Abracadaver (Esther Diamond Novel)

Raves for the Esther Diamond series:

“Gleeful, clever. . . . Sexy interludes raise the tension between Lopez and Esther as she juggles magical assailants, her perennially distracted agent, her meddling mother, and wiseguys both friendly and threatening in a well-crafted, rollicking mystery.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Fans of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series will appreciate this series’ lively heroine and the appealing combination of humor, mystery, and romance.”

—
Library Journal

“Seasoned by a good measure of humor, this fantasy mystery is a genuine treat for readers of any genre.”

—
SF Chronicle

“With a wry, tongue-in-cheek style reminiscent of Janet Evanovich, this entertaining tale pokes fun at the deadly serious urban fantasy subgenre while drawing the reader into a fairly well-plotted mystery. The larger-than-life characters are apropos to the theatrical setting, and Esther’s charming, self-deprecating voice makes her an appealingly quirky heroine. The chemistry between Esther and Lopez sizzles, while scenes of slapstick comedy will have the reader laughing out loud and eager for further tales of Esther’s adventures.”

—
Romantic Times

“Plenty of fun for readers.”

—
Locus

“A delightful mélange of amateur sleuth mystery, romance, and urban fantasy.”

—
The Barnes and Noble Review

“A paranormal screwball comedy adventure. Light, happy, fantastically funny!”

—Jennifer Crusie,
New York Times
bestselling author

The Esther Diamond Series:

DISAPPEARING NIGHTLY

DOPPELGANGSTER

UNSYMPATHETIC MAGIC

VAMPARAZZI

POLTERHEIST

THE MISFORTUNE COOKIE

ABRACADAVER

Copyright © 2014 by Laura Resnick.

All Rights Reserved.

Cover art by Daniel Dos Santos.

Cover design by G-Force Design.

DAW Book Collectors No. 1673.

DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA).

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

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eBook ISBN: 9780698152434

This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother,

Gertrude Diamond Resnick,

and to her mother, who came to America,

Esther Diamond

I
don’t have anything against the dead—not as long as they
stay
dead.

It’s when they get reanimated that I become hostile. Also scared, creeped out, and nauseated, as well as violent if the occasion calls for it—which it usually does when you’re being confronted by a frisky corpse.

In the normal course of events, obviously, the deceased
do
stay that way. But mystical Evil loves to mess with the mundane, and there are any number of dark forces that can make death less decisive than you’d think.

So when I got a phone call from an undertaker telling me that the departed had
departed
—as in, got out of the coffin and walked away—I didn’t dismiss this news as drunken delusion or a dumb prank. I know that the unbelievable can happen because I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

Besides, John Chen wasn’t a drunk or a prankster. He was a serious, credible person—as well as a graduate student at NYU pursuing a doctoral degree in biochemistry. So I didn’t doubt his strange story when I heard it. John also worked part-time at his family’s funeral home in Chinatown, which is how he came into contact with corpses, animated or otherwise.

I had met John via his side job, a temporary gig doing hair and make-up for
ABC
, an indie film set in his neighborhood and written, produced, and directed by his old school friend, Ted Yee. I had been cast as an insensitive uptown white girl whom the ABC (American Born Chinese) hero of the film dates for a while before realizing that his soul mate is actually a hardworking young woman who’s lately immigrated from China.

Unfortunately, Ted Yee told me earlier today that he was calling a halt to the film. I mean that this was unfortunate for
me
, not for audiences who would now be spared the prospect of suffering through Ted’s clumsy, cliché-ridden, low-budget melodrama. I’d had a difficult winter so far, and Ted’s film was the only real work that had come my way since November. By “real work,” I mean acting—that’s my profession. When I’m not acting, I’m doing whatever work I can find that will pay the rent—which, even in a rent-controlled apartment like mine, is extortionate in New York City.

So to make ends meet after the Off-Broadway show I was in this past autumn finished its limited run around Thanksgiving, I had taken a job as Dreidel, Santa’s singing-and-dancing Jewish elf, at Fenster & Co., the famous Manhattan department store that was probably destined to go bankrupt soon, what with mismanagement, truck hijackings, attempted murder, and the recent conjuring of a solstice demon that wanted to eat Manhattan. I have had more demeaning and humiliating jobs than being a retail elf, but not many.

After Christmas (and also after whole portions of Fenster’s had been destroyed in confrontations between Good and Evil, as well as between criminals and the NYPD), I returned to my usual between-roles job of waiting tables at Bella Stella, a tourist trap and mob hangout in Little Italy. I liked my job there as a singing waitress, and the owner, Stella Butera, was a fair employer. But she was also allegedly laundering money for the Gambello crime family. So the cops raided the restaurant on New Year’s Eve, closed the place down, and arrested a number of the people present—including me. (In my case, the charges were dropped. The other arrestees were now awaiting trial.)

