2 Death Rejoices (38 page)

“And if he's right?” he asked. “If Harry is damned, would you turn to dark magic?”

I shook my head. “What the hell do you care, anyway?”

One hand rubbed at his mouth, eyes troubled. “Don't want to see you go off the deep end, if it's not too late all ready.”

I offered him a shrug to acknowledge the temptation. I thought of Ruby's grimoire, throbbing away like a sentient force in my herb cabinet. I wanted to stay on the right hand path. It would be easier to accomplish things if I didn't have to worry about consequences, but the cost… I saw worry replace impatience on Batten's face.

“Sometimes,” he said quietly, “you're not an easy woman to care for.”

It stung because I suspected it was true. “Only sometimes?”

“Maybe you should let someone be nice to you once in a while.” He advanced, encroaching on my space. I heard Chapel's warning in my head, noted the softening around Batten's eyes, and cleared my throat unhappily.

“And maybe you should just send my idiotic assistant back in so I can get to work. For someone so pressed for time, you sure waste a lot of it.”

He watched me kneel down and pretend to examine the body, and if he felt dismissed then I wasn't entirely proud of it, but the time had come for him to go. If he didn't leave now, I was going to say things that would either confuse every issue we ever had, or hurt him, not because I wanted to hurt him, but because I didn't want him chipping away at my defenses or witnessing my weak moments. I didn't want him coming to my rescue. I didn't want to need him.

“That all, Dr. Baranuik?” Batten asked.

“No, Agent Batten,” I said as calmly as I could. “Please get me some coffee before I lose my shit. It looks like Golden's off that particular hook. Unless the ambulance guys bring some, in which case, I'll take mine with a side of hot paramedic.”

He stood there for a moment, fuming, before opening the shed door. He sent over his shoulder, “Get your own fucking coffee,” as the crunch of his boots on gravel faded.

Declan returned to the shed with a cool wet paper towel, which I rejected.

“I'm fine. Let's just figure this damn thing out.”

“I only brought it so you could wipe the dust off your face.” His frown scolded. “The mighty river of thy pride overflows its banks, your nibs.”

Whatever the fuck
that
meant. “Let's just finish up, please.” I heard Agent de Cabrera's distinctive throat-clear behind me, and backed up an inch for him to take final pictures. Declan made procedural notes in his iPad. “Make a list of the additional samples and cultures we'll need for the health department, and get it to Chapel.”

Declan sounded chagrined. “Look, I'm sorry. I was out of line back there—”

“If I thought you knew what you were talking about, it might matter. Just get back to work.” I pointed at the webbing. “At least Mr. Kelly isn't moving. Maybe the CDC was wrong. Get samples of that heavy clump there, check for…”

My cell phone chirped in my pocket.

It was from Chapel.
The arm is moving.

C
HAPTER
29

“THAT'S SOMETHING YOU DON'T SEE
every day,” de Cabrera offered.

Declan wiped sweat off his brow with the back of his hand. His curls clung around his ears tightly now; under the frost-white glare of the floodlights, his true-black hair offered hints of blue. Beside him, standing in a very Batten-esque stance, legs spread slightly and arms crossed over his chest, de Cabrera watched me inspect the moving arm with a hands-off approach.

“Do either of you know what the fuck is going on?” he asked.

Everyone was in a tight circle around the writhing arm; despite my orders to stay the hell back, I had bodies pressing into my comfort zone, casting shadows. The flesh on the limb was badly decomposed, and from where I crouched, I could see that the humerus was discolored but cleanly disarticulated, as if it had just popped out of its joint, leaving the cushioning cartilage elsewhere.

I used my neoprene-gloved hand to point at the desiccated muscle fibers that were all that remained of the rotator cuff. “Left arm, male. This wasn't torn or broken off.”

“What other option is there?” de Cabrera asked, but his tone said he already knew.

I voiced it for him. “It fell off because the tendons and ligaments were too rotten to hold it on after the muscle was damaged. Note the discoloration on the remaining lymph node, there.”

Declan handed de Cabrera the camera and approached in a crouch-walk, keeping down so that de Cabrera could take pictures over his head. “Greenish-black,” Declan said. “Not furry like the ones on Roger Kelly. Pustules.”

“Buboes,” I corrected.

“As in bubonic plague? Black Death?” Chapel asked from directly over my head.

