Read Back From the Undead Online
Authors: Dd Barant
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Fiction, #Romance
Back From the Undead
CONTENTS
Praise for DD Barant and The Bloodhound Files
ONE
One night. That’s all I got, one lousy night.
Not that the night itself was lousy—no, no, no. That was pretty damn great. In fact, I’d have to say that of all the nights I’ve spent having amazing, mind-blowing sex with supernatural beings, this was the best. Okay, so I only have one other night to compare it with, and that was with a werewolf and not a vampire, and I was drunk on magicked-up booze on a Japanese bullet train, but still.
Maybe I should start over.
They say that office romances are always a bad idea. When your boss is a centuries-old vampire who runs the National Security Agency, and you’re an FBI profiler from a parallel world who was dragged into this reality against her will, they say—well, they don’t say anything, they just roll their eyes and shake their heads and wander away muttering underneath their breath.
Add in the fact that my boss, David Cassius, has what I can only call an endangered species fetish—human beings make up only 1 percent of the population here, the rest being vampires, werewolves, or golems—and that I’m an extremely strong-willed woman who doesn’t want
anyone
to take care of her, and you have all the ingredients for a relationship H-bomb.
Did I mention how good the sex was?
But none of that matters, not now.
Because all I got was one lousy night.
* * *
“This is a bad idea,” Charlie mutters.
Since we happen to be waiting for a bomb to go off, I can’t really argue. “You got that right. But what other choice do I have?”
“Lots. You could read a book. Watch a movie. Buy new shoes. Walk in front of a moving bus—”
From behind my closed bedroom door, there’s a hopeful whine from my dog. “Don’t say the W word. You’ll get Galahad all worked up.”
“Sorry.
Jump
in front of a bus.
Leap
from the top of a skyscraper.
Throw
yourself in a live volcano—”
“I get the idea. Stop making suggestions and try to be a little supportive, will you?”
He turns and glares at me. When a golem with see-through plastic skin stuffed with three hundred pounds of black sand glares at you, it can be a little unnerving. Fortunately, I’ve built up an immunity over time. “Jace. This is as supportive as I can be while hiding behind someone’s couch.”
“You know, where I come from people hide
behind
sandbags when they’re dealing with high explosives. You know, instead of beside them.”
“Where you come from sandbags don’t wear suits made of Italian silk.” He has a point. His jacket is pale green, with just a hint of gold woven into the fabric. Matching fedora with a yellow hatband, of course.
I’m dressed in black sweatpants, sneakers, and a white T-shirt, but hey, it’s my apartment and my day off, so I plan on being comfortable while possibly destroying my apartment. My partner, on the other hand, doesn’t even know the definition of the word
casual.
I’d say he was born wearing a three-piece suit, but golems aren’t so much born as manufactured. Charlie may be the most lethal person I’ve ever met, but his fashion sense is just as sharp as his killer instincts.
Needless to say, he’s not thrilled with the prospect of crouching on my unvacuumed-for-three-weeks carpet while risking the possibility of severe wardrobe malfunction or even destruction.
I check my watch again. “Four minutes. I think the fuse must have gone out.”
“I’ll go check.”
“No!” I yank on his arm and pull him back down. Charlie doesn’t take conventional explosives seriously—not because he’s invulnerable, but because of a global spell cast on this world back in the twelfth century. The enchantment is a subtle one; it doesn’t make firearms or bombs impossible to create, it just makes everyone believe both concepts are ridiculous. Nobody’s ever built a gun or a hand grenade or a nuclear weapon on Thropirelem—that’s what I call this place, due to all the thropes, pires, and lems—because people have no faith in the ideas behind them. But then, when you’re dealing with near-indestructible supernatural beings strong enough to pick up cars, your approach to warfare takes a very different direction. Charlie likes to pitch steel-cored silver ball bearings at just under the speed of sound, himself.
I, however, am the exception to the rule. I may not turn into a seven-foot-tall hairy monster, I might not drink blood and avoid sunlight—but that doesn’t mean I’m helpless. I carry my own personal talisman, a heavy chunk of steel known as a Ruger Super Redhawk Alaskan. It’s one of the most powerful handguns ever created, and I brought it—and a crate of ammunition—with me when I crossed the dimensional divide to this world. Since then I’ve had the bullets specially modified, the lead replaced with hand-carved teakwood tipped with silver.
But I’ve only got so much gunpowder—and nobody here knows how to make the damn stuff.
I’m no chemist. I’ve tried taking samples to professionals to have it analyzed, but the spell blocks me every time; the lab results get lost or forgotten or thrown away, as if the material involved contains the distilled essence of incompetence. I’ve had more than one tech just stare at me skeptically and tell me he doesn’t have time for pranks.
