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  Dead Lucky

  Ghosts & Magic #0

  By M.R. Forbes

  Copyright 2014 M.R. Forbes

  Published by Quirky Algorithms at Smashwords

  Cover art by Mario Sanchez Nevado

  All rights reserved.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Not the call I was expecting.

  "Conor... The dishes."

  I glanced up from my spot on the sofa, running my finger along the deep tears in the fabric that Mr. Timms had created. Danelle was standing in the doorway to the small kitchen, her dark hair wrapped in a long, braided pony-tail, her forehead slick with sweat.

  I reached up and rubbed some of my own sweat away from my brow, registering the coldness of my skin despite the heat, and then leaning forward and falling into a fit of coughing. I put my hand up to hold Danelle off from taking on my chore herself while I finished the hack.

  "I've got it," I said. My voice was scratchy, tired. Not a surprise, considering I had one foot in the grave, and the other dangling dangerously close to the edge.

  "You need your meds?" she asked, once I was done. Her annoyance at my failure to clean up was replaced with a look of concern.

  "Not yet. We can't afford it, anyway. Not until after the job."

  I got to my feet and made an effort to stretch, feeling my muscles shifting and popping beneath the motion. I pushed my shoulders back, rounded my neck, and coughed again.

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yeah."

  "Maybe Rayon can do them?"

  "No. I'll do it. I don't want to waste the energy."

  I gave her a weak smile as I shuffled over in bare, gray, bony feet.

  When I closed my eyes and sat still enough, I could almost feel the sickness, the disease that coursed through me, that should have stolen my life years ago. Sometimes when I did, I would picture it in my mind, this black, oozy beast that I could somehow conquer with nothing more than sheer will. I would shout it back, and sometimes I could even make it retreat a bit, and leave myself a few minutes to enjoy the peace and relative reduction in pain.

  Until I opened my eyes.

  I had to open them. I had to get up. I had to keep moving.

  Living with cancer was better than dying with it.

  Danelle put the back of her hand to my forehead when I reached her. She smiled at me, a row of perfect white teeth contrasted against her darker, native-american skin. "You've been worse."

  "Which is why I don't want the meds yet."

  "Make sure you get all the shit off the plates. Last time the dishwasher just threw it all over everything else and dried it like that."

  "Why the hell do we even bother? We're doing all the work anyway."

  "You want to dry them, too?"

  I made my way over to the sink. The house in general was old, small, and not in the best shape. The sink was worse than that, lined with rust and scratches, and when I turned the knobs the water sputtered from the faucet in fits and gasps, a constant reminder of my own state. A half-dozen plates, bowls, and mugs rested below, waiting to be scrubbed.

  Dannie took a seat at the kitchen table. Her laptop was already resting there, the screen spilling our bank account info out into the room. I didn't need to look at it to know what it said. We weren't living on beans and rice for nothing.

  "Maybe after the job, we can upgrade to long-grain," I joked, lifting the first plate in one hand, an old sponge in the other. I was used to death. Old sponges smelled worse.

  "Not likely. This grab for House Green is paying shit. We'll have just enough to get you boosted and pay the rent."

  "And send some to Molly."

  I winced right after I said it, preparing.

  "Conor...not this time. Seriously. We need to eat."

  "So does she."

  "How much was the insurance policy for? It's guilt money. Nothing else."

  I bit my tongue. "Do we have to do this now?"

  A long, silent pause while I finished the first dish and dropped it in the washer.

  "No. We can worry about it after the job."

  I picked up the second dish and looked down at it. I was distorted in the reflection, and it almost made me look better. There was nothing pretty about bald, spindly, and gray.

  "You want to run through it again?" I asked.

  Preparation was gold in our line of work. Preparation kept you alive.

  "Hang on." She had to pull up the notes we'd taken. "This one should be cake. Archaelogist found an old coin at a dig site in the Andes, supposedly predates the Leschamp. It was brought to the Field Museum for restoration and cataloging. Break into the museum, grab the coin. We've been in the Museum before."

  "Before they upgraded the security and hired a user to keep watch. Thanks to the Houses for getting a little too frisky over their artifacts."

  "The Houses do what they will, you know that. Anyway, sneaking past the user is what makes the take big enough to be worth the effort. Keep scrubbing while I cover the ticks."

  The ticks... the time milestones we needed to hit for the job to go smoothly. She was going to distract the guard while I grabbed the coin. I was still debating if I should bring Kerry along for backup.

  Necromancer.

  I dropped the plate I was holding. It hit the ground and shattered, pieces of ceramic launching across the floor. I felt the sting as one of them dug into my foot.

  "Conor? What the fuck?"

  There you are.

  I spun around, looking for the source of the voice, and at the same time knowing I wouldn't find it. I was a user. I could hear the shifting frequencies of the fields that moved within the earth. I could sense the constant, grinding, throbbing pulse of my specific magic.

  Death magic.

  It was an undercurrent of sound and energy, the byproduct of geomagnetic reversal, the polarity change in the Earth's magnetic fields, the event that had shocked the world by returning magic to it sixty years ago.

