No Humans Involved (25 page)

Cause And Effect

AFTER LUNCH, WE STOPPED BY HOPE'S PLACE to update her. while she talked with Jeremy, I asked to borrow her phone book. I looked up Peter's son's name and found a handful of direct matches, plus a lengthy list of possibilities. When I explained to Hope and Jeremy what I was doing, Hope offered to help.

"With all that information you've got, I should be able to find him. Just tap into a few databases unless…" She looked at me. "I don't mean to jump in."

"No, I'd appreciate it."

As I said it, I realized I meant it. Like Eve said, we all have our specialties. Finding people wasn't mine.

"I'd love to see how you do it, though," I said. "For next time."

"Sure." A watch-check. "I've got twenty minutes before a meeting, so I'll boot up my laptop, try a few things. Might not find him, but we'll try."

She'd just cleared a spot on the table when my cell phone rang. I answered.

"Speaking of meetings," I said after I hung up. "It seems I have one. Becky wants me back at the house and she sounds pretty tense." I glanced at Jeremy. "You stay. I'll grab a taxi."

"No, I'll go with you."

Hope paused with her finger over the power button on her laptop. "Should I wait on this?"

"Not on my account. If you get a chance to look, that'd be great. If not, we'll do it later."

HOPE'S ODOR exited at the rear of the building. As we passed the adjoining alley, Jeremy glanced down it. He tried to be discreet, but the flare of his nostrils told me it was no casual sweep of his surroundings.

I stopped and peered into the alley. "What's down there?"

"Nothing."

I stepped into the shadows. "I could have sworn I saw you looking down here earlier too, when we first arrived."

He hesitated, as if trying to decide whether to brush me off. "I was just…checking."

"Someone's following you, aren't they? Is it a werewolf?"

He walked over. "If that happened, I'd tell you, for your own safety. I'm just being cautious."

I wanted to press him, but he'd tell me if he wanted—and wouldn't if he didn't. Still, I couldn't resist walking another few feet into the alley, testing his reaction. But he didn't grab my arm or call me back. When I glanced over my shoulder, his face was relaxed, meaning there was nothing to worry about.

I took two more steps and glanced back. "Not going to follow?"

He smiled. "Sorry. I was just… watching."

"Ah. Enjoying, I hope."

"Very much, though I must admit, it's igniting a question I've been trying not to think about all morning."

"And that would be?"

He tilted his head, gaze traveling over me, still standing at the mouth of the alley, making no move to come closer. "Whether you're as… unencumbered by extra articles of clothing as you were last night."

I laughed, then turned to face him. "I'm afraid yesterday's outfit wasn't very undergarment friendly. This one is." I unbuttoned my blouse and spread it apart. "See?"

"I do."

"Sorry to disappoint."

His gaze stayed fixed on my raspberry demi bra, the lace thin enough to leave little to the imagination. "I wouldn't say
disappointed
is the word. Are there a matching pair of…" His gaze dropped below my hips.

"You don't expect me to show you that too. In a public alley? In the middle of the day?"

"Expect, no. Hope… ?" He smiled.

"Well, it would be hard to show you that. This skirt isn't easy to lift up. It's too tight."

"So I see."

"I'd have to take it off."

The smile twitched. "Pity."

I looked around. There was no sign of anyone. I reached around for the zipper—

My cell phone rang. Jeremy let out a curse as I answered it.

"Jaime?" Angelique said. "Has Becky called you? There's a meeting."

"Angelique," I said, with a glance at Jeremy. "Yes, she called and we're, ah, on our way."

"Oh, thank God. I think—" A sharp intake of breath. "I think I'm being kicked off the set."

"What?"

"Will came by my room and asked whether I'd made my plane reservations for home yet or would like him to do it. I said I didn't know what he was talking about and he wouldn't tell me, just apologized and hurried off."

"I'm sure he's mistaken. Or trying to spook you. Don't be surprised if Becky shows up in a few minutes, trying to bully you into agreeing to something—after he's scared you into thinking you're leaving. If she does, stall. I'll be there as soon as I can."

THE SHOOT was over. All of us were leaving.

Grady, Claudia, Angelique, Jeremy and I sat in the living room as Becky explained.

"Mr. Simon thinks we have more than enough footage for the lead-up bits," Becky said. "We'll film the Monroeseance live, as planned, but the preshow work here is done."

We stared at her.

