The Urban Fantasy Anthology (29 page)

“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 sex 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 glasses of champagne. He handed me one.

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

Crap. 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 glasses on her face and stomped out the hall to her front door. No matter that most of the good transmutation 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 glasses. “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?”

And he gave her the answer she expected in return. “Something called Samhain’s Coven.”

Moira took a tighter hold on the door. “I see.”

It wasn’t really a coven. No matter what the popular literature said, it had been a long time since a real coven had been possible. Covens had thirteen members, no member related to any other to the sixth generation. Each family amassed its own specialty spells, and a coven of thirteen benefitted from all of those differing magics. But after most of the witchblood families had been wiped out by fighting amongst themselves, covens became a thing of the past. What few families remained (and there weren’t thirteen, not if you didn’t count the Russians or the Chinese who kept to their own ways) had a bone-deep antipathy for the other survivors.

Kouros changed the rules to suit the new times. His coven had between ten and thirteen members…he had a distressing tendency to burn out his followers. The current bunch descended from only three families that she knew of, and most of them weren’t properly trained—children following their leader.

Samhain wasn’t up to the tricks of the old covens, but they were scary enough even the local vampires walked softly around them, and Seattle, with its overcast skies, had a relatively large seethe of vampires. Samhain’s master had approached Moira about joining them when she was thirteen. She’d refused and made her refusal stick at some cost to all the parties involved.

“What does Samhain have to do with a werewolf?” she asked.

“I think they have my brother.”

“Another werewolf?” It wasn’t unheard of for brothers to be werewolves, especially since the Marrok, He-Who-Ruled-the-Wolves, began Changing people with more care than had been the usual custom. But it wasn’t at all common either. Surviving the Change, even with the safeguards the Marrok could manage, was still, she understood, nowhere near a certainty.

“No,” he took a deep breath. “Not a werewolf. Human. He has the
sight
. Choo says he thinks that’s why they took him.”

“Your brother is a witch?”

The fabric of his shirt rustled with his shrug, telling her that he wasn’t as tall as he felt to her. Only a little above average instead of a seven foot giant. Good to know.

“I don’t know enough about witches to know—” he said. “Jon gets hunches. Takes a walk just at the right time to find five dollars someone dropped, picks the right lottery number to win ten bucks. That kind of thing. Nothing big, nothing anyone would have noticed if my grandma hadn’t had it stronger.”

The
sight
was one of those general terms that told Moira precisely nothing. It could mean anything from a little fae blood in the family tree or full-blown witchblood. His brother’s lack of power wouldn’t mean he wasn’t a witch—the magic sang weaker in the men. But fae or witchblood, Alan Choo had been right about it being something that would attract Samhain’s attention. She rubbed her cheekbone even though she knew the ache was a phantom pain touch wouldn’t alter.

Samhain. Did she have a choice? In her dreams she died.

She could feel the intensity of the wolf’s regard, strengthening as her silence continued. Then he told her the final straw that broke her resistance. “Jon’s a cop—undercover—so I doubt your coven knows it. If his body turns up, though, there will be an investigation. I’ll see to it that the witchcraft angle gets explored thoroughly. They might listen to a werewolf who tells them that witches might be a little more than the turbaned fortune-teller.”

Blackmail galled him, she could tell—but he wasn’t bluffing. He must love his brother.

She only had a touch of empathy and it came and went. It seemed to be pretty focused on this werewolf tonight, though.

If she didn’t help him, his brother would die at Samhain’s hands and his blood would be on her as well. If it cost her death, as her dreams warned her, perhaps that was justice served.

“Come in,” Moira said, hearing the grudge in her voice. He’d think it was her reaction to the threat—and the police poking about the coven would end badly for all concerned.

But it wasn’t his threat that moved her. She took care of the people in her neighborhood, that was her job. The police she saw as brothers-in-arms. If she could help one, it was her duty to do so. Even if it was her life for his.

“You’ll have to wait until I get my coffee,” she told him, and her mother’s ghost forced the next bit of politeness out of her. “Would you like a cup?”

“No. There’s no time.”

He said that as if he had some idea about it—maybe the
sight
hadn’t passed him by either.

“We have until tomorrow night if Samhain has him.” She turned on her heel and left him to follow her or not, saying over her shoulder, “Unless they took him because he saw something. In which case he probably is already dead. Either way there’s time for coffee.”

He closed the door with deliberate softness and followed her. “Tomorrow’s Halloween. Samhain.”

“Kouros isn’t Wiccan, anymore than he is Greek, but he apes both for his followers,” she told him as she continued deeper into her apartment. She remembered to turn on the hall light—not that he’d need it, being a wolf. It just seemed courteous: allies should show each other courtesy. “Like a magician playing slight of hand he pulls upon myth, religion and anything else he can to keep them in thrall. Samhain, the time not the coven, has power for the fae, for Wicca, for witches. Kouros uses it to cement his own, and killing someone with a bit of power generates more strength than killing a stray dog and bothers him about as much.”

“Kouros?” He said it as if it solved some puzzle, but it must not have been important because he continued with no more than a breath of pause. “I thought witches were all women?” He followed her into the kitchen and stood too close behind her. If he were to attack, she wouldn’t have time to ready a spell.

But he wouldn’t attack, her death wouldn’t come at his hands tonight.

The kitchen lights were where she remembered them and she had to take it on faith that she was turning them on and not off, she could never remember which way the switch worked. He didn’t say anything so she must have been right.

She always left her coffeepot primed for mornings, so all she had to do was push the button and it began gurgling in promise of coffee soon.

“Um,” she said, remembering he’d asked her a question. His closeness distracted her—and not for the reasons it should. “Women tend to be more powerful witches, but you can make up for lack of talent with enough death and pain. Someone else’s, of course, if you’re a black practitioner like Kouros.”