Dead Lucky Page 2

  Another orc was manning the front desk, a female with a massive barrel-chest and a huge laugh that echoed across the whole lobby. She was friendly enough, her eyes watching every move I made during the check-in process. It was clear she didn't trust us, but who knew if that was because we were classics, or because we looked like we were going to rob the place.

  I had to stay close to Evan to hold the tether and keep him up, so Dannie made the trips from the ice machine on the sixth floor to our room on the eighth. It took about twenty to get the bathtub filled.

  "Time to go back to sleep," I said, directing Evan to disarm. I thought about having him disrobe too, but it wasn't like he had any body heat to melt the ice.

  "Fuck you," he snarled, pleasant as always. He glanced over at Danelle and did his best lipless smile. "Fuck you?"

  "It's a muscle, Evan," Dannie said, looking down.

  "So?"

  She raised an eyebrow.

  "My secret shame."

  "Goodnight, Evan."

  He walked into the bathroom and climbed into the shower. I broke the connection the moment his head touched the porcelain, and then proceeded to cough up a storm while Danelle covered him in ice.

  "Maybe I shouldn't have brought him," I said once the hacking was done. "I feel like shit."

  "You look like shit. You don't know what we're dealing with. Hell, you don't even know where we're going. Having an undead soldier can't hurt."

  "It does hurt."

  "You know what I mean."

  "I'm sorry I dragged you here."

  "Like you could drag me anywhere."

  I laughed at that. "Yeah, well, I'd feel better if I knew what the fuck I was supposed to do. Anyway, thanks for coming, and for accepting this whole insane idea to begin with."

  "Somebody has to look out for your boney ass."

  "You used to like my ass."

  "That was before it was boney."

  She slapped me on the rear and went over to the tote. "Let me do a little digging, see if I can come up with any recent House activity in the area, or anything that might give us an idea of what we're looking..."

  She paused. Not just speaking. She stopped. Completely. A second later, her arms moved out to her sides and sat there, as though she were a marionette and the puppeteer had just racked her.

  "Dannie?"

  The door was supposed to be magnetically secured, accessible only with a card key.

  It swung open.

  Hesitation meant death for ghosts like Dannie and me. I had a gun in hand before I could see the person behind the door, and I started shooting the moment a dark head came into view. I could feel the changes in the thrumming and pulsing of the fields at the same time the bullets swung wide of their course, sending chips from the wooden doorframe.

  "That's no way to treat a visitor."

  She was an exquisite beauty. Young and thin, a narrow face with high cheekbones, and the blackest skin I had ever seen. A tattoo of a white snake wound across her bald scalp, the head falling down to the bridge of her small nose. She walked into the room as though she were a queen, her head raised high and a long white dress trailing on the floor behind her.

  "Who are you?" I asked, the gun still trained on her. She was a user, though I wasn't sure what kind. She could redirect bullets, which could have made her a metallurgist, or an elementalist.

  "My name is Marie," she said, her voice carrying a cajun drawl. Her light green eyes flicked over to where Dannie was hanging, frozen. "I came to talk."

  "Did you do that?" I asked.

  "My associate. He's waiting in the hall."

  I looked past her. I didn't see anyone.

  She smiled, her white teeth such a contrast against her skin that she reminded me of a Cheshire cat. "They can't slip bullets."

  "How did you know I was going to shoot first?"

  "A necromancer? It would have been a shock to me if you didn't."

  "Necromancer?" I didn't like to admit what I was. Necros were the black sheep in the world of magic. Most users considered it fortunate that our life expectancy was normally measured in weeks.

  She kept smiling. "You can play dumb if you wish. As I said, I came to talk."

  "What about?"

  "Why are you here?"

  I wasn't about to tell her I heard a voice through the aether. "We came down for a job."

  She walked towards me, her hips rocking with each step. Every part of her flooded sexuality. The fact that it did nothing for me only convinced me my better days were definitely long gone.

  She stopped in arm's reach, holding her hand out and stroking my chin with her finger. "What kind of job?"

  I lowered the gun, tucking it back into its holster beneath my arm. She'd already proven its ineffectiveness.

  "You didn't come to ask me questions. You came to talk. So, talk."

  She put her whole hand against my face. It was soft and cool to the touch.

  She slapped me. "Have some manners."

  I fought not to flinch at the sting, instead keeping my eyes on her. "You're the one who broke into my room and is holding my associate."

  "I would have held you, too, but the voodoo doesn't work on users."

  "Voodoo?"

  She ran her finger along the head of the snake tattoo. "I know why you're here, necromancer. I wanted to know if you knew why you were here."

  I didn't know anything about voodoo. That it had power, magic... I was a believer. The shift had brought a lot of old traditions back into play. Shamans, medicine men, witches. It all came from the fields. It all came from users. Everything else was just detail.

  "You called me." I was ninety percent sure.

  Her head bobbed. "Not me. Mother. She told me when you got into town. She sent me to you. We have a job for you."

  A job? "You could have gone through the standard channels."

  She laughed, a deep, throaty, sexy laugh. "There are no standard channels for necromancers. Would you like to know how many there are?"

