The Urban Fantasy Anthology Part 24

Maybe she could tell me herself.

Finally, I had to touch her, in order to get the salt into her mouth. I put my hand on her shoulder. She swayed enough that I thought she might fall over, so I pulled away. A moment later, she steadied, remaining upright. I could probably push her forward, guide her, and make her walk like a puppet.

I shivered.

Swallowing back a lump of bile threatening to climb my throat, I held her chin, tipping her head back. Her skin was waxen, neither warm nor cold. Her muscles were limp, perfectly relaxed. Or dead. I tried not to think of it. She'd been drugged. That was the theory I was going for. Praying for, rather.

"What are you doing?" Matt said.

"Never mind. Did you call the ambulance?"

"They should be here any minute."

I sprinkled a few shakes of salt into her mouth.

I had to tip her head forward and close her mouth for her because she couldn't do it herself. And if she couldn't do that, she surely couldn't swallow. None of the information said she had to swallow the salt, just taste it. In cultures around the world salt had magical properties. It was a ward against evil, protection against fairies, a treasure as great as gold. It seemed so common and innocuous now. Hard to believe it could do anything besides liven up a basket of french fries.

Her eyes moved.

The film, the dullness went away, and her gaze focused. It flickered, as if searching or confused.

Fear tightened her features. Her shoulders bunched, and her fingers clenched into claws. She screamed.

She let out a wail of anguish, bone-leaching in its intensity. A couple of yelps of shock answered from within the apartment. Her face melted into an expression of despair, lips pulled back in a frown, eyes red and wincing. But she didn't cry.

Reaching forward with those crooked fingers, she took a stumbling step forward. My heart racing, my nausea growing, I hurried out of her way. Another step followed, clumsy and unsure. She was like a toddler who'd just learned to walk. This was the slow, shuffling gait of a zombie in every B-grade horror movie I'd ever seen. The salt hadn't cured her; it had just woken her up.

She stumbled forward, step by step, reaching. People scrambled out of her way.

She didn't seem hungry. That look of utter pain and sadness remained locked on her features. She looked as if her heart had been torn out and smashed into pieces.

Her gaze searched wildly, desperately.

I ran in front of her, blocking her path. "Hey-can you hear me?" I waved my arms, trying to catch her attention. She didn't seem to notice, but she shifted, angling around me. So I tried again. "Who are you? Can you tell me your name? How did this happen?"

Her gaze had focused on something behind me. When I got in front of her, she looked right through me and kept going like I wasn't there. I turned to find what had caught her attention.

A man and woman sat wedged together in a secondhand armchair, looking like a Mack truck was about to run them down. The zombie woman shuffled toward them. Now that I was out of the way, she reached toward them, arms rigid and trembling. She moaned-she might have been trying to speak, but she couldn't shape her mouth right. She was like an infant who desperately wanted something but didn't have the words to say it. She was an infant in the body of an adult.

And what she wanted was the man in the chair.

A few steps away, her moaning turned into a wail. The woman in the chair screamed and fell over the arm to get away. The man wasn't that nimble, or he was frozen in place.

The zombie wobbled on her next step, then fell to her knees, but that didn't stop her reaching. She was close enough to grab his feet. Those clawlike hands clenched on his ankles, and she tried to pull herself forward, dragging herself on the carpet, still moaning.

The man shrieked and kicked at her, yanking his legs away and trying to curl up in the chair.

"Stop it!" I screamed at him, rushing forward to put myself between them.

She was sprawled on the floor now, crying gut-wrenching sobs. I held her shoulders and pulled her back from the chair, laying her on her back. Her arms still reached, but the rest of her body had become limp, out of her control.

"Matt, get a pillow and a blanket." He ran to the bedroom to get them. That was all I could think-try to make her comfortable. When were those paramedics going to get here?

I looked at the guy in the chair. Like the rest of the people at the party, he was twenty-something. Thin and generically cute, he had s.h.a.ggy dark hair, a preppy b.u.t.ton-up shirt, and gray trousers. I wouldn't have picked him out of the crowd.

"Who are you?" I said.

"C-Carson."

He even had a preppy name to go with the ensemble. I glanced at the woman who was with him. Huddled behind the armchair, she was starting to peer out. She had dyed black hair, a tiny nose stud, and a tight dress. More like the kind of crowd Matt hung out with. I wouldn't have put her and Carson together. Maybe they both thought they were slumming.

