Beyond the Pale: A fantasy anthology (13 page)

Step by step, she fell back, while Mag hammered at her with things that
made no sense, many of which I could not even see. Each time, the rune-magic of
that axe defeated the attack— and each time, it seemed to cost her
something. A lightly singed face here. A long, shallow cut upon her newly-bared
arm there. And the runes, I saw, were each in different places on the axe,
being burned out one by one. Gard had a finite number of them.

As Gard’s heels touched the threshold of the saferoom, Mag let out a
howl and threw both hands out ahead of him. An unseen force lifted Gard from
her feet and flung her violently across the room, over my desk and into the
wall. She hit with bone-crushing force and slid limply down.

I faced the inhuman sorcerer alone.

Mag walked slowly and confidently into my safe room, and stared at me
across my desk. He was breathing heavily, from exertion or excitement or both.
He smiled, slowly, and waved his hand again. An unpleasant shimmer went through
the air, and I glanced down to see rust forming on the exposed metal of my gun,
while cracking began to spread through the plastic grip.

“Go ahead, mortal,” Mag said, drawing the words out. “Pick up the gun.
Try it. The crafting of the weapon is fine, mortal, but you are not the masters
of the world that you believe yourselves to be. Even today’s cleverest smiths
are no match for the magic of the fomor.”

I inclined my head in agreement. “Then I suppose,” I said, “that we’ll
just have to do this old school.”

I drew the 18th century German dragoon pistol from the open drawer
beside my left hand, aimed, and fired. The ancient flintlock snapped forward,
ignited the powder in the pan, and roared, a wash of unnatural blue-white fire
blazing forth from the antique weapon. I almost fancied that I could see the
bullet, spinning and tumbling, blazing with its own tiny rune.

Though Mag’s shadows leapt up to defend him, he had expended enormous
energy moving through the building, hurling attack after attack at us. More
energy had to be used to overcome the tremendous force of the claymores that
had exploded virtually in his face. Perhaps, at his full strength, at the
height of his endurance, his powers would have been enough to turn even the
single, potent attack that had been designed to defeat them.

From the beginning, the plan had been to wear him down.

The blue bolt of lead and power from the heavy old flintlock pierced
Mag’s defenses and body in the same instant and with the same contemptuous
energy.

Mag blinked at me. Then lowered his head to goggle at the smoking hole
in his chest as wide as my thumb. His mouth moved as he tried to gabble
something, but no sound came out.

“Idiot,” I said coldly. “It will be well worth the weregild to be rid
of you.”

Mag lurched toward me for a moment, intent upon saying something, but
the fates spared me from having to endure any more of him. He collapsed to the
floor before he could finish speaking.

I eyed my modern pistol, crusted with rust and residue, and decided not
to try it. I kept a spare .45 in the downstairs desk in any case. I took it
from another drawer, checked it awkwardly one-handed, and then emptied the
weapon into Mag’s head and chest.

I am the one who taught Hendricks to be thorough.

I looked up from Mag’s ruined form to find Justine staring at me,
frozen in the middle of wrapping a bandage around my second’s head.

“How is he?” I asked calmly.

Justine swallowed. She said, “He m-may need stitches for this scalp
wound. I think he has a concussion. The other wounds aren’t bad. His armor
stopped most of the fragments from going in.”

“Gard?” I asked, without looking over my shoulder. The valkyrie had an
incredible ability to resist and recover from injury.

“Be sore for a while,” she said, the words slurred. “Give me a few
minutes.”

“Justine, perhaps you will set my arm and splint it,” I said. “We will
need to abandon this renovation, I’m afraid, Gard. Where’s the thermite?”

“In your upstairs office closet, right where you left it,” she said, in
a
very
slightly aggrieved tone.

“Be a dear and burn down the building,” I said.

She appeared beside my desk, looking bruised, exhausted, and
functional. She lifted both eyebrows. “Was that a joke?”

“Apparently,” I said. “Doubtless the result of triumph and adrenaline.”

“My word,” she said. She looked startled.