  I knew we were rare. It had to do with the fact that we tended to die before we could ever get much of a hold on how to use the magic. "How many?"

  "Two, as of this morning. Two, in all the world."

  "I feel special."

  "You are. That's why Mother called you."

  "Is she the head of a House?"

  Nobody knew who the wizards that ran the Houses actually were. All anybody knew was that it was a huge mistake to cross them and get caught.

  The laugh again. "No. The furthest thing. They'd like to take us. Take the power. We hide from them the best we can."

  "Good plan. So, you have a job? What is it?"

  "Olivier Despre is the real estate magnate responsible for a good part of the New Orleans restoration and modernization project. Almost all of the tall buildings you see when you look out the window belong to him."

  I glanced past Danelle's frozen form to the window. I could see two tall buildings across the street, close enough that they blocked the rest of the view.

  "He's also a voodoo lord. He's a master of the arts, using his spells to subjugate the city government, to win building contracts, change laws to his favor, you name it. Once, he was married to Mother. Now, they are rivals."

  "You called me down here to play marriage counselor?"

  Her eyes narrowed and burned. "Don't be a fool. We don't need a necromancer for that." She stepped away from me. Was she shaking her hips like that on purpose, or was that just the way she walked? "Mother and Olivier had a... disagreement. Olivier left the estate that same night. He took something with him when he did."

  She reached into the bosom of her dress, retrieved a folded up old Polaroid from it, and held it out to me. I took it and looked at the faded image. A pair of dice. They looked old, really old, carved from ivory or bone of some kind. They were concave, each side tapering in towards the center, where faint red marks were painted onto the face. One resembled a flame, the other two straight lines with a cross through the bottom, like a pair of swords.

  "Dice?"

  "From before the Leschamp. From the last reversal. Olivier stole them from Mother. We've tried to get them back on our own. We can't."

  "Why not?"

  "Olivier owns a casino in the French Quarter, the Oubliette. It isn't exactly legal, but as I said, he has the city in his pocket. He created a game similar to craps, a game which uses a pair of dice to determine the winner. He claims it is the game that the old humans created during the reversal." She smiled and shook her head. "He's full of shit. He designed the game as a joke, a tease, a slap in the face."

  "Can you get to the part that has to do with teasing me down from Chicago?"

  "He has twelve tables. Each table has four pairs of dice, so they can be swapped in and out in order to help... massage... the odds. The dice are painstakingly exact visual replicas of the ones he stole. Forty-eight pairs. Only one can be the real thing, or maybe none are. Olivier's pleasure comes from the fact that we don't know. We can't know. Only a necromancer can identify them."

  I laughed. I had to. Whether Marie liked it or not, it was funny.

  I thought she might slap me in the face again. Instead, she laughed with me.

  I respected that.

  "If your mother knows that the dice are the real thing, and not just another replica, that means..."

  "Yes. My father, Rene. He died before I was born."

  I'd never met another necro. I doubted I ever would. Finding someone who knew one was probably the best I would ever do. "How did he get the dice?"

  "He didn't. They've been in our family for as long as anyone knows. They were special because they were an heirloom. We didn't know they had power until my father got sick."

  "What kind of enchantment do they hav
e?"

  "I don't know."

  I stared at her, trying to figure out if she was lying. Why would she? "He never used them?"

  "What for? He had everything he wanted. Besides, he was only sick for ten weeks before he died. He didn't have much time to figure out how the power worked. But... you have. How?"

  It was the meds that kept me alive. Black market, experimental. I wasn't about to tell her about them. "Just lucky, I guess." I looked over at Dannie again. "I don't supposed you can let her go now?"

  "She'll be released when we're finished."

  I hoped whatever was holding her didn't hurt.

  "You told me the job. What about payment?"

  "For one, Mother will lift the hex she put on you."

  "Hex?"

  "The reason you came so quickly when she called. The further away you get from the source of the hex, the more it will bother you."

  "At least now I understand the crazy need to be here. What else?"

  "Two hundred thousand dollars."

  It was more than decent payment to walk into a casino and steal a pair of magic dice. Then again, the payment probably wasn't as much to steal the dice as it was an incentive to do that job, instead of just going after her mother. Hexes weren't heavily used because while they could compel people to do things, they couldn't actually make them do it. And killing the person who had placed the hex would remove it as surely as having it wiped.

  "Where do I find you once I have them?"

  "We have an estate on the west side of the wall, near the airport. When you get the dice, bring them there."

  "The west side of the wall?" That meant they were in the wilderness.

  "As I said, we try to stay out of sight of the Houses, and we have our own protection from the monsters. Take the 10-gate out, and then follow the signs to the Laveau plantation. I trust you can take care of yourself well enough to get there in one piece?"

  I nodded.

  "Very well. I'll return to Mother and let her know that you've accepted the job." She turned and went over to the door. She paused before she finished closing it, her head poking through the crack. Her eyes were bright, sincere. "Thank you."

  "...For."

  Dannie's arms moved back into position, and she kept reaching for the tote as though nothing had happened.

  "Dannie," I said.

  She unzipped the bag and reached in. "Just give me a minute. Hey, do you know if they had free wi-fi here?"

