Back From the Undead (19 page)

“Beats me. We should get Eisfanger to look at it.”

“Yeah.” I pull out my phone. “We’re gonna have to fill out a ton of paperwork with the local cops, anyway. I just hope none of them is in Zhang’s pocket.”

Charlie looks at me. “Or the Yakuza’s.”

“Or are just corrupt and greedy and willing to sell me to the highest bidder.”

Charlie keeps looking at me. I sigh and put the phone back in my pocket. “Let’s get the hell out of here before we hear sirens.”

“Works for me.”

Before I can stop him, Charlie leans down and grabs the idol.

“Don’t!” I blurt. “It could—”

Charlie snaps upright. He turns his head toward me, moving stiffly. “Must … kill … Bloodhound,” he rasps.

“Oh, hey, look at that. I still have one bullet left.”

He relaxes his posture and tosses the idol from one hand to the other. “Urge … passing,” he says. “Won’t … call … bluff.”

“Get in the car, zombie boy.”

He does, dropping the idol in the backseat. “That wasn’t even a real threat. I mean, it’s a weapon that I’m incapable of taking seriously.”

I get in beside him. “Hey, for a performance like that? You’re lucky I bothered to threaten you at all.”

“What? I was being menacing and mind-controlled.”

“You know how they say a bad actor is wooden? A tree could give
you
acting lessons.”

“You just don’t appreciate nuance.”

“A really
young
tree. A sapling.”

“You probably can’t even
spell
nuance.”

“Just drive, okay?”

*   *   *

“So,” Eisfanger says. He scratches the pale stubble of his crew cut and peers at the idol, now sitting on the hotel room table in front of him. “You just left? With a dead gangbanger and his car in the middle of the street?”

I shrug. “Nobody tried to stop us.”

“I wouldn’t, either, if you were carrying this.” Eisfanger opens his forensics kit on his bed and starts rummaging around. “Early Babylonian, I think. Not HPLC level, but probably linked to one of the minor deities of that period who were trying to siphon off followers by pretending to be more powerful than they actually were. Some of them would even pose as Elder Gods, though that usually ended badly for them. And any civilization in the immediate vicinity.”

“Wait,” I say. “You’re saying that the …
thing
this idol represents is only a
knockoff
?”

Charlie shakes his head. “What’s the cosmos coming to? You just can’t find an original Entity of Ancient Evil anymore.”

“Not at reasonable prices, anyhow … so how dangerous is this chunk of rock, Damon?”

“I’ll know after I run a few more tests. But at least it doesn’t seem to have any tracking wards on it.”

We leave Damon to his tests, going back to my room to reconsider our options. Charlie slumps into the room’s single chair and I flop down on the bed on my back. “Ugh. So where’s this leave us?”

Charlie tips his fedora back on his head. “I hate to say it, but I don’t think Hemo was behind that attack.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Too quick, for one thing. Mizagi would have had to report to whoever’s really in charge, they’d have to make a decision, then the order would have to go out. The Yakuza’s pretty anal about chain of command.”

“So it was just Zhang, making another play?”

I sit up and shrug. “Maybe not even Zhang, just a couple of ambitious lieutenants. Those two saw an opportunity and went for it. Zhang might not have survived his little chat with Stoker.”

“So we’ve got a Triad
and
the Yak after us now.”

“Looks like. Isn’t it nice to be popular?”

*   *   *

The dream is in black and white.

It used to be thought that the majority of dreams were in black and white. Then, in the 1960s, something interesting happened: color television arrived. And as it gained in popularity, the percentage of Technicolor dreams did, too. These days, only about 12 percent of people dream without color, and most of those people are over fifty-five. Black-and-white dreams are apparently largely a product of pop culture, a re-creation in the mind’s eye of what it’s seen on a screen, large or small.

In which case, I seem to be starring in a 1940s movie. One of those classic suspense and romance things, where the bad guys are always lurking in the shadows wearing trench coats and hats with the brim pulled way down low. In fact, that’s how it opens: I’m on a corner, looking nervously across the street at the silhouette of a man just like that, standing at the entrance to an alley. Smoke curls lazily up around his face as he draws on a cigarette, but I can’t make out his features.

