Dead Lucky (2 page)

"Yeah, its definitely your radiator hose," Charles said, pointing at the new cracks surrounding the duct tape that had been holding it together. "I can see you took the cheap route to patch it. Where'd you say you drove from again?"

Charles was an orc, seven feet tall and hunched, with thick, slightly greenish tinged skin that gave his particular class of new humans, the 'leathers' their moniker. He was also the first mechanic I found after the van bit it, about eight blocks away from his shop near the north end of town. He was wearing a baseball cap large enough to wrap around his massive, round head, and a cigarette dangled between his lips.
 

I tried not to be a racist asshole, but I hated orcs, and Charles in particular. First, all orcs were immune to cancer. Of any kind. Second, he was flaunting it.

Beggars couldn't be choosy, so I grinned and bore it. I needed him to fix the van, and that was it. "How long?" I asked.

"Have to make a few calls around town, see if I can get a spare, or find a user who can fuse everything back together. A day, maybe?"

I could live with a day. "How much to tow it to the shop?"

He grinned, his bottom teeth poking up over his upper lip when he did. "No tow. I'll get my brother, we'll push it. No problem, no charge."

"Keys are in the ignition. Let me grab my companions and she's all yours."

"You got a number I can reach you at?"

"I'll stop in tomorrow."

He shrugged. "Suit yourself."

I left Charles at the front of the van and circled around to the back. Dannie was waiting for me there, wearing a long coat that was sure to be hiding a fair amount of ordinance. Evan was sitting on the deck next to her, in a long duster, hoodie, jeans, and boots that hid as much of his rotted corpse as could be managed.

"Not a word," I said to him. "You armed?"

I could just barely make out his dead eyes beneath the shadows. It was balls hot and humid here, and the heavy clothes were going to draw attention.
 

Not as much as a dead S.W.A.T officer moving under his own power.

He pushed aside the duster, showing off the pair of handguns in a shoulder holster beneath his arms, and the strap of the Bushmaster over his shoulder. "Better hope the cops here are either blind or as stupid as you."

I could feel the thin thread of magic between us, the line that kept him up and running, and allowed me to control him despite the fact that he hated my guts. I pulled lightly, to remind him who the boss was.

"Not my first choice to bring you along, but the coolers don't lock and I can't have Charlie over there stumbling across your remains."

"Whatever."

"So, now what?" Dannie asked. She hopped off the deck and put her hand on my shoulder. "Any ideas?"

I closed my eyes, listening to the sound of the fields pulsing and thrumming. No voices. No instructions. Something had brought me here. "Not yet. Maybe once we get a little further into the city. Evan, grab the bag."

"What do I look like, a fucking mule?"

"Yes. Grab it."

It wasn't like he had a choice. He reached back into the van and picked up the tote. Once it was clear I slammed the doors shut.

"Tomorrow," I said to Charles as we walked past. He grunted and watched us go. I could almost feel the heat from his brain while he tried to figure us out.

It only got hotter as the sun made its way across the sky, the earthen walls doing a great job at blocking the fetid air from an easy escape. I was wearing my own light trench and hoodie, my standard garb to try to hide how shitty I looked, and I could feel the sweat running along my bald scalp and down the back of my neck.

We moved further into the city, tracing Ridgelake into Metaire. We got a lot of looks as we walked, mostly sidelong glances and stares from people in tanks and short-shorts, short-sleeves and sundresses. I would pause every few blocks and trace the magical fields, feeling them grow and shrink with the geography, and hoping for some kind of clue as to what the fuck I was doing.

I had been crazy to come here. This whole thing was crazy.

Dannie put her hand on my shoulder, breaking me out of my head. "Conor, we need to get Evan inside. We look funny enough, and he's starting to reek."

Reanimating the dead didn't do anything to stop the rotting. That's why I had the coolers. "Yeah, shit. We need to get him to a freezer. Are there any hotels nearby?"

She pulled out her cell and started tapping. She pointed a minute later. That way. The Jambalaya."

"I thought that was a food?"

