Dead Set Read online

  “Morgan,” I said, taking a step forward and stealing a glance at my bag. She was clearly drawing from the skull, but the bag of bones was too far out of reach. “What are you doing?”

  “You don’t get it?”

  “No,” I said, taking a small step toward the bag. I had no idea where Cathy had disappeared to, but I hoped she wasn’t going to try anything stupid. “Asaroth the Defiler? Why would you want to bring him here? That’s not your style.”

  Morgan tilted her head to one side. “Asaroth? Who the hell said anything about the Defiler?”

  I moved a little closer to the bag. “Funny thing. You know he gave himself that nickname? No matter—you can’t fool me. I saw the summoning sigil in theater eight—I was here the other night. I know you are going to use the Old Dead’s Magick to summon him. What I don’t know yet is why? Why the horde of New Dead? And why do that to Claudia Wilson?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Summoning circle? Asaroth? New Dead?”

  That makes no sense. I saw the circle. I know Asaroth when I see him, and I know New Dead…

  “I hate you, Gene. I mean like, complete abject hatred, but I don’t mess with Asaroth. If I recall correctly, communing with higher powers is your thing.”

  The book… The book sitting in my safe… The safe my daughter opened.

  “You ruined me, Gene.”

  It was my turn to be confused. “I don’t understand.”

  Morgan squeezed the skull tighter, causing its sigils to glow a sickly green. “You will.”

  Porter cocked the gun. “Gene!”

  “Do I have your attention now?” Morgan shouted.

  “Morgan, you’ve had my attention ever since you got back into town,” I said, not entirely lying, but hoping I could stall her long enough to reach the bag. “I’m guessing you’re still angry with how we left things—”

  “Guessing!”

  “Let me finish,” I said, taking another step toward the duffle. “When I saw you at the Shelldeck house it brought back a lot of emotions, you know that.”

  “You let me go!” Morgan shouted, forcing Porter to push the gun barrel against Kris’s head. “I told you I loved you, and I did. We had so much potential, don’t you remember? We were going to make the world a better place. Why, Gene? Why did you throw it all away?”

  “I wasn’t the person you thought I was.”

  “But I gave you so much. I taught you Magick. Eldero’s Seven Seals, the Velcurses Conundrum, even the Jacobean Prefect.”

  Just a few more feet.

  “I’m sorry for what I did to you, Morgan. I really am. No one should have ever had to endure that.”

  My foot brushed against the bag. The bones inside practically hummed—they must have been able to sense the close proximity of the skull.

  Am I sure I want to put these two together?

  “You broke me, Eugene Law—and now I’m going to break you, person by person, and you’re going to watch.”

  “Mom!” Cathy cried, appearing inside the casket, Ariadne’s thread hovering just behind her.

  “Catherine?” Porter said, tears in her eyes.

  “Do it, Cathy!” I shouted, ducking down to unzip the bag.

  My daughter threw herself at Porter and Kris, tackling the souls clean out of their bodies as the gun barrel exploded. The bullet missed Kris’s head by inches, but it was still enough to burn the side of his cheek. The kindergartener didn’t feel any of it, though, as he and his mother were now hovering with my daughter just outside their bodies.

  Morgan didn’t waste time on words. She held up the Old Dead skull and gathered her Magick.

  With the amount of power swirling around her it was clear to see this one was going to be the game ender. As long as she had that skull, Morgan Crowley was too powerful—that’s why the skull needed to go back to its prior owner. I just hoped to hell he appreciated it.

  “Get them back in their bodies!” I shouted, directing my junior Necromancer to get the souls of her brother and mother safely back to where they belonged.

  “Gene!” astral Porter shouted. “What’s happening?”

  “Family reunion—do it now, Cathy!”

  “Cathy?” Porter said, laying an astral hand on her daughter’s translucent face. “How?”

  “Another time, Mom. I’ll see you on the other side.” My daughter gently placed her mother and brother back in their limp bodies that still lay in the coffin.

