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. Since they were dead—again—there was really only one other place they could be.
I shut down the laptop, threw on some clothes and went out to the living room. Honey, my piskie roommate, was on the coffee table with four of her sisters. They were playing Chinese checkers, but the game seemed more about pelting each other with marbles than the strategies I’d learned as a child. There was a fair amount of violence in it, since the marbles were almost as large to the piskies as a bowling ball would have been to me.
“Hi, Domino! Wanna play?”
“I need to cross over for a bit. Hold down the fort while I’m gone.”
“I can come with you.”
“Play your game. I should be in and out.” I sank onto the couch, spun my spirit-walking spell and crossed over to the Between. I grabbed the Colt Peacemaker from the closet and belted the rig around my waist. The weapon had belonged to Wyatt Earp and they called it the Dead Man’s Gun in these parts. They also said it was cursed, but it was still a comfort in a place where I couldn’t use sorcery.
I left my condo and strolled down the blue-lit nighttime street outside my building. I entered the pale mist that shrouded the streets of the shadow city, and the world seemed to spin around me like a vinyl record on a turntable. When I stepped out of the fog, I was standing at the gates of the cemetery.
This was my first time visiting a cemetery in the Between. I’d expected it to be a happening place, the ghostly equivalent of a busy hotel. Instead, it was deserted, quiet and still. In the real world, it had been designed from the sod up to ooze peacefulness and serenity. It was pleasant enough you could almost forget it had corpses buried in it.
In the Between, that calm and soothing ambiance was replaced by something else entirely. Not danger, exactly—I didn’t feel threatened by it. The vibe I got from the place was more like loneliness, regret. The cemetery was the last station at the end of the line. “Everyone gets off here,” it seemed to whisper. “There’s no place else to go.”
I went in through the gates and walked down the winding road toward the graves. The ambient blue light of the Between at night was dimmer here. There were no leaves on the trees that flanked the road, and they cast no shadows.
Tony’s grave was still open, a stark, black shape like a doorway in the ground. I walked to the edge and knelt beside it. “Tony?” I whispered. No response. I tightened my jaw, lay down on my stomach and reached into the grave. It was empty—even the coffin was missing. I hastily stood up and brushed the grave dirt from my clothes. I looked around, and seeing nothing, I walked over to the mausoleum where I’d torched Tony with the fireball spell.
The blast shadow was still there. As I approached, it rippled and flowed away from the wall, and then floated