Dead of Night (Ghosts & Magic #1) (3 page)

She didn't laugh with me. "Give me an hour, and then go meet Dalton at the shop."

An hour was good. I had another stop I needed to make in the meantime. "I do have a bit of good news for you. I'll give it to you when I get home."

"Can I eat it?"

I hung up.

It took me about ten minutes to make the drive over to Graceland, and another five to get back to the plot where I had dug Caroline up. I'd been real careful with how I'd moved the earth, in preparation for this very event. This time I had a helper with a second shovel, and we reached the coffin within a quarter of an hour.
 

"Thanks for everything."
 

She was in the pit, standing in the base of the open casket.
 

"Mmmmmffffff."
 

It sounded like a goodbye.
 

"Just close the lid behind you, and I'll let you go. I won't be calling on you again."

She paused a moment, and her hand lifted up in a curt wave.
 

I returned the gesture. "I hope wherever you're going, it's a good place for you to be."
 

Caroline laid down in the box, and then reached up and pulled the lid down. As soon as it was closed I let go of the tie that was controlling her, feeling the specter of her soul float free of my grip. Internally, it was like I had been holding air in my esophagus for too long and had just belched it out.

I succumbed to a bit of coughing then, putting the back of my hand to my mouth and taking a moment to stare at the blood when I moved it away. I needed to cover her up and get my ass over to Dalton. The touch had left me in worse shape than I thought. Maybe he'd been a user after all.

Magic. It had been mother nature's best kept secret, hidden in the form of not-exactly-magnetic fields that wrapped around and through the earth. According to people who knew better than me, it had always been there. It was just that us humans couldn't feel it, or see it.

Then the Earth's polarity had shifted.
 

It was called geomagnetic reversal, and it hadn't happened in about forty-one thousand years. For whatever reason, this shift did something to the not-exactly-magnetic fields, powering them up to the point that they began to have strange effects on us surface dwellers.
 

Some of us became what we called sensitives. We could feel these fields emanating around us, and in some cases we could even hear them as a constant thrumming and pulsing in the ears that we just couldn't shake.
 

That was me, five years ago. That was me, before I got sick and started the quick downward spiral towards death. I had always been able to hear the buzzing and thrumming. I had always known I was sensitive. In this world being sensitive meant learning to live with the noise, and knowing there was a power out there that others had access to but you didn't. It was like being first in line at the most exclusive nightclub on the planet and having the bouncer tell you to fuck off.

It was the medicine that had brought me across the line, from sensitive to user. It was black market, experimental, and illegal. I didn't know who made it, what it was made of, or where it came from. I hadn't even known there was a whole underground of remedies to all sorts of nasty things out there until I had gotten one of those nasty things, and been lucky enough to hook up with Danelle.
 

At first, I didn't understand that I'd finally gotten into the club. I began to feel the fields. I was able to bring the energy into me. I was also getting sicker and sicker. My hair fell out, my skin turned a gnarly grey, and no amount of sexual attention of any kind could get me aroused. I was sure I was close to death.
 

Only, I didn't die.

The things I touched did.

I'd been rightfully terrified, but Danelle had kept a level head about it, and once again become my guide. She was maybe a little too excited to find herself with a necro sleeping on her couch, but she saw the potential, and began to teach me everything she knew. She had more experience with magic than any sensitive had a right to, because she was supposed to be a user. She'd been bred for it, and when it didn't happen her father had disowned her for her 'failure'.
 

I set about the task of closing the grave, down one partner to help me shovel. It was tough going, as weak as I was, and I had to stop more than once for a fit of heavy coughing. By the time I finished leveling the dirt I was dead tired. Too tired to even make my way back to the van.

I sat down against Caroline's headstone, a plain slate of beveled marble with her name, dates, and a simple epitaph:
 

'Beloved daughter. God is blessed to have you in His Kingdom.'

I felt the familiar twang of guilt, and I wiped a wayward tear from my eye. I'd never asked for power over death and the dead, but when you were in my situation you needed every advantage you could get.
 

