The Collected Christopher Connery (6 page)

Gail woke up in a strange bed with an ache in her head
and an odd tingling running up and down her arms. She slid her hand across the
too-smooth comforter.
Hotel blankets.
So they’d made it back to The
Crown.

She pushed herself up into a sitting position and leaned
back against the wide headboard. Her hair had come almost entirely loose from
her short braid, so she undid it completely before slumping back on her elbows.

What a day. Houses full of angry dead people who tried to
kill her, evil furniture that tried to kill her, evil
toys
that tried to
kill her.

All in all, the case was off to a rollicking good start.

Someone knocked on the door. Part of Gail wanted to fake
sleep, but she supposed it was about time she dragged her ass out of bed
anyway. She called, “Come in,” as she quickly pulled her hair back again.

The door opened slowly and Nia poked her head in. She had
changed her clothes and fixed her hair, but she still had a livid scrape on one
cheek.

“You didn’t fix your face,” Gail said before she realized
that wasn’t the politest way to start a conversation.

“Excuse me?” Nia touched her cheek, fingers brushing
across the scrape. “Oh, this? It’s nothing.” She smiled, a little unsteadily
Gail thought. “Are you all right, detective?”

“I seem fine. All in one piece anyway.” Gail looked down
at herself and realized that she was still wearing her bloodstained clothes.
She probably looked pretty garish next to Nia in her pretty purple dress.
Speaking of Nia… “Thanks, by the way, for fixing me.”

“Oh, no, no, no, no!” Snapping her mouth closed before
she could keep running on forever, Nia coughed lightly and folded her hands in
front of her. “I should be thanking you. You were the one who found Connery for
us.”

“I found – right, the head.” Gail vaguely remembered
yanking a severed head out of a toy box. “So I take it we got him – it –back to
the hotel all right?”

“Oh yes, we put him in a hat box!”

Of course, what else? Gail swung her legs over the edge
of the bed, rubbing her still tingling arms.

“Are you all right, detective?” Nia asked with sudden
urgency. “You don’t feel ill, do you?”

“No. Should I?”

“No, no, no, no – I was simply… worried. You were badly
hurt.”

“Well, you can stop worrying. I’m fine.”

Nia’s face relaxed into a real smile. “I’m glad.” Then
she jumped a little. “Oh! I was going to ask what you wanted for dinner! Arthur
and I thought you probably wouldn’t want to come down to the restaurant tonight
after all the excitement. Tomorrow, we’ll have to find somewhere nice to eat
–at the Academy’s expense, of course.”

“Sounds good to me.” Gail plucked at her bloodstained
shirt. “I might take a shower first.”

“Oh, of course! I should leave you to that, shouldn’t I?
I’m sorry, sometimes I don’t know when to stop talking. I think it’s a common
flaw for people who work alone – talking to oneself, I mean. I work alone a
great deal.”

Yeah, Gail had gotten that impression.

“But before I go,” Nia continued brightly, “I do have
some good news.”

“Wow, really, more?” Then Gail kicked herself for being
an asshole. Without the Illuminator, she probably wouldn’t be here right now.
Best case scenario, she’d be laid up in the hospital. Thanks to Nia’s magic,
she felt almost as good as new except for that tingling and a weird buzzing in
the back of her head. A good night’s sleep would probably cure both. She made
her voice sound friendlier when she added, “What is it?”

Nia looked at her closely for a moment, seeming unsure if
Gail was making fun of her or not, but apparently decided to give her the
benefit of the doubt. “As it turns out, there is another part of Connery very
close by. Much closer than I would have guessed, actually.”

That was good news, Gail supposed. The sooner this case
was over and she got the second half of her paycheck, the better. “Where?”

“Ah, well, I haven’t been able to
pinpoint
the
location yet. Connery’s magic is so very complex; it will take more precise
work to narrow it down, but you can rest assured that we won’t have to go far!”

Gail nodded slowly. “Speaking of which, can I ask you
something?”

