“Delice did all that was needed. I have no need for a zombi to do my bidding. She spent her life enslaved. No need for her to spend her death there too.” Ava Ani rolled a length of red ribbon, scented with rose oil, into a small tight coil. She slipped it into the gris-gris bag she wore around her neck.
“You are too soft, Ava Ani,” scoffed Philippe. “Join with us in the Cochon Gris and find your true power.”
“Non, merci,” she replied, a bit tartly. Ava Ani leaned her weight against the stone slab. She pushed with every ounce of strength she had, and slowly the slab slid back into place, sealing the tomb. Delice again shared a dead-house with the other dead slaves of the DuPlessis household.
Ava Ani straightened up, wiping the sweat from her forehead. In the faint starlight she saw Philippe scowling at her. Her almond eyes narrowed, but she forced a smile.
“Erzulie liked the fancy white chat I fixed for her,” Ava Ani said sweetly. “Mais oui, she liked it very much. She said to me that she had never had such a fine gift.” She watched Philippe’s shadowed face. A moment passed—and then a flash of white teeth answered her.
“Very well, mambo. I see you made a friend of Erzulie. You go back to your little magic and I will go back to mine.”
“C’est bon,” Ava Ani said, but he was already gone. She turned back to the dead-house.
“No more voudou, ma fille. Now only angel songs.” She got down on her knees and fumbled around her neck. Under the gris-gris bag that hung between her breasts she found her rosary. She pulled the cross out from the neck of her dress and let her fingers slide along the warm smooth ebony beads. “Now I pray to the Catholic gods for your eternal rest, ma petite.” She knelt in front of the dead-house and crossed herself.
“Hail Marie, full of grace, the Lord is with thee . . . ”
Trail of Dead
Joanne Anderton
You don’t realize how many dead things there are out here until you walk over them. Hmm, maybe I should rephrase that. I didn’t realize how many dead things there were out here until I walked over them. Yes, that’s better. No one else would have this problem.
Most of them are lizards, poor things little more than dried-out skin and tiny bones. They shuffle—why do dead things shuffle?—like they’re made of cardboard. All stiff legs and flat backs. Snakes too, and they have so much trouble moving on the sand. Then there’s the odd, dusty skeleton. People who’ve been dead for so long they collapse as soon as they’ve pulled their way out, bones crumbling away in the breeze.
They make me sad, those ones. Really, this is my fault. I know it. And here they are dissolving away like they’ve never existed, all because of me.
I stop for a moment, pull a stolen bottle of water from my tattered backpack and drink quickly. Only takes a sec before I realize there’s something buried at my feet. A beak pokes up into the hot, late afternoon air. It’s dark, with two large holes near the tip. A thin skull soon slithers after it, a few scraggly feathers attached, sticking up like a demented mohawk.
Emu. Damn. If that thing’s still got legs, oh how it will run.
I stuff the warm bottle in my bag and start to jog.
There are worse things than emus, to be sure. So the longer I stay out here the better. Away from cities, farms, any kind of human habitation. If I’m lucky no one else will suffer for my mistakes, my damned, drunken pride.
And I just might stay ahead of the old woman and her stones.
“It is conventional wisdom that a bullet to the head will do. Use something with a good amount of kick, like a shotgun.” The Hunter did not draw a gun; he balanced a Japanese sword with a woven green hilt and glinting edge in the palm of his hand. “But you know why we shouldn’t use those, don’t you?”
Chase looked up at him, pimple-ridden face paler than whitewash. “Yes, sir.” His voice broke, and he shook his head. “It’s not their fault.”
“No indeed. And we’re here to give them peace, to be dignified about it. Not to have ourselves a good time.” Grimly, the Hunter tipped up his wide-brimmed, rabbit-fur hat with his thumb. Dark brown eyes surveyed the park, touching on each of the approaching undead in turn. “Hunting is an old art, boy. You need to remember that.” He leaned forward, weight on the balls of his feet, balanced. Fluid. Ready. “A clean cut to the neck, separate head and body. One swipe is all it takes. No mess, no disrespect. No guns.”
The Hunter leaped forward and cut the undead down. He wasted nothing. Each stroke sliced through a rotting neck, each step took him right to the next cadaver. Slowly, the park emptied. The mass of shambling, rotting corpses became a heap of sprawled, rotting corpses.
Chase watched as the Hunter and the undead danced. He glanced down at the small, ugly-looking gun in his hand. An old-school thing, derringer the Hunter had called it, with a smooth wooden handle and a chrome barrel. Just looking at it made him feel sick. That the Hunter had put a gun instead of a sword into his fumbling, unsure hand said a lot.
“Chase!” The Hunter snapped from across the park. “Watch yourself!”
Chase looked up to a reaching, decayed hand. Yelping, he stumbled backward and lifted the derringer with a reluctant arm. The zombie had not been dead for long. She had hair, it tangled into a bleached-out nest at her shoulders, and most of her face remained intact. There was lipstick on parts of her lips.
She still looked like a person, and that always made it hard.
For one thing, they were quicker. The undead woman knocked Chase’s hand to the side even as he tried to aim the gun. She lunged, bloodied mouth snapping in the air like a rabid dog. Chase gave into his shaking legs and fell, leaving her teetering, head swiveling with almost comic confusion.
It helped, in a way. She didn’t look human any more, acting like some deranged animal instead of a woman. Chase scooted back, aimed up at her even as she saw him collapsed on the churned-up dirt, and fired. The first shot took her in the shoulder, pushing her back. As Chase fumbled for the spare bullets in his front pocket, dropped one in the mud and scrambled desperately to find it, she righted herself. She reached down.
He didn’t need the second shot. With a step and a tight swing of his sword, the Hunter cut her down.
Driza-bone coat flapping in a putrid breeze, the Hunter stared down at his apprentice. He did not offer a hand up. “Knives are too short, close quarters fighting only favors the undead.” He pulled a clean, white cloth from his pocket.
Chase had heard this speech before, heard it many times. He guessed it showed just how little regard the Hunter had for him, how much of a disappointment his so-called chosen boy had turned out to be. The man didn’t have anything else to say.
“Foils are no good for cutting through necks; you need to be on a horse or a trail bike to make sabres any use. But this—” the Hunter wiped his sword with the cloth, removing flaps of crackly skin and chunks of dry flesh. There was never very much blood. “—this is perfect.”
The Hunter looked into the distance, eyes shadowed by his hat, mouth set and serious. “Remember this, and when it is your time, treat her well.” Gently, he slid the sword into a lacquered scabbard at his hip. “You will make a Hunter one day. When I am gone.”
Chase gave up on the bullet, lost in the mud, and pushed himself to his feet. His pants were plastered with muck, especially around his backside where it clung with an uncomfortable weight. Quickly, before the Hunter could pick him up on it, he bundled up a handful of his navy polo shirt and wiped dirt off his gun. All the while, he tried to get the image of decapitating the Hunter out of his mind. But when you’re apprenticed to a Necromancer Hunter, that’s part of the deal. The only way to make sure that when they die, they stay dead.