Dead Things (11 page)

Good thing I’m already bleeding. I wipe my hand across the wound where the bullet grazed me, scatter a fine spray of blood into the air. I spin a series of images through my head like a visual mantra. Each one clicking into place like the tumblers on a safe. Scenes of burn victims, murders, suicides. Grief, mourning, the emptiness of death.

I pull myself from the land of the living to the land of the dead and the bullets punch through empty air.

Chapter 11

I haven’t gone anywhere. Physically I’m in the same place. I’ve punched through the barrier between worlds, but they occupy the same location. Same house, same walls, but gray and shadowed. All the color has been sucked out.

Like being able to see the dead on the living side, I’m able to see the living on the dead side. Griffin’s men are still coming down the hallway, gray blurs of indistinct light. I don’t get out of their way fast enough and they run through me, a cold wash as our bodies intersect, leaving me nauseous and dizzy.

I stumble away from them, fighting the nausea until I get to a side hallway then puke my guts out. Between the broken nose, gunshot, and vertigo-inducing flip between worlds I spend a good couple of minutes emptying my stomach.

I pull myself up, wipe my mouth with the sleeve of my coat. This is a temporary respite at best. If I stay too long here I’ll die.

This side of the fence isn’t designed for the living. Everything here is dead and drained. The very air sucks at your energy, saps your memories, your will, your life with a creeping inertia. The place itself will kill me in short order. Provided the ghosts don’t do it first.

The walls look insubstantial, but they’re solid enough. This is an old house. Been around long enough it’s become a part of the landscape. The furniture’s another matter. It’s too recent, too transient. It’s barely visible and I can step through it with ease.

The rules are different for me over here than they are for the Dead. They’re the predators, I’m the prey. I won’t be walking through the walls of this place, but they won’t have a problem.

I pick my way past Griffin’s searching men. They can’t see me, but it doesn’t mean one of them might not be sensitive enough to pick up I’m here. I’m one monster of a roving cold spot.

The front door’s going to be a challenge. I can move things on the other side from here, but it’s not easy. I take a look out the window. It’s going to be tougher than I thought.

I’m a beacon for the Dead at the best of times. And that’s on the other side. Over here I’m a fucking bonfire barbeque with a blinking neon sign that says GOOD EATS.

They’re lining up to get a taste. The yard is filling up fast with Wanderers. Clusters of them are already at the door and piling up at the windows. When they spot me a mob of them start hammering on the glass, howling and screaming.

They’re not coming in despite the fact that most of them could slide on through without even knowing there’s a building here. I crane my neck over to get a look at the outside of the door, catch a pulsing purple glow. So that’s what wards look like on this side. That’s good. Means I’ve got some more time to figure out how to get out of here.

I hear a snarl behind me and realize I’ve spoken too soon. I turn and there’s Gorilla Boy. What’s left of him, anyway. He stands there as he died; thin, emaciated, ancient. But that’s just a look. He’s just as dangerous and vicious as any other ghost.

He leaps at me, mindless with need and hunger. There’s really not much left of him in there. There probably wasn’t much to start with.

I duck and jump to the side, thankful he hasn’t been around long enough to figure out he doesn’t have to move like a living man, anymore. He hits the ground, rolls, kicks off for another pass. His bony fingers rake across my back as I dodge past him, a searing cold tears across my skin.

I hit the ground in a flash of agony. The cold spreads like an explosion over my body and just as quickly it fades, leaving me shaken and numb. All that from one touch.

He comes at me. I’m easy pickings now. Feeling’s starting to return to my legs and hands, but I won’t be able to get out of his way fast enough.

There’s not a lot I can do over here. I have to preserve what power I have left. I’m cut off from the pool of power on the other side and I used a lot with that spell in the office and jumping over here. I’m running off my own reserves and those are draining rapidly. Would suck if I didn’t have enough left over to get back home. Fortunately I’ve got a couple wild cards.

I’ve got so much ensorcelled ink on my skin I’ve forgotten what some of it is for. I had it written all down once, but I lost the list in a car fire about five years ago.

