The Voodoo Killings Read online

  “Cameron, just stay still,” I said, my teeth clenched. “You just need to put up with me for a few seconds.”

  I searched first for the gold glow of his bindings. I picked up the four anchoring lines, heavier and brighter than the rest, running through his arms and legs. All four lines coalesced in one spot, Cameron’s heart, in a bright gold beacon typical of Western and African bindings. Then the secondary lines flared into view, branching off the main lines and into his fingers and feet, getting thinner and thinner until they were fine gold threads that reminded me of nerve endings. It was good work. Most practitioners wouldn’t have bothered with the fingertips. They’d have called it a day at the wrist, maybe the palm if they were feeling generous. So with such careful bindings, why the hell was he in such bad shape?

  I checked his head next. I expected to see a fifth line, but there was none.

  Shit. He was one line short of a full deck.

  Without a fifth anchoring line in his head, no amount of human brains could fix him. I’d been sure he was a five-line, but whoever had raised Cameron had meant him to be temporary. With the detail on the hands, it had to be Max, or else there was another very good practitioner lurking around Seattle.

  Not that it mattered. I couldn’t leave Cameron up and running with only four lines. I’d have to put him back myself.

  I took a deep breath, pushed the Otherside nausea down, and readied to untie his lines.

  “Kincaid?” Cameron said through clenched teeth. He was still gripping the arms of the chair.

  “Not much longer, Cameron,” I said. Almost over.

  I pushed more Otherside through his lines and flushed out the symbols: traces of the incantations used to write the bindings onto Cameron’s body, the bolts that were holding his lines together, so to speak.

  Cameron winced as the symbols flared a gold only I could see. Sweat collected on my upper lip. One more push and then everything would unravel, and whatever was left of Cameron’s ghost would siphon back to the Otherside. He’d never know what hit him. Or at least that was the plan.

  I sent the final wave at Cameron.

  And that’s when things got weird.

  The four main animation symbols, all ones I recognized from classic voodoo, floated up from each of the anchor lines. I expected that. But then six more symbols flashed to life inside his head.

  Cameron arched as if in the throes of a seizure, his head twisting. The six new symbols flared brighter and brighter. Celtic? Norse wasn’t out of the question either. Then a fifth line leading from Cameron’s heart to his head, the one I’d expected to find in the first place, flickered into existence. The six strange symbols brightened as Cameron convulsed, and then they began to spin slowly, like gears in a clock.

  “Kincaid.” Cameron’s voice was strained. No kidding.

  I sent another wave of Otherside towards him, hoping the symbols would stop their revolutions. Instead, they sped up, and all five main anchoring lines wavered. Cameron convulsed again.

  Shit, I was hurting him.

  I might not recognize the architecture of that fifth line, but Cameron sure as hell wasn’t a four-line zombie.

  I dropped my globe, letting the Otherside flood back across the barrier before any more of Cameron’s bindings could destabilize. He slumped back into the chair, his face covered in sweat as he gasped for air—not that he needed to breathe anymore. A long moment passed before he glanced at me.

  “That was more than a few seconds,” he said. “And it hurt like a son of a bitch.”

  I shook my head. “Cameron, I hate to break this to you, but—”

  “But what?” he said.

  I started again. “What just happened—it should be a physical impossibility. Your bindings…” Damn, how to explain instability of bindings to a barely compos mentis zombie? “Look, I don’t know how to put this exactly, but I don’t think you were made right.”

  Cameron just stared at me.

  I tried again. “Imagine if you were building a car, except instead of ordering all the right parts, you just used whatever you had lying around. You’re one massive jerry rig.” Or, more accurately, like a bomb ready to go off…

  Cameron didn’t take his eyes off me. “That doesn’t strike me as particularly comforting.”

  Well, his faculties were working a little better than they had been, probably from the massive hit of adrenalin caused by the seizure. One little chemical, so many wonders. “It wasn’t meant to be comforting.”

  “Can you fix it—me?”

  “I have no idea.”

  The burner rang, and I grabbed it. “Mork, what the hell?”

