The Voodoo Killings (39 page)

I had Cameron on the back of my Hawk and Nate yelling in my ear. At least the sun was coming up and for the first time in three days it wasn’t raining….

“No one walks in on Maximillian Odu. Not even us ghosts. It isn’t done,” Nate yelled.

Another brilliantly accurate point. “I’m not walking, I’m riding. Do you have a better idea?”

“Yeah! Go home and call Aaron!”

“Nate, I told you already, I have no idea what Aaron will do. Neon had him convinced I was involved, and I don’t think her being missing will help my cause.”

“And I told you I’ll fucking believe that Aaron wouldn’t help you when I see a pig fly!”

“Besides, if Max’s in trouble, like I think he is—”

“And what if he’s
not
? Am I the only one who thinks about our skins?”

“You don’t have a skin.”

“I have a PlayStation!”

“That makes
no
sense whatsoever.”

“If you had any appreciation for video games, it would,” he said.

I shook my head. “Too late—we’re here.” I pulled up to the curb in front of Max’s, which was the only place to park. He had decided years ago to turn the gravel driveway into garden space.

Max’s home was not what you would call well-kept, just a cottage set in an overgrown garden. The house was rundown, but the gardens made up for it, including the tangle of potted plants that covered the cracked cement porch.

Wind chimes rustled and I could hear birdsong, but nothing else. I climbed onto the porch and focused on the Otherside until I figured out where Max’s famous ghost barrier was, the one that kept them from hounding him day and night. It was still intact. Cameron had followed me up to the porch steps.

“Cameron, it’s best if you wait by the bike. The place is surrounded with Otherside. It isn’t going to play nice with your bindings. If Max is okay, I’ll have him drop the barrier.”

He nodded and went back to the bike. I glanced around. The last thing we needed was an anonymous call to the police, so maybe Cameron should wait somewhere else, like in the park down the road.

I called, “Why don’t you head to the park and wait for me there? It’ll be safer.”

He exchanged a glance with Nate before complying. “Shout if you need me,” he said.

Nate joined me at the edge of the barrier.

“Ready?” I asked him.

“No,” he said, but dissolved back to the Otherside anyway. I stepped through Max’s ghost barrier, registering no more than a slight tingle. As soon as I was across, I pulled out my pocket mirror and wrote Nate’s name. Easiest way to get him across without setting off an alarm.

When he was back with me, I thought about knocking, but all that might do was alert the killer I was here. I tried the door and it opened.

“K, this is too easy,” Nate said. “Why would Max leave his door open?”

“Because the only people who come looking for him are ghosts and he has a barrier for that?”

Nate floated through the door and back out. “Pulling me across was awful easy. Way too fucking easy if you ask me.”

“We’ll be careful,” I said.

The inside of Max’s home matched the outside; it was not without its charm but was in need of a fresh coat of paint and some repairs. There was no sign of Max as Nate and I walked through the living room, though his large coffee mug was sitting on the coffee table. It was half full and the milk had begun to curdle. Not like Max to leave something like that lying around. In the kitchen, I noticed that the bird feeder that hung outside the window was down to its last few sunflower seeds.

Max hadn’t been avoiding me. The coffee and bird feeder suggested that he’d been gone since he’d come to see me in Pioneer Square. He’d said he had a client to go see.

The spring hinges squeaked as I opened the screen door into the backyard. And there Max was, standing in the vegetable garden with his back to me. One hand rested on the crabapple tree he threatened to cut down each and every year.

“Max?” I said.

He turned and gave me a tired smile. “Took you long enough.”

I started down the steps towards him. “Thank god, Max!” I stopped when I caught sight of the symbols soaking through his shirt. I switched my view to Otherside. The lines were everywhere, woven through the garden and anchored to the blood symbols drawn on Max.

“You must be the thickest, most stubborn apprentice I’ve ever had the pleasure to teach. I expected you to break down my door when Gideon showed up, not call and leave me a message.”

Another piece of the puzzle slid into place. “Gideon Lawrence didn’t find me by accident. You planned that. That’s why you insisted on meeting me for coffee, so that damned ghost would catch sight of me.”