I didn't want to wind up like Caroline, with a small bit of stone and a sentimental phrase to send me off into the great beyond.
 

I wasn't ready to die.

CHAPTER THREE

Is this medically necessary?

"You look like shit, pardner," Dalton said when I stumbled through the door to his pawn shop.
 

 
It was eleven at night, a little early for peak in the dusty old storefront, where a mint guitar hung in the bullet-proof glass window, claiming to have been owned by Elvis Presley. Nobody but Dalton actually believed that it had.

I winced in pain, holding back another cough. "When have I ever come to you and not looked like shit?"

His sharp smile was annoying. So was the life in his dark, almond shaped eyes. "Gina!"
 

A few beats later she joined us in the center of the shop. The King's greatest hits were radiating through the hidden speakers above me, and to either side rested shelves covered in mounds of crap I couldn't believe he had given money for, or that anyone would ever buy. They probably wouldn't, but what did it matter? Was there any pawn shop around that wasn't a front for something?

She was a total counter to her cowboy-obsessed husband. Where he wore flannel and high leather boots with faux spurs, she wore tight black leather and fishnets. His head was covered by a fedora, her hair was dyed green and pink. Either way, both styles looked warped on the pair of Chinatown refugees.

"Hey, Conor. You look like shit, man."
 

I gave her the same unpleasant look I had given her husband.

Dalton smiled at her, leaned in, and kissed her cheek. "He's in a bad mood today."

"When is he not in a bad mood?"

"Did Danelle send the payment over?" I could feel my stomach knotting up, and my lungs complaining as their seizing accelerated. There was this notion among the ignorant that magic meant crazy power with no consequences. It would have been great if I could wield it like Gandalf and smoke a pipe after, but it just didn't work like that; at least not for me. Touching someone meant accelerating my own illness. I'd almost killed myself in my decision to keep the secret.

"Of course. She sounded pissed about it though, bro."

I expected as much. It wasn't the cost of the medication that made her angry - the meds were keeping me alive way past my use-by date. It was the other expenditure she hated, that we had fought about tooth and nail for weeks, and would still be fighting about if she hadn't lost her legs and become dependent on me to keep a roof over her head.
 

"She'll get over it. She always does. You have everything set up?"

"Yeah, come on down. You're the next contestant."

It was Karen, and Molly, that gave her fits. My ex, and our daughter, who was two years, one week when I was diagnosed, and two years, one week when I had abandoned them in a fit of self-loathing and with the bright idea that they'd be better off without the burden of my slow burnout. Once that stupid decision had been made, I'd been too much of a coward to go back, and so I sent them money instead. Maybe they knew it was me, but probably not. I'd paid to have myself declared dead three years ago so they could collect the life insurance.

I looked around. "I'm the only contestant. How many people take these meds, anyway?"

"Come on, pardner. You know I can't tell you. HIPAA and all that."
 

That statement got me to laugh, despite the pain.

We made our way behind the counter, into a back storeroom that was even more cluttered with worthless garbage. Trays filled with wedding bands, tree-like wooden dowels buried in necklaces, and a whole wine barrel filled to the top with firearms.
 

"It amazes me every time I come back here," I said.

"You know what I like about this front? It's the stories, Conor. Every pathetic dude who comes in here has some kind of pathetic story, and if you can sort through the alcohol induced shit, you can be entertained for a while. Then, when I'm hanging with my buds, or maybe going down to Chinatown to see my mom, I've got plenty of stuff to talk about to make them feel better about their own situation."

There was an old rug laying across the floor, and he knelt down and folded it back, revealing a trap door. He dug his fingers in the corner and lifted it out of the way.

"Do you have a story to make me feel better?"

He looked at me, his left lip curled in an Elvis smile. "You? Fuck, no."

We climbed a simple wooden ladder ten feet down into a small hallway that adjoined the operating room. You'd never know from all the mess and crap up top that anyone would be able to maintain a perfectly sterile environment below it, never mind one that was used for all kinds of sewing, sticking, and cutting of live people.
 

