12

  My boot was filling up with blood as I sat in the back of a bug with cream-colored seats, trying not to show it on my face. I’d had to slip my ruined shoe back on (after rushing to patch the hole with some chewed gum) when I saw the car and realized I wouldn’t be allowed inside otherwise.

  Adrian’s texts were blowing up my phone already—it hadn’t taken him long to cave to the guilt of keeping me out of the loop, I supposed—but I was trying to ignore them for now so I could concentrate on healing my foot enough that I could at least do a better job of pretending it was fine.

  It was hard enough to concentrate already with the cheery driver incessantly chatting, speculating on all the gruesome details of the crime scene she’d picked me up at. All she’d seen was some burned wreckage, and she was convinced someone had summoned a demon to open the gates of hell.

  At least she had yet to master the art of pausing after asking questions. She didn’t seem to expect me to say anything, and that was a small blessing.

  I closed my eyes and did my best to tune her out, focusing on the magic in me and around me. Once again, it felt weak. Like it always did during the day—maybe even a little weaker. I hadn’t eaten enough or slept in too long, I knew.

  But healing had always been easy for me. I should be able to do it without even seeing or touching the wound. I could feel it. Not just the pain, but the hole in my flesh. The disruption of order. The cells separated and dying, wanting to rejoin. The blood leaving my body unwillingly, wanting to be held in. Millions of cells calling out to me like lost little children, needing guidance.

  And I couldn’t help them.

  The magic wouldn’t listen to me.

  It was there—not a lot of it, but it was there. And it wouldn’t move. It wouldn’t change. It wouldn’t do what I wanted.

  I opened my eyes, frustrated, and the world was blurry. My cheeks were wet. The driver’s words were muffled and distorted in my ears.

  I’d always known this could happen. The magic isn’t mine. It had never been mine. I’d repeated that phrase like a mantra all throughout my childhood, forced to say it over and over because the coven leaders had known it would be impossible for me to understand otherwise. Once you could sense the magic, it felt like it was a part of you. Just as much as your skin, or your lungs, or your legs.

  But it wasn’t. And despite my having said the words so much that they had practically become a part of me, I had never really understood them until this moment. Until I’d tried to heal a basic wound of all things, on myself—the last thing I would have ever expected to fail at—and had the magic not obey.

  “Do you think they have hippopotamuses in hell?”

  The driver’s words crashed into me as the car lurched to a stop. When I looked up, I saw Baz’s mermaid statue staring at me from outside. “What?”

  “Hippos. You know, because no one knows if they’re really good or bad. One minute they’re all cute, slow and fat and eating grass, and the next minute they’re running you down and trying to eat you, and all you wanted was a picture for—”

  “No,” I said. Firmly.

  Finally, the driver paused. “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because there’s no such thing as hell,” I answered. “When we die, we’re just gone.”

  That shocked her into silence long enough for me to get out of the car and slam the door.

  It was an unpopular opinion, now that the world was filled with provable magic out in the open. Most people had taken this as confirmation there would be an afterlife, since it was the one magical thing so many had believed in even when they had no good reason to. No one wanted to be gone when they died. Even if it meant contemplating the possibility of going to hell.

  But I only believed in what I had seen with my own eyes, and throughout all the vampires and shifters and fae and djinn, and even fucking mermaids, I still had yet to see or hear of any ghosts. There were no necromancers summoning the dead, no fortune tellers holding seances—not real ones, at least. Which was part of the reason I needed so badly to figure out what had happened to Becca.

  Not only so I could bring her killer to justice, but so I could know whether it was really her I had seen in that god’s realm—her soul, possibly trapped for eternity, burning. If it was . . . it would be a big deal. And not one I would stand for.

  My phone buzzed again as I limped up to Baz’s door, and I pulled it out to see a string of texts from Adrian. He didn’t know how to get to the point, apparently. I scanned through to find the meat of what I needed to know, which was four messages up:

  Someone stole Becca’s body.

