The Voodoo Killings (6 page)

“I’m taking him to see Lee.”

The poltergeist wavered in front of me before turning to stare down my terrified zombie. If ghosts look bad to the undead, poltergeists have to look worse. I felt sorry for Cameron: barely dead, no memory, and he’d already had to deal with two ghosts in one night.

Des hovered for a long moment, snarling at Cameron.

“Des,” I said, warning in my voice.

Finally, he tore his eyes off Cameron. “Fine, Kincaid. Take him to see Lee. But next time, tell me you got company.” He dissolved into a grey cloud and flew at Cameron, who backpedalled faster than I thought a zombie could move.

“Asshole,” I said under my breath.

“I heard that,” Des said, but his voice was faint and he didn’t reappear.

Cameron stared at the spot where Des had been a moment ago.

I sighed. “Not fun, but the worst of it is over. Come on.”

He didn’t move.

I tried again. “If you stay here, Des will come back. He’s a bit of an asshole that way. All poltergeists are.”

That did the trick. Fear, the almighty motivator.

I stuck the flashlight in my mouth, and we crawled through the collapsed sawmill until we reached the log chute. “Through here,” I said.

Cameron took one look over my shoulder. Even without shining the flashlight in his face, I could tell he was glaring.

“I’m dead. That doesn’t mean I have a death wish,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. “Look, I’m going first. Just follow me. The city is on the other side. Promise.”

Cameron swore but crawled after me.

When I said it was just on the other side, I meant it. The chute was only a few yards long. Halfway along, I started picking up the thrum of the city, amplified by the tunnels ahead. At the end, I lowered myself down the four-foot drop into another brick-lined tunnel. The difference between this tunnel and the previous ones was that it was lit by a trail of yellow paper lanterns. I figured it was Lee’s way of saying, “If you’ve made it this far, chances are good you
belong. If not, we’ll probably kill you, so no point making your last few moments miserable tripping through the darkness.” Lee was nothing if not polite.

Once I helped Cameron down, we followed the trail of paper lanterns. The noise of the city became louder with each step, and soon the lanterns gave way to lampposts. The tunnel started to widen and the dusty brown bricks turned bright red, as if someone here bothered to take care of them. Then the tunnel stopped, the red bricks turning into a spiral stairwell.

At the bottom was the start of a floodlit boardwalk with storefronts on one side and a market on the other. The underground city. No one was passed out on the steps yet, which meant I didn’t have to worry about Cameron stepping on one of them and scaring himself as he descended.

I motioned for Cameron to carry on. He gripped the railing beside me and stared down, speechless. I gave him a second to catch his breath. Memory or not, it’s not every day you stumble onto an entire city hidden underground.

Finally, he said, “It’s beautiful.”

Not the exact descriptor I’d use, but I’m not a zombie. “Keep hold of the railing and try not to trip,” I said, and we started down the spiral steps into the city.

The city unfolded in a series of wide tunnels with stores and apartments recessed into the walls all the way up to the arched ceilings. Those ceilings were high, considering how far down we were. Wrought iron lampposts reached out over the tunnels, gaslight lending the vibrancy of a city that comes alive at night.

The twenty smaller tunnels, or streets, spilled out into First Street, a “main street” that stretched out for a mile. As on the other streets, the shops and apartments here resembled their frontier Seattle roots, even though they’d been built after the great fire. The only section of the city that had escaped the flames was the market, a large alley off to our left as we stepped off the stairs onto the city boardwalk. A dead-end offshoot of First Street, it was one of the few places large enough to accommodate rows of stalls.

“Try not to stare, Cameron,” I said, and pushed him along the boardwalk and away from the staircase, which descended for two more levels, each with an identical layout. The second level wasn’t somewhere I went often, because it catered to zombies and ghouls. As for the third level? Well, the third ended at the subterranean docks. If you found yourself needing to go down there, you had big problems.

I kept a hand on Cameron as we moved through the crowds coming out of the market. The pedestrian traffic rivalled that of any busy street in downtown Seattle, except that nothing here ever really shut down. Nate compared it to Las Vegas for zombies, though I didn’t see it. Not enough lights and the gambling broke out into fist fights more often than not, which was one of the reasons Lee didn’t keep poker tables in her establishment anymore.

