Page 2 of Devils and the Dead
With a sigh, I finished locking the door, still watching Patty and her man-of-the-evening as they climbed into their Lyft ride. I needed time for my bruised heart to heal. And I knew deep down that for me, healing wouldn’t come by jumping into the sack with some random guy.
Patty and her own random guy drove off. I turned to survey the mess I needed to clean up before I went home.
“At least tips were good.” Kristin swept a dozen empty bottles into a trash can and began to scrub down the table top.
We’d run our asses off tonight, understaffed and coping with an unexpected crowd. I didn’t mind the hard work if I rolled in the kind of dough I’d made tonight. Kristin and I would set the place to rights, and I’d be home by three, blackout curtains firmly in place so I could sleep in past noon. The schedule showed me working tomorrow night, then off for Sunday and Monday, and I was already dreaming of spending them without pants, sprawled in front of the television, eating whatever my chosen delivery brought to my door. Maybe I’d freshen up my hair color a bit. Turning my natural auburn hair into glossy locks of fire-engine red meant regular maintenance. Touch up the do, binge old sitcoms, and not see the light of day, or night, for forty-eight hours. That was the plan, and I was sticking to it.
“Hey, there’s a guy at the door,” Kristin announced. “Should I let him in? He’s kinda beefy, and we already let Ricky go home for the night.”
Ricky was our bouncer. I made my way back to the door, because while Kristin might hesitate to let in a guy that outweighed her by eighty pounds, I wouldn’t. Not that I was any use at all in a physical fight, but if beefy-dude tried anything, I’d sic the ten undead rats from the storeroom on him. I don’t care how tough a man is, a swarm of decomposing rodents is gonna make him scream in soprano and run for the hills.
Undead stuff was my jam. I was the youngest of the Perkins witches, and I’d been gifted with the freakiest magic. Necromancers were rare. Technically it wasn’t even a witch skill, but it wasmyskill and I’d never really bothered to question the why or the how of it. Ever since I’d been in the cradle, I’d been animating the dead. The bar where I worked had a bit of a pest problem, and the poison traps set out all over the storeroom meant there were lots of dead for me to animate. There was a guy who came in every few days supposedly to dispose of the bodies, but he never found any of them.
I made sure he never found any of them.
My little undead army. Normally I stuck to insects and animals, because animating humans took a real toll on me, but a few weeks ago I’d needed to raise a bunch of dead to defend my sister, my friends, and me against some nasty demons. There’d been too much going on to keep track of all the dead, so I’d crossed a line I didn’t usually cross. I’d zombified them.
Animated dead are like puppets that I control. Zombies I can give instruction to and turn loose. They manage completely on their own. It’s easier for me, but it involves calling a portion of their soul back into the body. According to my sisters, it was a morally gray area, but according to them everything I did was a morally gray area. In the past, nothing horrible had ever happened when I’d created zombies, but I’d always tried to save that activity for emergencies only.
Unlocking the heavy door, I swung it open to see that Kristin was right. There was a beefy dude on the other side. He was about six foot three and a solid wall of muscle clad in jeans and a flannel shirt. Curls of chest fur poked out of the open neck of his shirt. His hair was slicked back either from gel or the cold rain that had started to come down. Dark stubble was the only thing darkening his chin and jaw, meaning he’d probably shaved at least three times today. His hands twisted a ball cap between them.
“Hi Babylon. Can I come in?”
“Clinton!” I stood aside and let the werewolf into the bar, catching his damp, earthy scent as he passed me. “We’re closed for the night.”
Not that the werewolf was probably here for a beer and the music. I lived outside the limits of Accident—the town where supernatural creatures felt free to openly live their lives, protected and guarded by the wards and magic of generations of Perkins witches. A few supes occasionally hung out in the human world, but not werewolves. They were like some incredibly paranoid cult, living mostly secluded lives in their packs and avoiding humans. There were some werewolves in Accident who’d never seen a human in their entire lives. There were some who’d not only never journeyed outside Accident, they’d never left their pack territory.
Clinton was the Alpha of a splinter pack that had broken off from his father’s main one. The whole thing had nearly caused a war and a ton of bloodshed, but somehow all that had been avoided. The two packs now lived on different mountains, socializing and hunting on common lands during full moons and shifter holidays. So having Clinton show up in a human bar outside of Accident was a bit of a shock.
“Is this a friend of yours?” Kristin sashayed up to us holding a broom. She liked muscle-bound guys, and she knew I didn’t. That made Clinton fair game in her book.
Clinton’s eyes grew huge. The poor guy was terrified. Centuries of isolation after being once hunted down and targeted for extermination meant the werewolves weren’t just suspicious of humans, they were afraid of them. The big alpha looked as if he were about to bolt right back out the front door. I put a hand on his arm, trying to calm him down a bit.
“This is my co-worker, Kristin. Kristin, this is Clinton. He’s gay.”
Clinton wasn’t gay that I was aware of, but my labeling him as such had the desired effect. Kristin’s mouth turned into a pout and she headed back to her cleaning, muttering something about how it just figured.
I waited a few seconds for the werewolf to turn his attention away from the potential threat and to me. “What’s up?”
He went back to twisting his hat. “I’m hoping you can help my pack and me up on Savior Mountain.”
“With construction?” With the assistance of everyone in Accident, Clinton’s pack had managed to get buildings up and under roof, wells dug, solar power online, and some basic roadways done before the weather had turned. There was still a lot of work for them to do, but I wasn’t the one to help them with that. Hammering nails and hanging drywall were at the bottom of my skills list.
“No.” The hat tore in two, and Clinton looked down at the pieces as if he were baffled about how it had happened. “We’ve got a ghost problem.”
“Ghosts?” Werewolves were very superstitious, but I’ve never heard any of them claim to have seen the spirits of the dead.
“At night we see them down by the road, over by the river, and even in our own homes. Sometimes they knock things over. Flick claims one spoke. It said something about Christmas decorations being missing.”
I shook my head. “I can speak with the dead and sometimes convince them to return to rest, but I’m not a skilled medium, Clinton. Ghosts aren’t really my thing.”
“Dead is your thing, though.” Clinton put the torn pieces of hat on a nearby table. “You’re a necromancer. A witch and a necromancer. You make the dead rise up. Ghosts are dead.”
“Yeah, but ghosts are spirits, not dead bodies.” I held my hands up. “My magic animates the dead. That doesn’t involve helping them find their lost Christmas decorations.”
“But you return the dead to the grave when you’re done with them. Can’t you do the same to ghosts?”
I opened my mouth to say no, then snapped it shut. In all honesty, I could. It just wasn’t something I did on the regular. I’d seen plenty of ghosts in my lifetime. It was what had given me the idea of trying to do more than just animate a corpse. Some spirits were clearly souls that had refused to move on, preferring to hang around here without a body, but those were rare. Most ghosts were just echoes of their former selves, performing a certain action over and over again, always at the same time and same place. Others could occasionally be communicated with and had the ability to somewhat vary their patterns.