There’s one in particular I picked up on an Indian reservation in Montana; a murder of crows on my chest. They’re constantly shifting color and formation, number and size. One day they’re in a V pattern on my chest, the next there’s only one and the rest have migrated to the spaces in between other tats. They like to move around. And they really like to be let loose.

I give a low whistle, a short tune the artist taught me. There’s a tearing sensation on my chest like I’m losing a layer of flesh and I cry out from the pain.

The birds erupt from my body, tearing through my shirt in a shower of screeching black. They circle the ghost, pecking and tearing at him like spectral piranha. I’ve never used them against the Dead before. Wasn’t sure it would work. Didn’t know they had a taste for ectoplasm.

Within seconds they’ve shredded him into wisps of insubstantial smoke. I don’t know if he’s gone. I doubt it, but with some luck it will be a little while before I have to worry about him again.

The crows circle a bit, then fade to nothing. I open my ruined shirt. On the other side they would have lasted longer. Here they lasted less than a minute. Tells me I don’t have a lot of time myself.

They’re back where they started, but now they’re just ink. The magic I bound into the tattoo is spent. If a touch from one ghost could screw me up so badly, there’s no way I can take on the crowd outside. Screwed if I stay here, screwed if I go back. I need something to get their attention off of me.

I get a really nasty thought. I know what to do. I’ve done it before. I find a window over to the side. I shove on the latch, trying to push it open. It’s not just that it feels like it’s stuck, it’s hard to get any kind of grip on it, like sinking my hands into mud.

I switch to hammering on it with the butt of the gun, and after a few seconds it clicks over. I look to see if any of Griffin’s men are coming over. They can’t hear anything I do on this side, but they can hear anything I influence on the other.

Some of them have scattered, I assume to look for me in other parts of the house. A few are still hanging out here, whether waiting for me to show back up or not I don’t know. No one seems to notice the latch opening. I’m careful not to try to open the window. It’ll probably take some force, but I don’t want to break any of the wards on the house. Not yet, anyway.

One hand on my open straight razor, the other on the doorknob I wait by the front door until I see one of Griffin’s men come my way. On this side they all look the same to me, man-shaped blobs of light. Maybe I’ll get lucky and one of them will be Griffin. There are a few teasing moments when one of them comes almost in range, but not quite. The timing on this is going to be tough and I can’t afford to fuck it up.

Finally one of them gets close enough and I flip back to the land of the living. There’s an explosion of light and sound and life. I can feel the magic flooding back, color bursting into everything. Shouting as I suddenly appear, guns being drawn.

I loop my arm around the guy’s neck, kick open the front door, flip back to the twilight side. Take him with me. The amount of power it uses is enough to leave me dizzy and I really don’t know if I’m going to have enough to get back now. He’s not expecting it. He probably doesn’t deserve it. Hell, not a lot of people do. I take advantage of his surprise and disorientation from the transfer.

“Sorry, man. Nothing personal,” I say, slicing the straight razor fast across his neck, arterial blood spurting high into the air. I spin him around and throw him out the open door.

The ghosts go batshit. They descend on him in a seething mass of piranha love. Ripping him to shreds, drinking his life. When they get done with him there won’t be anything left to move on to whatever afterlife might be waiting for him. They’ll eat his soul.

I don’t wait to see the process. I’ve seen it before. After the car went up at Boudreau’s warehouse I went in, found him torn and broken inside. I dragged him, barely conscious, already dying, out into the night. Threw him onto the still smoking hood of the car.

I took him over to the other side with me and fed him to the Dead. Listened to him scream. Waited until they tore up every shred of that man’s soul.

I don’t think I’ve been the same since.

I run back inside the house to the window I unlocked. I don’t have much time. That many ghosts on a guy, he won’t last long at all. I take a running jump at the window. It’s like hitting concrete. I bounce back, take another jump at it. I’m running out of time.

The third one does it. The window pops open and I hit the ground on the other side. There are a few wanderers still lingering who haven’t figured out the main event’s by the front door. They fall in behind me, taking swipes as I run past them. The grounds of the house are pretty big. I want to find an exit. I run across the circular driveway past dim outlines of Mercedes and BMWs.

