Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (32 page)

It got heavy all of the sudden and I nearly dropped it. The muscles in my forearms snapped to attention to hold it still in exactly the position it began, and my fingers curled into near-claws to contain the power spilling through me into the bowl of my palms.

“By the count of one, the spell's begun,” Last chance to opt out. If I cocked it up, I'd call the full heat of the sun, which could only end in a massive Marnie-kafoomf. I'd lose my eyebrows. Again.

“By the count of two, my blessing's due/ By the count of three, suffer my need/ By the count of four, Dark Lady's lore,” My voice thickened and I had to shove it out. “By the count of five, the spell's alive/ By the count of six, my force be fix'd/ By the count of seven, so lightly given/ By the count of eight…”

That's when I drew a blank. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Harry jerk like I'd slapped him. Forgetting his promise to restrain himself, he lunged up.

“Harry, no!” I commanded, but he would not hear. He was a visual blur, a crow drawn in black finger-paint streaks, as he stole Dunnachie's baton from his utility belt, whipping it around overhead and coming at the ghoul. The ghoul reached for him. Harry swung the baton up and under her arm, flipping her around in a submissive hold that twisted her to one knee. Bullet wounds or not, with superhuman strength, the two undead creatures set against one another, straining with set grimaces. Dead Kristin's joints cracked. Harry officially crossed legal lines with a determined, fangs-out hiss, putting his preternatural weight behind his clinch. The ghoul's shoulder joint buckled outward with a wet, warning pop. I had to stop him.

The moon's gentle glow filled my hands as Hecate's power raced in to reclaim the ground She had lost to my dabbling with limbo-space. It flickered like a candle near-snuffed by a draft and I shouted: “By the count of eight, the divine awaits/ By the count of nine, Her light be mine!”

As the glow swelled, I rushed forward, swinging it at the ghoul's face. A taut sphere of the divine captured in a witch's blessed hands. It bubbled up against the poker-hot black sludge of the demon's handle on Dead Kristin's ghoul. One touch was enough.

The ghoul swiped at me with its free arm, hitting me just the wrong way, fist connecting with my cheekbone and pelting me over hard. With a throaty grind the ghouls’ head rocked back, knocking Harry's chin and breaking the revenant's hold. Whipping to her feet, Dead Kristin launched across her own shattered casket, pouring
liquid-smooth through the air, surprisingly agile for a decomposing slab of meat. The ghoul landed like a jungle cat on all fours on the other side, limbs rebounding flexibly despite their injuries. Harry spun after her in a soaring arc of cold, savage energy. Batten tore through the space with a stake raised, and his approach was accepted by the wide-wing outstretch of the ghoul's embrace. She flung wide her arms to catch him like a child caught by a father playing toss-the-baby.

The stake sank in between her ribs and snapped in his hand but the response was lightning quick. She whipped him through the room like he was made of balled paper, then shoved past a horrified Rob Hood, flailing him aside.

Harry made a dismayed snarl and sprang back to his feet despite the bullets imbedded in his ribs, rocketing towards the ghoul. At the same time Harry's baton rose again to strike. Kristin Davis’ badly spoiled cadaver fell under Harry's swoop, disappearing into a back room, clattering furniture down and shrieking as she went, leaving behind a trail of hot sick.

Harry and Chapel went after it like a shot. Dunnachie lowered his gun and looked to me for an explanation, eyebrows puckered in a twist. Hood was wiping, wiping, wiping his arm with his hand, his pasty face quickly greening to match the tone of the quivering gunk stuck to him.

“You shot him,” I accused Dunnachie, who looked genuinely baffled. “You humungous asshole. You shot Harry.”

Dunnachie's mouth worked impotently, then said, “I thought…”

Batten dropped to a knee beside me. “Marnie, your stitches. Are you all right?”

I thought about it. There was putrefied ghoul sludge on my cheek and hands. It smelled like someone had dumped a rancid box of meat in an old cheese factory.

“Excuse me,” I gulped, bolting. I used my elbows to bang open the bathroom doors and shove the faucets on. Running water over the jiggling feculent goo didn't cut it. I pumped soap madly from the dispenser with my bare hands. The Blue Sense flared into unexpected vivid reaction. As nausea blared in my gut. I tried to force up a psychic wall to block it, but caught the faintest whiff of a
sordid mind, a trace of black magic on the soap pump. I slammed my eyelids shut and tried to block it. Images squeezed into my brain like cold fingers nonetheless—need want hunger rage—and I scrubbed harder between my fingers until the vision began to lift.