  “Ms. Strange,” Mork said. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

  I frowned. I hated people using my last name. Mork only used it to piss me off. “I need a delivery. Now.”

  “Now will cost you. High grade? Low grade?”

  “High, and don’t mix. I’ll smell the formaldehyde.”

  “Five hundred, Strange. I’ll see you in an hour. You know where.”

  “Five hundred? Are you out of your—Goddamn it!” Mork had hung up on me. I tossed the phone and Cameron jumped as it hit the floor.

  “Sorry, Cameron. I didn’t mean to scare you,” I said.

  It took him a second to look away from the phone. “Who—what was that?”

  “Negotiation, or lack thereof,” I said, nodding at the phone. “Mork’s special—he manages to piss everyone off.”

  It wasn’t just the price I’d wanted to negotiate. Mork’s “you know where” was the underground city. Which meant I had to either drag Cameron with me or lock him up here. Neither of those options appealed to me. It was like flipping a coin: heads, get caught with a zombie outside, tails, have a zombie discovered in my home….

  Though the underground city did have Lee, and she’d seen more zombies come and go than anyone else in Seattle. Maybe she’d know what the hell was wrong with Cameron’s bindings.

  Cameron cleared his throat.

  I glanced up. I was used to zombies, but they have a tendency to stare.

  “Where can I get—whatever it is I need to eat?”

  It was my turn to stare.

  “That’s what you were talking about, wasn’t it? Food?” he said.

  Right. If Cameron had regained enough cognitive function to not only deduce the subject of a one-sided conversation but analyze it with respect to an unrelated, earlier conversation, there was no way I was leaving him alone. Chances were too good he’d get bored and take off. And losing him would not be good, not with those unusual bindings. I checked the clock: 10:30. One hour to meet Mork.

  “Come on, Cameron,” I said, and tossed him a leather jacket out of the closet, one that Aaron had left behind. He managed to catch it. If I’d had any doubt that my meddling with his unusual bindings had had an effect, the recovered reflexes sealed it.

  “Stay right there,” I said, and headed into the bathroom. I grabbed the red lipliner out of the toothbrush holder and held it up to the mirror.

  Mirrors are the easiest way to send messages to the Otherside. Ghosts are bored by nature and drawn to any mirror they come across. It’s like a voyeurism TV channel for ghosts: look but don’t touch. If the mirror is primed—and this one was—they can send messages across to the side of the living or, with a practitioner’s help, come through themselves.

  Nate, going to Damaged Goods. If you can swallow your ego for half an hour I’ve got a gig for us Sat. night, I wrote.

  At last, a reaction. Not interested, Kincaid, scrawled backwards across the glass in ghost-grey fog.

  Like hell he wasn’t interested. Nate never passed up an opportunity to schmooze with diehard fans. I’ll give you the next six episodes of Lost, I wrote. I wasn’t above bribery.

  As I left the bathroom and ducked into my bedroom, I saw that Cameron was able to track me. “Stay put,” I called, and closed the door.

  I pushed my queen brass bed frame to the side then pried the loose flo
orboard up and retrieved the white envelope. My stash of emergency cash. I pulled out the five hundred I needed for Mork and pocketed it. I counted what was left. Fifteen hundred. Shit. I knew it was going to be low, but not that low. If seances were sparse between now and Halloween, I’d be hard pressed to make rent let alone restock my brain slushie supply. Whoever raised Cameron was going to get one hell of a bill at the end of all this.

  I slid the paltry fifteen hundred back under the floorboard and made sure the brass bed was in place. Where the hell was I going to scrounge up more work? The cops were out until they lifted the ban on paranormal advisers. The university frat houses? Only if Nate got over his hissy fit.

  The door opened. I spun, grabbing my keys out of my pocket, wielding them like a weapon.

  Cameron stood there, calm and alert. In the time it’d taken me to retrieve the five hundred, he’d managed to slide the old jacket on. It looked better on him than it had on Aaron. “Jesus, Cameron, stop sneaking up on me,” I said.

  His brow furrowed as he took me in. “We know each other, don’t we?” he said, focusing on my face. “Is it Kincaid?”