  Great. Another thing to add to the list of crazy I had to make sense of. What could anyone want with that charred corpse?

  I sighed. Realistically, this was actually a great lead. The kind of question whose answer could solve the whole case. But I’d never been a great detective. Sure, I’d taken classes in this kind of work at the Academy. But there was a reason I’d worked in security after graduation, and not investigation.

  My brain was excellent at assessing threats, preventing bad things from happening when they were right in front of me. But working out why crazy people would do crazy things? When there were this many misshapen pieces of the puzzle? With every new detail I learned about Becca’s case, I only felt more in over my head.

  I pushed my phone back into my pocket and rang Baz’s doorbell.

  This time, he opened the door instantly. And for the first time since I’d known him, I thought he looked a bit frazzled. Frantic.

  “Oh, birdie—thank the stars. Are you here to pick up the child?”

  “That bad, huh?” I asked, stepping in past him. “I always thought Noah was a good kid.”

  “He is, he is. Quite good. Better than good. But my aunt is . . . Well, it’s been a very, very, very long time since she’s had a child to care for, and her enthusiasm is . . . astounding.”

  “Good to hear he’s in enthusiastic hands,” I said. “But that’s not why I’m here.”

  Baz’s face fell, and he grumped over to the kitchen to make tea, almost like a puppet on strings. Open door, let in guest, make tea—a routine he probably hadn’t veered from in a millennium.

  I followed him, deciding to get right to the point. “I was just attacked by a palis.”

  That got his attention. He turned around and eyed me suspiciously, as if I was trying to pull one over on him. “Birdie, do you even know what a palis is?” he asked with disdain.

  Without responding, I sat down on the floor of his still-furnitureless kitchen and took off my boot. Blood dripped and smeared all over the tiles, and Baz almost dropped his tea kettle.

  “Not on the tile!” he shrieked, running over to me with a towel.

  He wiped up the floor frantically, then balled up the towel under my foot. Peering at it, he asked, “How under the stars did you manage to find a palis on this continent? And . . .” He paused, looking up at me with a bit of worry in his eyes. “How did you escape it?”

  “I sawed off its tongue and then removed its head.”

  Baz’s eyes got all big and round and buggy when he heard that, and he leaned in close to whisper in my ear, “Let’s not tell my Aunt Salma that, little bird. She doesn’t take kindly to people who dispose of our kind.”

  “It was sucking the blood out of my foot!” I yelled at him.

  “Oh?” Salma’s voice interrupted our argument. I looked up to see her standing in the doorway, her hand on her hip. “Did you encounter one of the creatures I brought over?” She walked closer and leaned over me, crouching down with more agility than a woman with her appearance should have. She pushed the dainty glasses up on her nose as she said, “I sold the last of them a few days ago, so I’m afraid I can’t be held liable for anything they’ve done since then.”

  At that point, Baz got up and shuffled out of the room, grumbling, leaving me alone with the cheerful old woman.

  “You . . . brought vampire-frog-men from the other side of the world and sold them?” I asked her.

  “Of course. That was the main reason for my visit. I was trapped in a teapot for ages and only recently freed, but all my assets were stolen in the meantime, so I needed to get back on my feet somehow.” She pressed her lips together and peered at me closer. “You aren’t DSC, are you? You have to tell me if you are—so you can’t act on anything I said without knowing.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m just a bartender. Former Guardian.”

  “Ah, so you must have plenty of enemies from your past, and one is obviously a client of mine.” She clapped her hands together and stood up straight again. “Maybe you’re in the market for some exotic minions of your own, to protect you? I’ve sold all the palis, but I have other—”

  “I think I’ll be fine,” I said, interrupting her. I really didn’t want to hear about all the other creatures she had apparently enslaved. The sweet grandmother persona that had captivated me at our first meeting was quickly falling away, and it was unsettling. Salma seemed to be just as unpredictable as her nephew. “Can you just tell me if you sold a palis to the Sweepers?”

