my rescue.

There was no one.

Picking my way around the broken shards of urns and tipped coffins, I found the necromancer’s sister pinioned to the floor by surgical instruments. Scalpels and scissors had landed precisely along the edges of her sweater and jeans. A roll of medical tape unraveled over her mouth.

She glared angrily at me and struggled against the makeshift bonds.

“Weird,” I said. Glancing over my shoulder, I still expected some accomplished wizard to step out of the shadows to take credit for this.

Another blast of wind, icy this time, came from the stairway. I pivoted, ready for some new danger. The shadow on the wall showed batlike wings that, before my eyes, folded into the figure of a man. Valentine glanced carefully around the room, his cell phone still close to his ear.

“Oh my God, thank you,” I said, leaping over the detritus to envelop him in a big hug. “I thought I was dead.”

His arms went around me slowly, as though surprised by my gratitude. “You’re thanking me for arriving too late?”

I pulled my head from his chest to frown up at him. “No, for the rescue, the big magic bang—that was
you
, right?”

“I believe that was
you
,” he said dryly.

“Me? But all I did was—”

Curse.

Just like when I “stole” the necromancer’s snake protector. If this was how my power manifested, I was going to seriously have to watch my mouth from now on.

There was a commotion upstairs. I could hear pounding and voices shouting, “This is the police! Open up!”

Valentine gave me one of his self-satisfied grins. “Ah, I see the cavalry has arrived.”

Of course, Jones got all weird and confrontational when he saw Valentine, which meant Valentine got that smug expression on his face that I was beginning to interpret as “I could eat you all in a single bite.”

“The important thing,” I said in my loudest voice to get Jones’s attention, “is that we have the necromancer’s sister.”

“Brooklyn? What? Where?” Jones’s eyes frantically searched the room.

Jones knew her name?

I was about to comment on that, when Valentine pointed down to the floor. Jones followed his gesture, and his eyes went wide with—sympathy? Concern? Whatever it was, he quickly schooled his expression to coolly inspect the still intensely pissed off and struggling woman pinned to the floor. He knelt down and examined the various instruments holding her in place. “Spontaneous improbability magic?” He shot a surprised look at Valentine. “I didn’t think that was your species’ specialty.”

“It’s not,” Valentine said, with a proud glance in my direction. “It’s hers.”

“You?” Jones sounded incredulous as he gave me a measured inspection. “You did this?”

I shrugged. “I guess.”

Jones gestured to an officer with his chin. The officer must have known what Jones wanted because he came over and began unsticking the necromancer’s sister, while holding up some kind of talisman that he pulled out of his cop utility belt.

Standing up, Jones pulled me to the side. “Tell me what happened.”

Valentine shadowed us as Jones led us to a mostly undamaged section of the basement, next to the crematorium furnaces. I was horrified to discover they’d been turned on.

“Start at the beginning,” Jones prompted. “What brought you here?”

I explained how I’d gotten lost and everything up to the final “fuck all,” as it were. He listened intently, looking progressively more irritable. Valentine, meanwhile, couldn’t keep the smile off his face.

“You’re sure that’s all you did?” he asked. “No accidental gesture? No…Latin?”

“Unless cringing counts as a gesture, yes, I’m sure.”

Jones looked at Valentine and shook his head. “Well, we can clean up here. Why don’t you take some time off?”

I wasn’t sure that was a good idea. “Do you know her?” I asked Jones, gesturing with my chin in the direction of where they were still dealing with the necromancer’s sister. “Only I noticed you called her Brooklyn.”

“Oh, I did?”

That was the most unconvincing lie I had ever heard in my life. Jones couldn’t even keep his eyes from sliding away from mine.

“Yeah, you did.”