"It's also a hotel."

I nodded, taking a second to cough a bit, which drew even more attention.
 

"The Jambalaya it is."

CHAPTER FOUR

The voodoo that you do.

The Jambalaya turned out to be a 'mixed' hotel, which meant it did its best to cater to both classic and new human. Mainly, it meant larger doors, higher ceilings, and a more diverse menu, but it also meant being the only classic humans in the place.
 

Segregation was alive and well in the new world. It just looked a little different now.

Another orc was manning the front desk, a female with a massive barrel-chest and a huge laugh that echoed across the whole lobby. She was friendly enough, her eyes watching every move I made during the check-in process. It was clear she didn't trust us, but who knew if that was because we were classics, or because we looked like we were going to rob the place.

I had to stay close to Evan to hold the tether and keep him up, so Dannie made the trips from the ice machine on the sixth floor to our room on the eighth. It took about twenty to get the bathtub filled.

"Time to go back to sleep," I said, directing Evan to disarm. I thought about having him disrobe too, but it wasn't like he had any body heat to melt the ice.

"Fuck you," he snarled, pleasant as always. He glanced over at Danelle and did his best lipless smile. "Fuck you?"

"It's a muscle, Evan," Dannie said, looking down.

"So?"

She raised an eyebrow.

"My secret shame."
 

"Goodnight, Evan."

He walked into the bathroom and climbed into the shower. I broke the connection the moment his head touched the porcelain, and then proceeded to cough up a storm while Danelle covered him in ice.

"Maybe I shouldn't have brought him," I said once the hacking was done. "I feel like shit."

"You look like shit. You don't know what we're dealing with. Hell, you don't even know where we're going. Having an undead soldier can't hurt."

"It does hurt."

"You know what I mean."

"I'm sorry I dragged you here."
 

"Like you could drag me anywhere."

I laughed at that. "Yeah, well, I'd feel better if I knew what the fuck I was supposed to do. Anyway, thanks for coming, and for accepting this whole insane idea to begin with."

"Somebody has to look out for your boney ass."

"You used to like my ass."

"That was before it was boney."
 

She slapped me on the rear and went over to the tote. "Let me do a little digging, see if I can come up with any recent House activity in the area, or anything that might give us an idea of what we're looking..."

She paused. Not just speaking. She stopped. Completely. A second later, her arms moved out to her sides and sat there, as though she were a marionette and the puppeteer had just racked her.

"Dannie?"

The door was supposed to be magnetically secured, accessible only with a card key.
 

It swung open.

Hesitation meant death for ghosts like Dannie and me. I had a gun in hand before I could see the person behind the door, and I started shooting the moment a dark head came into view. I could feel the changes in the thrumming and pulsing of the fields at the same time the bullets swung wide of their course, sending chips from the wooden doorframe.

"That's no way to treat a visitor."
 

She was an exquisite beauty. Young and thin, a narrow face with high cheekbones, and the blackest skin I had ever seen. A tattoo of a white snake wound across her bald scalp, the head falling down to the bridge of her small nose. She walked into the room as though she were a queen, her head raised high and a long white dress trailing on the floor behind her.
 

"Who are you?" I asked, the gun still trained on her. She was a user, though I wasn't sure what kind. She could redirect bullets, which could have made her a metallurgist, or an elementalist.

 
"My name is Marie," she said, her voice carrying a cajun drawl. Her light green eyes flicked over to where Dannie was hanging, frozen. "I came to talk."

"Did you do that?" I asked.

"My associate. He's waiting in the hall."

I looked past her. I didn't see anyone.
 

She smiled, her white teeth such a contrast against her skin that she reminded me of a Cheshire cat. "They can't slip bullets."

"How did you know I was going to shoot first?"

"A necromancer? It would have been a shock to me if you didn't."

"Necromancer?" I didn't like to admit what I was. Necros were the black sheep in the world of magic. Most users considered it fortunate that our life expectancy was normally measured in weeks.

She kept smiling. "You can play dumb if you wish. As I said, I came to talk."

"What about?"