  Morgan’s Magick ramped up. Armed with the skull, she was pulling in power—a lot power—and the second she chose to release it we’d all be toast.

  Pull the battery and the toy stops.

  “Reformacione,” I cried, throwing the bag of bones for a second time tonight, and really hoping I could get lucky enough to have them land close.

  In the end, it didn’t matter. With the bag unzipped, the bones tumbled out like spilled popcorn, littering the floor as they spun.

  Dem bones, dem bones gonna rise again. Holy Hell—What have I done?

  51

  Old Dead

  The dusty bones tumbled out onto the floor, but they didn’t stay there. They pulled together, piece by piece, bone by bone, reforming the Old Dead’s skeleton. Just like the song, the leg bones connected to the thigh bone, and the thigh bone connected to the hip bone.

  Dem bones gonna walk around.

  And walk around they did—right at my Magickal ex-girlfriend.

  The Old Dead’s body was on a collision course with its head, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be the one that got in its way.

  Morgan gripped the skull tighter, amassing what Magick she could, and just like me at the Shelldecks’ pool, Morgan’s hands glowed and crackled with power.

  “Cathy—”

  “Hide? You got it,” my spectral daughter said, diving into the coffin beside her unconscious mother and brother.

  Morgan unleashed a furious blast of multi-colored lighting at the advancing bones, but she might as well have shuffled her feet to whip up a static charge for all the good it did her. The Old Dead aren’t deterred by Deep Magick—it’s their jam.

  Old Dead are Magicians that go in for the amazing-cosmic-powers-to-cheat-death plan. The actual process was not well known, and for good reason; once complete, those dusty old bones are near impossible to destroy and tend to be about as warped as bent nickel.

  The skull tore free of Morgan’s fingers and hurtled across the room to its rightful position on the shoulders of the shuffling undead.

  And now you’ve gone and done it.

  Tendons erupted from the Old Dead’s joints, tendrils of sinewy tissue that snaked like ivy and joined the arms, legs, and skull to the rest of the body. A thin layer of plastic-wrap-like skin stretched across bones in a haphazard pattern, covering only bits and pieces of the old Magician. Its eye sockets sprung to light with burning fires that smoldered like spent coals.

  Morgan’s controlling sigils burned away to reveal a smooth and polished skull.

  So much for someone’s battery.

  Not one to stand in the face of defeat, my ex-girlfriend made a break for the exit—only, she didn’t make it much more than a few feet. The boney vise-grip of the old dead grabbed Morgan’s wrist and pulled her toward it.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” it said, with a deep and penetrating voice that made my gut do a few somersaults. “You like the power, don’t you?”

  Morgan froze, her eyes wide as saucers and stuck in complete panic mode. It was hard to watch. While I hated who she’d become, there was still a part of me that didn’t want to see an old love suffer—and that was a good thing.

  “Hey!” I shouted, waving my hands in the air like an idiot. “Over here!”

  Way to go, Gene—get the hundreds-of-years-old dead Magician to turn his gut-churning gaze on you. Brilliant.

  The Old Dead pulled Morgan toward him, bringing her face next to his. He took a deep breath, or at least it looked like a breath. It was hard to te
ll without a nose or any other real internal organs.

  “It’s not you,” he said, tossing my ex-girlfriend to the ground like a discarded toy. “Where is that choice Medium I tasted earlier?”

  Choice Medium? Oh hell, Cathy!

  The Old Dead took another pseudo-breath. “It’s like a spring day. Fresh and inviting—untouched and innocent.”

  “Cathy! Get the hell out of here!”

  My daughter’s head popped up from the top edge of the casket. Then, taking one look at the Old Dead, reached for her silver cord.

  Good, give it a pull and it’ll bring you back to your body.

  My daughter wrapped both hands around that translucent umbilical cord and pulled, but instead of being dragged back to her body, Cathy found herself holding the cut end of her one-way ticket home.

  What the hell?!

  There was only one person left in the house who could have done that.