Carefully breathing through my mouth, I checked my hands front and back to see if they were clean. An experimental sniff told me they were definitely not. I washed them again. And again. After the fifth wash I found a paper-thin strip of overripe tissue stuck under my fingernails that wouldn't come out.

I didn't know whether to cry or barf. So I did both.

TWENTY-NINE

“Explain to me,” Batten said from the front seat of their SUV, “why you had Davis’ eyeball in a Ziploc bag in your pocket?”

“I thought it belonged to a newt.” I sniffed at my fingernails. They smelled vile, so bad I couldn't believe it and had to check again.

Batten inhaled deeply through his nostrils, exhaling nice and slow. One of his hands stroked his forehead. “Tell me.”

“I saw these filmy things in my jar, which should have only contained eyes of newt. I suppose the fact that I had fifteen should have tipped me off, or size of them, right? But they were broken, and I didn't really inspect them. I assumed.” I sighed. “And you know what they say when you assume.”

“You make an ass of you and me, and accidentally raise a ghoul at her own funeral?” Batten finished with unexpected grim humor.

Beside me, Harry reached for my hand, noticed me sniffing it, and changed his mind. His nose scrunched as he searched his pockets for his monogrammed handkerchief.

“How did Kristin Davis’ eye get in your jar?” Batten asked.

“All in favor of going another round with the Demented Mailman theory?”

“Don't toy with me, MJ,” he said.

I froze with alarm. Harry abruptly stopped rubbing the gunshot wounds in his back against the seat like a cat against its master's legs. He craned sideways at me ever so slightly, his neck stiffening with displeasure.

“Only Harry calls me MJ, Agent Batten,” I said quickly. “You may call me Snickerdoodle.”

Batten whipped around in his seat and blinked at me in disbelief.

“What? I like Snickerdoodles.”

Batten repeated unhappily, “How did Kristin Davis’ eyeballs get into a jar in your home?”

“Actually, I have a theory about that,” I told him. He didn't seem impressed. He should have been; I so rarely have workable theories. “A ghoul isn't raised by accident, and it isn't easy. Someone was planning it, but I don't think they intended it to rise during the funeral. That part was accidental. I think the plan was to conjure Davis in ghoul form after the funeral, using the eyes at my house as a lure to attack us.”

For a moment, I imagined the ghoul rummaging through my bedroom looking for her eye while I slept, and had to re-launch my heart by giving my chest a thump. “Unfortunately I took one of the eyes out of the jar, planning on mailing it back for a refund. I got too close to the casket with it and jump-started the spell.” And now, the reanimation of Davis’ head in the mailbox made a whole lot more sense. I'd had a broken eye in my pocket.

“So this was witchcraft?”

“Black witchcraft. Flesh magic. The spell used was exothermic, belching out heat from an internal, infernal source, and sloughing off her skin as the heat was liberated.”

“All that bloating,” Batten agreed. “There shouldn't have been gases like that in an embalmed body.”

I wrinkled my nose, and hugged myself. “Thank the Dark Lady it wasn't summer or she'd be covered in flies.”

“Do we think this was Danika Sherlock?” Batten asked.

“Danika's a fucking lunatic,” I reminded him. “Question is, would she have the mental resources to do this?”

“I am inclined to suppose this business requires the wherewithal of a far more stable mind, an organized psyche,” Harry said, almost to himself. “Ms. Sherlock's iniquitous attack at the Ten Springs Motor Inn was possessed and near-mortal, but out of control.”

“She must have control, if she's doing complex magic,” I said.

Harry shook his head. “Upon no account should I like to think Ms. Sherlock capable of turning out complex magic. Why, only yesterday you said the barmy fraud was not a witch at all, that she was all gall and wormwood; barking mad and due Skeffington's gyves, granted, but not in the least keen with a bolline.”

Batten looked around as though he'd tripped through a portal into an alien land. I estimated Mark understood about thirty percent of what Harry said at the best of times, and this was not one of those times.

“Yes Harry,” I said wryly. “Word for word, that's exactly what I said.”

“Was it English?” Batten asked.

Harry pursed his lips. “Do not furnish me with your cheek, young man. I'm sure you will agree, Ms. Sherlock may be red in tooth and claw but when it comes to multifarious conjurations of a malevolent manner, she is hardly worth a tinker's cuss.”

“Thanks for clearing that up,” Batten's shoulders shook with silent laughter. “Maybe you just don't know what she's capable of?”

“Oh, lad.” Harry gave a scolding cluck of his tongue. “I am a four hundred thirty-five-year-old man. It is safe for you to suppose I have more than a basic working knowledge of both the normal and abnormal psychology of mortal homo sapiens and all of which they should ever be capable.”

