Dead Red (Ghosts & Magic Book 2) Read online

  "I'm looking forward to it."

  "Me, too." She rolled her eyes and put her hand on my shoulder. "Don't forget you're meeting Dr. Strange at nine."

  Thanks to Jin, I had my own injector. The good Doctor would provide the meds.

  "Right. I should go soon. I need to stop by the storage unit and get ready. I'm not exactly excited about heading into a vortex."

  She leaned up and kissed me on the cheek. "Thanks for being a sport. It will all work out."

  I smiled weakly. "Keep telling yourself that."

  She disappeared behind the partition, plugging into the Machine. I grabbed my coat and headed out the door.

  Dinner at seven. It was going to be great.

  3

  $19.95 a month

  I was renting a storage unit on the other side of town. It was a high-end model, with its own punch-code security system and an adjustable thermostat that came complete with a separate electric bill.

  Mine was probably the highest in the whole complex.

  I made my way through the tall security gate that was guarded by a twenty-something in navy blues and carrying a heavy shock wand on his waist. I nodded and smiled at him on the way by and he surprised me by maintaining eye contact. I didn't get too many people who wanted to look at my face or my hollow eyes. Then again, you had to be pretty ballsy to work security with nothing more than a shock wand. I wouldn't want a vampire, werewolf, or other nasty within twenty yards.

  I wandered through the alleys between the storage units, head down, coat pulled tight against me in the crisp autumn air. I traced the route from three feet out, watching the cracks in the cement go by and hoping to avoid any other would-be hoarders who were checking in on their collections. I could imagine some of the junk they had preserved: magazines, photo albums, Aunt Gertrude's collection of porcelain dolls.

  I could guess what they would think if they got more than a passing glimpse at what I had saved.

  Thankfully nobody else had stopped by at seven o'clock on a weekday morning. It was just me standing in front of my small roll-up door at unit C-17, the only eyes on me those of the crows resting on the rooftops, hoping I had something edible I might drop. I punched in my code - Dannie's birthday - and heard the lock release. Then I reached down and pulled up the door, slipping through the bottom and closing it from the inside in the space of a few seconds.

  There was a small, battery-powered LED light strip on my left. I flicked it on. The storage space was illuminated in a soft white glow that only made it more macabre. I pulled the coat a little tighter. It was colder in here than it was outside.

  I'd lost all of my corpses after Ms. Red. All except Dannie's cat. Mr. Timms was nice to keep around for nostalgia, but he wasn't going to do me much good in a fight. As a result, I'd needed to go on the hunt for a new complement of my own dolls, scanning the tri-state area obituaries, driving to cemeteries in the dead of night and digging up potentials. It was gruesome, disgusting work. It was often draining and even more often disappointing. It wasn't enough for the cadaver to be somewhat whole. Some people took too much energy to control. Others didn't respond well enough to the magic, maybe because when they had been alive they lived like they weren't. In any case, it was a ten-to-one ratio of digging up a body to keeping it.

  My months in New Jersey had given me time to claim two new partners. One was a rough-cut, a seventeen-year-old prostitute who had been found strangled to death in an alley in Manhattan. Her name was Pepper, and what she lacked in experience, she made up for in potential.

  The other was a bruiser named Carl 'The Punisher' Johnson. He was an amateur boxer who overdosed on a cocktail of 'roids and cocaine and found himself on the wrong side of the line. Six-foot three, three hundred pounds. He had gone three rounds against an ogre and almost won. Plus, his body was nearly pristine. He was the polished diamond.

  They were both resting together in a large cardboard box in the left-rear corner, kept preserved and almost scentless by the cold air. I glanced over at the box, wishing I could bring one of them with me, and then turned to the right side.