"Why are you here?"

I wasn't about to tell her I heard a voice through the aether. "We came down for a job."

She walked towards me, her hips rocking with each step. Every part of her flooded sexuality. The fact that it did nothing for me only convinced me my better days were definitely long gone.
 

She stopped in arm's reach, holding her hand out and stroking my chin with her finger. "What kind of job?"
 

I lowered the gun, tucking it back into its holster beneath my arm. She'd already proven its ineffectiveness.

"You didn't come to ask me questions. You came to talk. So, talk."

She put her whole hand against my face. It was soft and cool to the touch.
 

She slapped me. "Have some manners."

I fought not to flinch at the sting, instead keeping my eyes on her. "You're the one who broke into my room and is holding my associate."

"I would have held you, too, but the voodoo doesn't work on users."

"Voodoo?"

She ran her finger along the head of the snake tattoo. "I know why you're here, necromancer. I wanted to know if
you
knew why you were here."

I didn't know anything about voodoo. That it had power, magic... I was a believer. The shift had brought a lot of old traditions back into play. Shamans, medicine men, witches. It all came from the fields. It all came from users. Everything else was just detail.

"You called me." I was ninety percent sure.
 

Her head bobbed. "Not me. Mother. She told me when you got into town. She sent me to you. We have a job for you."

A job? "You could have gone through the standard channels."

She laughed, a deep, throaty, sexy laugh. "There are no standard channels for necromancers. Would you like to know how many there are?"

I knew we were rare. It had to do with the fact that we tended to die before we could ever get much of a hold on how to use the magic. "How many?"

"Two, as of this morning. Two, in all the world."

"I feel special."

"You are. That's why Mother called you."

"Is she the head of a House?"

Nobody knew who the wizards that ran the Houses actually were. All anybody knew was that it was a huge mistake to cross them and get caught.

The laugh again. "No. The furthest thing. They'd like to take us. Take the power. We hide from them the best we can."

"Good plan. So, you have a job? What is it?"
 

"Olivier Despre is the real estate magnate responsible for a good part of the New Orleans restoration and modernization project. Almost all of the tall buildings you see when you look out the window belong to him."

I glanced past Danelle's frozen form to the window. I could see two tall buildings across the street, close enough that they blocked the rest of the view.
 

"He's also a voodoo lord. He's a master of the arts, using his spells to subjugate the city government, to win building contracts, change laws to his favor, you name it. Once, he was married to Mother. Now, they are rivals."

"You called me down here to play marriage counselor?"

Her eyes narrowed and burned. "Don't be a fool. We don't need a necromancer for that." She stepped away from me. Was she shaking her hips like that on purpose, or was that just the way she walked? "Mother and Olivier had a... disagreement. Olivier left the estate that same night. He took something with him when he did."
 

She reached into the bosom of her dress, retrieved a folded up old Polaroid from it, and held it out to me. I took it and looked at the faded image. A pair of dice. They looked old, really old, carved from ivory or bone of some kind. They were concave, each side tapering in towards the center, where faint red marks were painted onto the face. One resembled a flame, the other two straight lines with a cross through the bottom, like a pair of swords.

"Dice?"

"From before the Leschamp. From the last reversal. Olivier stole them from Mother. We've tried to get them back on our own. We can't."

"Why not?"

"Olivier owns a casino in the French Quarter, the Oubliette. It isn't exactly legal, but as I said, he has the city in his pocket. He created a game similar to craps, a game which uses a pair of dice to determine the winner. He claims it is the game that the old humans created during the reversal." She smiled and shook her head. "He's full of shit. He designed the game as a joke, a tease, a slap in the face."

"Can you get to the part that has to do with teasing me down from Chicago?"

"He has twelve tables. Each table has four pairs of dice, so they can be swapped in and out in order to help... massage... the odds. The dice are painstakingly exact visual replicas of the ones he stole. Forty-eight pairs. Only one can be the real thing, or maybe none are. Olivier's pleasure comes from the fact that we don't know. We can't know. Only a necromancer can identify them."