  I sighed. “Yes. My name is Kincaid. You’re Cameron and we just met.” I walked over and did up the zipper on his jacket for him. “Come on.”

  “Where?” Cameron asked.

  “Out for dinner,” I said.

  —

  Not for the first time, I was happy the freight elevator had been left a wide-open safety hazard, not renovated into something small, modern, and enclosed. Zombies don’t do well in confined spaces. The elevator clanged to a stop on the ground floor. Before I opened the grate, I looped my arm through Cameron’s so I could steer him towards the door. Or that was the plan. As soon as he saw the art installations, he veered towards them.

  “Cameron, we don’t have time for this. You can look when we get back,” I said, and attempted to tow him along. But Cameron was on a mission. Ignoring every single garish sculpture in the lobby, he headed straight for the ornate standing mirror.

  The same young man in Renaissance clothing stared out in perfect mimicry of a ghost. The most striking feature of the work was the ghost-grey cast to the image; even his blue eyes had the right layer of grey to them.

  Cameron stopped just inches away from the Renaissance man’s face.

  “Cameron, be careful,” I said. Not socializing with the artists in the building was one thing; pissing them off by breaking their artwork was something else entirely.

  Then I noticed something that I hadn’t seen before—a single word scrawled backwards across the glass, as if drawn in condensation.

  Help

  Maybe it was meant to be avant-garde, but the combination of the ghost man and the message…I shivered.

  Cameron brushed his fingers against the foggy script. “I don’t know why, but I like this one,” he said. “The others are trying too hard.”

  Well, Cameron’s memory might be a loss, but his aesthetic sense was intact.

  “It’s a good rendition of a ghost in a set mirror,” I told him. “You were a decent artist. Who knows, maybe there’s something to the whole realism-in-art thing…”

  I trailed off as the Renaissance man turned his head towards me and blinked twice.

  Son of a bitch, the mirror was real…which meant the ghost had to be real too. I grabbed Cameron by the arm and moved him a step back.

  “What the hell is that?” Cameron said as the ghost turned his attention from me to him.

  Cameron now took his own step back, dragging me with him. His reaction didn’t surprise me. He was dead. What he saw in the mirror was a far cry from the Renaissance man I saw. Ghost or zombie, when the dead see the dead, it isn’t pretty. “Cameron, say hello to your first ghost,” I said.

  “I’d rather not,” he whispered, as if afraid he might cause the ghost to jump out at him.

  The ghost tipped his head to study Cameron, a movement that looked as though he was fighting against molasses. What could cause a mirror to do that? A faulty set?

  Cameron tensed again as the ghost, with a great deal of effort, turned its attention back to me. Since he couldn’t be more than a hundred years old, he was probably an actor who’d died in costume—or, worse, onstage. Not a pleasant way to go. “Don’t worry, Cameron, it can’t hurt you,” I said. That was more or less true.

  Even in Cameron’s basket-shy-of-a-picnic zombie state, the look he shot me said he wasn’t buying it.

  “Just don’t make eye contact with it, okay?” I said, trying to decide what to do. On the one hand, I was not okay leaving a ghost in some art exhibit. On the other hand, I had enough trouble dealing with Cameron. The ghost wasn’t going anywhere; chances were he’d still be there when we got back.

  Oh hell, five minutes wouldn’t kill us.

  “Cameron, hold tight for a minute,” I said, and tapped the barrier. The nausea hit me hard this time, not surprising since this was the second time I’d tapped it in an hour. I held on to my stomach as cold Otherside flooded my skull. Ghosts are mostly harmless, but I did not like the way this one was now sizing me up. I clenched my teeth as another wave of nausea hit, stronger than the last one. I was going to be feeling the after-effects later.

  Still, I forced myself to hold the Otherside until my globe finished forming. When it did, my view of the mirror shifted.

  Not one piece of inscription had been placed on the mirror to filter it. A mirror without any filter is like, well, an open flame to a moth. The mirror was a giant grey beacon broadcasting to every ghost in a hundred-mile radius. No ghost could resist the chance to communicate across the barrier with the living. No wonder the Renaissance man was moving with so much effort. Who knew how many ghosts were jostling behind him for a spot?