  I had been attuned to the frequency since I had started on the meds and cheated death.

  Nothing had even spoken to me through it before.

  Danelle was on her feet, moving towards me.

  Find us.

  I put my hand against the sink to steady myself. I started coughing. Dannie's arm wrapped around me, and she held me steady.

  "What's going on?"

  I closed my eyes, concentrating on the sound of the fields, searching for the source of the words that had reached out through them. They didn't come again, but I could feel them vibrating like a spider web in a breeze.

  "Conor?"

  "How much gas do we have in the van?" I asked.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Road trip.

  "Why are we going to New Orleans, again?"

  I slid my long, black, nylon trench over my narrow shoulders. "I heard... something... in the fields. It was talking to me."

  We were standing in the driveway, next to our beat-up white delivery van. It was an old thing, with a high ceiling and the words 'Flowers by Jack' in large, faded blue script along the sides. I could only hope it would make the trip. Louisiana was about a thousand miles away.

  "Yeah, you said that already. I mean, why are we going? Hearing things in the magic fields... the smart thing to do would be to stay as far away from them as possible."

  "When have you ever known me to be smart?" I circled around to the back of the van and pulled the doors open. It was nearly empty inside, save for a small trunk in the corner that was filled with tools of the trade, and a large cooler on either side, powered by a separate generator mounted to the roof. The generator was going, rattling the whole van and creating an echo on the inside. The cooler on the right hummed in time to it.

  "Stop being an asshole. You were a surgeon. There must be some kind of i
ntelligence hiding in there. I just don't get why you're willing to drop everything to make a road trip we can barely afford?"

  I turned around and looked at her. "Honestly, Dannie? I don't know. I heard the words, and now it's all I can think about. They're just echoing in my head, over and over again, and I have this insane desire, no, need to go to New Orleans. Whatever it was that sent me the message, whatever the message was supposed to mean, it's waiting for me there. Somewhere."

  I went to the trunk and flipped it open. It was about halfway full of an assortment of guns - handguns mostly, with a couple of full shotguns, a sawed-off, and a single assault rifle resting at the top. I knew Evan would want the Bushmaster. I pulled a pair of extra clips from the coat and dropped them in.

  "I don't want to sound like a nagging bitch, but this is a bad idea."

  "I know it's a bad idea. What are my options? I'm going to go crazy otherwise."

  "Maybe it'll ease up if you give it a little time?"

  "It won't."

  I saw by her expression she was going to ask me how I knew that, but she saw by my expression that I was as sure of it as I could be. Her lips formed a tight line and she nodded.

  "I'll go get the bag."

  I slipped between the seats and got behind the wheel, finding the keys in a pocket and jamming them into the starter. It took three tries to get the engine going, a full production complete with its own smoke machine. I took a deep breath and stifled a cough.

  Dannie appeared at the front door of the house a minute later, carrying a large tote. She locked the front door, hefted the tote over her shoulder, and joined me in the van.

  "I really wish we had the AC fixed," she said. Her black tank was clinging to her slender frame, the sides dark with her sweat. "Evan gets to stay cool."

  "Even smells a lot worse than you do when he gets too hot."

  "It's going to be even hotter in New Orleans."

  "If we need him, I won't care."

  "Let's just hope we can get back here in time to handle the job for Green. I don't think he'll take 'I was hearing voices' as a valid excuse for not getting it done."

  We had a week until the Green job. "If we drive straight through, we can be there in fifteen hours."

  She laughed. "That's assuming this piece of shit doesn't leave us stranded out in the middle of nowhere, just waiting for a feral, or a chupacabra, or worse to come along."

  "I replaced the radiator hose last week. We should be fine."

  I put the van in gear, taking it slow over the broken cement that served as a driveway. I accelerated once we were out into the street, heading for the interstate. The humid summer breeze wasn't enough to cool us off, but it was better than nothing.

  Dannie had fallen asleep by the time I reached the security gates to our residential community, pausing while they trundled open and then continuing out into the world at large. Once upon a time, we hadn't needed fences and walls and gates everywhere. Once upon a time, the biggest and meanest things roaming the spaces between humanity were bears and wolves and other relatively harmless mammals.

  I kept my eye on the instrument cluster as we reached I-55, heading south, one eye staying pinned to the temperature gauge. I could only hope the used radiator hose I had replaced the other used radiator hose with would hold out, like I promised Dannie it would. When you were living day to day, you learned to keep your entire life held together with duct tape, paperclips, and tourniquets. You got used to the idea that it could all go to hell at any moment, and you were lucky to have made it to that moment in the first place. You tried not to dwell too much on the past, or think too much about the future.

  Still, I wished I had splurged on new.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jambalaya.

  We were lucky.

  The hose didn't give out until we were inside New Orleans proper, passing through the gates at the other end of the Lake Pontchartrain causeway and into the protected area. The shift had changed a lot of things, a lot of places, but few as much as New Orleans. It had always been a city surrounded by wetlands, marshes, water, and wildlife refuges, and when the magic fields started messing with genetics, and the monsters began to make their way in from that wilderness... it had been messy.