“Of course!”

“The magic in the house. Do you really think Connery had
those spells just lying around for his cronies to steal? I mean, Connery was an
evil bastard, but I don’t think even the evilest of evil bastards would have
murder spells, raising the dead spells, and attack furniture spells all
conveniently on hand at the same time. If nothing else, it seems like just
asking for someone to steal them to use against you.”

Nia blinked owlishly at her. Then she broke into a bright
smile. “You know, Detective Lin, you’re very astute!”

“Uh, thanks. It’s sort of my job.”

The smile faded as quickly as it had come. “I had
actually been pondering the same thing, though I must admit, not with the
exactness you have.”

“Well, when you spend a lot of time hunting evil
bastards, you start to get an idea of how they think. Most of them wouldn’t
trust their underlings to bring home the right kind of milk, so I have a hard
time believing Connery would leave so much valuable ammunition just lying
around unless he really needed the spells.” She paused. “And does anyone ever
really need a killer furniture spell? Something seems off.”

Talk about an understatement,
everything
about
this case seemed off. It was like she was trying to do a puzzle in the dark.
She could sort of feel how things fit together, but just because she could find
two pieces that matched up didn’t mean that she understood the big picture.

Nia sat down in one of the stiff hotel armchairs,
apparently forgetting Gail’s earlier comment about wanting a shower. “If you’re
feeling up to it, perhaps we should sit down and discuss our next move.
Obviously, we were taken by surprise today, but now that we have an idea of the
sort of magic we can expect, we can take proper precautions.”

What sort of precautions could you take against walking
dead people and homicidal houses? Still, Gail guessed planning would be better
than sitting around. “I feel up to just about anything so long as it doesn’t
involve fighting dressers. Let me get showered and changed and we can go down
to dinner together.”

“Wonderful!” Nia beamed so brightly that Gail suspected
she had been more disappointed than she had let on about not being able to eat
out on her first night in the city. She was almost out the door when she turned
back with a sharp, “Oh!”

Gail, halfway through rolling up her sleeves so she could
examine the perfectly smooth but still aggravatingly itchy skin on her
forearms, looked back at her. “Yeah?”

“Would you mind terribly if Arthur joins us?” Nia’s voice
dropped to a near-whisper, as though she feared her colleagues had their ears
pressed against the walls of the adjoining rooms. “Technically, he’s only
supposed to be given case information on a need to know basis, but I would feel
awful asking him to sit in our room while –”

“We got attacked by corpses. I think preventing that from
happening again counts as something he needs to know.”

A relieved smile lit up Nia’s face and Gail was suddenly
certain she had expected to be told no. Why had they even sent Arthur along if
he was supposed to be kept away from everything up to and including meals?
Anyway,
was Gail even allowed to say no to the Illuminator? She would call the Academy
to ask, but that would probably just result in a full list of dos-and-don’ts
and she really didn’t have time for any more bullshit.

“We’ll meet you downstairs in half an hour then?” When
Gail nodded, Nia finally turned to go, murmuring something under her breath
about changing her dress.

Shaking her head to knock away the haze left by her
surprise nap, Gail went to the bathroom, shucked off her bloodstained clothes
and took a quick shower. When she returned to the bedroom wrapped in a
bathrobe, she stood in front of her suitcase, wondering what she should wear.
The clothes she had been wearing today were probably a loss unless Nia knew
some sort of laundry spell that removed set-in bloodstains.

Actually judging by the way Nia ran headlong into danger,
she probably knew five. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that if the
magicians were dressing up for a night on the town, should she do the same?

She took a moment to ponder then promptly decided,
fuck
that, I’ll dress up tomorrow,
and grabbed something comfortable.

Despite the best of intentions and – according to Arthur
– all laws of time and logic, Nia and Arthur arrived in the hotel dining room a
few minutes after Gail. The detective was dressed much the same as she had been
before, the only difference Nia could spot was the color of her suspenders. She
was reading the newspaper when they came in, an unlit cigarette in her mouth.