I skid to a stop when I see it. The vague shape of a Cadillac Eldorado. It’s glowing the same purple the front door had with wards and protection spells.

I can’t think of anybody who would do that to a Caddy but me.

I run to the car, try to pull the door open, but I can’t get a grip on the handle. It hasn’t been here long enough to make a solid impression on the landscape. The ghosts are getting close. I try a second time, realize I’m an idiot and flip back over to the living side.

The world bursts into color and sound again. I yank the car door open, slide into the driver’s seat. One of those assholes shoved a screwdriver into the ignition. I turn it and the engine roars to life.

In the rearview I can see Griffin’s men running out the door. I throw the car into reverse and stomp on the gas, scattering most of them and bouncing a couple across my trunk. I swerve into the cars in the driveway, bouncing my already battered bumper into the cars’ wheel wells hard enough, I hope, to tweak the steering and make them undrivable.

I kick the car back into drive and peel out onto a small private road that’s more of a glorified driveway. A vine-covered gate looms in front of me and I give the car more gas, speeding into it and tearing it off its hinges. The doors bounce into the street.

I hit the street hard. Sparks fly up from the car’s undercarriage when it smacks off the asphalt. Griffin’s house turns out to be on one of the side streets north of Sunset. Should have known. Ritzy place. I toss out a small misdirection spell, hopefully powerful enough to give me a head start. I head for the freeway.

—

I’m not feeling so good.

I find some Kleenex in the glove compartment, tear off a chunk and stick it up my nose to stanch the bleeding. The second it goes up a nostril, pain flares between my eyes and I almost swerve into a truck.

I hate having a broken nose. Getting it reset is going to suck. After driving around for half an hour and not seeing anyone following me I pull over to the side of the road and take stock. The rib’s definitely broken. In the rearview mirror I can see my face is one massive, purple bruise. Dizzy, which is never good. But I’m not seeing double, so that’s something.

But my thoughts are like Teflon. I can’t get anything to stick for very long. The adrenaline dump I got back at the mansion has left me shaking.

I push past the mental Slip n’ Slide. So Ben Duncan, the asshole who kicked me out of L.A., is Ben Griffin. I have to kill him to pay for my cryptic clue from Santa Muerte.

I can work with that.

But did he kill Lucy? Even through the beating my head took I know he didn’t. No profit in it. Why go through all that trouble just to bring me back here and then try to kill me?

He wanted to see me first. Find out why I was in town before he took me out. His surprise when I mentioned Boudreau was genuine. Or he’s a really good actor.

I find my mind wandering past that to how he tracked me down. Still think he had somebody camped at the cemetery, but how did he know where my motel was? I look around at the seat. Takes me a minute, but I find it, the wadded up receipt for my motel room. Stuck between the cushions. Okay. So they broke in while I was in having my talk with Santa Muerte and found it?

I’d buy it if the receipt hadn’t been so tightly wedged in there. But how else could they have figured it out? And how would they know what room I was in? I hadn’t told anyone.

Oh. Wait. Yes, I had. Son of a bitch.

—

I pop two wheels up on the curb down the street from Alex’s club and shove down on the parking brake. The day’s getting on and already the parking lot is full. Happy hour.

I dig around in the glove compartment. The Browning’s still there. I pull it out, make sure it’s loaded. I get out of the car and immediately regret standing. I stagger, catch myself on the door as dizziness washes over me. I pull it together and lurch down the street to the club. The effect I’m going for isn’t subtlety. It’s entirely possible I’m not exactly in my right mind. Being repeatedly beaten can kind of have that effect.

I throw the door open and get a face full of bouncer. He could wipe the floor with me, but I’m ready for him. And I’m in the mood to hurt somebody. I drop him with a blast of electricity without bothering to say anything first. He falls backward through the curtain in the foyer to the bar floor.

None of the customers have seen a mage in action before. Part of me cares enough to keep it that way. All they see is the bouncer land on the floor, skid a couple feet and lie there. He’ll probably get up thinking I’ve got one hell of a right hook.