Beyond the Pale: A fantasy anthology (14 page)

And that I
would mourn him when it was time to let go.

I didn’t want
to do this. It had hurt too much, been too intimate. I wanted to walk away from
all of it... but if I did, someone else would be standing here within the hour.
Someone like Lottie, who would turn something wonderful into something
horrible.

I had no
choice.

Andrew Toland
looked peaceful, frozen at that moment of death. He no longer had the wounds
that had killed him; the last witch had repaired that as part of the
reconstruction. He was just... dead. All I had to do was bring him back.

And once again,
I had to wonder:
why him?
Lottie had
wanted him, specifically. It could have just been her one-two punch of hating
me and wanting the prestige of running a disposable, but I couldn’t believe
that. There were easier ways to hurt me, and Andrew Toland was nobody she’d
want to mess with. She knew his story, just as I did.

Andrew had
lived a hard, interesting life, and he’d earned himself a reputation, in his
thirty-two short years, of being one of the toughest men of a rough and ready
period of American history. A resurrection witch, like me, he’d gone down
fighting during one of the worst zombie wars ever conducted in the Southwest. From
time to time, a resurrectionist goes bad, and when that happens, the results
are massively dangerous. Get three or four of the bad ones together, and you
have the makings of an unstoppable army of the dead.

Andrew Toland
had gone up against that, and earned himself a broken neck. Then, by prior
agreement with his friends, he’d had himself resurrected to fight again.

He’d won. Most
of his allies had been taken out, and in the end he’d carried on by himself—a
gritty two-week campaign of attrition against the toughest opponents
imaginable. And even when his resurrection witch had been killed in the last
critical moments, he’d still managed to stay alive long enough to take out the
enemy. It had been unheard of then, and it was still without parallel, and in
the textbooks apprentices studied, he was an entire chapter all his own.

You just don’t
get badder-assed than that.

I knew Prieto
was watching, and the last thing I needed was to lose my objectivity at a time
like this. I put all my feelings away in a lockbox, bent down, and opened
Andrew Toland’s death-filmed eyes.

I parted his
clay-cold lips and poured in the first, massive dose of the potion. It pooled
in his mouth, liquid silver, and then I performed the part that nobody else
could do.

I kissed him,
very gently, on the lips, and completed the last step of the preset spell. I
felt a line of power spooling out of me, traveling through the dark and
connecting, with a jolting snap of power, with the spirit of Andrew Toland.

The last time I’d
done this, Andrew’s power and strength had overwhelmed me. This time, it felt
oddly soothing. Like being folded in warmth and light.

Andrew coughed,
swallowed, and blinked. His skin remained pasty white for a few seconds. The
cataracts on his eyes faded first, fainter with each blink, and then his skin
took on color.

He wasn’t back,
but he was breathing.

I took his
hands and poured more power into him, raw and wild. It was sweaty work,
bringing back the dead, and it required me to be vulnerable in ways most
witches weren’t willing to attempt. I had to touch his soul, and let him touch
mine. I had to not just taste death, but drink it down—accept it as a
lover.

He gasped when
I made contact, and the shine in his eyes shifted from mere existence to real
life. Real consciousness.

I heard the
first slow thud of his heartbeat, then the second. Then the rhythm falling into
place.

And despite all
the drugs cushioning his fall, I saw the agony hit him—I felt it, too,
dim but strong, through our link, and had to breathe deeply to control the
pain. He didn’t scream. Some did, but not Andrew; he hadn’t screamed when I’d
revived him last year, either. His hands tightened on mine, brutally strong,
and I tried not to wince.
It’ll pass,
I told myself.
Breathe. Breathe, dammit.

I was doing
fine until he met my eyes, and he whispered, “Holly. Wasn’t it finished? Didn’t
we get him?”

Holy hell. He remembered.

For a frozen
second I couldn’t think what to say, but training came back to me in a rush.
Establish control. Guide the dialogue.