“Get moving,” I told her. “Make the fire look accidental. I need to
contact the young lady’s patron so that she can be delivered safely back into
her hands. Call Doctor Schulman as well. Tell him that Mr. Hendricks and I will
be visiting him shortly.” I pursed my lips. “And steak, I think. I could use a good
steak. The Pump Room should do for the three of us, eh? Ask them to stay open
an extra half an hour.”

Gard showed me her teeth in a flash. “Well,” she said. “It’s no mead
hall. But it will do.”

~

I put my house in order. In the end, it took less than half an hour.
The troubleshooters made sure the formorian creatures were dragged inside, then
vanished. Mag’s body had been bagged and transferred, to be returned to his
watery kin, along with approximately a quarter of a million dollars in bullion,
the price required in the Accords for the weregild of a person of Mag’s
stature.

Justine was ready to meet a car that was coming to pick her up, and
Hendricks was already on the way to Schulman’s attentions. He’d seemed fine by
the time he left, growling at Gard as she fussed over him.

I looked around the office and nodded. “We know the defense plan has
some merit,” I said. I hefted the dragoon pistol. “I’ll need more of those
bullets.”

“I was unconscious for three weeks after scribing the rune for that
one,” Gard replied.

“To say nothing of the fact that the bullets themselves are rare. That
one killed a man named Nelson at Trafalgar.”

“How do you know?”

“I took it out of him,” she said. “Men of his caliber are few and far
between. I’ll see what I can do.” She glanced at Justine. “Sir?”

“Not just yet,” I said. “I will speak with her alone for a moment,
please.”

She nodded, giving Justine a look that was equal parts curiosity and
warning. Then she departed.

I got up and walked over to the girl. She was holding the child against
her against her again. The little girl had dropped into an exhausted sleep.

“So,” I said quietly. “Lara Raith sent you to Mag’s people. He happened
to abduct you. You happened to escape from him—despite the fact that he
seemed to be holding other prisoners perfectly adequately—and you left
carrying the child. And, upon emerging from Lake Michigan, you happened to be
nearby, so you came straight here.”

“Yes,” Justine said quietly.

“Coincidences, coincidences,” I said. “Put the child down.”

Her eyes widened in alarm.

I stared at her until she obeyed.

My right arm was splinted and in a sling. With my left hand, I reached
out and flipped open her suit jacket, over her left hip, where she’d been
clutching the child all evening.

There was an envelope in a plastic baggie protruding from the jacket’s
interior pocket. I took it.

She made a small sound of protest, and aborted it partway.

I opened the baggie and the envelope and scanned over the paper inside.

“These are account numbers,” I said quietly. “Security passwords.
Stolen from Mag’s home, I suppose?”

She looked up at me with very wide eyes.

“Dear child,” I said. “I
am
a criminal. One very good way to
cover up one crime is to commit another, more obvious one.” I glanced down at
the sleeping child again. “Using a child to cover your part of the scheme.
Quite cold-blooded, Justine.”

“I freed all of Mag’s prisoners to cover up the theft of his records at
my lady’s bidding,” she said quietly. “The child was… not part of the plan.”

“Children frequently aren’t,” I said.

“I took her out on my own,” she said. “She’s free of that place. She
will stay that way.”

“To be raised among the vampires?” I asked. “Such a lovely child will
surely go far.”

Justine grimaced and looked away. “She was too small to swim out on her
own. I couldn’t leave her.”

I stared at the young woman for a long moment. Then I said, “You might
consider speaking to Father Forthill at St. Mary of the Angels. The Church
appears to have some sort of program to place those endangered by the supernatural
into hiding. I do not recommend you mention my name as a reference, but perhaps
he could be convinced to help the child.”

She blinked at me, several times. Then she said, quietly, “You, sir,
are not very much like I thought you were.”

“Nor are you. Agent Justine.” I took a deep breath and regarded the
child again. “At least we accomplished something today.” I smiled at Justine.
“Your ride should be here by now. You may go.”

She opened her mouth and reached for the envelope.

I slipped it into my pocket. “Do give Lara my regards. And tell her
that the next time she sends you out to steal honey, she should find someone
else to kill the bees.” I gave her a faint smile. “That will be all.”

Justine looked at me. Then her lips quivered up into a tiny, amused
smile. She bowed her head to me, collected the child, and walked out, her steps
light.