"I had two interviews scheduled for tomorrow," I said. "I don't mind staying to do them—"

"Thanks, Jaime. Really. You're a trouper. But Mr. Simon wants everyone cleared out today."

"Today?"

I glanced at Jeremy, sitting silently beside me.

I turned back to Becky. "Aren't there more soances for us to film? You said there were six—"

"I'm afraid they just aren't going as planned, Jaime. Mr. Simon is pulling the plug."

In other words, we weren't giving the kind of reality TV footage they'd hoped for. I argued—we all argued—but it did no good. We'd had our chance.

"I hope you aren't telling us to pack our bags," I said finally. "I can't catch a flight to Chicago until tonight and I'm not going to sit around a terminal all day waiting."

"We have until the end of the day, I'm sure." Claudia's glare dared Becky to argue.

After a moment, Becky said, "As long as you're cleared out by sundown, because that's when the staff has been told they can leave."

WE WENT back to my room. Jeremy closed the door behind him and watched me getting out my necromancy kit. I double checked, making sure I wasn't missing or low on anything.

Finally I looked up at Jeremy. "I'm doing the raising now."

"I see that."

I studied his expression. Blanker than usual.

"You're wondering why I practically announced it down there, telling Grady and Angelique I'm going into the garden for a while."

"The question did cross my mind."

"I'm setting the stage," I said as I checked my supply my supply of vervain and hoped it would be enough.

Jeremy frowned. "Setting the stage for the discovery? I'm not sure that's—"

"Wise?" I finished. "Maybe not. But I'm trying to come up with something worthy of a television event. The spiritualist, summoned to the garden by the restless dead, uncovers their bodies. There's no way Todd Simon will shut us down after that. It'll add a whole new dimension to
Death of Innocence
. The show will go on and we won't need to leave before we've solved the mystery and freed the ghosts."

After a moment Jeremy said softly. "It could backfire, Jaime."

"Yep."

Another quiet moment, then, "It could cost you that TV show you want."

"I don't really want it anymore."

The words startled me at first. Then the sensation settled into one of relief, as I realized I'd given voice to a decision I'd been longing to make.

"I hate television," I said. "I don't need the added boost to sell tickets. So the only reason I have for pursuing it is self-satisfaction. To reach a goal I was raised to believe I should want, above all others. Well, I don't want it. These last couple of days I've hated it more than ever, because it was interrupting something I really wanted to do."

I looked up at Jeremy. "You said you like to help. So do I, but I've been fighting it all my life. Maybe I'm not very good at it. And I'm sure I'll never run around chasing down problems like Paige or Hope. But this is what I want to do—now, not five years from now, after I've had a TV show that I'll hate every moment off. Time to do what will make
me
happy: stage work and council work."

"Good." He smiled, then went sober. "But this could still damage your professional reputation."

"Yep. It could." I opened a small tin of grave dirt and sniffed it for freshness. "But what matters right now isn't the show or my reputation, it's the children. What's best for them is to have me here, close by, with all-hours access, working to free them. Whatever the cost."

"But you can do this without the premonition angle. You happened to be in the garden. You saw something sticking from the dirt. You alerted the guards who called the police. Their interviews alone will delay all plans to pack up today."

"Maybe. Maybe not. But giving this a spiritualist angle guarantees they won't pull the plug on the final show, which I suspect they're considering, despite all the promotion they've done. They'll back out and blame 'problems on the set'—meaning us. But if I find a body and claim it had something to do with spirit communication? The buzz will be too big for them to cancel it. Personally, I don't care anymore, but I feel… guilty, I guess. I'm responsible for getting us shut down, and now I may have ruined Angelique's big shot at stardom and Grady's chance to pick up a North American audience."

"We'll have to handle it carefully."

"I plan to."

OUR THEORY about this human magical group was that they were "scientists" of the occult world, trying and discarding various theories and practices, maybe latching onto a ritual or an ingredient that seemed to work, and experimenting until they found just the right combination, the one that did
something
.

As I prepared to raise a body, kneeling at my altar cloth while Jeremy and Eve kept watch, I pondered on how we—true supernatu-rals—weren't much different. There's no single way to raise a corpse. Every necromancer family has its way—one it swears is better than everyone else's.

Some use poppets—small dolls stuffed with hair or nail clippings from the target. The O'Caseys prefer a more complicated method, but one that doesn't require body bits.