“You're talking about
Yersinia pestis
.
Yersinia sarcophaginae
also causes buboes, these are more greenish than black.”

Declan jumped ahead. “
Yersinia sarcophaginae
means this body was likely raised from the grave. Judging by the state of decomposition and the slowed rate of putrefaction as calculated by the Revenant Coefficient—”

“Whoa,” Batten said sternly. “Slow down for those of us who don't have an UnBio degree.”

Declan ignored him. His gaze was holding steady on mine. “The body this arm came from was raised on purpose, Dr. B. Whomever this arm belongs to, he was up and walking around, undead, with flesh-eater plague for a week before creeping plague set in and he became infectious.”

I nodded unhappily.

He continued, “It's probable that this arm belongs to the guy who disemboweled Cosmo Winkle, leaving behind in the abdominal cavity traces of both types of plague, as the CDC saw in the lab report.”

“Then it's possible …” I mused, but stopped. My belly was a cold fist of dread.

“Cosmo Winkle's body wasn't stolen,” Declan made the leap. “It got up and walked out of the morgue by itself. And Roger Kelly could rise any second.”

“Don't jump to conclusions,” I shot over my shoulder at Chapel as he turned away to start talking rapidly into his Blackberry, probably to Assistant Director Johnston. “And don't say the Z-word, whatever you do. Not yet.”

Declan did a rapid nod of agreement; though accurate, the Z-word wasn't going to come out of his mouth, either.

Batten let out a long unhappy noise and dialed his phone. When someone answered, he muttered, “Dr. Varney, how far out is your team? Our situation has some bad news.”

“What the hell?” I hissed. “You called Paul Varney? What'd you do that for?”

Batten put a hand over his phone. “You said he was the expert.”

“We've got the state health department.”

“Who fucked up once already. CDC is on their way.”

Dammit. Paul Varney. That's all I needed. Another prick for my thorny garden.

“We'd better find Cosmo Winkle's corpse,” Declan said excitedly. “Where would it go? Why didn't it stay at the hospital? Plenty to eat, there.”

Good question, but blerg
. “First things first. Get forensics over here to take nail scrapings, then bag this arm. If we're right, and this arm belongs to the thing that killed Roger Kelly, that gunk under his fingernails will be Kelly's flesh. We should bag Kelly's head, hands and feet, then put restraints on the body just in case.”

“If this thing is what you're suggesting,” de Cabrera said carefully, also ducking the Z-word. “How are restraints going to do anything? Don't they have superhuman strength?”

“The restraints are just there to buy us time to react,” I said. “But you're right; they'll only hold seconds, long enough for us to jump back.”

Declan suggested, “Shouldn't you Grope the arm before they take it away?”

I looked at him like he was crazy. “Uh, it's oozy. It's festering. It's plague-ridden and fuzzy with blight. Also, it's fucking squirming.”

He jerked his chin at the flexing fingers, which opened and closed the greasy palm under the harsh white floodlights. It was smeared with something that looked like congealed Minestrone soup. “Poke his ring.”

I stared at that left arm for a long moment, while dread pooled through my innards. A married man. A dead married man.
Please don't be who I think it is.

“What is it?” Batten said, putting his hand over his phone. “Baranuik, what's the problem?”

“Permission to Grope that ring, Agent Batten?”

“It's too filthy to get prints. If you think it'll help, go for it.”

I suggested to him, “Might want to put a K9 search team and cadaver dogs on the surrounding woods here, and see if we can't track down the owner of this arm.”

He put his phone away. “State health department called for a quarantine of Shaw's Fist. No one in. No one out without sweep and/or clearance.”

“This day is going to be a lot longer than I thought,” I told him, scrunching my forehead. A trickle of sweat rolled into my eye and I blinked the salt away. “Tell me
someone
got a line on some coffee.”

“I'll make a call,” Batten promised. “Do what you gotta do.”

I sat back on my haunches and watched Declan fish in his doctor's bag to bring out the vial of moths. When he shook it at me, the dried wings were like little fern-green feathers rustling against the glass as if alive and fluttering to get out.

“Moth-in-chains?” he suggested.

“What do I need to do?”

“You just do what you always do,” he told me, worrying at his gold necklace through his shirt, “and leave the amplification to me, all right?”

“You're sure this is okay?” I asked, wondering what Harry would say.

“I'm not worried about it.”