I debated putting a bullet in her head, but decided against it. She had
information about my defenses which could leave them vulnerable—and more
to the point, she knew that they were effective. If she should speak of today’s
events to Dresden…

Well. The wizard would immediately recognize that the claymores, the
running water and the magic-defense-piercing bullet had not been put into place
to counter Mag or his odd folk at all.

They were there to kill Harry Dresden.

And they worked. Mag had proven that. An eventual confrontation with
Dresden was inevitable—but murdering Justine would guarantee it happened
immediately, and I wasn’t ready for that, not until I had rebuilt the defenses
in the new location.

Besides. The young woman had rules of her own. I could respect that.

I would test myself against Dresden in earnest, one day—or he
against me. Until then, I had to gather as many resources to myself as
possible. And when the day of reckoning came, I had to make sure it happened in
a place where, despite his powers, he would no longer have the upper hand.

Like everything else.

Location, location, location.

DEATH WARMED OVER

~

by Rachel Caine

I hate raising
the dead on a work night.

My boss Sam
Twist knows that, and so it was a surprise when I got the email on a Monday,
telling me he would need a full resurrection on Thursday.

“Short
turnaround, genius,” I muttered. It took days to brew the necessary potions,
and I’d have to set aside the entire Thursday from dusk until dawn for the
resurrection itself. Not good, because I knew I couldn’t exactly blow off
Friday. I had meetings at the day job.

Sam, who ran
the local booking service for witches, was usually somewhat sympathetic to my
day job/night job balancing act, mostly because I was the best resurrection
witch he had—not that being the best in the business exactly pays the
bills. It was a little like being the best piccolo player in the orchestra—it
took skill, and specialty, and not a lot of people could do it, but it didn’t
exactly present a lot of major money-making opportunities.

Then again, at
least resurrections were a fairly steady business. Some of the other types of
witches—and we were all very specialized—got a whole lot less. It
was a funny thing, but so far as I could tell, there had never been witches who
could do what the folklore claimed; those of us who were real worked with
potions, not words. We couldn’t sling spells and lightning. Our jobs—whatever
our particular focus—took time and patience, not to mention a high
tolerance for nasty ingredients.

I contemplated
Sam’s message. If I’d wanted to, I
could
have turned down the job—I wasn’t hurting for money at the moment. Still.
There was something in the terse way he’d phrased it that made me wonder.

So was I taking
the job, or not? If I said yes, prep needed to start immediately after work. Part
of my mind ran through the things I was going to need, and matched it against
the mental stock list I always kept in my brain. The bowls were clean and
ready, I’d put them through the dishwasher and a good ritual scrub with sacred
herbs just a week ago. I’d need to put a fresh blessing on the athame. I had
most of the other things—rock salt, sulphur, attar of roses, ambergris,
and a whole bunch of slimier ingredients. I might be running low on bottled
semen, but the truth was, you could always get more of that.

I fidgeted in
my chair as I stared at the message. Sam wasn’t telling me much—just
timing and a dollar amount, which while considerable wasn’t enough to pay my
mortgage. On their own, my fingers typed my reply.
I might be interested. Who’s the client?

I rarely asked,
because most of the time that fell under need-to-know, and I didn’t. So long as
the client paid Sam, and Sam paid me, we were all good. But this time—this
time I felt like it was worth the question.

I went back to
my regular work—tonight, that meant straightening out a worksheet the
experts in accounting had completely trashed—and was a little surprised
when Sam’s emailed reply came so quickly. Then again, it was a short answer.

P.D.
Police Department.

My hackles went
way up. The police didn’t part with their money willingly for resurrections. The
testimony of the resurrected had been thrown out as inadmissible five years
ago, and the land-office rush for witches to bring back the dead had dried up
just as fast. Some of the richer cities still managed one or two resurrections
a year for particularly cold cases, just to generate leads, but I hadn’t seen
one in Austin for a while.

 
So if the Thin Blue Line was knocking,
something was up, and it was big. Very big.

Why?
I wrote back, and hit SEND.

It didn’t take
long to get my answer. Four minutes, to be exact, give or take a few seconds,
until my cheery little
you have mail
chime dinged.