  That was where I kept my other tools of the trade. Guns. Lots of them. At one time, I had kept them in a trunk in the van, tossed in as if they didn't matter. Dannie used to handle the receipts, but after I got a better idea of how much they cost I started being a little more meticulous. Now I kept one small sidearm with me at all times. The rest were here, packaged separately in vaguely marked boxes, kept with rounds in the chamber and more wrapped in. All I had to do was grab the boxes I wanted and be on my way, and then make sure to put everything back in its proper place when I was done. It was a better system than the trunk had been, and it would be easier not to lose everything in the not-completely-impossible scenario that my van got ripped apart by shifters.

  I only took one box from there. A Smith and Wesson 500. It was the most expensive gun in my arsenal, a tough weapon to manage and control. I didn't like it because it killed my shoulder to manage the recoil, and revolvers were always a pain in the ass to reload in a hurry. I felt like I might need it where I was going.

  I left that box near the roll-up and slipped behind the guns, finding a duffel there. I leaned down and unzipped it, and then pulled out a few minor assistances. A set of lock picks, a small boot knife, and finally a credit-card sized piece of black plastic with an NFC chip hidden inside. An anonymous payment card. I'd already loaded the payment for the meds onto it.

  I cast one more wistful look over at the box holding Carl and Pepper, picked up the box with the 500 inside and then slipped under the door and dropped it closed again. I checked my pocket watch. I had an hour to get to the north side of Hoboken, also known as the Playground.

  4

  Who knows what fear lurks

  I didn't like the Playground.

  I knew that much, even though I'd never been there before. Of course, it was called the Playground for a reason. It was a magically confused stretch of land, about a mile across and half a mile wide, where for whatever reason the fields that allowed users to do what they did found themselves in this odd vortex that created all kinds of sensory feedback and random effects. In other words, you could use magic there, but you were doing it at your own risk. There was no way to know what would happen. That was why I had to go it alone. My zombies were tied to me by a magic string, and the Playground would take that string, knot it and twist it and wind it up, and they might drop, they might rampage, or they might turn on me.

  It was also the reason I brought the 500. New humans loved the Playground. They felt the fields differently than us old-fashioned homo sapiens, one of the reasons they couldn't do magic. I'd heard the place was like an aphrodisiac for them, a six-block orgasmic machine. Kind of gross when you gave it too much thought, so I tried not to.

  A lot of the new humans - ogres, orcs, trolls - had tough hides and could take a beating. The .50 caliber bullets the 500 fired were a little more than a beating.

  I was supposed to meet Dr. Strange at a small marijuana shop near the center of the zone. The area itself was urban, but the shift had converted what had once been a series of five to ten story apartments mixed in with groceries, pharmacies, doctors offices, and the like into a purely commercial area that was heavily focused on marketing to new humans. It was bright, flashy, a little bit dirty, and definitely pushing the erotica angle as hard as it could while still maintaining some level of discretion. That meant plenty of signs that said things like "Improve Your Performance," or "Field Good in the Playground," and a number of brothels and clubs that advertised their wares in their names, but nobody prancing around with their naughty bits threatening to fall out in your face. In fact, the people on the street looked as normal as any twelve-foot monster with thick green skin, or four-foot pixie with wiry hair could.

  I knew the minute I stepped into the Playground. Not just because of the welcome sign, but because my magical sense that allowed me to hear the death magic frequencies went totally haywire, like it wa
s playing the Beatles in reverse. The strength of the magic came and went and I heard a few other sounds mixing in. They were random, subtle notes that I would never have recognized if the mask I was carrying in my pocket hadn't allowed me to hear them. Fire magic, air magic, glamour magic. They were like colored sprinkles that had been mixed into my coffee ice cream and were totally throwing the flavor.

  "You lost?" a small voice asked me from my left. I turned my head and looked down at the dwarf. She had thick red hair, a round nose, and a petite frame that belied the weight of her dense bones. She was wearing a pair of short shorts and a t-shirt, her genetic mutism leaving her nearly immune to registering heat and cold.

