Strange Brew (9 page)

Murphy blindsided me with a kick that lit up my whole rib cage with pain, and had seized an arm before I could fight through it. If it had been my right arm, I’m not sure what might have happened—but she grabbed my left, and I activated my shield bracelet, sheathing it in sheer, kinetic power and forcing her hands away.

I don’t care how many aikido lessons you’ve had, they don’t train you for force fields.

I reached out with my will, screamed, “
Forzare
!” and seized a large plastic waste bin with my power. With a flick of my hand, I flung it at Murphy. It struck her hard and knocked her off me. I backpedaled. Meditrina had regained her feet and was coming for me, bottle flickering.

She drove me back into the beer-stand counter across the hall, and I brought up my shield again just as her makeshift weapon came forward. Glass shattered against it, cutting her own hand—always a risk with a bottle. But the force of the blow was sufficient to carry through the shield and slam my back against the counter. I bounced off some guy trying to carry beer in plastic cups and went down soaked in brew.

Murphy jumped on me then, pinning my left arm down as Meditrina started raking at my face with her nails, both of them screaming like banshees.

I had to shut one eye when a sharp fingernail grazed it, but I saw my chance as Meditrina’s hands—hot, horribly strong hands, closed over my throat.

I choked out a gasped, “
Forzare
!” and reached out my right hand, snapping a slender chain that held up one end of a sign suspended above the beer stand behind me.

A heavy wooden sign that read, in large cheerful letters, please drink responsibly swung down in a ponderous, scything arc and struck Meditrina on the side of the head, hitting her like a giant’s fist. Her nails left scarlet lines on my throat as she was torn off me.

Murphy looked up, shocked, and I hauled with all my strength. I had to position her before she took up where Meditrina left off. I felt something wrench and give way as my thumb left its socket, and I howled in pain as the sign swung back, albeit with a lot less momentum, now, and clouted Murphy on the noggin, too.

Then a bunch of people jumped on us and the cops came running.

While they were arresting me, I managed to convince the cops that there was something bad in Mac’s beer. They got with the caterers and rounded up the whole batch, apparently before more than a handful of people could drink any. There was some wild behavior, but no one else got hurt.

None of which did me any good. After all, I was soaked in Budweiser and had assaulted two attractive women. I went to the drunk tank, which angered me mainly because I’d never gotten my freaking beer. And to add insult to injury, after paying exorbitant rates for a ticket, I hadn’t gotten to see the game, either.

There’s no freaking justice in this world.

Murphy turned up in the morning to let me out. She had a black eye and a sign-shaped bruise across one cheekbone.

“So let me get this straight,” Murphy said. “After we went to Left Hand Goods, we followed the trail to the Bulls game. Then we confronted this Maenad character, there was a struggle, and I got knocked out.”

“Yep,” I said.

There was really no point in telling it any other way. The nefarious hooch would have destroyed her memory of the evening. The truth would just bother her.

Hell, it bothered me. On more levels than I wanted to think about.

“Well, Bassarid vanished from the hospital,” Murphy said. “So she’s not around to press charges. And, given that you were working with me on an investigation, and because several people have reported side effects that sound a lot like they were drugged with Rohypnol or something—and because it was you who got the cops to pull the rest of the bottles—I managed to get the felony charges dropped. You’re still being cited for drunk and disorderly.”

“Yay,” I said without enthusiasm.

“Could have been worse,” Murphy said. She paused and studied me for a moment. “You look like hell.”

“Thanks,” I said.

She looked at me seriously. Then she smiled, stood up on her tiptoes, and kissed my cheek. “You’re a good man, Harry. Come on. I’ll give you a ride home.”

I smiled all the way to her car.

Jim Butcher
enjoys fencing, martial arts, singing, bad science-fiction movies, and live-action gaming. He lives in Missouri with his wife, son, and a vicious guard dog. You may learn more at
www.jim-butcher.com
.

Death Warmed Over
Rachel Caine

I hate raising the dead on a work night.

My boss Sam Twist knows that, and so it was a surprise when I got the e-mail on a Monday, telling me he would need a full resurrection on Thursday.