I held my breath as we passed by the food stalls that catered to zombies and ghouls. It wasn’t the smell that bothered me, but the fact that it reminded me of chicken noodle soup. I did my best not to look, either. I can handle dead bodies, but not a lot of unidentifiable hanging…things.

We passed by zombies who looked almost normal and others where no way they were passing topside without a gallon of paint. I almost lost Cameron once when he stopped to stare at a ghoul, a type of zombie, sitting on a bench.

“Sorry,” I said to the ghoul in apology, and towed Cameron back along the boardwalk. “You wouldn’t have stopped to stare if you knew what the serrated teeth were for,” I said.

Halfway down the boardwalk, I turned down one of the narrower side streets, and after five more minutes of weaving through the foot traffic, we reached our destination: a dusty, gold-coloured shop window next to a set of saloon-style red doors. Gold Chinese characters decorated the doors and the edge of the window, and hanging above the entrance, also written in gold letters, was a sign announcing Damaged Goods.

I noticed a pair of Chinese paper lanterns hanging just inside the window, white with red characters. Hunh, those were new. Either
Lee got bored with the old ones or there’d been another fight. I was betting on the fight.

“Well, Cameron. Here we are. What do you think?”

Cameron examined the shopfront painstakingly. Then he turned to face me, confused. “You’re taking me to a dive bar?”

I shrugged and pushed him ahead of me through the red saloon doors. “Depends on what you consider a dive bar.”

CHAPTER 4

DAMAGED GOODS

We stepped straight into a set of beaded curtains suspended over the entrance—not your classic hippie beads, but strings of bamboo painted white and decorated with red Chinese characters. Hmm, those were new too, and, oh…phew.

I covered my mouth with the sleeve of my jacket; the air was loaded with paint fumes. Well, that explained why the place was empty for a Friday night. As I stood there giving my eyes a chance to adjust to the newly dimmed lantern light, I took in the scene that lay before me. Lee really had been redecorating.

White Chinese paper lanterns had been strung across the entire ceiling, in the windows, and wrapped around the wood pillars, all of them covered with the same red characters that decorated the bamboo curtains. Each lantern gave off a warm yellow glow much dimmer than the gas lamps Lee had been partial to, which were nowhere to be seen. Besides the addition of the lanterns and beaded curtains, the walls, table, chairs and bar stools had also been given a new coat of bright red paint—from the smell of it, exterior enamel.

“Hunh, Lee’s been spiffing the place up,” I said. The wisdom of that was suspect in my mind. The underground isn’t what I’d call a haven for interior decorators. It reminds me of a living, breathing thing more than a place, and tends to rebel against any and all change. Think of bathing a cat: there’s a good chance it’ll bite you.

Lee was nowhere to be seen in her white and red extravaganza, and barring a handful of sketchy patrons clinging to recessed corner booths at the back, the place was dead—no pun intended. Then again, any human practitioner with any respect for their lungs would be taking their business elsewhere tonight. Even most zombies wouldn’t put up with these fumes. While they didn’t have to breathe them in, the fumes still smelled bad.

I’d have turned tail, but I needed brains from Mork and I wanted Lee Ling to see Cameron. And then there was the small problem of Nate, my prima donna roommate. Just maybe he’d actually show up.

I caught Cameron covering his mouth. “You can just stop breathing and you’ll be fine,” I told him. “Trust me.”

He frowned at me then gulped twice as the muscles in his throat and chest fought with the idea before all motion in his chest stopped.

I focused on the smells filtering through my sleeve. Turpentine, paint…and was that tar? Yup. Paint, solvents, tar and next to no ventilation.

I glanced at Cameron as he started to pull his hood up and shook my head. Best not to hide your identity in the underground. The zombies like to know whom they’re dealing with.

“Well, what do you think?” I asked Cameron, my voice muffled by the sleeve of my jacket.

He scanned the bar from one end to the other, and then his eye was caught by a red and gold poster taped to the wall behind the bar and obscured by a string of white lanterns. One of Lee Ling’s wards against evil spirits—a real one, loaded with Otherside. Unnerving if you were dead. “It’s harmless,” I said, half expecting an argument. I’d been telling Cameron an awful lot of things were harmless.

