The Collected Christopher Connery (4 page)

By the time Gail and Arthur burst into the kitchen, the
floor was already slick with blood.

“Nia!” Arthur cried, catching himself on the edge of the
table as he slipped in a red puddle.

“Get back!” she replied in a sharp, commanding voice.

The woman in the floral nightgown was slumped against the
counter. Her hair had fallen half out of the curlers to hang in clumps around
her face. Her head twisted toward Gail and Arthur as they entered the kitchen.
Her eyes – brown eyes, Gail saw, like the boy’s – stared blankly at them as her
lips moved slowly in some silent word. 

Nia, picking herself up from where she had fallen in the
corner, brushed off the front of her dress and fixed the woman with a glare.
“How
dare
you?”

Startled by the hostility in her voice, Gail said, “She’s
not –”

“She knows,” said Arthur. “She’s talking to the
magician.”

“
What
magician? Connery?”

“Maybe. Whoever did this.”

The woman in the night gown lurched away from the
counter. As she faced Nia, Gail saw that her bathrobe had fallen open. The
nightgown underneath was soaked in blood, turning the pink and white flowers a
uniform crimson.

“Shit.” She could hear Arthur echoing her sentiments over
and over under his breath.

But Nia didn’t flinch. She knelt on the kitchen floor and
began running her fingers through the blood at her feet. All the while, the
woman stalked slowly toward her, her head lolling limply on her shoulder.

Gail grabbed for her gun, hoping it would be enough.
Sure, a bullet had put down the kid, but this woman was bigger and didn’t seem
to care nearly enough about the guts sliding out of her belly. She clicked back
the safety, but before she could fire, Nia said, “Don’t! I have everything
under control.”

“It doesn’t look it.” But the certainty in Nia’s voice
made Gail hesitate.

The magician continued tracing shapes in the spilled
blood, not lifting her head even as the woman loomed over her.

“Nia, hurry up,” Arthur said, voice tight with fear.

Count of three and I’m firing. One.
Gail’s finger
slid over the trigger.
Two.

“It’s done.” Sitting back up on her heels, Nia looked up
at the dead woman. There was no fear in her face, just sadness. “I’m sorry.”

The woman blinked her empty eyes, stretched out her hands
toward Nia’s face – then froze. She stayed standing for a moment longer, then
slumped down to the tile. Her eyes continued to stare at the ceiling until Nia
gently closed them.

Gail waited another few seconds then slowly lowered her
gun.

“What – what did you do?” Arthur asked, coming another
careful step into the room.

“Just a little dispelling magic,” Nia answered as she got
to her feet. “This spell wasn’t particularly strong, just ugly.”

That was one word for it. Gail knelt beside the dead
woman. Her eyes kept being drawn to the blood staining the flowers on her
nightgown. “So this was a trap.”

Arthur, who was looking dangerously queasy at this point,
stared at her. “What?”

“Someone was expecting us – or expecting someone anyway.”

“You’re right,” Nia said as she washed her bloodstained
hands in the sink. “The spell was designed to keep her acting normally until
she was triggered.”

“And she was triggered by us showing up?”

Nia nodded. “Or more precisely, she was triggered into
triggering herself. She was making tea when she broke a tea cup and cut herself
on a shard of porcelain. Then her stomach opened up.”

For a sheltered bookworm, Nia sure dealt with a
spontaneous disembowelment with more serenity than Gail would’ve expected. In
fact, she seemed to be handling it better than Arthur, the resident doc. “Are
you sure you’re all right?” She noticed the question came out sounding more
accusatory than concerned, but fuck it, really. “Most people would be a bit
shaken after seeing something like that.”

Nia looked back at the dead woman as her hand brushed
across the flame on her lapel. “I’ve seen worse.”

“There were at least two others,” Arthur said before Gail
could ask the obvious follow-up question. “A man and a little boy.”

“A child?” Nia breathed with what Gail finally considered
an appropriate amount of disgust.

Arthur nodded. “They both attacked us right away,
though.”

“They were deeper in the house. They probably weren’t
supposed to show themselves until –” She looked back at the woman – “after.”

