The Nekropolis Archives (82 page)

  Edrigu grinned, displaying small rounded teeth that looked like two rows of ivory gravestones. "Sorry. That would be cheating."

  I thought that the Lord of the Dead would take his leave then, returning to the fireplace like some dark version of Santa Claus going back up the chimney. But instead he said, "I have something I wish to give you. A reward for the service you rendered to me, and indeed, to the entire city. Hold out your hand."

  I did so and an instant later a coin appeared on my palm. I held it up to my face to examine it. The coin was copper, incredibly old, its features worn so smooth that I couldn't make them out.

  I looked at Edrigu. "Don't tell me this is a tip."

  Edrigu smiled. "Of a sort, I suppose. That is one of Charon's coins. In Greek mythology, the dead have to pay Charon the ferryman to take them across the River Styx to the land of the dead. But once the coins have been touched by Charon they can be used to purchase a single day of life. You have but to grip the coin tight, wish it, and you will be become a living, breathing man for a single twenty-four hour time period. But be warned: you can only use the coin once, and afterward, you can never use another."

  I stared at the coin, unable to believe what Edrigu had told me. To be alive again, if only for one day…

  "I will take my leave of you now," Edrigu said. "As you might imagine, many tasks have piled up while I've been asleep that I must attend to, and of course my fellow Lords will undoubtedly soon be returning to their endless intrigues, and I must prepare to deal with them." He started to go, then paused. "One thing more. Just before I appeared, I overheard part of your conversation with Devona. There are many things a man might accomplish with one day of life." He gave me a knowing smile. "Including siring a child."

  The Lord of the Dead gave me a parting nod, turned, and walked back into the fireplace and was gone. I stared at the flickering flames for a moment and then I heard Devona say, "Well? Can you?"

  I remembered the last words she'd spoken before Edrigu had frozen her.

  A big commitment. Do you think you could handle it?

  I turned to see her frowning.

  "Weren't you just sitting next to me?" she asked.

  I looked at Charon's coin one last time before tucking it into my pocket and rejoining Devona on the couch.

  "To answer your question, my love, I think I can handle it just fine."

  She gave me a look filled with love and we kissed.

  You know something? I have a pretty good life for a dead guy. And thanks to Lord Edrigu – and the coin he'd given me – I had a feeling that it was soon going to get even better.

A SHORT STORY

ZOMBIE INTERRUPTED

I made my way down a sidewalk in Ruination Row, moving with a stiff-legged gait that was only a little faster than standing still. It had been a couple weeks since my last round of preservative spells, and I was overdue for a little freshening up. One of the nice things about being a zombie is that, when your bouquet begins to ripen, people give you a wide berth, so I didn't have to worry about shoving my way through the crowd of pedestrians. The Darkfolk that had come to patronize the less-than-savory businesses in the Row stepped aside as I approached, the Bloodborn and Lykes grimacing as their heightened sense of smell picked up my scent.

  "Goddamn deader," a genetically altered Lyke growled as I approached. She looked like a cross between a leopard and an alligator, and she snarled and elbowed me hard in the side as I passed her. The blow didn't hurt – I hadn't experienced pain since the day I became a zombie – but the force of it sent me stumbling sideways into an alley. I tried to keep my balance, but even when I'm at my freshest, I'm not exactly the epitome of grace, and I stumbled and fell into a pile of trash – which wasn't difficult to do since the alley was crammed full of the stuff. Besides the usual crumpled fast-food wrappers, discarded newspapers, cardboard boxes, and empty beer bottles, there were chunks of meat, splintered lengths of bone, and various disgusting-looking pools of liquid spread about that, one way or another, had probably been inside a body at one point. The stench had to have been horrendous, but my sense of smell is as dead as the rest of me, and I was rarely as grateful for that as I was right then.

  I rose to my feet with a series of stiff, jerky movements and brushed the worst of the muck off my gray suit as best I could. I contemplated going back out onto the street, tracking down the leopard-gator, and showing her just how much I appreciated her elbow to my ribs, but tempting as the thought was, I'd come to Ruination Row to do a job, and I didn't want to get distracted.