“Short turnaround, genius,” I muttered. It took days to brew the necessary potions, and I’d have to set aside the entire Thursday from dusk until dawn for the resurrection itself. Not good, because I knew I couldn’t exactly blow off Friday. I had meetings at the day job.

Sam, who ran the local booking service for witches, was usually somewhat sympathetic to my day job-night job balancing act, mostly because I was the best resurrection witch he had—not that being the best in the business exactly pays the bills. It was a little like being the best piccolo player in the orchestra—it took skill, and specialty, and not a lot of people could do it, but it didn’t exactly present a lot of major money-making opportunities.

Then again, at least resurrections were a fairly steady business. Some of the other types of witches—and we were all very specialized—got a whole lot less. It was a funny thing, but so far as I could tell, there had never been witches who could do what the folklore claimed; those of us who were real worked with potions, not words. We couldn’t sling spells and lightning. Our jobs—whatever our particular focus—took time and patience, not to mention a high tolerance for nasty ingredients.

I contemplated Sam’s message. If I wanted to, I
could
turn down the assignment—I wasn’t hurting for money at the moment. Still. There was something in the terse way he’d phrased it that made me wonder.

So was I taking the job, or not? If I said yes, prep needed to start immediately after work. Part of my mind ran through the things I might need, and matched them against the mental stock list I always kept in my brain. The bowls were clean and ready, I’d put them through the dishwasher and a good ritual scrub with sacred herbs just a week ago. I’d need to put a fresh blessing on the athame. I had most of the other things—rock salt, sulfur, attar of roses, ambergris, and a whole bunch of slimier ingredients. I might be running low on bottled semen, but the truth was, you could always get more of that.

I fidgeted in my chair as I stared at the message. Sam wasn’t telling me much—just timing and a dollar amount, which while considerable wasn’t enough to pay my mortgage. On their own, my fingers typed my reply:
I might be interested. Who’s the client
?

I rarely asked, because most of the time that fell under need-to-know, and I didn’t. So long as the client paid Sam, and Sam paid me, we were all good. But this time—this time I felt like it was worth the question.

I went back to my regular work—tonight, that meant straightening out a worksheet the experts in accounting had completely trashed—and was a little surprised when Sam’s e-mail came so quickly. Then again, it was a short answer.

PD
. Police Department.

My hackles went way up. The police didn’t part with their money willingly for resurrections. The testimony of the resurrected had been thrown out as inadmissible five years ago, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, and the land-office rush for witches to bring back the dead had dried up just as fast. Some of the richer cities still managed one or two resurrections a year for particularly cold cases, just to generate leads, but I hadn’t seen one in Austin for a while.

So if the Thin Blue Line was knocking, something was up, and it was big. Very big.

Why
? I wrote back, and hit send.

It didn’t take long to get my answer. Four minutes, to be exact, give or take a few seconds, until my cheery little
you have mail
chime dinged.

They need a disposable
, he wrote, and this time, I sat all the way back in my chair. And rolled my chair back from the computer.
Tried to talk them out of it. Told them you wouldn’t want in. You can pass on it, H.

In technical terms, a disposable is a long-term resurrection—counterintuitive, but that’s police parlance for you. Most resurrections last no more than a few minutes, maybe an hour—you really don’t need that much time to do whatever needs to be done. It’s mainly finding out the name of their killer, or where they stashed the family silver, or where the bodies are buried if your deceased soul is the one who buried them in the first place. Holding them longer is brutally hard, and gets harder the longer it goes on. When a police department requests a long-term resurrection, it’s almost always specific—there’s a situation that requires a particular person to resolve, or a particular skill. When the cops ask for a disposable resurrection, well, you know it’s going to be bad.

I knew it better than anyone.

I typed my reply back in words as terse as Sam’s had been to me.
Bet your ass I’m passing
.

I hit send, feeling only a little wistful twinge of regret at all that virtual money disappearing from my future, and began to shut my computer down.

I’d just picked up my purse when my cell phone rang, and I wasn’t too surprised when the screen’s display told me it was Sam.

“Hey,” I said, shouldered my bag, and headed for the elevators. “Don’t try to talk me out of it. I don’t do disposables. Not anymore.”