I start to walk. It’s late at night, no one else is around, and danger is in the air. The sound of my heels clacks loudly off the brick walls of deserted buildings. I look over my shoulder, but the man is gone. A wisp of smoke hangs in the air like an afterthought.

I have to get to the rendezvous. Not just my life, but the lives of others hang in the balance. I know this, just as I know that there are evil …
beings
trying to stop me. Was that man in the alley one of them?

Maybe. They’re everywhere. There are so few of
us
left now.

There’s a rumble of thunder, and it begins to rain. Hollywood rain, the heavy kind that falls straight down. I look around for somewhere to find shelter—

Someone reaches out from a doorway, grabs me by the arm. Yanks me into the shadows.

I open my mouth to scream, but a hand clamps over my lips. He’s strong, inhumanly so, but I know he won’t kill me—no, there are worse things in store for me.

And then I find myself staring at a miracle. Into the two bluest eyes I’ve ever seen, so blue they’re like holes into a dimension of pure sky. His face is as monochromatic as everything else, but those eyes belong to another reality altogether.

“Ssssh,” he says. “Okay?”

I nod, as best I can. He takes his hand away and slips it around my waist.

“Oh, David,” I whisper. “I was so
scared
…”

“Let’s go. It’s not safe on the streets, not now…”

He pulls me through an open door and inside. Leads me up a rickety staircase and down a long hall to a room with fading flowered wallpaper, a folding cot, and a bedside table that holds a bottle of whiskey and a cracked glass.

He closes the door softly, never taking his eyes off me. His blond hair is slicked back, and he wears a long gray coat over an expensive double-breasted suit. He shrugs off the coat, tosses it aside. I’m happy to see him but terrified at what he’s going to say.

“Do … do you have them?” I ask.

Now he looks away. “I was only able to get four.”

“But—but there are five of us! We
need
five!”

“I know. But they’re starting to crack down—these were the last four I could obtain. The shaman who was supplying them has disappeared.”

“Was he arrested?”

“Maybe. Maybe he just took a powder because things are getting too hot. Give me some time. I’ll try to find another source.”

“Time. Sure.” I force a laugh. “Got plenty of that, don’t you? But us mere mortals aren’t so lucky.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“How am I supposed to talk when you just sentenced a member of my family to death? Hang a grin on my face, sing a happy little song?”

“I’ll find you another.” He sees my expression and adds, “Not another family. Another—”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I’m sorry. I truly am.”

“Thanks. That and a wooden nickel will get me twice what I got now: a big fat nothing with a bunch of zeros behind it.”

That’s not fair—or true—and I know it, but I’m angry and disappointed and scared to death about what I’m going to tell my folks, my kid sister, my big brother. I’m mad at the world, but the world has too many problems of its own to notice mine, and wouldn’t care if it did. So I lash out at the man who’s risking everything to help me, because he’s here and so am I and both of us are trapped.

And because, despite everything he’s done, he’s one of them.

“The war was hard on everyone,” he says. “I lost people, too. Good people. But it’s over. Things will be better now—”

He’s trying to get me to see the sunny side—which is a real side splitter, considering who he is—but his heart isn’t in it.

“Better, huh? For who? Sure, the Allies won, but Hitler gets the last laugh. If nobody finds a way to stop the damn plague his sorcerers let loose before Berlin fell, pretty soon there won’t
be
any human beings left to fight over. There’ll just be thropes and pires—one breeds like rabbits and the other doesn’t breed at all, not without humans to turn. Who do you think will come out on top then? In a few generations, your kind will be so badly outnumbered they’ll be able to round all of
you
up and stick you in camps—but nobody’ll come out again.”

He turns away so I can’t see his face. He doesn’t speak for a moment, and I wonder if I’ve gone too far. It’s true, every word of it, but pointing out what he already knows doesn’t solve anything.

I’m suddenly ashamed of myself. David doesn’t deserve my anger. This is an apocalypse for his race, too, just a slower one; and his immortality means he’ll very likely be around when it comes to a head.

He’s also gone to a great deal of trouble to obtain the charms that’ll protect my family from the plague—they’re almost impossible to create and nearly as difficult to get. The government has officially denied that any such charms even exist, and David refuses to tell me why.