  "Dannie."

  She pulled her laptop out and started to turn. She was sharp, observant. She saw the bullet marks on the door, and her head snapped towards me. "What the hell?"

  "We have a job."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Rats.

  It sounded simple to break in somewhere and steal something, and maybe if you were a thug it was. For a ghost working for and against the Houses there was no such thing as simple. If you wanted to survive, you needed to be ready. That meant a lot of things depending on the job, but it always covered the basics. Intel about the target, some greased palms, some social engineering, and the procurement of the exact equipment needed to maximize the chances of not only succeeding, but succeeding unharmed.

  Having only hours to get ready for the heist left us with little time to do any of those things, and the idea of going in blind left Dannie and me pissed off and edgy, which tended to be a bad combination.

  "How do I look?" she asked, stepping out of the bathroom.

  She was wearing a long, strapless maroon gown we had picked up nearby, along with a pair of black heels. Considering she had to sponge clean in the sink and put her hair up herself...

  "Not bad."

  "Try to hold back your gushing."

  I reached up and shifted the mop of fake brown hair back into position. It was hot and itchy, and I hated it. Dannie had insisted I buy and wear it so that I would look a little less dying necromancer, a little more human being. I thought I just looked like an idiot.

  "Fine, you look amazing. If I could still get hard, I'd say we should forget the job and stay here to screw."

  "Shut up."

  "I don't know why you ask me anyway. You don't need me to compliment you to be confident."

  "I ask because I value your opinion."

  I shrugged. "We don't have time for you to buy anything else, so it doesn't really matter what I think."

  "Do you have to be an asshole?" She shook her head and walked over to the bed. She'd bought a small black clutch, and now she unzipped it and shoved one of the guns inside.

  I took a deep breath. "Sorry, Dan. This whole thing has me a little out of sorts. Do I really have to wear this?" I shifted the wig again.

  "Have you looked in a mirror lately? If this Despre knows that only a necro can spot the real artifact, he's going to mark you from a mile away."

  "And this rat on my head is going to reduce that to what? Half a mile?"

  "We still need to get you made-up. A little bit of concealer and you'll almost look normal. Speaking of which, come on."

  I followed her into the bathroom. Evan was still resting in the tub, though half the ice had melted and gone down the drain. A bottle of makeup was sitting on the sink.

  I glared at it while she picked it up, unscrewed the cap, and dumped a little bit on an already stained sponge she'd produced from who knows where.

  She started wiping it across my face.

  "The treatments hurt. This is torture." I squinted my eyes against the cold, wet onslaught.

  "Stop being a baby and calm your face."

  "That's easy for you to say."

  "Just do it."

  I fought through it, grateful when she put the cap back on. I turned and looked in the mirror. The wig was horrible, and the makeup made me feel like a prostitute. "Maybe I should just send Evan in to shake things up a bit."

  "Stick to the plan, and stop whining."

  Dannie was in full job mode. It made her easy to work with, hard to live with.

  I'd already done my warm-up. It was time to get to work.

  "Rise and shine, Evan," I said, reaching down and putting my hand on his wrist. I could feel the warmth of the magic passing between us, the power that would pull his soul back from wherever, sticking it in what remained of his mortal shell and allowing me to command it.

  His head turned, and a chattering cough followed.

  He was laughing at me.

  "Holy shit. Are you for real?" The laughing continued. "What the fuck died on top of your head?"

  "Stow it, Captain," I said, forcing him to quiet down.

  "I told you not to call me that." The words were strained as he fought against me.

  "Get up, it's time to go."

  He planted his hands on the tub and pushed himself to his feet. The water ran off him. "I'm soaked."

  "Change of clothes in the other room. Be gentle toweling off, you have enough missing flesh already."

  "What's another fingernail? I already lost the most important part."

  He climbed out of the tub, still laughing, and made his way into the other room. I'd left him an old tuxedo we'd picked up at a nearby consignment shop, black and wrinkled, complete with top hat and tails.

  He held it up. "Are you serious?"

  "It'll make sense when we go outside."

  The clothes didn't make him look any less like a corpse. This time they weren't supposed to. Dannie sprayed him down with some heavy cologne, and the three of us made our exodus from the Jambalaya. Of course we caught a lot of eyes on the way from the elevator to the front. I kept a closer eye on the expressions, and was relieved to see it was standard distrust.

  "Eu de toilette doesn't mean I should smell like one," Evan said as we crossed the floor. "What did you pay for this shit?"

  "I got it at the dollar store," I replied. "Only the best for you." I pulled harder on his reigns, preventing him from trying to hit me.

  "Will you two try not to attract any more attention than we already are?" Dannie said.

  "Don't look at me, I can't help the way I look. Rat-hat on the other hand..."

  Another pull, and Evan was silent. We got out to the street, where a cab was already waiting. We piled in, with Evan behind the driver to help avoid too much scrutiny.

  "Where you headed dressed so fine?" he asked. He was small and dark, and he smelled like pot.

  "The Oubliette," I said, reaching into my pocket.

  He shook his head. I could see his eyes measuring me in the rear-view. "I been living in the city going on twenty years now. There's no such thing as the Oubliette."