  Tristan had lied—every last ounce of his story had been utter bullshit. That boy wasn’t afraid of Morgan—he was using her. Cathy’s boyfriend was hellbent on summoning The Defiler, and my daughter had just unlocked the safe and given him a road map to finish it.

  Those weren’t sparkler burns on his arms, those were Hell Flea bites. Son of a bitch.

  The Old Dead stretched out his sinewy fingers and my daughter floated toward him; she tried to stop herself, but like a swimmer being dragged down by a gator she couldn’t fight the monster’s pull.

  “Dad!”

  If I’d been a better father, we wouldn’t have been in this position, and if I’d planned before diving into things, my first-born daughter wouldn’t have become the main course for an undead Magician.

  Sometimes, though, you don’t think, sometimes you just do—and hope to hell it doesn’t mean your undoing.

  I removed the simple metal flask from my pocket, the same flask I’d filled with bourbon earlier—it didn’t need to do much, but maybe it would be enough to give Cathy time to break free.

  And go where? Her cord has been cut—from the other side!

  “Quia mortui sunt fratres!” I shouted, dumping the bourbon on the rich red carpet.

  It was old Magick, so old very few people even thought of it as Magick anymore. Pouring out that expensive bourbon and sending it to my dead brothers and sisters wasn’t going to make for a big display of power. There were no lightning bolts forthcoming, and I certainly wouldn’t have the fiery hands of kickass power I’d enjoyed at the Shelldeck pool, but if it worked, I wouldn’t need any of those things.

  The Old Dead turned away from Cathy, just long enough to focus his burning-eyes on me.

  “Go, Cathy!”

  My daughter swam through the air, trying to pull away from the temporarily distracted undead Magician. “I can’t get back to my body!” she cried, her ghostly form frantically clawing at the air.

  Thin and wispy tendrils of mist reached up from the small puddle of premium liquor, snaking and twisting to wrap around the boney legs of the Old Dead. Long-dead Magicians really don’t like those undead ones that try to stick around—think of it like cheating on your taxes.

  The mist pulled on the Old Dead’s legs, driving those bones to the ground and the undead Magician with them.

  “Cathy!” I shouted, crossing the lobby to get to my spiritually detached daughter. “You need to find your way back, I can’t do it for you.”

  “Dad, I don’t know how!”

  “And this is why we don’t jump ahead in the books, right?”

  “Dad!” my daughter cried, turning end over end in the air like a lost astronaut.

  “Right. Close your eyes, Catherine. Focus on my voice. Think about home, think about your family. Think about what’s important to you.”

  My free-floating daughter squeezed her eyes shut and clutched the sliced end of her silvery lifeline, then slowly started to fade from view.

  “There, you’ve got it—”

  Cathy’s spiritual body crashed into the floor, pulled down by the same tendrils of Magicians past that were crushing the Old Dead. I’d spoken too soon—the spirits of my dead brothers and sisters in Magick had decided they’d like to have my daughter too.

  Crap.

  52

  Special Delivery

  In the blink of an eye I’d gone from beating back a true Old Dead, to watching my daughter’s untethered soul being dragged away by the unbridled anger of long-dead Magicians.

  Yeah, Magick is like that—exactly like that.

  “Dad!” Cathy yelled, fighting for her freedom against the misty strands trying to drag her down. “Help me!”

  The Old Dead was in the same predicament as my daughter, but being corporeal meant he had a lot more time than my untethered high-school spirit.

  Crap, crap, crap!

  Undoing it now was sure to mean problems later. Magick was like a top, and once you got it spinning it was next to impossible to stop without it smacking your hand or it whirling off to smack someone else’s.

  “Dad!”

  Not the time to stand around and debate it, full stop!

  I spit in the small pool of spilled bourbon, dropping a perfectly grotesque wad of Magician saliva right in the center of that golden-brown puddle. The crippling mist vanished, releasing my untethered spirit-child, and the ancient Old Dead now hellbent on my wanton destruction.

  Go me.