But they work. Not a single human wearing one has gotten sick, while others around them collapse and sink into comas. They must use some kind of high-powered government sorcery, one the authorities want to keep under wraps; maybe even something they stole from a Nazi lab.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” I say. “I’m sorry. It’s just—”

“I know,” he says quietly. “Believe me, I know.”

I’ve had no choice but to trust David, with my life and with my family’s. I’ve set that trust against my anger, my fear, my sorrow, and my desperation, and when that wasn’t enough to do the job I added more. A lot more.

It’s my turn to grab his arm. I lift a hand behind his head and pull him down into a kiss. He’s a lot stronger than I am, but he doesn’t resist. He stopped resisting after the very first time, and I still don’t know why. He says he loves me, but there’s more regret than passion in his voice when he does. He’s battling his own long list of feelings, and I don’t know what he’s using as ammunition.

I guess when it comes down to it, the only ammo we have against the darkness is life itself. So what is a man who hasn’t been alive for hundreds of years supposed to do? What does he have to fight with?

Right now, he has me.

He pulls back from the kiss. “You don’t have to do this,” he says. “You never did. The charms are yours.”

I slap him. It should hurt my hand, but doesn’t. “Is
that
what you think I am?”

“No. Never.” He raises a hand to his cheek, though I haven’t left a mark. “It’s what
I
am that I can’t forgive…”

“Forget about forgiveness. Forget about everything, everything but me and you. Just for a little while…”

I kiss the corner of his mouth, tenderly. He doesn’t react. I brush my lips softly against his, more a caress than a kiss. His lips part, but I don’t give him time to protest. I lean in close, crushing my mouth to his, my body to his.

My coat slides off my shoulders and drops to the floor. I’m wearing a thin sheath dress underneath, and it joins the coat a second later. I’m already fumbling with his tie, pulling at his coat, neither of us willing to break the kiss. Somewhere, I hear a radio playing something slow and bluesy, a saxophone flirting with a bass while a piano dances in the background.

I finally pull back, breathing hard, to focus on unbuttoning his shirt. I don’t know, there’s just something about a man in a buttondown shirt … he watches me intently, letting me undress him, not saying a word. I have to kneel to pull off his socks and shoes.

I stay down there a while.

He stops me before I’m done—or before he is—and takes a step backward. He still isn’t breathing hard, but his eyes aren’t the only thing with some color now. I accept this in that way you do in dreams, but still find it fascinating; I wonder what else I can bring to vivid, colorful life.

I get to my feet slowly. I’ve kicked off my shoes, but I’m still wearing a camisole and underwear. He touches my breastbone with a single cool fingertip, then slides it to the right, to the camisole’s strap. It slips off my shoulder. His finger traces its way across my skin to the other side, the other strap. The camisole falls away.

His other hand rises. Another cool fingertip touches my skin, just above my navel. I close my eyes and concentrate on the feeling as they trace their way along my body, two dots of sensation traveling to their inevitable destinations.

Ah. And ah.

His fingers move in slow, gentle circles. When they stop, I open my eyes and look down. Sure enough, I see two firm little nubs sticking out, and they’re not just erect, they’re pink. I wonder if David can see this or if it’s just me … but before I can ask him he leans down and blocks my view of one of them.

Oh, my.

I arch my back and whimper. When he pulls away, his lips are pink. So is his tongue.

We find our way to the bed. He’s never bitten me, he hasn’t even asked, but tonight … tonight feels different. Tonight feels like an ending of some kind, like I’ll never see him again.

Or maybe it’s something else that’s coming to an end.

He’s normally a gentle lover, but not this time. This time is all about urgency and desperation and striving for something you know is just out of reach. We buck, writhe, twist. He can’t seem to find a rhythm he’s happy with, but I’m so revved up I’d be happy upside down, and a minute later I’m proven right.

It’s ecstatic and maddening, frustrating and heavenly. All the other times, he must have been holding back, afraid of hurting me; now he’s using his full strength, moving me from position to position like I weigh nothing at all; I’m on top, I’m on my back, I’m on my hands and knees. It feels like I’m having sex with an elemental force, making love to a hurricane or an avalanche or an earthquake. Something relentless and wild and powerful, so far beyond your control that you can only hang on and hope you survive the experience.