  "Not yet," I said. I was wearing a baseball cap pulled low over my face and the collar of my trench was riding high in an effort to broadcast "leave me the hell alone."

  "Okay. I was just asking because users don't come in here." She paused and stared right at my face, in a way that no one did. "Ever."

  The statement took me by surprise, and I had to fight to keep it hidden. "How do you know I'm a user?"

  "I'm a dwarf."

  "What does that have to do with it?"

  She pointed at my left coat pocket, where I kept the mask. "I can sense imbued artifacts. The one you're carrying is burning a fucking hole in my retina."

  I reached into my pocket and put my hand near the mask. I could feel the warmth of it against my flesh. Whatever crazy shit was happening with the fields it was messing with my best weapon, too. I had felt vulnerable before. Now I felt like I was naked and bleeding in a shark tank.

  At least I had the gun.

  "Do you know Dr. Strange?" I asked, changing the subject.

  She smiled. "Now that makes sense. You're a necromancer, aren't you?"

  She surprised me again. "How do you know?"

  "My name is Lila."

  "I didn't ask for your name. I asked how you knew I was a necromancer."

  "I know, but I'm giving it to you anyway, Prince Charming. I'm Dr. Strange's nurse. He asked me to come out and wait for you here. He thought you might need a little help."

  "To walk across the street?"

  "You're a user in the Playground. Yes, to walk across the street."

  I considered her for a minute, and then put my hand out. "Conor. Nice to meet you."

  She didn't make a motion to take my peace offering. Most people didn't want to touch a necro. "He didn't tell me I was meeting a necro. I was expecting another tough guy, like the one who stopped by yesterday."

  "For the cancer treatment?"

  "That's confidential."

  "Right. Do you have a problem with necromancers?"

  "Does anyone not have a problem with necromancers?"

  While I was terrified of death and dying, most people were just uncomfortable with it. They didn't want to think about it, didn't want to look ahead to what they were going to be faced with one day. Necromancers were more than just a constant reminder of the dying condition. We were a hard slap in the face to the people who knew what we were and what we could do. Yes, there was something beyond death, and good or bad we could rip you out of it and make you dance to our tune.

  Nobody liked the thought of that.

  "So, are you going to lead me to Strange?" I asked.

  She waved me ahead. "That's what he's paying me for."

  We started walking down the street. I could feel the constant shifting of the fields swirling and bunching, a racket in my inner ear and a gnawing tickle in my gut. In some places the energy was stronger, and I began to feel weak-kneed and grateful Strange had the foresight to send someone to guide me. Other times the energy was weaker, and I got a relative breath of fresh air. It could flip-flop in an instant, even standing still, and the overall effect was that I started to become disoriented by the constant, sudden changes.

  "I thought dying made me feel like shit," I said as we passed a pair of trolls who were clearly heading for someplace private.

  "I didn't think it was possible, but you look worse than you did when I picked you up," Lila said.

  An especially strong wave hit me, and I felt my legs buckling. Before I knew what was happening, she had her arm around my waist, propping me up against her with ease. It passed a moment later, and she let me go.

  "You can feel the variations?" I asked.

  "Yeah. Working in the zone takes a little getting used to."

  "How so?"

  "What they say about the effect on us new humans is true. It's tough to work somewhere when your body is reacting the entire time you're there. And the big spikes? Tourists love them. The hookers don't mind them. I hate them."

  I noticed her ears were bright red and her face had flushed. She didn't need to say anything else.

  "So why work in the zone?"

  "I need to eat. Besides, Dr. Strange is in the zone, and where he goes, I go."

  "Are you two-"

  "That's personal."

  "Right. Sorry."

  "We aren't, though thanks to the fields half the time I wish we were. The other half, I want to rip his fucking head off for making me be here. He saved me from a bad situation once, gave me a job, so I feel indebted."