With effort, Gail pushed the horror of what she had just
seen to the back of her mind.
It’s just another crime scene,
she told
himself.
All at once, several things occurred to her. “So this was a
trap, but who was it set for? It was only luck that you noticed it.” She looked
at Arthur. “That you both noticed it.”

Arthur made a face. “It would have been hard not to. My
magic sense isn’t as good as Nia’s, but even I knew something was wrong
straight away. Any magician would have.”

“So the trap was likely set for ‘any magician’ then.”

“That seems obvious,” Nia agreed as she wiped her hands
dry on a dishtowel.

Gail got to her feet and looked at Arthur again. “You
said there was a man. Where was he? How did you get away from him?”

“He was in the basement. When I heard the scream I ran
straight to the stairs, but when I was going, I heard someone banging on the
basement door and thought maybe it was one of you. I opened it and –” He
hesitated for a moment and Nia pulled in a sharp breath.

“Arthur, you didn’t –”

“Nia, my magic is bound, remember? I couldn’t have used
it even if I tried to, which I didn’t, but I appreciate the show of trust,
truly.”

“There are examples of bound magicians who in moments of
great stress were able to – at any rate, I wasn’t accusing you of anything,
Arthur.”

Arthur’s eyebrow seemed to believe otherwise, but he
didn’t say anything more on the subject. “Anyway, I pushed him down the stairs.
I think he probably hit his head or impaled himself somehow. He didn’t come up
after me at least.”

Nia hummed thoughtfully to herself. “I should take a look
anyway to make sure the magic has been fully dispelled.” She shook her head
with a soft sigh. “But I should see to the child first, the poor thing.”

“He’s upstairs.” Gail thought of the kid lying motionless
on the carpet, a bullet in his half-decayed skull. “I’ll show you.” She didn’t
want to look at the kid again, but she couldn’t let Nia go alone, magician or
no. The boy had been a lot faster than the woman and if he got up again, he
might very well take her by surprise.

They were about halfway up the stairs when a loud
bang!
stopped them in their tracks.

Gail reached for her gun, but Nia held out a hand.

“Wait a moment, it may just be –”

There was another bang, this one accompanied by the sound
of splintering wood and the violent thud of running footsteps. Nia pushed Gail
out of the way, pulling a piece of paper out of her pocket just as a heavy-set
man dressed only in his underwear and a threadbare bathrobe charged around the
corner. His head had been caved in at one side, but that didn’t seem to slow
him down any.

Nia brandished the paper and shouted something.

The floorboards beneath the man’s feet undulated like
waves and he pitched forward, but as he fell he caught hold of Arthur’s coat
and dragged him down the stairs.

“Damn it.” Gail swung over the bannister and grabbed the
dead man by the shoulders. She pulled back hard, but the man kept fighting to
lock his bloody hands around Arthur’s throat.

Drawing back her arm, Gail slammed her elbow down on to
the back of the man’s skull. The bone gave a bit beneath the blow, but the man
didn’t seem to feel a thing.  

Somewhere beyond the stairs, Gail could hear the frantic
scrape of chalk on the floor, but Gail didn’t wait to see if Nia would finish
the spell in time. With no options left, she threw herself on top of the dead
man and used her weight to roll him off of Arthur.

Her left shoulder hit the floor hard. She tried to roll
right back to her feet, but the dead man was on her too fast, grabbing her hair
and slamming her head onto the floor.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Arthur turn on to
his side, coughing violently. Then the dead man put his hand over her face. As
she fought to get a knee up into his stomach, she felt warm fetid air on her
exposed throat.

Even a moment of panic would have meant a death that
would’ve made Connery’s look tame, but Gail didn’t make a habit of panicking.
Before the dead man could bury his teeth in her throat, she grabbed him by the
hair and yanked his head back. He twisted both arms back to claw at her hands,
which was just what she had hoped he would do. She took advantage of the tiny
bit of space this gave her to draw one leg up to her chest and kick the man
hard in the gut. He didn’t seem to feel pain, but the force of the blow knocked
him back far enough for Gail to get her feet under her again.

“Detective Lin!” Nia called. “Get down! I –”

But Gail didn’t intend to wait for magic this time. As
the dead man stumbled to his feet and charged her like a bull, Gail pulled out
her gun and put a bullet in his head. The man staggered, missing her and
hitting the banister instead. Ramming him hard with her shoulder, Gail sent him
sprawling to the floor.

