All Hallows Page 18

  “Good gravy. You are worse than a golden retriever. Serves me right for making that diaper,” Maren said. She patted the flat of her hand on the dog’s oozing forehead.

  Sarquito leaned into her palm. Maren noodled with a ragged ear, and the chupacabra groaned with pleasure, passing gas. Rolling her eyes, Maren surrendered and dug-in. Going by his appreciative purr, Sarquito didn’t receive physical affection often.

  “At least you don’t shed,” Maren said, though mostly to console herself—the chupacabra was close to hairless. A powerful ammonia reached her despite the breeze.

  Her eyes smarting, Maren scratched roughly, convinced that there wasn’t enough soap and lotion in her bowling bag to ever make a full recovery against the smell.

  After several minutes—Sarquito earned extra innings by bicycling his rear legs, once Maren found a good spot—she drew away with a knock of her knuckles, her hands as sticky as if she’d dipped them into a comb of honey.

  “I hope you’re happy. The sun is farther along than I would like. We should go, each our own way: you’ll be wanting to steal from children, and I have a house to burn,” Maren said.

  Sarquito licked her hand a second time, wrinkled his nose in either disgust or appreciation, and was gone with a whip of his tail.

  Maren looked at the scissorwing in her hands, a thick gruel of slobber coating its razor sharp construction.

  “Let’s get us cleaned-up, if such a thing can be done,” she said.

  13

  Her knees clicked as she walked, but Maren maintained a steady pace along the narrow, unlit lane.

  In many neighborhoods, the gloom would inspire rational concern—of young men clustering on corners, of drivers rolling through stop signs, of concealed crimes.

  Not here.

  Here, darkness met with the security of affluence. A dry moat encircled the golf course community; the sides were prohibitively steep, and a bridge on the east was the single common entrance or exit to the exclusive property.

  Maren had scouted the location weeks ago. Seventy-six homes dotted the artificial island in three rings, the innermost of which surrounded a tiny park that was, of course, public only to those who could reach it.

  A police cruiser sat in a recess where the narrow bridge began, its engine quiet, its headlights off, the parking lights predatory.

  The cruiser looked too much like a troll for Maren, and, given the proximity of the bridge, she felt justified in thinking so. Her stomach churned at the thought of a troll. While no advocate for genocide, Maren couldn’t say she missed the decline in that population.

  She waved at the cruiser, an elderly woman on a walk. Maren wondered if she knew the detective who might be watching. She couldn’t see the plates, but it was the right type of vehicle: a Charger in two-tone metallic livery.

  She paused when there was no response, reaching for a spoon. There was no warmth between her breasts—nothing to suggest she was observed. Perhaps the officer was asleep at the wheel, or busy studying a screen of incidents and reports.

  The headlights of the vehicle came to life, blinding her, and Maren stepped back and away on instinct. The red and blues did not switch on, the siren was silent—and the passenger door was ajar.

  “Maren? Is that you?”

  “It is.”

  “This is serendipitous. Join me.”

  The familiar voice came from behind the car; Maren detected the faintest of echoes. She quickly brought a small, colorful rectangle of glossy paper from her bowling purse without looking.

  “Easy, Maren—it’s me. You’re just in time to help me drag this woman away.”

  “Did you kill a cop? Who is me?”

  “Uriah Lee Brio. Your friend. Your lover.”

  Maren’s tongue stuck in her mouth. Uriah or otherwise, her spoons should have reacted—that they had not was a most ominous omen.

  “What a pleasant encounter,” she managed. “I meant to stay in contact, but you know how it is for us gypsies. I’ll give you my calling card to—ah, but I forget myself. We agreed you’d prove your identity.”

  “Prove it?”

  “Surely you remember; speak the phrase.”

  “Oh, yes, let’s see. It’s been so long. Uh… elastic meadows in endless sorrow, clad with night soil…”

  Maren breathed through her nose carefully, but the air was still. Whatever was claiming to be Uriah Lee was large, though it was hunched in deep shadow.