"Do you know her?" I asked him, nodding at the zombie woman on the floor.

He shook his head quickly, pressing himself even further back in the chair. He was sweating. Carson was about to lose it.

Matt returned and helped me fit the pillow under her head and spread the blanket over her. He, too, was beginning to see her as someone who was sick-not a monster.

"You're lying," I said. "She obviously knows you. Who is she?"

"I don't know, I don't know!"

"Matt, who is this guy?"

Matt glanced at him. "Just met him tonight. He's Trish's new boyfriend."

"Trish?" I said to the woman behind the armchair.

"I-I don't know. At least, I'm not sure. I never met her, but I think...I think she's his ex-girlfriend. Beth, I think. But Carson, you told me she moved away-"

Carson, staring at the woman on the floor, looked like he was about to have a screaming fit. He was still shaking his head.

I was ready to throttle him. I wanted an explanation. Maybe he didn't really know. But if he was lying... "Carson!"

He flinched at my shout.

Sirens sounded down the street, coming closer. The paramedics. I hoped they could help her, but the sick feeling in my stomach hadn't gone away.

"I'll meet them on the street," Matt said, running out.

"Beth," I said to the woman. I caught her hands, managed to pull them down so they were resting on her chest. I murmured at her, and she quieted. Her skin color hadn't gotten any better. She didn't feel cold as death, but she felt cool. The salt hadn't sent her back to any grave, and it hadn't revived her. I wasn't sure she could be revived.

A moment later, a couple of uniformed paramedics carrying equipment entered, followed by Matt. The living room should have felt crowded, but apparently as soon as the door cleared, most of the guests had fled. G.o.d, what a way to kill a party.

The paramedics came straight toward Beth. I got out of the way. They immediately knelt by her, checked her pulse, shined a light in her eyes. I breathed a little easier. Finally, someone was doing something useful.

"What happened?" one of them asked.

How did I explain this? She's a zombie. That wasn't going to work, because I didn't think she was one anymore. She was a zombie didn't sound any better.

"She was going to leave," Carson said, suddenly, softly. Responding to the authority of the uniform, maybe. He stared at her, unable to look away. He spoke as if in a trance. "I didn't want her to go. She asked me to come with her, to Seattle-but I didn't want to do that either. I wanted her to stay with me. So I...this stuff, this powder. It would make her do anything I wanted. I used it. But it...changed her. She wasn't the same. She-was like that. Dead almost. I left her, but she followed. She kept following me-"

"Call it poisoning," said one paramedic to the other.

"Where did you get this powder?" I said.

"Some guy on the Internet."

I wanted to kill him. Wanted to put my hands around his throat and kill him.

"Kitty-" Matt said. I took a breath. Calmed down.

"Any idea what was in this powder?" one of the paramedics said, sounding like he was repressing as much anger as I was.

Carson shook his head.

"Try tetrodotoxin," I said. "Induces a deathlike coma. Also causes brain damage. Irreparable brain damage."

Grimacing, the paramedic said, "We won't be able to check that until we get her to the hospital. I don't see any ID on her. I'm going to call in the cops, see if they've had a missing persons report on her. And to see what they want to do with him."

Carson flinched at his glare.

Trish backed away. "If I tried to break up with you-would you have done that to me too?" Her mouth twisted with unspoken accusations. Then, she fled.

Carson thought he'd make his own zombie slave girlfriend, then somehow wasn't satisfied at the results. She probably wasn't real good in bed. He'd probably done it, too-had s.e.x with Beth's brain-damaged, comatose body. The cops couldn't get here fast enough, in my opinion.

"There's two parts to it," I said. "The powder creates the zombie. But then there's the spell to bind her to you, to bind the slave to the master. Some kind of object with meaning, a receptacle for the soul. You have it. That's why she followed you. That's why she wouldn't stay away." The salt hadn't broken that bond. She'd regained her will-but the damage was too great for her to do anything with it. She knew enough to recognize him and what he'd done to her, but could only cry out helplessly.

He reached into his pocket, pulled something out. He opened his fist to reveal what.

A diamond engagement ring lay in his palm.