“Brave,” I noted sourly.

“I've always prided myself on a certain amount of courage.”

“You know what brave gets you, right?” I eyeballed him across the fallen arm. “Dead. Brave gets you all sorts of dead. Look at that guy.” I jerked my chin in the general direction of Roger Kelly's body inside the shed. “White water rafting with guys half his age, partying all hours at wild, furpile orgies at strangers’ rented cabins in the wilderness. Now he's all sorts of dead.”

“You know, your pessimism stunts the natural streak of bravery I see in you.”

“It's not pessimism, it's realism. You recognize reality, don't you, Irish? Reality is that fat black leech on the rotten arm, there, sucking away but getting nothing. And if realism makes me cowardly, that's all right, because it also keeps me alive. Now get real with me, Declan. Is this spell truly okay to do?”

“What if it's not?”

“If you taint me with it and Harry finds out, I suggest you change your name to John Smith and move somewhere safer, like Antarctica. Maybe the moon.”

Declan cranked the vial's stopper off and shook the dried moths into his hand, closing his eyes. “I wouldn't dream of passing my risk
to you, Dr. B. Whenever you're ready, you go ahead. It would help to imagine the Blue Sense opening not in the front of your forehead, at the third eye, as usual, but drawing up from the Earth into your core.”

“By ‘core’ you better mean ‘abdomen’, buster,” I warned him.

I'd seen the moth-in-chains spell sketched out once, in Ruby Valli's grimoire, during a random peek before I'd shut myself of it. It was a spell meant to capture the moth's last encounter for the witch to extract at a later date, or to amplify psychic impressions on the past. Used for “remembrances” and “alchemicals”, the drawing of the spell in the grimoire made me think two things: a) a trained moth on a window ledge eavesdropping would be seriously cool, and b) if Ruby Valli had stuck to sketching and not sketchy magic, she might be alive today, enjoying a successful art career. She was an Audubon-class sketcher. Of course, she was also evil, which is why I didn't mind so much that she was dead.

So did Declan Edgar have spy-moths, here? Or had they simply touched upon something he needed? I could hear him speaking softly under his breath, a whispering sound like the wings on glass. I decided to trust him, and, poking the ring with one fingertip, closed my eyes.

When I opened them, everything was blurry. Visions and voices were overlapping, sand over water, trees, movement, shadow, the night sky, pale waving arms moving through the air, voices both panicked and calm and demanding, messing around inside my ears. I was pretty sure not all of them were real voices, that some were memories and empathic remnants. I felt a rush of excitement, of triumph, and Anne no, not Anne, but Dallas,
her name is Dallas
, and Cosmo, and Roger, begging
please, don't go Annie
, and a young woman's high, tipsy laughter, mocking, taunting, sexually free and wild. Cosmo calling her down to look at the “wicked dark spot” he saw in the lake, and then her laughter overlapping again with Roger's begging,
please Annie, don't go see him tonight. It's sick, it's just sick
. See who? And Anne, no, Dallas, no, Anne, brightly, her playful call lilting above the water, then splashing, her voice clear like bells over the plunk of rocks tossed in the lake, bragging,
he wants me, he promised me
, and Cosmo shouting
holy fuck, dude, you're so wrecked!

“Dr. B.?” Declan's voice, and I knew it was real, like seeing something move stealthily through fog and knowing it's just a dog and
not the rabid wolf of your nightmare. “Tell us what you're seeing Marnie.”

“Everything. A jumble. Voices. I can hear them. I actually hear them. I've never heard during a vision before.”

“Hear who?” Declan asked patiently.

The scuffle of boots on stone to my left. I knew it was Batten by the impatient crunch; somehow he made footsteps sound jerk-like. He remained quiet, letting Declan interact with and annoy me.

Deep within my psychometric vision, the owner of the ring was moving forward on a mission toward the voices, fixated on the woman. Through the ring, I could feel the water as a thigh-high push of cool eddies, the pain in his disintegrating feet, his rotting knees that no longer worked well, bone grinding in the joints. There was so much pain, not felt in a personal way; a distant agony, dissociated, disconnected. More important was the terrible intensity of his hunger. But under that, a hint of something else: his wife.
His wife
. Whose wife? He didn't miss her, he didn't love her, not now. He was beyond such abstractions. Now he only had one feeling, one speed, one thought: eat wife.