Chapel broke his silence. “Let's get back to the subject.”

“Gotta sort the data,” I suggested. Lost without a No. 2 and Moleskine, I used my fingers to list off facts. “Kristin was raised a ghoul, not a zombie, so we're looking at black witchcraft, not Haitian Vodou.”

“Explain,” Batten ordered.

I complied, fishing out my Shalimar purse spray and dousing my fingertips, rubbing the dribbles directly up under my nails. Now they smelled like velvety Oriental vanilla ghoul scum. Not exactly the improvement I was hoping for.

“A zombie is raised as a servant by a bokor,” I said. “A Haitian necromancer. Zombies are mindless slaves to the bokor. Without direct orders they merely shamble about looking for yummy snacks.”

Batten looked reluctant to even say the word out loud. “Brains.”

“A popular misconception,” I told him, leaning my tired head against the rear driver's side door and closing my eyes. “Any chewy bits will do: tongues, livers, gall bladders, spleens. A nice, mushy heart. Zombies’ jaw joints tend to give them trouble, and most of the
time they lose teeth when their gums retract after death. They're slow like morbid constipation and not overly bright. But the bokor's magic combined with the byproduct of yersinia sarcophaginae, their active bacterial infection, gives them incredible strength. They'll rip doors off hinges, bash through ribcages, crack your skull open like a shell to get to the nibbly parts.”

“The ghoul moved fast.” Chapel glanced in his rear view mirror at me.

“No faster than a human. It had extraordinary strength but not supernatural speed. It just wasn't what you expected from the dead.”

“It outran Harry,” Chapel pointed out.

“But Harry is healing two massive bullet wounds to the back. I'd like to see you whip up preternatural speed while you're holding a couple of .45s in your broken ribs.”

“The ghoul still seemed really fast,” Chapel argued.

“Because you expected shambling, zombie-speed. Any human can outrun a shambling zombie. Just pop behind a tree or dive in a bush. Zombies are dumb as stumps. They won't think to look there unless the bokor orders it. Kids know. Pulling your blankets up over your head fools some monsters. If they can't see you, they give up and stumble off down the hall to eat your parents.”

Harry said, “I would not suggest that as a wise course of action in the case of a ghoul in your bedroom.”

I felt ill. A ghoul in my bedroom. Fetching her other eyeball. All at once, I knew where Kristin Davis’ remains were hurrying off to.

“Go on,” Batten urged.

I gave a queasy smile and hesitated before saying, “Fact: raising ghouls and poltergeists requires goetic summoning via the lesser key of Solomon. One needs the cooperation of a lesser demon, and that means flesh magic.”

“You thought the reanimation of the skull in the mailbox was also done with some form of flesh magic,” Chapel said.

“Yes. The good news is, we can totally find our bad guy now. They'll either be having an abnormally-long orgasm while speaking in tongues… or they'll be missing exactly one pound of flesh from their own body, and probably a digit. A finger or toe. That might be hard to miss, even for us.”

“Poltergeists are spirits.” Batten drummed his fingers on the headrest. “Like a ghost? So, what exactly is a ghoul and how is it made and ordered around? Was there someone at the funeral with a magic remote control? Did we miss the shoes sticking out from behind the curtains by the coffee urn?”

“Hilarious,” I sighed, but something nagged me when he said it, and I knew I was forgetting something. Something I had seen, or heard, or felt. Harry noted my frustration through the Bond and tapped the back of my hand in question. I smiled him away and he went back to contemplating the night through the car window.

“A poltergeist is not a ghost,” I said. “A ghost lingers after its body has died because it's lost. They're confused, often melancholy, but not hurtful to the living. A poltergeist on the other hand is the angry, uncooperative and incorporeal remains of a person raised very soon after death against their will by a demon. It's basically a soul that is prevented from rightfully ascending to heaven. The demon kinda plucks it out of the light, and holds it here on Earth in spirit form for a bit. Poltergeists are crankyass bitches. They were almost in perfect peace and now they're stuck here with only a demon for company. If they're kept here long enough—and that would require the goetic witch, I might add, continually feeding the demon pound after pound of her own flesh to keep the demon cooperative—the poltergeists gain strength and bulk, and can actually affect their environment: knock over chairs, shove people, scrawl things on your mirror in lipstick. You have to keep the demon happy to keep the poltergeist here. Once the demon flees back to its cozy nook in the third circle of hell, the poltergeist is free to go join their ancestors.”