  Several weeks back I'd had a run-in with an ancient Bloodborn named Orlock who, it turned out, fancied himself as a sort of Darkfolk version of Noah. He'd spent the last few centuries gathering one-of-a-kind objects, animals, and in some cases people, and adding them to his already vast collection. Orlock viewed himself as a preservationist working to protect the Darkfolk's culture and history. I viewed him as a senile old vampire with more than a few screws loose, and I was determined to free those beings he'd imprisoned in his collection. Orlock was too powerful to take on directly, so I made a deal with him: I'd retrieve artifacts that he wished to add to his collection, and he'd pay me by releasing some of the people he'd captured. The number of people he'd let go each time depended on the rarity of the object I brought him, and I often had to haggle with him over my "fee". Of course, I reserved the right to pick and choose which jobs I'd take. I wouldn't acquire an object for Orlock just because he coveted it. But more often than not, the artifact he desired was insanely dangerous and in the possession of some less-thanupstanding citizen who intended to use the device to commit appalling acts of mayhem.

  Case in point: the Argentum Perditor.

  Silver is a controlled substance in Nekropolis. It's highly poisonous to any number of Darkfolk, but especially to Bloodborn and Lykes, and the only ones who can use it legally are those Arcane who need the metal as a spell component. But you can buy anything on the streets of Nekropolis that your black little heart desires – if you have the darkgems to pay for it, of course. There are any number of silver suppliers in the city, but the most wellknown is a man who calls himself the Silversmith. His true identity is a carefully guarded secret, and he only deals through intermediaries. Not even Orlock knew who he really was. But the ancient vampire knew one thing: the Silversmith was in possession of the Argentum Perditor, a mystic weapon that was like King Midas' touch, turning its targets into solid silver. And Orlock wanted it – bad.

  As far as I was concerned, Nekropolis would be better off if a weapon that powerful was locked away in Orlock's collection, and I'd spent the last few hours making inquiries around Ruination Row to see if I could get a line on how to contact the Silversmith. I wasn't sure how I was going to get the Argentum Perditor away from him once I found him, but I figured I'd worry about that later. Improvisation has always been one of my strong suits.

  So as much as I wanted to go after Leopard-Gator and put a few dents in her scaly hide, I was going to have to let her insult pass. Not only am I the city's only intelligent, self-willed zombie, I'm also its only private investigator – and once I accept a job, I keep at it until it's done.

  I started toward the mouth of the alley when I heard a loud buzzing behind me. I still have emotions, but I don't feel the physical effect of them, so I didn't experience a sick surge of adrenaline upon hearing the sound, even though I was pretty sure what it was causing it and the thought terrified me. I turned to see a cloud of small creatures the size of gnats rising from the trash, and I realized I'd must have disturbed them when I'd landed in their midst. The mass of creatures was so thick it looked like a black smoke, and my worst fear was confirmed: I was facing a carrion cloud. The cloud was the larval form of carrion imps, nasty little creatures that scour the alleys of Nekropolis on a never-ending quest for dead flesh to devour. The imps perform a useful function, I suppose, but considering that I
am
dead flesh, you can see why I prefer to avoid them whenever possible.

  But as bad as carrion imps are, their larval form is far worse. Carrion clouds are absolutely ravenous and they move fast as lightning when they sense a food source is near. Once they begin to feed, they can strip away every bit of meat from the bone within seconds. Even if I was at my freshest, I wouldn't have been able to outrun the cloud, and given my current condition, I knew I wouldn't be able to take more than a single step toward the street before the larvae were on me. There was only one thing I could do, and without pausing to consider the ramifications of my actions, I reached into my pants pocket and gripped an ancient copper coin, its features worn smooth by the long passage of time. I willed the coin's magic to activate and closed my eyes as the buzzing swarm of larva rushed forward to engulf me.

  A jolt of what felt like electricity surged through my body's dead nervous system, startling me. Normally all I can feel is pressure, as when someone or something is pushing against my body, but this level of sensation was so intense that it momentarily stunned me. I collapsed to my hands and knees, the carrion cloud still swarming around me, and as the electric sensation gave way to a gentle tingling all across my body, I wondered if what I was experiencing was the feeling of being eaten alive by thousands of ravenous insects. But then the buzzing sound grew fainter, and I risked opening my eyes.