As for the ingredients and invocations, again, they vary. Like spellcasters, we use what's been "proven" to work. As with spellcast-ers, there are those who say the whole thing is hooey—that we don't need to sprinkle grave dirt over a chalk symbol, we don't need to blow corpse dust to the four winds—that the power to raise the dead, as the power to communicate with them, is within us.

But we keep using what works. That doesn't mean we're too stupid and superstitious to try without the bits and bobs of ritual. This group had probably done the same—tried sacrificing an adult. Maybe it failed, as did our pared-back rituals. That could be psychology at work—at some level we're convinced we need ingredient X and therefore we fail without it. Or maybe I was thinking too much to avoid what I was supposed to be doing.

Paige told me once that her mother always said the main function of ritual was that it provided the spellcaster—or necromancer—with a gradual transition from the everyday world to the magical. That the act of concentrating on placing ingredients just so, on drawing symbols, on laying out tools and lighting censers was for focus, to release the brain from thoughts of shopping lists and luncheon dates. If that was the case, I'd probably never needed that refocusing more than I did this afternoon.

It wasn't thoughts of shopping lists cluttering my mind, but the horror of what I was about to do.

Raising the dead. If you're a religious person, you call it resurrection and it's a miracle. If you're a horror buff, it's Armageddon at the hands of a flesh-munching mob of shambling corpses. In truth, it's some of both.

Like miracle workers, we return the ghost—the soul—to the body, conscious and aware. So unless you raise a Hannibal Lecter, the person's not going to start eating brains. But the body is the dead one, the broken one, the rotting one, just like in a horror flick. So now the ghost is trapped, fully aware, in that broken and rotting corpse. Could anything be more horrific?

Yet every well-trained necromancer is taught to do this. Must practice even. Whether he or she ever chooses to raise a zombie, we know how, should we need that knowledge.

And now I did. To raise a child.

The Darkest Power

I BEGAN THE INCANTATION. Jeremy stood just past the nearest garden bed, watching for anyone coming from the house. Eve patrolled for ghosts, warning them off. I think Kristof was helping too, but I didn't see him; didn't see anyone.

As much as I tried to clear my mind, every sight, every sound seemed to vie for my attention. The poke and scrape of pebbles under my knees. A prop plane buzzing overhead. A fly walking over my chalk symbol. The sickly sweet smell of lilies. To me, they smell of funeral homes and death. Sweet yet off-putting, like the stink of rot.

Rot…

How long had these children been in the garden? How much had their bodies decayed? Were they even whole? What if they weren't and I'd return a soul to a partial corpse, one without arms, without legs, unable to fight to the surface, trapped under the earth as I sat, oblivious, listening to airplanes and watching flies—

Enough. Focus.

It took awhile, but I finally found a mental place without sights, without smells, feelings, sounds, even thoughts. Just me, commanding any nearby soul to return to its body.

A soft sound came to my left, so faint that I first mistook it for the rustle of a leaf. Then I heard Jeremy, softly calling my name.

I leapt to my feet and hurried toward the sound. Jeremy was walking toward a garden of rosebushes, moving fast, his gaze on a shifting patch of earth. Something small and gray darted back and forth as if pushing the dirt away.

Jeremy slowed. "Isn't that the spot where—?"

The ground erupted in a flurry of dirt. Even Jeremy reeled back.

"Raw—raw—raw—"

The garbled raucous cry echoed through the garden as the dirt continued to fly, the thing at its center moving so fast it was only a blur under the geyser of dirt. I saw something long and flat and broad, flapping against the ground. A wing.

The dead bird. The one Jeremy had uncovered and I'd reburied.

Once I realized what I was seeing, I could recognize all the parts— the eyeless head lolling, neck broken, one leg grabbing dirt, trying to find its grip, the other leg jabbing at the earth, the claws gone, wing beating frantically, trying to take off. The bird kept screaming in fear and pain, battering itself against the ground as it tried to make its broken body work. The stink of it filled the air, that horrible rotting—

"Jaime!" Eve's voice was harsh at my ear. "Send it back."

All I could do was stare at the bird.

"Goddamn it, Jaime. Send it back!"

I snapped out of it then, my lips flying in the invocation that would free the bird's soul from its body. The garbled screeching stopped and the tiny corpse fell to the earth, dirt raining down on its still form.

For a moment, nobody moved. Even Jeremy seemed shocked into speechlessness.

Life from death. The darkest power. In my hands.

After a moment, Jeremy moved in to clean up. He said something to me and I responded, but I don't know what I said. I walked past him, as stiff and unseeing as a sleepwalker. He caught my arm, tried to get me to stay, but I mumbled something—again, I don't know what—and kept going.