  “Let me check.” She closed her eyes. A moment later, she opened them again and said, “I did, yes. What did you do to anger them?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  Baz shuffled back into the room then, his arms full with bottles and cloths of various shapes and sizes. He plopped himself down beside me and grabbed my bloody foot unceremoniously.

  “Now birdie, tell me—why haven’t you healed this yet? Please don’t say you intended to bleed all over my kitchen just to get my attention.”

  I eyed him carefully, wondering how he knew I could heal with magic.

  He knew I could infuse drinks because I’d shown him as a selling point so he would hire me as a bartender. But I kept my healing abilities very secret, and I didn’t think I’d used them for anything at all since I’d started working for him.

  “Ah, don’t worry, birdie, I won’t tell,” he said, picking up on my wariness. “One look at you and I can see very clearly all you can do. It’s part of what I am.”

  “I . . . tried,” I said simply. “It isn’t working right now.” That was the truth, and all I knew.

  He squinted at me and then clicked his tongue. “Oh yes, I see now. She’s angry with you.” He shook his head at me and then dove into the materials he’d brought, starting to dab my foot with a stinging liquid.

  “What? Who?” I asked, but he ignored me.

  “You really shouldn’t take for granted what you have, birdie. Play nice. Do what she wants. You’ll thank me later.”

  At that point, Salma chuckled. “It seems to be a recurring theme with you, yes? Angering people obliviously? You should probably learn to communicate better.”

  I clenched my teeth and breathed out sharply through my nose. My own anger level was rising quickly.

  Baz and his aunt were acting less like the family I’d always wanted and more like the family I’d run away from. Berating me about some made-up nonsense I’d somehow fucked up while doing nothing to help me understand. I was starting to think I’d been monumentally stupid for letting myself get even a little comfortable around them, but then I heard a door squeak open, and Noah poked his head around the corner next to Salma.

  “Hi Darcy!” he said in a rush before tugging on Salma’s sweater. “Auntie, I finished it. I’m ready for the next one. Come on!”

  “Alright, dear,” she said, and they disappeared back down the hallway.

  I sighed. Noah was happy here, and that was all that really mattered for now.

  My phone buzzed again. When I looked down, there was another message from Adrian:

  The body wasn’t stolen.

  It took a great deal of self-control not to crush my phone in my grip. The annoying play-by-play was bad enough, but couldn’t he get his facts straight before passing them on to me? Had they seriously just wasted this much time because some intern had mislabeled the bodies and mistakenly reported Becca’s as stolen?

  The phone buzzed again, and a new message popped up:

  It was reanimated.

  I stared at the screen, at this point wondering if I had actually been dreaming since yesterday. That was the only thing that could explain this much crazy happening to me all at once.

  Another buzz:

  We saw her on camera getting up and walking out.

  And then another:

  Any idea where she would go?

  Just then, I heard a crash from the entryway, like someone had thrown something through the window at the front of Baz’s house.

  “Yep, I think I have an idea,” I said aloud as Baz disappeared from in front of me without a word, leaving my foot half-bandaged. It was nice to see where his priorities lay.

  After shooting off a quick text to Adrian, I stuffed my phone back in my jacket and stood. The pain had lessened somewhat, probably a psychological effect from the wound having been cleaned and partway dressed, so I was able to make my way down the hallway fairly quickly.

  When I got to the entryway, I saw Becca climbing in through Baz’s broken window. Actually Becca. Not her reanimated corpse. It wasn’t charred and twisted and shriveled and dead—it was my friend, the way she’d been before. She was even wearing the same blue and yellow lacy lingerie set she’d been wearing at work last night.

  Which, as it turned out, was not the best outfit for climbing through a broken window. The jagged shards of glass were cutting into her exposed skin, and she was about to track way more blood into Baz’s house than I just had.

