everything,” he said. “I remember the uniforms showing up, and later the murder police. And after, when the doctors laid me out and started cutting on me. I was awake but I couldn’t move. It didn’t hurt, you know, but I could feel what they were doing.” The kid started crying but there were no tears. His eyes were dry and gray. “I remember the funeral. But I was lying in that fucking box and I couldn’t see anything. I was able to open my eyes but all I could do was lie there and look up at the ceiling.”
“Any hoodoo on him, Domino?” Terrence asked. You could use magic to raise the dead, to make a zombie out of a corpse. I even knew the spell, though I’d never used it.
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“Maybe that fairy shit?”
“No, I’d see it.” When I’d killed the changeling who’d replaced Adan, I’d also taken his magic. Now I could see fairy glamour as easily as human sorcery and there was no glamour on Tony. Raising zombies wasn’t exactly the Seelie Court’s style, anyway.
“What you think we should do?”
“No clue.”
“We can’t put him back in the ground.”
“No, that doesn’t seem right.”
“Maybe if we wait awhile he’ll die again.”
“Fuck you, Uncle T. You think I can’t hear you?” Tony had stopped crying and was scowling at us.
“Sorry, Tony, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just not sure what to do about this.”
Tony staggered to his feet again. He was moving jerkily around the grave site when we heard a thumping sound coming from the other coffin. Terrence and I looked at each other and then at the grave. We walked over and looked down.
“I hurt, Uncle T,” Tony called from behind us. “Before I couldn’t feel nothing, now it hurts, real bad.”
“Chill out, Tony. I got to help Keshawn.” Terrence dropped to his knees in the mud, reached into the grave and unlatched the coffin. He opened the lid.
The body lying there didn’t look quite as good as Tony’s. Keshawn had taken one in the head, too, but the exit wound had torn away one side of his skull. The funeral home hadn’t done much more than slap some industrial-strength Maybelline on it. I flowed a little juice to steady my nerves and calm my stomach.
“I think I’m hungry, Uncle T,” Tony called.
“I said chill the fuck out, Tony. Give me a minute and I’ll take you to Mickey D’s.”
Keshawn opened his eyes. They were gray, empty and lifeless, just like Tony’s. His lips pulled back in a snarl and bared yellow teeth, and his hands flashed up and grabbed Terrence by the throat. Keshawn screamed and thrashed and pulled Terrence into the grave. Terror welled up from someplace deep in my mind and tried to paralyze me. I flowed more juice to take the edge off it and moved forward to help. Then I heard Tony step up behind me.
“I don’t want Mickey D’s, Uncle T,” he said, and I felt his cold, cold hands on my neck.
Everyone has an irrational fear. For some people it’s spiders, for others it’s snakes, or maybe clowns. I have a big fucking problem with zombies. I can deal with ghosts—even the really creepy ones. Hell, I share my condo with a spook, an old woman named Mrs. Dawson. I can also deal with dead bodies—as long as they stay down. If they get up and try to eat me, that’s just too fucking much.
So when Tony put his hands around my neck, I didn’t spin a combat spell. I didn’t trigger the defensive ring on my pinkie finger or do anything else that might have been vaguely constructive. Instead, my body seized up, my hands flew to my face and I screamed like a little girl. Actually, that’s not quite right. I screamed just like a bimbo in a zombie movie.
I stayed like that, frozen in place and screaming at the top of my lungs, until Tony’s teeth clamped down on my ear. In a zombie movie, flesh would have torn and blood would have sprayed, but fortunately, Tony’s teeth weren’t exactly designed for chewing ears. Blunt teeth or not, I can say one thing about having someone bite into your ear, and I think Evander Holyfield would back me up on this: it hurts like a motherfucker.
It hurt enough that it probably saved my life, or at least my profile. When I felt Tony’s teeth sink into my flesh, my scream turned into an outraged roar and I twisted, swinging an elbow into his face. I heard a sickening, crunchy, squelching sound as it slammed into his nose, and he staggered back from the blow. I turned to face him and put one hand to my ear. I looked at the hand and there was blood on my fingers. I looked up at Tony, who was staggering toward me again, his arms outstretched and his hands grasping like claws.
“You dirty, dead motherfucker,” I said. “You bit my fucking ear.” Tony made a terrible moaning, mewling sound. His lips curled away from his teeth, like that hideous thing chimpanzees do, and he kept coming.
“Vi Victa Vis,” I said, and my force spell hit Tony in the chest like a wrecking ball taking a shot at a condemned building. His body hurtled through the air away from me and slammed into the side of a family mausoleum, the marble cratering from the impact.
“Terrence,” I called over my shoulder, “your fucking nephew wants to eat me.” I heard sounds of a struggle from the grave behind me and I remembered Terrence was having his own issues.
“Smoke him,” he grunted. “He’s family, but that shit only goes so far.”
“A great flame follows a little spark,” I said. A ball of fusion fire appeared in my hand. I flicked my arm and threw it at Tony, and it streaked toward him like a meteor burning through the atmosphere. The fireball exploded when it struck the zombie. I had to shield my eyes from the blast, and the shockwave lifted my hair from my shoulders. When I looked again all that was left of Tony was a blast shadow on the mausoleum wall.
I turned and looked back toward the other grave just as Terrence leaped back. He flowed a rhyme from a gangster rap and liquid fire poured into the grave. Keshawn screamed as he burned, but the screaming stopped long before the fire did. I walked back to Terrence and stood beside him, and we watched the flames dancing in the grave.
“That was fucked up,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“It must have been Mobley. He must have put a spell on ’em, done a ritual or something.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But what if it wasn’t Mobley?”
Terrence looked over at me. “What you mean, Domino?”
“I mean, what if your nephews aren’t the only ones?” I looked around the cemetery, and shivered. “What if they’re just the first?”
two
That night, I sat on my bed with my laptop in front of me and searched for Tony and Keshawn on FriendTrace.com. I typed their names in the search box and poured juice into the spell I use to contact the dead.
I got a white screen with the words No Results Found on it. I couldn’t force Terrence’s nephews to take my call, but that’s not what my spell was telling me. It was telling me Tony and Keshawn weren’t in the Beyond.