“Andrew,” I
said, and my voice was low and gentle and soothing, entirely steady. “Andrew
Toland. Do you hear me?”

He nodded. He
hadn’t blinked since focusing on me.

“I need you to
sit up now,” I said. “Can you do that?”

He could, and
he did. He swung his legs over the edge of the cold morgue table and came
upright, and I stopped him long enough to adjust the sheet over his lap. I
wasn’t usually so fussy, but Andrew had thrown me off; I couldn’t see him as a
tool. He was a man, a living, vital
man
.

He hadn’t
looked away at all from my face. There was something very unusual about him. I’d
brought back hundreds of dead, and I couldn’t think of a single one who’d begun
the process with a question like that. It takes time for the personality to
reassert itself, for memories to come clear.

He had been
crystal-clear from the moment our souls had touched.

“Holly, you
must tell me the truth,” Andrew said. “Did we kill that bastard?”

How could he
possibly
remember who I was
? I’d had
one other soul I’d brought back twice, the CEO of a major corporation who’d
forgotten to pass along the passwords to some vital corporate accounts. I’d had
to do it twice because the Board of Directors wanted to be sure they had
everything from him, and that man, young and fit as he’d been, hadn’t
recognized me at all. Hadn’t remembered a thing from one resurrection to the
next.

“Holly!” His
tone was sharp with concern.
He
was
concerned. About
me.
I focused from
about a thousand miles away and realized that he was frowning, totally focused
on me. “Can you hear me?”

I laughed. I
couldn’t help it. It came out a strained, strangled gasp. “Yes,” I managed to
say. “I hear you, Andrew. We stopped him.”

“Then I expect
there’s a tale to be told about why I’m back here.” He released me from his
stare to turn it on the room around us. “Well, this place don’t get any
prettier.”

He remembered
that, too? Unbelievable. “How do you feel?”

“Feel?” His
gaze came back to me, electric and warm, and his lips curved into a smile. “Alive
would say it fine. But I’m not alive, I know that. You’ve brought me back
again. Why?”

I turned away
to pick up a stack of clothes from the pile nearby. Hospital scrubs for now,
nothing fancy. I handed them to him, and he frowned down at them for a few
seconds.

“Clothes,” I
said. It was unnecessary; he clearly knew what they were, but I was rattled. I
was all too aware of Detective Prieto at the viewing window, seeing me lose my
cool.

That earned me
another fey smile from Andrew. He had a nice face—a little sharp, with a
pointed chin. In certain lights, in certain moods, he would look sinister,
except for the humor in his eyes. “I know we’re well acquainted, but a bit of
privacy...?”

I turned my
back. I heard the faint sound of his bare feet slapping the cold floor as he
stood, and the rustle of fabric moving over skin.

He was way, way
too fast. Too well adjusted, for any newly revived corpse. He had
continuity,
and that meant he remembered
all the trauma of the first resurrection.

“How long?” he
asked. “How long have I been away this time?”

I cast a look
over my shoulder, and found he was adjusting the fit of the pants on his hips. Except
for the slight, indefinable distance in his eyes, he could have been any
hospital attendant. He looked completely... alive.

“About a year,”
I said. “Andrew—”

“Feels like
yesterday,” he said, and looked down at his hands. He flexed them, frowning. “Awful
strange, not knowing that.”

“We have work
for you,” I said. I was sticking to my script, even though Andrew had lost his.
“I’ll help you understand what you need to do. How do you feel?”

“Holly, my
sweet, I’m annoyed you’re not listening to how I feel.” He frowned, and I was
right, he could look menacing. “Which shouldn’t be true, I think. No corpse
revives so quickly as to be annoyed over such minor things.” Andrew should
know. He’d been a better witch than I ever could be.

“You’re no
ordinary person,” I said. My heart was pounding, my palms were sweating, but I
sounded as cool and soothing as any clinical practitioner. “Are you in any pain?”

“No.”

“None at all?”