“Here!” Nia cried from the stairs, almost bouncing as she
strove to get Gail’s attention. “Put him here!”

Gail looked up and saw that Nia had somehow managed to
draw a complex circle that ran up and down several steps.

Okay, so that was pretty impressive.

“Put him on here, so I can dispel the magic! Quickly,
before he gets up again!”

Nia’s urgency was not misplaced. The dead man was already
clawing at the floor with his fingers. Though he seemed to have momentarily
forgotten how to turn himself over, it probably wouldn’t be long before he
figured it out. With a growl, Gail leapt over his head and grabbed him by the
shoulders, dragging him toward the stairs.

Now, the body of a full-grown rather stout man wouldn’t
have been easy to drag up a flight of stairs at the best of times. And
considering this
body of a full-grown rather stout man was trying to
bite
her, this definitely wasn’t the best of times. Gail managed to get him up
two steps, only to almost lose her grip when he thrashed wildly and almost
slapped her in the face.

A moment later, Nia was beside her, grabbing one of the
flailing arms. Gail appreciated the thought, but she had seen Nia’s slender
wrists and doubted she would be much help in dragging two-hundred pounds of
squirming corpse.

As it turned out, however, the problem was quite the
opposite. Whatever spell made dead man’s body both mobile and homicidal
apparently hadn’t slowed the decaying process any and when Nia gave the arm in
her hands a particularly rough yank, it came off at the shoulder with a wet
pop.

Nia blinked down at the limb in her hand. “Oh.”

Then Arthur, apparently recovered from his throttling,
grabbed hold of the dead man’s kicking legs and shouted, “Lift him up!”

Gail obeyed, sliding her arms under the dead man’s back
and grabbin tight to the clammy skin. “All right, one, two, three – go!”

In just a few lurching steps, Gail and Arthur heaved the
dead man up on to Nia’s circle.

“Hold him down!” Nia commanded, which was a bit
unnecessary as the last thing Gail planned to do was let the angry dead man go.
Jamming her knees into his chest, she put as much of her weight on to the body
as she could without sliding down the stairs. Beside her Arthur was doing the
same. Gail could hear him swearing in disgust under his breath.

Dropping to her knees beside them, Nia murmured a few
word and tapped the dead man on the forehead with her chalk. Immediately the
body went slack, just a run-of-the-mill corpse again. Letting out a long
breath, Gail stood and shook out her aching hands.

Nia gently closed the man’s one remaining eye. “I’m very
sorry,” she said to him just as she had to the woman. “I wish we had gotten
here sooner.”

“There wouldn’t have been any magic to bring you here
sooner,” Gail reminded her.

“I – I suppose that’s true. Still.” Nia stood and went to
fetch the man’s arm, which had rolled down the stairs. She set it back against
the dead man’s shoulder then shrugged when Arthur gave her a questioning look.
“It doesn’t seem right to leave him – divided.”

Gail sat down hard on one of the upper stairs. “Speaking
of divided, you said this magic was Connery’s, right?”

Nia nodded. “Likely set up by a subordinate who stole his
spells.” She looked down at the dead man. “Though something this involved would
have required quite a few predrawn spells. More than I would have expected
anyone to have on hand.”

“I’m sure Connery stockpiled thousands of them,” said
Gail, feeling that old familiar mix of admiration poisoned by hatred she always
felt when she thought about Connery. “He was always well-prepared. Does that
mean that some of him might be here?”

Nia’s eyes brightened. “Maybe! Maybe they set up these
spells to stop us from finding him!”

Then Gail remembered. “The spell’s not all the way broken
yet.”

Arthur rubbed his eyes with one hand. “The boy.” He
coughed and pressed a hand gingerly to his throat. “Let’s hope he’s easier to
deal with than his father was.” Then he seemed to realize what he’d said and
shook his head. “This is nasty magic, Nia.”

“Some of the nastiest I’ve seen,” Nia agreed.

“That definitely sounds like Connery then.” Gail levered
herself to her feet. “We’d better go deal with the kid. Then we can take a look
around and see if Connery’s been stashed somewhere.”