I walked back to my ritual setup and dropped to my knees. A rock jabbed into my shin hard enough to cut me. Warm blood welled up. I couldn't find the energy to wince.

"It's over," Eve said, from somewhere close. "Yeah, it was bad, but it's over and the bird's free and it happened so fast it probably doesn't remember anything."

She kept reassuring me that the bird was okay, but we both knew that when I closed my eyes, I didn't see a broken and rotting bird, screaming and flapping in terror. I saw a child. Until now, I'd only imagined what I intended to do to these children. Now I saw it, heard it, smelled it.

"We'll find another way." Jeremy's voice, somewhere above me, his words drifting past.

Eve said nothing, but I could feel her tension as she held her tongue.

"We'll find another way." His voice was beside me now, as if he'd dropped to his knees.

"He's right," Eve said finally. "This was a bad idea—"

"No. I'm going to do it."

"You don't need—" Jeremy began.

"Yes, I do." I followed the sound of his voice, forced my gaze to focus and saw him crouched beside me. "This time I'll release the soul as soon as we see something. We don't have time to back off now and do more research. Better to—" I swallowed, "—just do it and do it fast."

Jeremy hesitated, then nodded. "Would you like me to go? Leave you be?"

"No." I met his gaze. "Please don't."

So, with him beside me, and Eve scouting, I began again. My heart beat so hard I could scarcely breathe. When I closed my eyes, I saw the bird again. Every time a child's ghost touched me, I jumped, as if in guilt.

"Take some time," Jeremy murmured. "Everyone inside is busy packing. No one's going to bother us."

When I couldn't relax, Jeremy tried distracting me with a story from his youth. Any other time, I'd have hung on his every word, sifting through the tale for insight. But, even though his story took place in his late teens, it made me think of childhood. Of the children. And underscoring his words, I heard them whispering.

As I leaned forward, sweat dripped onto the chalk symbol. I picked up the chalk to fix it, but my fingers were trembling so badly I snapped the piece in two. Moving to grab the fallen end, I accidentally erased the chalk edge with my knee.

"Here," Jeremy said, reaching for the larger piece of chalk.

I managed a weak smile as he filled in the missing parts. "Now I'm a true celebrity necromancer. I even get professional artists to draw my symbols."

A joke weaker than my smile, so I didn't blame him for not smiling back. When I looked, though, he seemed not to have heard at all, but had withdrawn into his thoughts. After a moment, he lowered the chalk to the paving stones and drew something to the side of my ritual setup.

"Remember those runes I mentioned? The ones I see?" he said as he drew. "This is one of them. Not for protection, but for calming."

He finished the simple design, then took my hand and laid it on the symbol.

"Now, maybe these are just part of some secret code I found on a cereal box when I was a boy but—" He met my gaze. "I think—I feel—there's more to them than that."

And as I knelt there, his hand light and warm on mine, the rough stone beneath, the edges of the rune running past my ringers, I could feel the anxiety and panic seeping from me, as if drawn into the stone.

I began the incantation, my hands on the rune, his on mine, and the words flowed with a confidence I rarely felt.

The sound came quickly. The same soft noise I'd heard earlier. Coming from the same direction. My gut twisted, half bitter disappointment, half frustration.

"The bird again," I said as I pushed to my feet. "It's that damned bird. I tried focusing on a child, but—"

"Wait," Jeremy said. "Let's be sure before you release it."

We followed the sound to the same garden. I could see where Jeremy had reburied the bird, but the ground there was undisturbed. My gaze shot to a spot a few feet away.

"The cat?" I said.

But that patch of earth was still too. The whole garden was still. And quiet.

I glanced at Jeremy. "The sound. Is it gone?"

He shook his head and leapt into the thirty-inch-high garden as easily as if it had been a mere step up. He cocked his head to listen, then picked his way deeper into the hexagonal rose garden, following the sound straight to the center.

As he bent, I heard it again, faint, coming from the ground. I climbed onto the retaining wall, stepped into the bed and almost fell back as my pointed heels sunk into the soil. My arms windmilled, but I caught my balance before Jeremy scrambled to my rescue.

"Two words," Eve sighed behind me. "Sensible shoes. Preferably sneakers. Not pretty, but I swear, someday they'll save your life."

"I know. I know."

I took off my shoes.

"Can you stand watch?" I asked Eve as I walked up beside Jeremy.