  “How say you, Uriah? My ears are old. Repeat that, if you would?”

  “Of course. I, uh… we are nobody now; we… something, something… red pens drawing aimlessly.”

  “Much can be said of Uriah, but she never—never—loses her sense of rhythm. I have seen her body rubbed with grave-suet and atropine, and still she retained impeccable meter. Besides, you are outdated. Yesteryear’s ditties won’t do. Show yourself, be you fiend or foe.”

  “Very well.” Shadows moved, and Maren heard the click of bone on bone. She tried not to compare the sound to her knees. Focusing, she spoke a short command.

  The brake lights glinted momentarily on whitened bone and a hint of gold. The rest she could imagine. A leathery phylactery would be nestled within its cage of impervious damascene steel, the bezel in the shape of a scarab.

  “I have had enough of trouble today,” Maren said.

  “It is eventide. Your troubles have just begun.”

  Her suspicions confirmed, Maren began a soft, polyphonic humming and polished her thumb over the scrap of paper. A shape the size of a bulldozer moved, and Maren sang quickly.

  Scrimp and save;

  This scamp enslave.

  My savings redeem

  Great evil unseen.

  The rectangle disintegrated like flashpaper, resetting Maren’s night vision.

  A massive, skeletal form smashed against the trunk of the police car, joints and antlers banging like a sledge, its scream held like the final note of a political anthem, reedy and whining.

  The sound was tinnitus perfected, and Maren resisted the urge to preserve what was left of her hearing by plugging her ears. She made a sour face and flipped through an envelope of thin, waxy clippings.

  “Which did I use? If that was my BOGO on baby carrots…” Maren squinted. “No, here’s that. And this one’s not good until… This takes a trip to yuppy central. A mall haircut? No mum bob for me. This requires a rewards card. This closed shop. This is a thousand miles from—I’ll never get the last stamp. Well,” she said, “if those are here, then here’s what isn’t: half-off in the dairy aisle. There goes my lemon yogurt.”

  The cadaverous mountain attempted to rise from the dented trunk; red sparks orbited the recipient of Maren’s spell in the way of an older atomic model; electron fireflies racing at incredulous speed.

  Maren backpedaled to the edge of the headlamps, careful to stay away from the blinding cone of light, but equally keen to avoid total shadow.

  Not with a necrolich finding its sea legs.

  As with many of the sisters, old world lycanthropes, and the usual sort of vampire, the lich were, by and large, pitiable. Maren had witnessed rotting corpses seeking sustenance from raw sewage; too, she had seen a skeleton offered Darjeeling tea with goat’s milk, content to lie still, worshipped in a dank cave by a dying island culture.

  But every branch of the fantastic had its skilled masters—and on the lich roster, Mudmush the Phidar was high in the ranks.

  As his cries dwindled, a clacking and stretching of hardening tissues twanged as he lurched forward, cracking the brake lights, dimpling the rear deck lid of the vehicle, denting the fenders with weakness—then with anger.

  Mudmush moved awkwardly and with a ponderous delay. The revenant mage took a halting step, talons of polished metal capping mummified fingers. The false nails screeched across the Charger’s clearcoat, keying paint from the fenders like zest from an orange.

  Mudmush appeared distraught, and Maren’s nerves stood on edge, the fillings in her teeth
aching with a sound mercifully beyond her range of hearing.

  The grisly collection of bone and rotting parts fumbled for the handle, opened the cruiser’s driver door, and leaned until hinges creaked and glass burst in a mosaic.

  In the glow of the accessory lights, Maren could verify that Mudmush had absorbed the full force of the spell she’d brought to bear.

  Or had he?

  The necrolich was renowned as crafty, and, like most of his kind, was haughty, yet capable of demeaning himself, losing a legion to win the battle. If feigning injury brought him closer—close enough to reach for her…

  Maren turned her focus to the rapid dispensation of another coupon, though she resolved to keep the advert for carrots to the bitter end. Two for one was increasingly hard to find with fall coming on; six packages would give her a root cellar of stew stock to hoard through the glorious winter months.