Beth reacted, arcing her back, flailing, moaning. The paramedics freaked, pinned her arms, jabbed her with a hypodermic. She settled again, whimpering softly.

I took the ring from Carson. He glared at me, the first time he'd really looked at me. I didn't see remorse in his eyes. Only fear. Like Victor Frankenstein, he'd created a monster and all he could do when confronted with it was cringe in terror.

"Matt, you have a string or a shoelace or something?"

"Yeah, sure."

He came back with a bootlace fresh out of the package. I put the ring on it, knotted it, and slipped it over Beth's head. "Can you make sure this stays with her?" I asked the paramedics. They nodded.

This was half-science, half-magic. If the ring really did hold Beth's soul, maybe it would help. If it didn't help-well, at least Carson wouldn't have it anymore.

The cops came and took statements from all of us, including the paramedics, then took Carson away. The paramedics took Beth away; the ambulance siren howled down the street, away.

Finally, when Matt and I were alone among the remains of his disaster of a party, I started crying. "How could he do that? How could he even think it? She was probably this wonderful, beautiful, independent woman, and he destroyed-"

Matt had poured two gla.s.ses of champagne. He handed me one.

"Happy New Year, Kitty." He pointed at the clock on the microwave. 12:03.

c.r.a.p. I missed it. I started crying harder.

Matt, my friend, hugged me. So once again, I didn't get a New Year's kiss. This year, I didn't mind.

Seeing Eye.

Patricia Briggs.

The doorbell rang.

That was the problem with her business. Too many people thought that they could approach her at any time. Even oh dark thirty even though her hours were posted clearly on her door and on her website.

Of course answering the door would be something to do other than sit in her study shivering in the dark. Not that her world was ever anything but dark. It was one of the reasons she hated bad dreams-she had no way of turning on the light. Bad dreams that held warnings of things to come were the worst.

The doorbell rang again.

She slept-or tried to-the same hours as most people. Kept steady business hours too. Something that she had no trouble making clear to those morons who woke her up in the middle of the night. They came to see Glenda the Good Witch, but after midnight they found the Wicked Witch of the West and left quaking in fear of flying monkeys.

Whoever was at the door would have no reason to suspect how grateful she was for the interruption of her thoughts.

The doorbell began a steady throbbing beat, ring-long, ring-short, ring-short, ring-long and she grew a lot less grateful. To heck with flying monkeys, she was going to turn whoever it was into a frog. She shoved her concealing gla.s.ses on her face and stomped out the hall to her front door. No matter that most of the good trans.m.u.tation spells had been lost with the Coranda family in the seventeenth century-rude people needed to be turned into frogs. Or pigs.

She jerked open the door and slapped the offending hand on her doorbell. She even got out a "stop that" before the force of his spirit hit her like a physical blow. Her nose told her, belatedly, that he was sweaty as if he'd been jogging.

Her other senses told her that he was something other.

Not that she'd expected him to be human. Unlike other witches, she didn't advertise and so seldom had mundane customers unless their needs disturbed her sleep and she set out one of her "find me" spells to speak to them-she knew when they were coming.

"Ms Keller," he growled. "I need to speak to you." At least he'd quit ringing the bell.

She let her left eyebrow slide up her forehead until it would be visible above her gla.s.ses. "Polite people come between the hours of eight in the morning and seven at night," she informed him. Werewolf, she decided. If he really lost his temper she might have trouble, but she thought he was desperate, not angry-though with a wolf, the two states could be interchanged with remarkable speed. "Rude people get sent on their way."

"Tomorrow morning might be too late," he said-and then added the bit that kept her from slamming the door in his face. "Alan Choo gave me your address, said you were the only one he knew with enough moxie to defy them."

She should shut the door in his face-not even a werewolf could get through her portal if she didn't want him to. But...them. Her dream tonight and for the past weeks had been about them, about him again. Portents, her instincts had told her, not just nightmares. The time had come at last. No. She wasn't grateful to him at all.

"Did Alan tell you to say it in those words?"

"Yes, ma'am." His temper was still there, but restrained and under control. It hadn't been aimed at her anyway, she thought, only fury born of frustration and fear. She knew how that felt.

She centered herself and asked the questions he'd expect. "Who am I supposed to be defying?"