“A plan? No. More of a hope. When you called me about Cameron, I saw an opportunity. Though I failed to foresee this happening.” He inclined his head towards the lines holding him in place.

Max’s client, the one he’d been going to see after meeting me. More pieces fell into place. I shook my head. “If you hadn’t played the senile voodoo priest so well, I would have been here two days ago.”

Max shrugged, careful not to move from his spot. “If I hadn’t been so convincing, I would be long dead. They’ve been watching me for a while. I needed a good reason to come see you, one my captor would believe and yet would set you on a path to find me.” He glanced at the bindings. “Though I didn’t expect them to lose their patience with me so…drastically.”

“Who kidnapped you, Max? Who’s trying to raise a Jinn?”

“I believe I am his next test subject.”

“Yeah, I know that. But who is it?”

He shook his head. “I cannot speak the name or disrupt these bindings. The consequences would be…unwelcome. One thing my captor has succeeded at is re-creating the symbols that force the Jinn into servitude. They work just as well on the living, it would seem.”

“How about I guess, Max? If I get it right, all you have to do is nod.”

He sighed. “All I can say, Kincaid, is that if they were someone you know, you would never guess it was them.”

Aaron. My heart fell. I’d never have suspected him in a thousand years. Though that was before Neon started manipulating the situation.

No time to worry about that now. I needed to get Max free.

I concentrated on the active bindings holding him in place. I recognized a symbol here or there, but the patterns of Otherside lines running through them were foreign to me.

How far were they from raising an actual Jinn?

As if reading my thoughts, Max said, “I believe I am to be the first success.”

“Figures. If they could control you, they could control anyone.”

The activated bindings had been ravelled so tight I didn’t think I’d be able to unwind them. Maybe the unactivated ones.

“Max, if I get rid of the bindings, will I set anything off?”

He gave me a ghost of a smile. “I believe they were in quite a hurry to leave.” Not much of a clue there.

I nodded. Now where the hell to start? Max couldn’t exactly give me instructions.

“Kincaid, do you remember the game I used to give everyone in my class?”

“Of course.” He used to give us incomplete binding puzzles in lieu of written tests. We had to fill in the missing parts of whatever binding pattern he’d laid out. Later, when I’d become his apprentice, and moved from seances to raising zombies, Max had used that same principle, relying on patterns and symbols I already knew to teach me the new ones. An intricate fill-in-the-blank mixed with “one of these things is not like the others.”

I could see Max working out what he could say to me. “I believe you were always very good with Egyptian symbols.”

Right, Egyptian symbols used for summoning ghosts near water. My favourite anchor for Otherside. I searched the patterns in the bindings until I found the Egyptian anchor symbol. Along with acting as an anchor for the Jinn ring, it held two separate lines of Otherside tied to Max himself.

I swore. Normally I’d just trash the binding with Otherside, but with the inactive Jinn lines so close to the active ones, I didn’t want to risk setting off a chain reaction. The old man watched me, his expression giving nothing away.

“I hope you didn’t bet too much on me figuring these out,” I said. Whoever had trapped Max here would have known to clean his supplies out of the fridge. I headed back towards the house at a run and pulled the loose board off the second step, peering underneath for the small cooler Max kept there. I breathed a sigh of relief: they
hadn’t found Max’s stash. I checked the contents. Sage, sea urchins and a decent knife.

Just being able to see the Otherside wasn’t enough for this situation, so I braced myself and pulled a globe. I bit back the head rush and nausea and used the knife on one of the sea urchins to dissolve the first Egyptian symbol. As soon as it faded, the anchored lines snapped and wavered, unstable in their new alignment.

I glanced at Max to see if I’d guessed the first step right.

“You were always adept at reading between the lines, Kincaid,” he said.

I spent the next twenty minutes following Max’s subtle clues to the various anchors holding the Jinn rings in place, then picking them off one by one with the sea urchins.

I kept asking him in different ways who had trapped him, but to no avail. He couldn’t tell me directly who had done this. Still, by answering a mix of yes-and-no and indirect questions, he was able to fill me in on the killings as much as he could.