"You know the drill." Dalton rolled up his sleeves and went over to the sink, starting his scrubbing.
 

I took off my trench coat, then the black hoodie beneath it, and then the white tee beneath that. A few minutes later I had removed my black pants, swat boots, and boxer briefs, and had washed away the bacteria in a hot spray of water from a nozzle next to the operating room door. I grabbed a freshly laundered towel and wiped myself dry, trying to ignore the mirror.

I wasn't a pretty man. I looked as sick as I felt. My body was rail thin, with grey skin clinging so tightly to muscle and bone that it looked like it had just been laid on top of my skeleton. My head was way too big for my body, my face was small and sharp, and my eyes were sunken and sullen, with no sign of brightness inside the almost wholly black orbs. I had no hair to speak of, and every breath I took carried a hint of pain and decay. I could still remember when I had been healthy, and almost handsome. At least, Karen had always told me I was the most beautiful man she had ever met. It had been enough for me.

The sink turned off, and I heard the snap of latex gloves. I turned the knob to unlock the operating room door and walked in, my body shaking from the clean cold. I grabbed a fresh sheet and laid it over the table, and then sat down.

"Just make sure you don't touch me." Dalton entered the room and went over to a safe, bolted into the floor. He put in the combination and heaved it open.

"It doesn't work like that, and you know it."

I watched him pull out a sterile bag which contained the medicine. It was nothing but a small, round capsule that contained who-knows-what. By itself, it was nothing too bad. The problem was that it couldn't be taken orally. It had to be injected.

"It had just stopped hurting, too." I leaned back and twisted a little, exposing a nasty pucker of scarred flesh that served as a twisted target for the treatment apparatus.

"Sorry, Conor." Dalton picked up the injector from the table next to the bed. It bore a vague resemblance to a gun, except the nozzle ended in a needle that was thick enough for the capsule to blast out of. He popped the side of it open and dropped the capsule in. A small bottle of compressed air went into the back, and would fire the little pill through my innards.

He flipped it on, and brought it to my stomach. I closed my eyes while he lined up the needle and jabbed it through the scar tissue. It gave pretty easily, having been penetrated so many times before. Even so, his precision was almost embarrassing. Dalton was a black market merchant who had learned medicine on the internet, and he was almost as good of a surgeon as I had been.

I grimaced through the pain. In the beginning I had taken his offer of anesthesia, but over time I'd realized the stuff he was giving me made me feel worse than the pain did, and cost a lot more to boot. Now I just grinned and bore it, and even watched the procedure with a calm expectancy. Every time I saw the blood start running down my abs I waited for it to be a thick black pus.
 

He put his finger on the trigger. "The hard part."

I nodded and took a few deep breaths. He'd have to get the capsule in pretty deep. Whatever was in it would spread throughout my system and attack the ugly cells that the base was producing, keeping the factory in check for up to a month at a time, unless I touched someone and caused it to go into overdrive. Why it couldn't actually destroy the mass that was causing the trouble I didn't know, and neither did Dalton. When I asked, he would only say, 'they're working on it'. Whoever 'they' were.

"On three," Dalton said, shifting the device in his hand, changing his aim.
 

He'd have to get the positioning just right, or it wouldn't travel to the right spot, and would open too soon and be relatively ineffective. It had happened once before, and I'd only gotten a week out of the treatment. Even worse, the whole thing was buyer's risk. Too bad it didn't take, I had to pay full price all the same.

"One..."

I closed my eyes, mentally preparing myself for the pain that would follow.

"Two..."
 

I sucked in one more deep breath, and held it tight.

"Three..."

There was a puff of air, and then I could feel the capsule moving down deep towards the base of my gut. I felt the burn of it, the hot agony of it pushing through my innards. It was a thousand stabs at once, dense and tight and unbelievable. In an instant, the needle retreated, and I felt the coldness of the air against my flesh again.