“Miss Holly,
I’ve been in your shoes.” His gaze moved to focus on them for a second,
smiling. “Never ones so dainty, maybe. But there’s no need to treat me like an
invalid. I’ll let you know when I start feeling it.”

I stared at him.
He stared back, challenge in those bright blue eyes. He was an average looking
guy in a lot of ways—pleasant features, except for that sharp, aggressive
chin; sandy brown hair that had grown into a style that seemed both modern and
antique—shaggy, certainly. He had a sharp ridge and twist to his nose, as
if he’d broken it early in life.

I tried to get
my mind back to business. “If you start feeling anxious or drifting, tell me. I
don’t know what the police need you for, or how long it will take, but you need
to have a dose—”

“Each hour,
yes, Miss Holly. I’m the one who wrote up the damn rules. Police, you say?” That
seemed to give him pause for thought. “Why us, again?”
Us,
not just him. Andrew assumed instantly that we were a team.

I didn’t want
to be a team. It had hurt so much the last time around, I couldn’t imagine how
bad it would be this time, when I knew him. When I cared.

I opted for
neutral topics. “Detective Prieto is waiting to brief us.”

Detective
Prieto entered the room, and both of us turned to look at him. “Mr. Toland,” he
said, and nodded stiffly. “I won’t say thanks, since I know you didn’t really
have a choice in coming... here.” Nice way to avoid the whole death/life
conundrum. “But I’m giving you a choice for the job. If you don’t want to do
it, we’ll end this right now.”

Andrew had lost
his smile. His eyes were narrowed, hard-focused. That was how he looked when he
fought, I thought. And yes, he could be intimidating.

“It’s no small
matter if you picked me,” he said. “I slept a hundred and thirty some-odd years
before Miss Holly here brought me back the first time, and I’ll allow as how
that job was worth the trouble. I expect this one’s just as raw.”

“Yes,” Prieto
said. Now that he was face to face with the soul he was about to send into
torment, possibly horrible death, he seemed deeply uncomfortable. “I need you
to help us save lives.”

“Didn’t expect
you brought me back for a pony ride, mister. Fine. I’ll do it.”

“Andrew,” I
said quietly. “Hear him out before you agree to anything.”

“Don’t need to.
Like I said, I wouldn’t be back here if it wasn’t bad.”

“All right,”
Prieto said. “We have a credible terrorist threat against a protected group of
individuals here in Austin. Four are already missing, and we’ve got intel about
the next one to be abducted. We think these people are being killed, but we
haven’t found remains yet.”

Andrew studied
him for a moment in silence, then said, “I understood little of that, ‘cept you
have four missing and some dead. I ain’t equipped to solve your crimes, so I
don’t think that’s what you need me for, is it?”

“We need you to
protect one of the people on the list of potential victims.”

“Wait a
minute!” I blurted, horrified. The resurrected—even disposables—weren’t
bodyguards, they were weapons—point them at a clearly defined objective,
and let them go achieve it no matter what the damage. Disposables didn’t have a
self-preservation instinct, so they were perfect for sending in on suicide
runs.

Bodyguarding
was completely different. For one thing, it was likely to be long-term, much
longer than a disposable ever lasted. Days. Weeks. Months, even. “Wait a
minute,” I repeated. My voice was loud enough to ring off the morgue steel. “What
the hell? Since when did the resurrected join the force? This is something any
cop in Kevlar could do, right?”

Prieto gave me
another look. This one was blank and cool. “We’ve tried that,” he said. “Didn’t
go so well, which is why we decided to go with somebody with nothing to lose,
like your friend here. Our intel says the attack’s going to come in the next
few days. Fact is, when we booked the job in the first place, we were planning
to protect a completely different person. While you’ve been
preparing
we lost two more of the
targets,
and
the teams of cops
assigned for protection. So I don’t give a shit about your problems, lady. I
lost four of my own police officers protecting these—people. Least you
can do is your job.”