"Kris has it covered."

In other words, she wasn't leaving. Probably expecting me to panic and screw up again. As I crouched, a high patch of earth shifted from a disturbance under the surface.

I raked back the dirt. Jeremy helped. Eve hovered. The garden seemed to go silent, no sound but the sifting and shifting of earth as we dug. The smell of damp earth soon came mingled with something danker, mustier—the stink of the grave.

I kept digging. Probably a dog or another cat, an older one, buried deeper, under more seasons of added soil, more layers of rotted vegetation. The family's designated pet cemetery, amid the roses, so their dearly departed wouldn't stink the place up.

I was scooping away a handful of dirt when a dark stone appeared at the bottom of the hole. Then it moved, jabbing upward. A long, dark claw. Another poked through. Then a third, the last only white bone. The long thin bone of a human finger.

"T-there," I said, lifting my hand to stop Jeremy. "Good enough. I'll send the soul back—"

"No," Eve said. "Dig a little more."

I swung around to look at her. "It's a hand. Even I can tell it's—"

"Yes, it is." Her gaze met mine, eyes cold and unreadable. "Keep going until you have the hand exposed—"

"It
is
exposed," I said, voice going shrill as I watched the fingers— bone and rotted flesh—reaching for the air. "That child is trying to dig his way out and I'm not standing back and letting it happen so we can have a whole body to show the police—"

"Then stop him."

"Stop—?"

Her gaze bore into mine. "Stop the child from digging and keep him calm. This will only take a minute, Jaime."

When I hesitated, she said, "Trust me."

I yanked my gaze away, closed my eyes and commanded the child to stop digging. That impulse to claw his way out was so strong, so deeply rooted, that zombies had been known to batter themselves to pieces trying to get free of a casket. And yet, when I gave the order, the hand stopped moving.

Again, for one moment, there was silence, Eve and Jeremy both staring at that still hand.

Here was the other side of that darkest power. Not only could a necromancer raise corpses, we could control them. Enslave the dead.

Looking at Eve and Jeremy, seeing awe on the faces of two of the most powerful supernaturals I knew, I realized it was more than just the darkest power. It was the most fearsome. The greatest power a supernatural could wield. Jeremy could tear his victims limb from limb. Eve could torture them with magic. But with death came release—unless I stepped in. Then death was only the beginning of the horror.

As I held the child still, murmuring words of comfort—mental and aloud—Eve knelt beside the hole. Then she reached in and took hold of the child's hand, fingers wrapping around the small ones as if she could reach through the dimensional barrier and touch them.

Her eyes had barely closed when her body went rigid. Beneath her eyelids, her eyes moved, twitching like someone dreaming. At a movement to my left, I looked to see Kristof had joined us, standing back but watching Eve, his face taut with worry.

"Her name's Rachel," Eve said, her voice tight, as if pushing words out. "Rachel Skye. She's eleven. She lives… no, I can't get that. An apartment building. A city. A busy street." A noise in her throat. "Not important. She's coming home from school. Taking the bad way. The one she's not supposed to take. But it's shorter and there's a TV show she'll miss if she takes the other way. She cuts through the alley. She hears something behind her. Something flies down over her head. Everything goes dark."

Eve pulled her hand back from the child's and crouched there, head bowed, hair falling forward to hide her face. Kristof moved up beside her, hunkered down and said something, too low for me to hear. A whispered exchange. Then he squeezed her hand and backed off.

Eve looked up at me. "That's all I get. Darkness, then she passed over."

I relayed everything to Jeremy, who'd been waiting patiently throughout, never asking for an explanation. As much as I longed to ask Eve what she'd done, I could tell I wouldn't get an answer. The what and how didn't matter. Only the results.

"So they probably drugged her or knocked her out," Jeremy said. "They kept her unconscious until they killed her. They're uncomfortable with what they're doing. They feel guilty."

"Cowards." Eve's face darkened, but she shook it off. "Hold on. I want to get this done so we can let her go."

She started again. Like Hope, she seemed to be experiencing a vision, getting her information that way rather than through questioning. Unlike Hope, though, this wasn't random flashes. She controlled the vision, as if guiding her way through the girl's memory.

The second foray added little to the first. Rachel had never regained consciousness after her attack. As she'd been losing consciousness, though, she'd heard a voice. A British-accented woman's voice telling someone else to make sure he grabbed Rachel's knapsack. In that command, she'd heard a name. Don. And that was all we had.