So I’m trying to make my own.
“You should learn how to use a bow,” Charlie says for the hundredth time. “It’s not hard. I’ll teach you.”
“Sorry, but I still don’t have a supernatural’s strength—the draw on those things is like trying to pull back the anchor chain for an aircraft carrier. I prefer a nice, simple trigger.”
“We can have one custom-made. I know a guy.”
I sigh. “It’s not just strength, it’s speed, okay? A thrope or pire archer can fire arrows so fast their bow basically becomes a semi-automatic weapon. Me, not so much—the first time I try to draw down on a suspect, I’m going to look like a pincushion.”
“I doubt that.”
“Thanks, but I lack your cheery optimism.”
“No, I meant the pincushion thing. A broadhead shaft from a thrope bow would punch right through you. You’d just have a bunch of gaping holes in your body—the pincushion metaphor doesn’t really work.”
“I appreciate your tactful approach to accuracy.”
“Not sure what does, though. A sponge? No … Swiss cheese, maybe?”
All right, so it’s possible that mixing my own gunpowder and testing it by igniting some in my living room wasn’t the most thought-out plan in the world. But I was feeling a little manic, a little paranoid, and more than a little sexually frustrated.
See, Cassius and I had finally had our moment. It was intense and epic and surreal, and since then—all of three days ago—I haven’t spent a lot of time around him. I asked for a little space to process things, and he agreed far too quickly. I used the hours to do a lot of thinking and made a few important decisions, including setting up my own martial arts dojo—a twenty-four-hour whirlwind of renting a space, printing up flyers, driving around town dropping them off, and then hunting down some used equipment—which left me happy and exhausted and itchy to do something else so I wouldn’t have to do any more thinking.
Because I was tired of thinking. I’m a smart person who spends way too much time inside her own head, and there are times when you just have to
do
something. “Too much knowledge numbs the will to action,” my old sensei Duane Dunn used to say, and he was right on the money.
Because this was too big to wrap my head around, and the more I tried the more I got snarled by analysis paralysis. A centuries-old vampire was in love with me. I was having an affair with my boss, the director of the NSA. I was trapped on a parallel world full of supernatural beings. Any one of those things was enough to drive a sane person crazy if she spent too much thinking about it, and they were only the most obvious factors in the equation.
So, I gave up trying to understand, and decided to just go with the flow. Adopt, adapt, and improve, as John Cleese once said. Of course, he was playing an inept stickup man who was robbing a lingerie shop at the time, but the principle still holds.
I called Cassius up and told him I wanted us to get together. That night, at my place. I told him to bring his toothbrush, or whatever the pire equivalent was.
Then I decided to blow myself up. Because, you know, my subconscious is a lot better with metaphors than I am.
“It’s not gonna implode,” Charlie says.
“
Ex
plode.”
“Whatever. How long are we supposed to wait? I got things to do.” He stands up.
Whaboom!
When I was a kid, I had a cap gun. You threaded this roll of red paper through it, and when you pulled the trigger the hammer snapped down on one of the little dark dots of gunpowder embedded at regular intervals through the paper, making a satisfying
bang!
I, however, being a spirited and inquisitive child, was
not
satisfied. So I took a whole roll of caps, placed it on a rock, and hit it with a much bigger hammer.
Did you know it’s possible to hear the first two letters of the word
bang
? Yeah, a really loud
ba,
followed by a loud ringing where the
ng
should be. Went away in a few hours, though I’m lucky I didn’t blow out an eardrum.
This is kind of like that. I don’t go completely deaf this time, though; I can hear all sorts of other noises, like shattering glass and the dull impact of flying objects coming to a sudden stop.
My ears are sure ringing, though. I stand up slowly, and say, “Charlie?”
He turns his head to regard me. He’s not wearing his fedora anymore. The front of his suit is blackened and shredded. I really should have moved that vase out of the way, too, because it’s in about a hundred pieces—most of which are sticking out of Charlie’s chest.
“Um,” I say. “You really shouldn’t have done that.”
“
That
being what? Buying this suit—
yesterday
? Getting up this morning? Or agreeing to have a partner who’s a brain-damaged pyromaniac in the first place?”
“I was going to go with standing up.”
“What, and ruin a terrific punch line? Otherwise known as a
twelve-hundred-dollar suit
?”
“I’ll pay for it, okay? Are
you
all right?”
He looks down at himself, where the neck of the vase is protruding from his belly like a rib with a wily escape plan. He grabs it and yanks it out, causing black sand to avalanche all over the floor. He slaps a hand over the hole and scowls at me. “I’ve been better.”