After that fiasco, I was unemployed and couldn’t find another job. I was down to my last few dollars in the world by the time I got cast in Ted Yee’s low-budget Chinatown film, and I was
very
glad to have income and acting work again, even if the script was lame and the pay was modest.

But now that Ted had decided to quit the film and shut down production, I was out of work once again and already worrying about how to pay my rent.

I knew that Ted was a dabbler, prone to embracing new artistic interests with great enthusiasm and then dropping them before long. So although I was disappointed by this turn of events, I wasn’t exactly surprised. And to be fair, even a completely committed and disciplined writer/director/producer might well throw in the towel on this project, after everything that had happened.

Ted’s first backer had died. So he found another backer—and that one died, too. Then he learned that his manipulative mother and controlling sister were responsible for those deaths, as well as for the nasty mishaps which had befallen other people involved in the film. In a nutshell, they were murderously meddling because they feared Ted’s project would embarrass the family; and, in any case, filmmaking wasn’t what they wanted Ted to do with his life. His sister Susan’s obsession with preventing him from making
ABC
had even led her to attempt to murder an NYPD detective and try to shoot John Chen for helping Ted with the movie.

As a direct result of recently getting to know Ted’s dreadful family, I made a solemn vow to be more patient with my own. They have their faults, God knows, but they don’t inflict deadly curses on my colleagues. They are also safely distant from me, all residing in the Midwest, which makes patience a little easier.

But Ted, the poor fool, lived with his family—well, until now. Barely an hour ago, his sister had been arrested in the act of trying to murder John Chen in front of witnesses, so she seemed unlikely to return home for 20-to-life. And I had a feeling that Ted and his mother would soon be parting company, too. Lily Yee’s mystical crimes couldn’t be proven under the limitations of mundane law, but she had confessed them to Ted, and her inflicting such damage on his friends and colleagues in order to control his life seemed to be (understandably) the last straw for him.

Those dangerous and deadly curses were why I was in Chinatown now, making my way through the frigid, icy, and densely crowded streets while firecrackers exploded noisily and drumbeats echoed all around me. It was the first day of the Chinese New Year, the day of the firecracker festival and the lion dance. Having discovered that Ted’s family members were responsible for the mysterious mayhem menacing Chinatown, I had come here today (in the company of my friend Max, an expert in such matters) to stop them—on what happened to be one of the most crowded days of the year in these narrow, bustling streets.

The rhythmic pounding of drums and cymbals were the traditional accompaniment to the colorful, athletic lion dancers who were still roaming the neighborhood, though it was late afternoon now. Each time I saw one of these creatures bobbing, bounding, and leaping around gracefully, it was easy to forget that the giant lion was a two-man puppet (one man was the head, and one was the body) rather than an enchanted four-legged beast. Each lion’s massive, dragon-like head was decorated with fur, fringe, and sparkly designs, and they all batted their long eyelashes coquettishly at the various spectators and passersby.

Snow, ice, and slush covered the streets, along with confetti from the celebrations today. Hours into the festivities, people were still following the many roaming lion dancers around Chinatown, watching them engage in the ritual of collecting red envelopes of “lucky money” from shopkeepers in exchange for their dance, then “chewing” up fresh green heads of cabbage and “spitting” the mangled leaves onto people as a blessing, to ensure an abundant New Year.

We passed a cheerfully regurgitating red lion, and I brushed limp bits of cabbage out of my hair without slowing my pace, navigating my way through the thick crowd of laughing, smiling people. It was overcast now, the gunmetal-gray sky threatening to drop more sleet and snow on the city. The light faded quickly at this time of year, and I sensed darkness encroaching already.

“You missed some.” Lucky, my companion, brushed at my wind-snarled brown hair to remove a few stray bits of leafy greens.

“Aren’t your hands cold?” I asked, realizing for the first time that he wasn’t wearing gloves.

“Freezing,” he admitted.

“Here, I’ll take Nelli.” I was sensibly dressed for being outside in late January. But Alberto “Lucky Bastard” Battistuzzi had rushed out of the Chen family’s funeral home on short notice today, after being alerted that John’s life was in danger. “Give me the leash, Lucky.”

The old hit man handed over the dog without protest and stuffed his hands into his pockets, shivering a little. Lucky had earned his nickname by surviving two separate attempts on his life because—both times—the gun that was pointed at him with deadly intent had jammed. (In fact, I had witnessed a third such incident the previous year, when a ruthless killer stuck a gun in Lucky’s face, pulled the trigger—and nothing happened. He really
was
lucky.) A semi-retired hitter for the Gambello family, he was a valued advisor to the
capo di famiglia
, Victor Gambello, aka the Shy Don.