Cameron only stared at the ward, hypnotized….

“Cameron?” I said, touching his arm and taking one big step back, just in case.

At the sound of my voice, he tore his eyes off the ward and turned a face, void of any recognition, towards me.

Shit. I took another step back. I did not want to pull another globe tonight to undo Cameron’s bindings, unless I really had to. Tapping the barrier for a fifth time in one night meant I’d stand a good chance of knocking myself unconscious. Cameron took an unsure step towards me, and I reached behind me and found the back of a chair.

That’d do. I readied to swing if Cameron didn’t snap out of it….Damn it, Lee was going to be pissed with me bringing her a dead body. Speaking of which, where the hell was she?

Cameron’s chest began to move again as he picked up a scent. Sniffing the air, he took another slow step towards me. I lifted the chair and got ready to strike. No time to feel sorry for him now, I could do that later….Damn it, this was going to be messy.

“Kincaid, to what do I owe this pleasure?” Lee’s low, throaty voice carried through the bar. Her voice had too rough a texture to be feminine, but it was refined with a hint of a British accent.

It wasn’t much of a distraction, but it was enough. Cameron turned to stare at the petite silhouette standing behind the bar, backlit by the lamps in her office. The blank expression disappeared as he turned back to me, frowning at the chair I still held. “I don’t think this is the kind of place I hang out,” he said.

I exhaled and put the chair down. “Cameron, you have no idea how close you just got to having a very short afterlife.” I turned to Lee. “Nice timing,” I said.

She snorted and ducked back into her office.

“And when did you start redecorating the place?” I called after her.

No answer.

I grabbed the nearest bar stool and double-checked to make sure the paint was dry before sitting down. Cameron reluctantly came to join me.

“Hey, Lee, what the hell do I need to do to get a drink around here?”

“Patience is a virtue, Kincaid,” Lee yelled back. I heard the sounds of rustling papers and a desk drawer closing.

“What I was saying—earlier—about this place not being somewhere I’d go?” Cameron interrupted.

I glanced at him.

“You don’t seem like the kind of person who hangs out here either,” he said, glancing back down at the bar.

“Six months ago I’d have agreed with you, Cameron.” I propped my elbows on the bar and craned my head to get a better look in the office. “Hey, Lee? How about a whisky sour?” I sat back, but my elbows met with glue-like resistance. Damn it, I’d forgotten about the tar smell. The entire wood beam that made up the bar had been coated in creosote, a tacky preservative Lee Ling used to hold back water rot. I tried wiping my elbows off on the side of the stool, to no avail. “I knew there was a reason no one was sitting at the bar,” I said.

“Yet here you are,” Lee said, stepping out of her office and into the bar’s lantern light. Tonight her hair was tied in a low knot and she was wearing a red silk Chinese dress. The colour was a lovely contrast against her pale skin and dark hair. It also drew attention away from the scars that ran across her face like cracks in porcelain—grey rivulets that were difficult to camouflage. The pale green-blue eyes, however, ruined any chance Lee had of passing for the living. Granted, her eyes had been bought and paid for. Dearly. The originals had been ruined more than a hundred years ago, after all.

I held up my creosote-covered sleeves. “Would it kill you to put up a Wet Paint sign?” I said.

She arched a single, perfect black eyebrow. “Everyone else figured it out. I fail to see why you should receive special treatment….” Her voice trailed off as her eyes moved to Cameron. It didn’t matter that he didn’t show any outward signs of decay. Any dead worth their salt can spot another dead; unlike the living, they don’t need to tap the barrier to see Otherside. Her eyes narrowed as she continued to examine Cameron, at the same time as she mixed my whisky sour with the deft grace that came from a hundred years of practice.

She passed me my drink without betraying any of her thoughts. Only a few of the muscles in her face still worked; Lee had turned that state of affairs into a gift of sorts.

“Nice zombie, Kincaid,” she said, the unspoken question heavy in each word.

I took my first sip. Lee made the best whisky sour in Seattle, topside included. “So you caught the same binding anomalies I did?”

“Your work?” she asked, her face still unreadable as she searched my eyes.