Someone had been stalking people with Otherside affinity in Seattle for a month or more. Max had spotted Morgan one day leaving Cameron’s apartment building. The girl was clearly interested in what Max was up to with Cameron, but she had had very little skill, so Max had not thought much about it. It was not until later he realized his mistake, and by then it was too late to warn anyone.

“So with each victim they’ve sought more and more Otherside affinity?” I asked, and he nodded. I dealt with the last outer anchors. A Celtic rune. Man, whoever had set this up wanted to make damn sure an amateur couldn’t unravel it.

They’d tried a zombie first, but Cameron had inadvertently been the trigger that had set them on a course of practitioners. He was still alive when Neon had mistaken him for a zombie—reasonable considering the number of bindings Max had attached to him. As the ghoul had suggested, Neon hadn’t realized her mistake until after she’d killed him. Right, of course: Neon was the one who killed Cameron.

“Why did he lose his memory?” I asked.

Max almost laughed. “An unforeseen complication.”

“On her part or yours?”

“Both. I did not anticipate someone attempting to layer bindings on Cameron, and she assumed the existing bindings meant he was already a zombie. An unfortunate mistake.”

“Why leave Cameron wandering the city? Why not just finish him off?”

“Simple. Cameron rose as a zombie after they’d killed him in their experiment, and they didn’t know how or what they’d done. When they eventually realized it was an accident, they used him as a decoy.”

“To keep me busy—the only other practitioner in the city besides you who’d stand a chance of figuring out they were raising a Jinn.”

“Though they did not count on your tenacity.” His smile fell. “Small comfort to Cameron, I know.”

Finally, I was left with the un-stabilized, un-anchored Jinn ring floating precariously between the two active lines still holding Max in place.

“Now what?” I asked.

Max nodded to the ring of Otherside symbols floating above him. “This reminds me of an old voodoo zombie set, do you not think?”

I studied it. Voodoo uses a small ring of symbols suspended above the corpse to act like a switchboard for lines of Otherside. The technique isn’t used often anymore, as more stable and efficient anchors are available. A traditional voodoo set ring is too easily disrupted where the lines meet the ring….

I looked for the intersections. I’d be able to unhinge the Jinn ring from Max by tying the lines to something else. If all went well, the Jinn ring would float off and I could work on unravelling the lines still holding Max in place.

I tapped the Otherside through my globe. I should be able to thread the lines bound to Max onto a free symbol left in the tree. I took a deep breath and wove my first thread, careful not to touch the ring itself.

I made conversation to keep his mind off what I was doing. “I’ve got Cameron stashed in the park. If you could fix up his screwy bindings, that would be useful.”

Max was silent. I glanced up to see if he was still okay. He was watching me.

“Kincaid, Cameron’s bindings aren’t meant to be permanent. Those were his wishes. They were only to last until he finished his paintings. That he was murdered for the Jinn experiments is tragic but does not change his goal.”

“No offence, Max, but Cameron got a raw deal.” I tied one thread to the tree.

“When I am free from these bindings, we can take a look.”

I concentrated on threading the last line.

“I’m sorry for bringing you into all this, Kincaid,” Max said. “For not taking Cameron as soon as you found him, for exposing you to entities like Gideon.” He shook his head.

“And then both you and Cameron would be dead and there would be a Jinn loose in Seattle. Apologize later.
After
you fix Cameron and buy me a really fantastic bottle of whisky.” I threaded the line through the hoop and started to tie it off. Careful, Kincaid.

I let out the breath I was holding as the new anchor set. The Jinn ring dissolved. I’d done it.

Max breathed deeply, as if a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders.

I wiped sweat off my forehead. “All right, Max. Where do you want me to start on your binding lines?”

I caught the first flash of Otherside as it kicked off one of the remaining lines. I swore. I hadn’t touched the line yet. So I’d made a mistake and triggered the fail-safe. That Otherside flare rushed along the line like a lit fuse to a stick of dynamite.

“Max! You said these bindings were safe for me to unravel.”

He gave me a sad look. “I said that I believed together we could remove the Jinn ring and save me an eternity as a Jinn slave. Saving my life is at this point beyond either of our capabilities.”