  I was looking at a ghost trap.

  What kind of asshole would do such a thing? It was like turning a bear trap into art. No wonder the ghost looked pissed. Who knew how long he’d been stuck there. And who the hell in my building could have set it? Anyone who’d sat for more than twenty minutes in a community college paranormal class, that’s who. All you had to do was learn the most rudimentary setting inscriptions and tap enough Otherside without passing out. Now adding filters, that was trickier….

  The logical, obvious solution was to go meet Mork, take care of Cameron, and deal with this later. But I couldn’t bring myself to leave the mirror like this; I’m not that mean.

  I glanced at Cameron, who was still watching the ghost from a safe distance. His bindings seemed stable enough.

  I switched my attention back to the mirror. First things first: get the ghost out of the way. I focused on the Renaissance man. “Sorry you ended up here tonight, buddy. I’m sure this was the last thing you expected,” I said. I might not be able to hear him, but he, and all the rest of them, could hear me. One push ought to do the trick.

  Before I could force the ghost out of the way with Otherside energy, he stepped back into the grey cloud of fogged nothingness and disappeared.

  What the hell?

  A jumble of backwards-written messages uncoiled over each other as the ghosts in the mirror fought for space.

  Help

  Please

  Stay

  Is anyone there?

  Call my girlfriend—please?

  I suppressed a shiver. The Renaissance man hadn’t been trapped at all; he’d been holding back the flood of ghosts. I shook my head. Ghosts aren’t exactly an altruistic bunch.

  The messages kept unfurling over each other until I couldn’t make sense out of any of them. Like I said, moths to a flame.

  “What is all that?” Cameron said.

  “Hold on, Cameron, I’m going to fix it.”

  Time to add some parameters. No red lipliner, though. Nate might see it and walk straight into the trap.

  I placed both hands on the glass and swallowed the bile that rushed up as more Otherside reached through the mirror into my hands, attracted to the energy I already held. The cold hit me full for
ce. I’d never actually tried to reset a mirror this way before, but I figured the principle had to be the same as setting an unset one. I breathed on the mirror until it fogged up and then began tracing the most common voodoo filter symbol I knew: This is a mirror.

  Otherside arced at my fingertips as I etched the image into the fogged glass. For a moment I worried the mirror would resist the simple filter, but it absorbed the symbol like a sponge. I frowned. Huh. Whoever set the mirror in the first place hadn’t known what they were doing, otherwise they’d have made it a lot harder to reset than that. I traced a second message into the fogged glass, just underneath the first: Beware. Carnival trick. Don’t get caught.

  I stood back to admire my handiwork and couldn’t help smiling. Whoever set up this mirror in the first place was going to be pissed when they tried to show it off. Fifty to one they’d have no idea how the hell to undo it.

  Just to be sure the ghosts in the mirror got the picture, I closed my eyes and felt around with my globe. There was still a captive crowd reaching out to me, curious, and I picked up the odd angry curse, but mostly just cold apathy and disappointment. The frantic crowd was gone.

  Apathy and disappointment are something ghosts are well equipped to deal with. That I could live with. I dropped my globe and sighed with relief as the nausea dissipated.

  “All right, Cameron, time to get out of here.” But before we could move, one last message scrawled across the glass.

  Good deed for the day?

  I took a closer look. No ghost should be able to do that after what I’d just done, but the fact that a flood of messages weren’t coming through meant my set had to be working. I thought I saw the Renaissance man’s face pass in front of me, but it vanished in the fog before I could be sure.

  “Kincaid?” Cameron said.

  The last thing I needed was to pull another globe. I’d check later.

  I touched Cameron’s arm and steered him towards the back door. The drizzle was still going strong but hadn’t morphed into rain yet, so I left my hood down. As soon as we were past my building’s floodlights, I let out a breath and tried to relax. I couldn’t. I’d dealt with hundreds of ghosts, dozens of zombies, and I’d never seen something as ugly as that ghost trap—or a ghost that could bypass my filter.