“Do you smoke?” Nia asked before realizing it was perhaps
none of her business.

Gail pulled the cigarette from between her lips and
tucked it into a pocket on the inside of her jacket. “Used to. I quit last
year. Holding one sometimes helps me think, though.” She got to her feet,
tossing the paper into the empty chair beside her. “All right, let’s eat. I got
us a table near the back, so we should have privacy.”

A few moments later, they were comfortably sequestered at
a corner table only inches from one of the wide windows. They were so far from
the rest of the diners that it almost felt like they had their own private
room, but through the window, Nia could still watch the finely dressed people
strolling past as the lights of the marquee flickered to life.

“Mind if I take this seat?” Gail asked Arthur even as she
slid into the chair that put her back to the window.

“There’s plenty of room on this side,” Nia said, shifting
over a little. “It’s quite a lovely view.”

“Nah, I’m good. I don’t much care for it.” Before Nia
could ask what she meant, she smiled crookedly and added, “These tables are
usually reserved for rich and famous guests. I had a feeling you would qualify,
so I wrangled it.”

“Oh, it’s lovely!” Nia burst out. “You can still hear the
music and –”
You’re on the job, Nia,
she reminded herself.
Do try to
act like a professional.
“That is, it’s most certainly private. Thank you,
detective.” She could feel Arthur smirking at her, but Gail just nodded and
opened her menu. Anyway, she was certain that Arthur was just as excited as she
was, even if he hid it better.

They didn’t start speaking right away. First there was
dinner to consider. The menu had more pages than Nia would have believed
possible and the drinks especially had long bewildering names that made her
think she had opened a thesaurus by mistake, but they finally successfully
delivered their orders to the quick and quiet waiter.

Then they got down to business.

“So,” Detective Lin began. “Today was interesting.”

“I thought so too!” said Nia. “Horrible as it was, the
magic employed was –”

“Sarcasm,” Arthur murmured.

“Oh.”

Gail was watching her with a frustratingly unreadable
expression.

“Well, I hope you understand what I meant.” She started
to twist her fingers in the tablecloth and quickly stopped herself. “It wasn’t
pleasant
by any means, but –” She met Gail’s dark eyes defiantly – “I’m sure you
find crime scenes interesting from time to time.”

After thinking for a moment, Gail shrugged. “Maybe, but
my job is to work out how something was done so I can catch the bastard who did
it and make sure they don’t do it again, not so I can do it myself.”

Nia’s mouth dropped open. “You can’t possibly think – I
have
no
intention of –!”

“Wait, I wasn’t finished.”

It was only with great effort that Nia managed to keep
silent. How could Detective Lin possibly think that
any
Academy magician
would employ such foul magic? That
wasn’t the kind of magic they hoped
to learn from Connery. If Connery could perform such powerful and complex magic
for evil purposes then he very likely had also recreated spells that could be
used for good. That was the magic they were looking for. Not… not what they had
seen today.

“All I’m saying is that whoever did the magic we saw
today committed murder three times over
and
tried to kill us in the
bargain. I got the feeling the magic itself wasn’t strictly Academy-sanctioned
either.”

“No indeed,” said Nia quietly. Bringing someone back from
the dead was acceptable under a very specific set of circumstances, one of
which – the revival of a magician with important knowledge – she was currently
operating under, but those poor people… They hadn’t even been properly revived.
They had been puppets trapped in a mocking reenactment of their former lives
until triggered to attack, their bodies held together by only the thinnest
strings of magic. Nia remembered how the blood had burst from the woman’s
stomach as if from a broken pipe. She hadn’t seen that much blood since –

“Whoever did it must have had a sick sense of humor,”
said Arthur.

Both Nia and Gail stared at him.

“What exactly did you find funny about any of that?” the
detective asked slowly.