  The carrion cloud had moved away and was slowly heading deeper into the alley. I stared at it for several moments because something seemed strange about the cloud, about the whole alley, really. Everything appeared sharper, colors richer, lines more distinct. It was like I'd been viewing the alley through a hazy sheen that had been lifted, and now I could see it clearly.

  As a zombie I don't need to breathe unless I want to speak, but right then I inhaled through my nostrils, and instantly regretted it as stench so thick you could take a bite out of it burned my nasal passages like acid. I was wracked by a sudden coughing fit so violent that I ended up retching, and if there'd been anything in my stomach to bring up, I'd have spilled it onto the alley floor and added to the noxious muck coating the ground.

  After a few moments, my coughing fit subsided, and I rose to my feet. My body moved with unaccustomed ease, and I felt so unbalanced that I nearly fell. I reached out to place a hand against the wall to steady myself, and I gasped as my flesh came in contact with brick. It felt cold and rough and solid, and the sensation was so intense that for a several seconds all I could do was gently rub the my fingers against the brick and marvel at how it felt. It was then that I knew for sure that the coin's magic had done its job. I was alive again.

  Magic isn't uncommon by any means in Nekropolis, but magic
this
powerful was rare indeed. The coin had once belonged to Charon, the ferryman who carried spirits to the afterlife in Greek mythology. It had been given to me by Lord Edrigu, master of the dead, as a reward for a service I'd performed for him. The coin could restore the dead to life for a period of twenty-four hours, but it was a one-time offer. Once the coin's magic was spent, the holder could never be granted life again, not from any source. So I was human again, and the clock was ticking.

  Keeping one hand on the wall to maintain my balance, and trying to breathe shallowly so the stench of the alley wouldn't induce another round of coughing, I reached into my jacket pocket and removed my hand vox and dialed Devona. Like a lot of homegrown machines in Nekropolis, voxes are flesh-tech, devices fashioned from organic material, and now that the nerves in my hands functioned normally, I was repulsed by the warm, soft feel of the vox. I could feel it throbbing gently, as if blood circulated through it, and I felt an impulse to drop the damned thing. But I held onto it and waited for Devona to pick up. But she didn't. Instead, I got her voicemail.

  "This is Devona Kanti, owner and proprietor of the Midnight Watch. I'm sorry to miss your call. Please leave your number, and I'll call you back as soon as I'm able."

  Once the vox's tiny mouth was finished recreating the sound of Devona's voice, it said, "Beep!" The vox's mouth exhaled gently as it spoke, and the feeling of its warm breath on my ear made me shudder.

  "It's me. I had to use Charon's Coin. I'll explain later, but I'm human now, and I'm on my way home."

  I disconnected and tucked the vox back into my suit jacket, glad to be rid of the thing. Devona was my partner, both personally and professionally. Normally she'd have come with me to Ruination Row to help search for the Silversmith, but she was a security expert, specializing in both the mundane and mystical aspects of the craft, and today she was helping to overhaul the wardspells for Diamonds are a Ghoul's Best Friend, one of the largest jewelers in the city. It was a huge account, and landing it had been quite a coup for her business. She was determined to do an excellent job for her new client, and I knew from experience that, like me, once she got her teeth into a job, she didn't let go until it was finished. So it was no surprise that she hadn't picked up when I called. She'd no doubt set her vox to silent mode, but she'd get my message eventually. And once she did, I knew she'd be thrilled.

  Devona and I had been together for a while now, and she longed to start a family. But as a zombie, I'm not exactly fully functional in certain key anatomical areas, if you know what I mean. Hard to father a child when there's no lead in your undead pencil. Another problem is that Devona is half vampire, half human. Normally her kind is sterile, like mules back on Earth. But with twenty-four hours of human life granted to me – along with the aid of a fertility charm created by Papa Chatha, the houngan who provided my preservative spells – we had a chance to conceive a child. But though I'd had Charon's Coin in my possession for a while now, I'd been hesitant to use it, and I'd only done so now in order to avoid becoming a meal for several thousand hungry imp larvae. So even though I'd just called Devona and told her I was headed home, I had mixed feelings about it.