  “Shame on you, witch. To think you would even try. My mind is slave to none.”

  “I had insufficient time to choose,” Maren confessed. “Wasn’t sure what I was up against. As to controlling your mind… clearly that didn’t take, so where’s the harm? Let me dig-out a spell involving a gaming console—you’ll be trapped for years.”

  “My mind can’t be—”

  “How about that body? I have found a sack of tachyderms. You may recall them.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Oh, but I would. I haven’t let them out in a coon’s age. If you have further thoughts of aggression, a dozen of them will suck at your bones. Seven stone each, this batch is, with a trunk up front and a tentacle for a tail. They will weigh you down for a month, and they love phosphates.”

  “No more,” Mudmush pleaded. “It was never my thought to attack you.”

  “Could have fooled me.” Maren looked at the lich’s charnal body, considered her own minor gimps and pains, and entertained a twinge of pity. “Are you sure you are not compromised? Compelled to whip together gingernut cookies, anything like that?”

  “There are no urges I cannot overcome. I have vanquished the effects. Tachyderms are—you don’t need those. What have you afflicted upon me? I can’t breathe.”

  “Are you sapped of speed, strength—?”

  “—Yes,” Mudmush moaned. “My size! You have diminished me to a dwarf. I am scarcely taller than you. Oh, to be ambushed by devious sorcery! There was no call for this, Maren. Were I a lesser being, you might have killed me.”

  “You’re already dead,” Maren observed.

  “Immaterial. Undo this curse.”

  Maren looked at the whites of the beat cop’s eyes, his body visible now that the interior lights were on; his face was leeched of life, blue veins channeling beneath pallid skin.

  “You found the officer that way, I suppose?”

  “Oh, yes, he was already… I mean him no harm.”

  “And hipsters don’t care about their hair. Mudmush, you have taken a young man’s life, or most of it, if he is not already dead. He is mortal. Their lives are short enough. Leave him be, or you may find you have not seen the half of it—literally.” Maren shook the sack of tachyderms. Now that she’d found them, she needed any excuse to let them free.

  “You have to fix this. I will be mocked.”

  “No can do. I must be on my way, and without you shambling behind. Fare you well, good Mudmush—I haven’t brought a shovel for you to borrow. Sweat a while in the cemetery, however, and you will be free of wearing that elk for a head.”

  “You don’t like the antlers? The vote is divided.”

  “They’re… I do, but they don’t quite go with the turtle’s shell you’re using for a plastron—and your neck is so… you didn’t! Will I read of a missing giraffe?”

  “This? No. Got it abroad.”

  “You must fly coach. I can’t pass this bag unsearched with my best smile. Be still. You’re the first recipient of an Indentured Coupon, but there are variations I would like to try—and this herd of tachyderms is begging to roll out.”

  “I demand you restore me.”

  “And I… no. You are a wise lich, and you will work your way free of these effects before you know it. Worst-case, that offer expires at midnight… on the seventh of November.”

  “I’ll miss our holiday,” the lich seethed.

  “The cemetery is open daily and late. Half-off isn’t… it’s not half as bad as you’re making it,” Maren said, backing away until she felt the edge of the bridge.

  When she was sure that the lich was not in pursuit—indeed, could not be—she broke into a fast-paced walk that, Maren hated to think, was nearing her highest speed.

  It bothered her a great deal that Mudmush should mention Uriah Lee. Not that they had been a secret item, but a lich cared about one thing, and one thing only: itself.

  Maren tried to recollect if she had heard Mudmush gossip in the past. If she had, the experience had not stuck with her over the years. She glanced at the cones of light and watched as a colossal shadow obscured the headlamps.

  Outlined, Mudmush was a frightful sight, and had his mind not been numbed, his skill in magic was commendable.

  Quickening yet again as the necrolich roared, Maren tripped, and she looked once more. The lich’s body was melding with that of the officer, consuming it in the way of an amoeba; portions of the corpse floated, the vital matter reducing to foul fluid. What was not selected for replacement would be left in a pyramid of unwanted bone.