  I didn't know anything about Dr. Strange, except that Prithi had found him in the Machine and learned that he had access to at least a dozen doses of the experimental meds that kept me alive. She'd arranged the meet, arranged the payment, given me the address, and now here I was.

  "So why does he work out of the zone? It seems this isn't really his target market."

  "The Houses, if that means anything to you."

  She was asking me if I knew about the Houses without being direct. "It does," I replied. Now that she said it, the whole thing made perfect sense. What better place to escape the most powerful wizards in the world than one of the few small patches of it where they couldn't easily go? "It won't help him much if they decide to send in a ghost team."

  She seemed to relax a little bit with the understanding that I knew the truth about the new world order. "No, but the head of Orange wants him personally. He never told me the whole story, but from what I've gathered he treated Orange's son, and then the son died. He knew the kid wasn't going to make it from day one, but Orange was insistent, so he was ready to make a run for it when the inevitable happened. You can't cheat death, right?"

  I felt the shiver in my bones. You could cheat death. At least for a while. I remembered the threat. Only for a while.

  How much longer could I escape it, and how big was the hole I had dug myself by defying it in the first place?

  That was the terrifying truth I didn't like to have to face.

  5

  Death becomes him

  We reached Dr. Strange's office without suffering any more spikes, though there were a few tremors that left me reaching out for Lila's shoulder to help me stay upright. She took it like a champ, and even reached out and held my wrist for a brief second one of those times.

  We had bonded over our mutual disdain for the place.

  The marijuana shop was exactly as described. Paraphernalia, plants, and whatnot all displayed prominently in the windows, and all kinds of goods on offer inside. After the shift, pot had been the least of the world's concerns, and so getting it legalized everywhere had been easy. I don't know if anybody expected anything special to come of it. It hadn't. It was just one more income stream, one more occupation, one more way to collect taxes. I had considered using it to help manage the pain on more than one occasion. I rejected the idea of it. I didn't want it to make me complacent.

  "Doc, you here?" Lila said when we entered. There were no customers. I wondered if that was ever not the case.

  She waited a few seconds. There was no reply, and I didn't hear any motion like he would be coming to greet us.

  "He's probably got his headphones on again," she said. "I'll go in the back and grab him."

  "Okay." I turned towards one of the shelves and examined a bong. It was handblown glass with bursts
of rainbow colors. Hippie-chic.

  I heard Lila's heavy feet moving down a set of stairs. If Dr. Strange was like Dalton, he had a hidden underground lab or store room for his less-legal pursuits.

  I felt a sharp sting in my leg. My head snapped down, and I saw a wisp of smoke rising from my coat pocket, where I kept the mask.

  "What the-" I reached for it, my fingertips scraping the top end. "Damn." I pulled my hand away, the fingers burned. The field vortex was still swirling, but there was no top-end jolt that would have caused the mask to react. In fact, the fields had settled to almost nothing.

  The absence of the magic hit me harder than the overabundance. A sudden sense of dread worked its way into my head.

  A short, muffled scream sounded from somewhere below my feet, almost in unison with the similarly muffled sound of gunfire.

  Shit.

  I reached under my coat for the 500, nestled in a holster on my hip and hidden by the coat. The first bullet whistled past my ear. It was followed by a lot more.

  I let my legs fall out from under me, dropping behind a shelf at the same time the shop windows exploded inward, the shrill sound hurting my ears. The shelf in front of me pinged and clanged, and holes appeared too close for comfort. I dropped onto my stomach and pulled myself along the floor, hand over hand towards the counter and the back room. There was something bad down there too, but maybe I could get the drop on that target. Whatever was spraying from outside was definitely the bigger threat.

  Somehow, I made it to the counter, throwing myself behind the wood and glass enclosure right before the bullets tracked along where I had just been, splintering the tile and making a loud mess. I reached into my pocket again, and then cursed and pulled back my hand. The mask was still on fire though I didn't know why. I could have kicked myself for putting it and the dice into the same damn pocket.