“I’m not saying
I
thought it was funny,” Arthur
replied defensively, “but clearly somebody was trying to put on a show. I’m not
a magic expert, but I know a lot about the human body and how it behaves and I
can tell you that just about every wound on those bodies was made after death.
If had to guess, I’d say the actual cause of death was poison.” He nodded
toward Gail. “Probably whatever was in the toy box.”

Gail chafed her arms then said, “So you’re saying it was
just a bit of flash to scare us off?”

“Yeah, though considering how quickly they tried to kill
us, I don’t think the person doing the magic meant for us to get away. So it
wasn’t trying to scare us off as much as just scare us, which is why I think
whoever did it had to have a pretty sick sense of fun.”

“True, I guess most people would be afraid of a lady’s
guts exploding with no warning.” To Nia’s surprise, Gail looked at her and
smiled. “Too bad for them, our resident warrior princess isn’t most people.”

Nia blushed. “Oh no, I was – I was quite startled.”

“Quite startled,” Gail repeated with a low chuckle. Then
she leaned back in her chair, brows drawn down in thought. “So someone put a
lot of effort into this freak show. Why?”

Why indeed. Nia twisted the chain of her necklace,
thinking hard, but all of the possible answers –
they were just evil or they
had some grudge against the family or they just wanted to try out the magic –
all
sounded too vague or unsupported.

“Like I said before, I’m no expert, but…” Arthur gazed
thoughtfully through the window behind Gail, “but I took a quick look at
Connery’s – at Connery – and that did not look like a decapitation performed in
anger. Whoever did that knew what they were doing. They almost certainly used a
scalpel and a bone saw and took their time.”

“Well, that confirms it, I guess,” Gail sighed.

Confirms what?
Nia bit back the instinctive
question, wanting to work it out for herself. What was she missing? A carefully
designed trap, a meticulously neat decapitation… Oh. “Whoever removed the head
and put it in that house clearly planned to come back for it and wanted to keep
it safe.”

“Yep, therefore I’d bet that whoever killed Connery
didn’t plan on letting him stay dead for long, not if they went out of their
way to keep him in good shape. And who is the one person in the world who has
the most interest in making sure that Connery doesn’t stay dead?”

Nia’s first thought was the Academy, but that wasn’t
quite right, was it? If the Academy knew where Connery was, he would
reassembled and alive already, the Directors probing him for information, so that
left – “Mister Connery himself.”

Gail nodded. “That’s what it looks like to me. I’m
guessing he had this all planned from the beginning. I can’t say I’m
surprised.” Then she wiped her hands together like she was brushing the case
from them. “In my experience, the best way to deal with Connery is to never
give him what he wants, so –”

“But we’re not!” Nia burst out. “In fact, I would say
that we’re doing just the opposite!”

“Huh?”

“Think of it this way, I agree that it seems likely that
Mister Connery chose to die to avoid paying for his no doubt numerous and
heinous crimes against civilized society –”

“You watch a lot of movies, don’t you?”

“
However,
it is also clear that he has a
contingency plan in place, a plan that almost certainly involves one of his
underlings reviving him after an appropriate amount of time has passed. Whether
he would take up a new identity or simply reemerge as himself, I don’t know…”

“How long will a revived person stay alive for? I assume
it’s not forever or there’d be a lot more 300-year-old magicians wandering
around.”

That brought Nia up short. “Well, only a few weeks at
most, but –”

Gail shrugged. “Then he won’t be reemerging for long.”

Goodness, this detective was frustrating. “But Connery
has been tampering with magic that we haven’t seen centuries. Who knows what he
may attempt to do if he has even a few weeks to experiment? At the Academy, he
wouldn’t get the chance. We could obtain his knowledge in secure surroundings.”

Gail grunted noncommittally. “Maybe, but even if his
underlings want to follow through with the plan to bring him back – and I’m not
sure why they
would
given what an asshole he was – they can’t do it now,
can they? Connery’s not Connery without his head and we’ve got that.”