  Until the wall had gone up. The powerful wizards who headed up each of the Houses had dredged enough sand and silt from the surrounding waterfront to create a solid twenty foot high, ten foot thick, dense pack of earth and laid it across the ground between the Mississippi and the lake, west of Kenner on one side, east of Meraux on the other. Patrols covered the waterfronts, and were more than enough to handle the few beasts smart enough to try an amphibious assault.

  Of course, that had meant New Orleans had to be condensed, and that condensation had led to a lot of new construction. Where the town had once been a little bit of tall buildings and a lot of small houses, it was now a minor metropolis, with over three hundred thousand humans packed between the walls.

  "Yeah, its definitely your radiator hose," Charles said, pointing at the new cracks surrounding the duct tape that had been holding it together. "I can see you took the cheap route to patch it. Where'd you say you drove from again?"

  Charles was an orc, seven feet tall and hunched, with thick, slightly greenish tinged skin that gave his particular class of new humans, the 'leathers' their moniker. He was also the first mechanic I found after the van bit it, about eight blocks away from his shop near the north end of town. He was wearing a baseball cap large enough to wrap around his massive, round head, and a cigarette dangled between his lips.

  I tried not to be a racist asshole, but I hated orcs, and Charles in particular. First, all orcs were immune to cancer. Of any kind. Second, he was flaunting it.

  Beggars couldn't be choosy, so I grinned and bore it. I needed him to fix the van, and that was it. "How long?" I asked.

  "Have to make a few calls around town, see if I can get a spare, or find a user who can fuse everything back together. A day, maybe?"

  I could live with a day. "How much to tow it to the shop?"

  He grinned, his bottom teeth poking up over his upper lip when he did. "No tow. I'll get my brother, we'll push it. No problem, no charge."

  "Keys are in the ignition. Let me grab my companions and she's all yours."

  "You got a number I can reach you at?"

  "I'll stop in tomorrow."

  He shrugged. "Suit yourself."

  I left Charles at the front of the van and circled around to the back. Dannie was waiting for me there, wearing a long coat that was sure to be hiding a fair amount of ordinance. Evan was sitting on the deck next to her, in a long duster, hoodie, jeans, and boots that hid as much of his rotted corpse as could be managed.

  "Not a word," I said to him. "You armed?"

  I could just barely make out his dead eyes beneath the shadows. It was balls hot and humid here, and the heavy clothes were going to draw attention.

  Not as much as a dead S.W.A.T officer moving under his own power.

  He pushed aside the duster, showing off the pair of handguns in a shoulder holster beneath his arms, and the strap of the Bushmaster over his shoulder. "Better hope the cops here are either blind or as stupid as you."

  I could feel the thin thread of magic between us, the line that kept him up and running, and allowed me to control him despite the fact that he hated my guts. I pulled lightly, to remind him who the boss was.

  "Not my first choice to bring you along, but the coolers don't lock and I can't have Charlie over there stumbling across your remains."

  "Whatever."

  "So, now what?" Dannie asked. She hopped off the deck and put her hand on my shoulder. "Any ideas?"

  I closed my eyes, listening to the sound of the fields pulsing and thrumming. No voices. No instructions. Something had brought me here. "Not yet. Maybe once we get a little further into the city. Evan, grab the bag."

  "What do I look like, a fucking mule?"

  "Yes. Grab it."

&nbsp
; It wasn't like he had a choice. He reached back into the van and picked up the tote. Once it was clear I slammed the doors shut.

  "Tomorrow," I said to Charles as we walked past. He grunted and watched us go. I could almost feel the heat from his brain while he tried to figure us out.

  It only got hotter as the sun made its way across the sky, the earthen walls doing a great job at blocking the fetid air from an easy escape. I was wearing my own light trench and hoodie, my standard garb to try to hide how shitty I looked, and I could feel the sweat running along my bald scalp and down the back of my neck.

  We moved further into the city, tracing Ridgelake into Metaire. We got a lot of looks as we walked, mostly sidelong glances and stares from people in tanks and short-shorts, short-sleeves and sundresses. I would pause every few blocks and trace the magical fields, feeling them grow and shrink with the geography, and hoping for some kind of clue as to what the fuck I was doing.

  I had been crazy to come here. This whole thing was crazy.

  Dannie put her hand on my shoulder, breaking me out of my head. "Conor, we need to get Evan inside. We look funny enough, and he's starting to reek."

  Reanimating the dead didn't do anything to stop the rotting. That's why I had the coolers. "Yeah, shit. We need to get him to a freezer. Are there any hotels nearby?"

  She pulled out her cell and started tapping. She pointed a minute later. That way. The Jambalaya."

  "I thought that was a food?"

  "It's also a hotel."

  I nodded, taking a second to cough a bit, which drew even more attention.

  "The Jambalaya it is."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The voodoo that you do.

  The Jambalaya turned out to be a 'mixed' hotel, which meant it did its best to cater to both classic and new human. Mainly, it meant larger doors, higher ceilings, and a more diverse menu, but it also meant being the only classic humans in the place.

  Segregation was alive and well in the new world. It just looked a little different now.