They need a disposable
, he wrote, and
this time, I sat all the way back in my chair. And rolled my chair back from
the computer.
Tried to talk them out of
it. Told them you wouldn’t want in. You can pass on it, H.

In technical
terms, a disposable is a long-term resurrection—counterintuitive, but
that’s police parlance for you. Most resurrections last no more than a few
minutes, maybe an hour—you really don’t need that much time to do
whatever needs to be done. It’s mainly finding out the name of their killer, or
where they stashed the family silver, or where the bodies are buried if your
deceased soul is the one who buried them in the first place. Holding them
longer is brutally hard, and gets harder the longer it goes on. When a police
department requests a long-term resurrection, it’s almost always specific—there’s
a situation that requires a particular person to resolve, or a particular
skill. When the cops ask for a disposable resurrection, well, you know it’s
going to be bad.

I knew it
better than anyone.

I typed my
reply back in words as terse as Sam’s had been to me.
Bet your ass I’m passing.

I hit send,
feeling only a little wistful twinge of regret at all that virtual money
disappearing from my future, and began to shut my computer down.

I’d just picked
up my purse when my cell phone rang, and I wasn’t too surprised when the
screen’s display told me it was Sam.

“Hey,” I said,
shouldered my bag, and headed for the elevators. “Don’t try to talk me out of
it. I don’t do disposables. Not anymore.”

“I know that,”
Sam said. He had a deep, smoky voice, the kind that implied a
cigarette-and-whiskey lifestyle. I didn’t know that for sure; for all I knew,
Sam might have lived prim as a preacher. Sam and I didn’t exactly hang out; he
kept himself to himself, mostly. “Not trying to talk you out of it, H., believe
me. I’m glad you turned it down.”

“Shut up,” said
a third voice, male, grim, and completely unfamiliar.

“Who the hell
is
that?
” I blurted. “Sam—”

“Detective
Daniel Prieto.”

“Sam, you
conferenced me?
” He’d never put me on
the spot before.

“Hey, they’re
the cops. I got no choice!”

“Hear me out.” Prieto’s
voice rode right over Sam’s. “I’m told you’re the best there is, and I need the
best. Besides, you have a prior relationship with the—subject.”

My mouth dried
up, and I stopped in mid-stride to lean against the wall. A few coworkers
passed me and gave me curious looks; I couldn’t imagine what was on my face,
but it must have been both alarming and offputting. Nobody stopped. I tried to
speak, but nothing was coming out of my mouth.

“Holly? You
there?” That was Sam. I could still hear Prieto breathing.

“Yeah,” I
finally managed to say. “Who?” Not that there was really much of a question. I
only had a
relationship
with one dead
man. He was the only disposable I’d ever brought back.

And Prieto,
right on cure, said, “Andrew Toland.”

I felt hot and
sick, and I needed to sit down. Never a chair around when you need one. I
continued walking, slowly, one shoulder gliding against the wall for balance. “Sam,
you can’t agree to this. You can’t let them do it again. Not to him.”

“What can I
say? I’m just the dispatcher, H. You don’t want to take it on, that’s just
fine.” The words sounded apologetic, but Sam didn’t do empathy. None of us did.
It didn’t serve us well, in this line of work.

Cops had the
same problem. “I have to tell you, if you don’t agree, we’re still bringing him
back. It’ll just be somebody else running him. You said this Carlotta is next
on the list, right, Mr. Twist? She’s the one who recommended this particular
guy be brought back, right?”

“
Lottie?
” I blurted it out before I could
stop myself.
No. Oh, no.
Carlotta
Flores and I went back a long time, and not one minute of it was pleasant. In
resurrections, we prided ourselves on detachment, but Lottie took pleasure in
the pain that her resurrected souls felt; she
enjoyed
keeping them chained into their flesh. I’d reported her
dozens of times to the review board, but there was never any real evidence. Only
my own word for what I’d seen.

The dead can’t
testify.

It was her
fondest wish to run a disposable, and it was the very last thing she should
ever do.
God, no.
The idea of letting
her handle Andrew’s resurrection was more than I could take.