“But one part could be easily stolen!”

“I thought you said the Academy is secure?”

Nia gritted her teeth before answering. “It
is.
But
storing something long term is always risky. I can think of only one solution.”

“I bet I can think of more. Why not just set the head on
fire tonight?”

“We have to finish what we set out to do,” Nia said over
her. “Find the rest of Connery and bring him back to the Academy, so we can
learn all we can from him. Then we can dispose of him for good.” She looked at
Arthur for support before remembering that he technically wasn’t permitted to
comment. He apparently intended to take full advantage of that fact, looking
around the dining room as if the only thing on his mind was the arrival of his
dinner.

Gail was shaking her head, her face shadowed by frustration.
“Never do anything Connery wants you to do.”

“But his knowledge –”

“He murdered –”

“Yes, and now he can pay for his crimes by helping –”

“Food’s here,” said Arthur lightly, giving both Nia and
Gail enough warning to bite back the rest of their arguments before the waiter
arrived. Nia forced a polite smile, but Gail just kept glaring flatly across
the table. As soon as the waiter had laid their food in front of them and
walked away, she pounced back into the conversation.

“Look, I get it. The Academy wants to know what Connery
knew, I understand that, but don’t you think we ought to worry about what’s
best for the whole city? Because dead Connery is a lot better than living
Connery, I can tell you that.”

“I understand you believe that, but –”

“Do you? Because I’ve seen his work firsthand. Those
people we saw today? Those aren’t the first deaths he’s been responsible for,
not by a long shot, and no one in the city moved as much vernix as he did.” She
looked at Nia pointedly. “He must have had a hell of a hook-up inside.”

“Of course he had a contact in the Academy,” Nia said
peevishly. “It happens. Magicians aren’t immune to the temptations of money and
power.”

Gail raised her eyebrows as she toyed with her glass.
“You don’t say?”

Temper fraying, Nia couldn’t resist saying, “I doubt you
could claim that the laymen police are all entirely honest.”

To her surprise, Gail laughed. “I wouldn’t take that bet
in a million years. Why do you think I quit the force? Besides the shitty pay,
that is. The only thing I hate more than bastards like Connery are the bastards
I worked with.”

“Oh,” said Nia. Then nothing else, because what else was
there to say?

“Connery had plenty of cops in his pocket, too. The ones he
couldn’t tempt with money and vernix, he threatened. Threatened them and their
families.” A humorless smile twisted Gail’s mouth. “Most people can’t take that
hanging over them day after day.”

“And you can?” Arthur asked, his tone more curious than
challenging.

“Yeah, I don’t have any family, so the only one they can
threaten is me and I don’t scare easy.” She flashed a sudden grin at Nia. “We
have that in common at least.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t know about…” Nia glanced uncertainly
at Arthur. Goodness, this woman was difficult to read.

As if to prove her point, Gail instantly grew somber
again. “I won’t lie, though Connery scares me. There was something just not
right about him. I have a hard time believing that anything short of the secret
to purifying the rain would be worth bringing him back for.”

“But he’ll be revived within the Academy, under the
supervision of the most powerful magicians in the city, and once he tells us
about his research, he will be – humanely euthanized again.”

“Why do you think he would tell you the truth? He’ll want
to keep himself alive for as long as he can and if his contacts on the inside –
All right, if you shake your head any harder, it’ll fall off. Tell me why I’m
wrong already.”

Nia fiddled with her pearl earring as she tried to
explain as tastefully as possible. “Living in a resurrected body is
uncomfortable. The subjects seem acutely aware that they are living in briefly
animated corpses. All they want is to be returned to death and that makes them
extremely cooperative.”

Gail scowled skeptically. “I’d think at least some people
would want to go on living as long as possible, no matter how uncomfortable
they were.”

“All of the data I reviewed suggests otherwise and I
reviewed quite a bit of data. Every single resurrection performed in the last
two hundred years, actually.”