“I know that,” Sam said. He had a deep, smoky voice, the kind that implied a cigarette-and-whiskey lifestyle. I didn’t know that for sure; for all I knew, Sam might have lived prim as a preacher. Sam and I didn’t exactly hang out; he kept himself to himself, mostly. “Not trying to talk you out of it, H, believe me. I’m glad you turned it down.”

“Shut up,” said a third voice, male, grim, and completely unfamiliar.

“Who the hell is
that
?” I blurted. “Sam—”

“Detective Daniel Prieto.”

“Sam, you
conferenced me
?” He’d never put me on the spot before.

“Hey, they’re the cops. I got no choice!”

“Hear me out.” Prieto’s voice rode right over Sam’s. “I’m told you’re the best there is, and I need the best. Besides, you have a prior relationship with the—subject.”

My mouth dried up, and I stopped in midstride to lean against the wall. A few coworkers passed me and gave me curious looks; I couldn’t imagine what was on my face, but it must have been both alarming and offputting. Nobody stopped. I tried to speak, but nothing was coming out of my mouth.

“Holly? You there?” That was Sam. I could still hear Prieto breathing.

“Yeah,” I finally managed to say. “Who?” Not that there was really much of a question. I had a
relationship
with only one dead man. He was the only disposable I’d ever brought back.

And Prieto, right on cue, said, “Andrew Toland.”

I felt hot and sick, and I needed to sit down. Never a chair around when you need one. I continued walking, slowly, one shoulder gliding against the wall for balance. “Sam, you can’t agree to this. You can’t let them do it again. Not to him.”

“What can I say? I’m just the dispatcher, H. You don’t want to take it on, that’s just fine.” The words sounded apologetic, but Sam didn’t do empathy. None of us did. It didn’t serve us well, in this line of work.

Cops had the same problem. “I have to tell you, if you don’t agree, we’re still bringing him back. It’ll just be somebody else running him. You said this Carlotta is next on the list, Mr. Twist? She’s the one who recommended this particular guy be brought back, right?”

“
Lottie
?” I blurted it out before I could stop myself.
No. Oh, no
. Carlotta Flores and I went back a long time, and not one minute of it was pleasant. In resurrections, we prided ourselves on detachment, but Lottie took pleasure in the pain that her resurrected souls felt; she
enjoyed
keeping them chained into their flesh. I’d reported her dozens of times to the review board, but there was never any real evidence. Only my own word for what I’d seen.

The dead can’t testify.

It was her fondest wish to run a disposable, and it was the very last thing she should ever do.
God, no
. The idea of letting her handle Andrew’s resurrection was more than I could take.

Detective Prieto somehow knew that, but then again, I supposed he’d done his homework. He’d probably gotten it from Sam, the chatty bastard.

“That a yes, Miss Caldwell?” Prieto asked. Sam was distinctly silent.

“Yes,” I gritted out. “Dammit to hell.”

“Right. Let’s get to business. City morgue, Thursday at dusk, you know the drill. Come loaded, H.” Sam was back to brisk and rough again, his brief moment of empathy blown away like feathers in a hurricane.

“Send me the details.” I sounded resigned. I didn’t feel resigned. I felt manipulated, defeated, and enraged.

“Will do,” Sam said. I heard a click. Detective Prieto had signed off without bothering to say good-bye. “Better you than Lottie, I guess. Though look, if you just don’t show up, what’re they going to do? Arrest you?”

“They’ll let Lottie do it instead. You know I can’t let that happen, Sam.”

“Kind of guessed, yeah.”

“Why
him
? God, Sam—”

“Don’t know. Lottie had some kind of chat with Prieto, next thing I know, he’s telling me it’s Toland he needs. Maybe Lottie told him about how tough the son of a bitch was. Is.”

Maybe Lottie just wanted to yank my chain. Equally possible.

“Holly? Sorry about—”

“Yeah. Whatever. See you.” I folded up the phone. I couldn’t take any more of Sam’s vaguely false apology. He knew my agreement was final. You don’t become a witch making false promises. The stakes are far too high.