Detective
Prieto somehow knew that, but then again, I supposed he’d done his homework. He’d
probably gotten it from Sam, the chatty bastard.

“That a yes,
Miss Caldwell?” Prieto asked. Sam was distinctly silent.

“Yes,” I
gritted out. “Dammit to hell.”

“Right. Let’s
get to business. City morgue, Thursday at dusk, you know the drill. Come
loaded, H.” Sam was back to brisk and rough again, his brief moment of empathy
blown away like feathers in a hurricane.

“Send me the
details.” I sounded resigned. I didn’t feel resigned. I felt manipulated,
defeated, and enraged.

“Will do,” Sam
said. I heard a click. Detective Prieto had signed off without bothering to say
goodbye. “Better you than Lottie, I guess. Though look, if you just don’t show
up, what’re they going to do? Arrest you?”

“They’ll let
Lottie do it instead. You know I can’t let that happen, Sam.”

“Kind of
guessed, yeah.”

“Why
him?
God, Sam—”

“Don’t know. Lottie
had some kind of chat with Prieto, next thing I know, he’s telling me it’s
Toland he needs. Maybe Lottie told him about how tough the son of a bitch was. Is.”

Maybe Lottie
just wanted to yank my chain. Equally possible.

“Holly? Sorry
about—”

“Yeah. Whatever.
See you.” I folded up the phone. I couldn’t take any more of Sam’s vaguely
false apology. He knew my agreement was final. You don’t become a witch making
false promises. The stakes are far too high.

I must have
punched the elevator buttons properly, because next thing I knew I was in the
lobby, walking toward the parking garage. I couldn’t feel my feet, and wherever
my head was, it wasn’t a good place. I went to the car on autopilot, got
inside, and bent over to rest my aching, sweating forehead on the steering
wheel.

My name is
Holly Anne Caldwell, and I’m a licensed seventh-generation witch, with a
specialty in raising the dead.

And I wished,
right at this moment, that I was one of them.

~

I buried myself
deep in prep work. It took up most of my nights, and I sleepwalked through my
day job until Thursday.

Late Thursday
afternoon, I went to raise the dead.

I knew the way
to the morgue all too well. I had a parking pass, and the guard at the door
knew me by sight. He still checked me against the list and opened up my heavy
case to check the contents. All above board, along with my certification papers
from the State of Texas. I’d dressed professionally—a nice dark suit,
very funeral home-friendly, with sensibly heeled shoes. Moderate makeup. Light
perfume.

It helps,
because I do run into the odd person who still believes witches come with green
faces, cackling, and cauldrons.

The guard
hooked me up with a temporary ID badge and escorted me back to the—excuse
the phrase—guts of the morgue, which always reminded me of a large-scale
industrial kitchen, with all the chrome work surfaces and sharp instruments
neatly arrayed on racks. Once there, he checked with the coroner’s assistant,
then backtracked me to a room that was normally used for family viewings. Nobody
had bothered to dress it out for this occasion, so it had a certain creepy
sterility to it that unsettled me.

Detective
Prieto unsettled me, too. He was about my father’s age, stern and possessed of
one stony expression as far as I could tell. He didn’t like me, and he didn’t
like what he was doing. He gave me the paperwork, I read and signed, and he
checked all of my credentials again before leaving the room to standing in the
viewing area.

I pulled the
sheet back on the corpse and there, lying pale and still in front of me, was
Andrew Toland.

He looked damn
good, for having been born in 1843, and especially since he’d died in 1875. By
rights, I should have been looking at a skeleton, not a fresh corpse—like
last time we’d been through this, another witch had produced a copy from his
genetic template. It was known as a homunculus, in the trade. How such things
were made was a closely guarded secret, although I knew the body would contain
some kind of tissue or bone from the original corpse to hold the link. I
wouldn’t have known how to begin to conduct that kind of operation, but then
again, the witch who’d made the mortal clay couldn’t have breathed life into
it, either.

Specialists.

I’d been here
before, in this very room, with Andrew. One year ago, almost to the day—my
first disposable. I’d been nervous, and excited, and thrilled at the prospect
of meeting the man who’d made history. I hadn’t been prepared, then, for the
idea that I would
like
him.