  For a Magickally animated skeleton without much in the way of muscle, the Old Dead was faster than I anticipated. Its sinewy fingers wrapped around my neck and slammed me into the carpet. Not one to waste time on long-winded speeches or proclamations of superiority, the undead Magician squeezed my throat while at the same time drawing out my Magickal essence.

  This wasn’t like the sexy-fun-time experience with a Half-Succubus—that would have been bliss compared to this. This was a tortuous burn, like peeling back my skin one layer at a time while using the business end of an acetylene torch to do it.

  I screamed, and not just because of the pain—which was near soul-rending—but because of what I’d lost.

  Somewhere just beyond the edges my conscious vision, Cathy fought back against the Old Dead, but her shade was too weak. Without the tether to draw strength from her body she was no more effective than a plastic bag in the wind. On top of that, Kris and Porter were unconscious, and I didn’t know the extent of their injuries, or even if they’d ever be the same again.

  Face it, Gene. You’ve lost.

  My vision started to fade, and my Magick with it. I closed my eyes and lost track of my own screams.

  Then it stopped.

  I cautiously opened one eye, then the other. I was still pinned beneath the sinewy, crushing force of the Old Dead, and I still had my neck intact, but everything else had stopped. Cathy and the undead Magician were frozen in place. My daughter had wrapped the cut end of her silver cord around the boney neck of the monster, for what little good it did, but neither of them moved. In fact, nothing moved. It was as if the rest of the world were stuck in some unending moment.

  There came the sound of shoes on the soft carpet. I tried to turn my head, but when you’ve got your neck pinned to the ground by a hundred-year-old monster that’s really hard to do.

  “Hello?” I said, but in my current state it came out more like ‘heh whoa.’

  “Someone’s got a delivery.”

  The House!

  A skinny old man shuffled into view, his comically wispy hairs drifting gently in the cool evening air. He tightened an old bathrobe around his waist and paused a moment to pull a pair of lightly tinted glasses down from his eyes. A rusty metal railroad spike dangled from his fingers like frozen cod. “Gene, Gene, Gene. John Henry’s Spike? Did you really think you could end me? I mean, I am eternal. You know that.”

  “Uh…”

  The old Magician-shaped House shook his head and held the railroad tie up to the light. “Pretty creative though, I’ll give you that. But don’t you think Viktor would have thought of this? I
mean, he was old, but he wasn’t a moron.”

  “I had to try…”

  The House dropped down next to me, his threadbare robe flapping open enough to give me an anatomically correct eyeful, just like the man whose likeness he wore had been prone to. “You had to? Here I am, still trapped in that stupid house, so many complex plans spiraling out of control, and all along you’ve been plotting my destruction?” The old man sighed and set the spike on the ground beside my head. “I’m starting to think you don’t want to work together after all.”

  “Sounds… about… right…” I said, fighting to get words past my undead neck tie.

  The old Magician frowned, then stood, cinching his robe tight. “Oh well, there’s always your daughter…”

  No!

  I grabbed the spike, but the House was gone, and with him went my stay of execution. The writhing pain of the Magick stripping resumed with righteous fury.

  I clutched the spike in my fingers, its power cold in my palm. The House would have to wait, I suddenly had more important plans for this single-use piece of problem-ending Magick.

  I couldn’t speak the words, but I don’t think I had to—what tiny Magick was left in me knew what I wanted. It could see Cathy hovering just above the Old Dead, fighting for her father, and it knew damn well what slept in that casket.

  The undead Magician crushing my throat hadn’t been back for more than a few minutes, but it was time for him to reach a very timely end.

  Using what little coordination I had left, I drove John Henry’s last spike clean into the side of that Old Dead skull.

  53

  Wild Magick

  Boom.

  Hundreds of years of pent-up Magick, natural and stolen, exploded in a brilliant wave of light and sound. This was Wild Magick, exactly the sort of thing that Morgan had been concerned about back at the Shelldeck estate. Wild Magick was just as it sounds, all but uncontrollable, and more often than not deadly as a heart attack.