In the strange twists and turns of fate that so often characterize life, Lucky was also my trusted friend.

And in a relationship that originated with the previous generation, Lucky was a silent partner in the Chens’ funeral business, as well as a close friend to the family. John called him “Uncle Lucky,” and there was very little that the normally law-abiding Chens wouldn’t do to protect him. Lucky, whose own relationship with the law was habitually adversarial, was equally loyal to them. So when I had phoned him earlier to warn him that John was in danger, he had risked his life and liberty without hesitation in a headlong rush to help save the young man.

He had also brought Nelli with him. A mystical canine familiar who had entered this dimension to confront Evil (with a capital E), Nelli had happened to be with Lucky when today’s crisis arose, but she actually lived with our friend Dr. Maximillian Zadok. Now that John was safe, Lucky and I had left the scene, taking Nelli with us, and we were looking for Max.

A mage who worked for the Magnum Collegium, an ancient and secretive worldwide organization about which I knew virtually nothing (except that they were dangerously inept at vetting their own apprentices—but I digress), Max was the biggest expert on Evil in the tri-state area, and quite possibly in this whole hemisphere. While Lucky and I had dealt with the mundane evil of Susan Yee trying to shoot John on Doyers Street, Max was dismantling and disenchanting the secret workshop where Susan and her mother had concocted the curses they’d been inflicting on Ted’s colleagues. It was located in the cellar of Yee & Sons Trading Company, the family business that Lily had long wanted her son to take over—and which Ted consistently said with fervent loathing he would
never
take over.

We reached Canal Street, and Nelli flinched mightily when a bright orange-gold lion suddenly leapt in front of us. Since Nelli was the size of a small pony, her involuntary yank on her leash jerked me off balance and I stumbled into Lucky.

He grunted as he caught me, then set me back on my feet as he said, “Maybe I should hang onto her, after all.”

My gloved hand tightened around the pink leather leash. “No, I’ve got her.” I gave a little tug and admonished Nelli to calm down.

She composed herself and wagged her tail hesitantly at the lion, which turned away from us and danced gracefully down the street, followed by clashing cymbals, pounding drums, and a crowd of spectators.

“Does she seem jumpy to you?” I asked Lucky, frowning down at Nelli’s head—which came up to my solar plexus.

“Maybe.” The old wiseguy shrugged. “Or maybe we’re just feeling jumpy around her. After what happened back there . . .”

I knew he didn’t mean John nearly getting shot. Or Susan’s screaming violence when thwarted in her attempt to murder John. Or even the spectacle of the lion costume John had been wearing suddenly roaring fire at Susan when she pointed her gun at me—something I must remember to tell Max about later.

He was talking about what Nelli had done back there on Doyers Street. The reason we had left so suddenly. The reason we were looking for Max now.

As we waited on the corner for the light to change, I contemplated our canine companion. “She only flinched when that lion startled her just now,” I said quietly. “Like her usual self. She didn’t snarl or attack.”

“Of course not,” said Lucky. “Our favorite familiar has got focus. There was a reason for what she done back there. Gotta be. We just don’t know yet what it is.”

The dangerous nature of Nelli’s mission in this dimension meant she could be unpredictable—sometimes terrifyingly so. But she was essentially an affable, gentle dog, the sort who could safely be left alone with toddlers and kittens (though the kittens might bully her). So her sudden burst of aggression a little while ago had been as surprising as it was worrying.

It was that incident which had sent us tearing off to find Max. We didn’t understand what had happened, but we had alarming suspicions about what it might signify.

Nelli shivered a little, and I realized she was cold. Her short fur wasn’t sufficient protection at this time of year in New York, and she usually wore a winter vest when she came outside. (Actually, she had half a dozen seasonal vests. Max tended to spoil her.) Her massive head was long and square jawed, framed by two floppy, overlong ears. The fur on her paws and face was silky brown, and the rest of her well-muscled physique was covered by smooth, tan fur. Her eyes and face were very expressive (though, to be candid, they rarely expressed intelligence), and her mystical nature ensured she had some unusual abilities, as well as some unexpected vulnerabilities (such as an allergic reaction to vampires).

The dog shivered again, and I patted her head. “Poor Nelli. We’ll be inside soon.”

Yee & Sons Trading Company was less than two blocks away. I didn’t relish returning to the store, given my various recent experiences there, but it was where I had left Max earlier today. Without any way to check his location now (he didn’t have a cell phone), I figured that was the logical place to look for him, since it would probably take him some time to destroy and purify the workshop of such talented dark sorceresses as Lily and Susan.

As I continued petting Nelli, she wriggled a little, pleased with the attention, and then gave me a convivial head butt. As I staggered back a step, Lucky said, “See? She’s actin’ completely normal. Like it never happened.”