  “Bex . . .” I said, but she didn’t acknowledge me at all. And now that I thought about it, she wasn’t acknowledging much of anything. There was an empty look in her foggy eyes, and her mouth was hanging half open, and her movements were sluggish. She walked right through Baz—actually through him, and he had to temporarily vaporize himself to avoid being knocked over by her—as he tried to block her from coming in.

  When he solidified again, he was yelling something about how no one had told him owning a strip club would mean letting naked women bleed all over his belongings all the time. Not in this day and age.

  There was a good joke in there somewhere, but now was not the time.

  “Bex!” I yelled, somehow hoping she would recognize me—or I would recognize her—if I raised my voice loud enough.

  But she just kept walking past me into the hallway, and when I stood in front of her she walked right into me, shoving me like a steamroller, refusing to acknowledge my existence. Her blood smeared all over my dress, the green fabric she’d loved so much darkening in splotches of wet brown. And her eyes just kept staring forward, lifeless despite the movement of her body.

  I put my hands on her shoulders and braced myself to hold her back, thinking that maybe if I could stop her, she would do something other than walk forward like a zombie.

  Oh bats . . . was she a zombie?

  Her eyes focused on me for a brief moment when I stopped her, and then she brought her arms up between us and punched me in the chest with both fists.

  She was strong. I didn’t fall on my ass, but I did stumble out of her way. My instincts told me to pounce on her from behind as she walked past me and tackle her to the ground, but I couldn’t do that—not to Becca.

  When she reached the door to the basement, she stopped short. Then she turned towards it, and she walked right into it. When it didn’t budge, she stepped back a bit and tried walking into it again.

  I groaned. Yep, she was definitely a zombie if she didn’t even have the brainpower to twist a damn doorknob.

  I heard Salma’s voice call up from the basement, muffled, “Bassam? What in the world is going on up there? The boy needs to concentrate.”

  Concentrate on what? I wondered.

  As soon as Salma had said his name, Baz disappeared from where he’d been standing next to me, and I assumed he’d gone downstairs to answer his aunt in person.

  Becca’s corpse, on the other hand, had frozen up at the sound of Salma’s voice. Then she let out a terrifying snarl, her mouth opening to reveal the sharpened row of outrageously long fae teeth I had never seen her show to anyone before.

  I knew all fae had vicious traits like this that they kept hidden behind glamours—but, well, most of them kept these things very hidden. Becca especially would never have let anyone see her like this unless they were about to die.

  Would she try to kill Salma to get her son back? She had already killed her ex for Noah’s sake, apparently, and that was when she’d had a working brain, or whatever the hell it was that made someone not a zombie.

  Invigorated, Becca’s corpse took a few steps back from the door and then ran at it, hitting it so hard she bounced off—and the door actually opened towards her after bouncing off its own frame. She ran forward through it and down the stairs into the basement, and I was left standing there trying to decide whether I was really going to go chase my friend and fight her to keep her away from her own son.

  I had to. I fucking had to, even if it was the last thing I wanted to do.

  If I didn’t, Baz and Salma would deal with her somehow. And as much as Noah was already going to be traumatized just from seeing his mom as a zombie, it would be worse if he saw two djinn make her head explode—or whatever djinn did to people who broke into their houses trying to kill them.

  I’d never seen Baz violent with anyone before, so I had no idea what he was capable of. But I had a feeling it wouldn’t be pretty.

  I ran to the doorway and down the stairs just in time to hear Noah shriek, “Mama! You’re hurt!”

  Becca’s corpse launched herself at him and he shrieked again, this time in fear. But Salma had him wrapped in her arms, and Baz was using a broomstick to hold Becca back from them.

  A broomstick, really? I thought. Becca’s corpse was too strong to be kept back by that. But then I saw the faint glimmer of magic running down its shaft, and a moment later it was wreathed in blue smokeless flames.

  Becca snarled again and leapt back when the flames touched her, and that was when I finally did pounce on her from behind, knocking her to the ground.

 

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