  The ossature of the undead magician would grow until some horrific contest wore at his enormity, leaving the lich to cast about for spare pieces and parts, taking from the living and the dead with equal pleasure.

  Maren looked at her eye-catching shoes and thought to duck into an alley before Mudmush pulled himself together.

  She sped across the street, avoiding a house lit like an airport gone mad.

  Three houses along—all of them with lights off—Maren’s spoons warmed as if pushed into open flame.

  She nearly decapitated a young woman who staggered from the alleyway between identical houses set not six feet apart, wall to wall.

  The woman wore a hiked skirt, high heels, and had a pile of peroxide hair stacked and pinned—or it had been. She did not look at Maren, nor at anything except for her feet. Given the stiletto heels, Maren could see why.

  “Take those off,” Maren suggested, but the blonde had no capacity for response. Drunk, possibly—but the spoons suggested a more nefarious cause for her intoxicated swaying.

  It came to Maren that the young woman could be a completely decent person; a young woman playing dress-up in observance of Samhain—the outfit was too new, too tight, and too ridiculous to be from an everyday collection.

  “Maybe in Milan.”

  The naughty businesswoman made ten steps before Maren’s advice—or common sense—caused her to pull at the straps of her shoes. The blonde collected both in her hands, took another series of steps, and fell into a chest-high hedge of cactus in a low-maintenance lawn. The woman moaned softly.

  Maren jumped a second time as an animated man, late thirties if she had to guess, emerged from the false alley. His shaven pate accentuated rolls of fat on the back of his head. The man had the build of a professional wrestler moving out of his prime; he came close to stomping a military boot onto one of Maren’s neon sneakers.

  “Hey!” Maren said, leaping to the sidewalk.

  The dazed wrestler muscled his way from the narrow passageway as though escaping a gravity well, his face lined with effort, his walk that of a man whose shoes had been laced together.

  He grunted as he collided with Maren’s bowling case, which she had put into motion when she saw the man would not avoid her—might well not even see her. The man jerked to the side, spun away, and continued his stumbling gait, speaking low and incoherently.

  “I’ll smack a cape on that junkie shark,” he said—or he might have said. Maren assumed the man was not communicating anything terribly important, whereas her spoons we
re.

  She would have preferred to flee the source of the commotion, but Mudmush was one type of threat, and this was another. Better not to give her back to it.

  The busty girl had begun to notice the slow burn of the cactus spines, and she moaned and flailed in the spiny bed. One hand raised to her neck as though she’d just awoken from an unfamiliar recliner.

  Maren stepped into the alley, keeping her hands visible and out of her bag, which took a good deal of effort.

  14

  He was, as ever, gorgeous.

  “Maren? How do you go? You look… drained.”

  “These are tiring times, Slager. Thank the good spirits I remembered to wear a new pair of kicks—blisters are the other end of comfort. Good evening, and my appreciation for the compliment, I should say—drained will keep me safe from anyone hunting blood.”

  “Inedible is not safe.”

  “Do you threaten me?”

  “I speak the truth.” Slager looked at her bowling bag; Maren showed her palms. He hid it well, but a line of trepidation dissolved on the vampire’s forehead.

  “Tone is all,” Maren said. “You’re menacing. I do not like to be threatened: my necklace scalds me for it.”

  “I threaten only what I respect—and I respect that which poses a challenge… or has something I want,” Slager said. His gentle eyes took-in her shoes; he swept over her face more quickly.

  “Do I not deserve respect, whatever my appearance?”

  “Someone thinks so. I don’t see why. It makes me shudder to see the bony remains of a woman once buxom. It’s a strange suicide you have chosen. The lone witch to refuse the gift. You abnegate the symbol of your status. Do you see it differently in the mirror?”

  “I know I’m getting on, if that’s what you mean,” Maren said.

  “It is worse than your looks. You have denied your birthright, and you are weaker than cheap wine. Might as well consort with the humans. I can respect what you were, but you no longer have anything I desire.”