Dirty Deeds Read online

  “I’m glad you remembered how showers work,” I said, following him inside and setting the guns down on the little table. “Nice to see you have more than the one shirt.” I looked back out the doorway one more time, before closing and locking it.

  “Which is more than I can say for you,” Noah said. I picked up the plastic bag of rolled a-shirts I’d already ripped into, pulled one out, and waved it at him. Noah rolled his eyes. “Now the real question is, do you remember how showers work? I can walk you through the mechanics if you need a refresher,” Noah said, flopping down on the bed closest to the bathroom.

  I sighed and collapsed on the other bed. I had to come up with some way to tell him. I couldn’t just boot him out of the truck in the morning. I closed my eyes and listened to the now-familiar sound of his deviated septum as his breathing slowed. The morning. I could tell him in the morning.

  “So,” Noah said on a yawn. “How do we take down a witch?”

  I smiled. One last hunt. “Well, first we have to find them.”

  “Ok,” I heard Noah’s bed creak and I opened an eye to see him sitting up, his head wrapped in a towel turban. “How do we do that?”

  “Uh, I use one of my three wishes to have you find them for me?” I said, looking at his turban.

  Noah scowled. “My hair gets frizzy if I just let it air dry.”

  “I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but that ship has sailed,” I said, looking down to pull my shoes off. A moist towel hit me in the face and I looked up at Noah.

  “Jerk,” he said.

  “Towel thrown in my face, and I’m the jerk,” I said.

  “How do you find the witch?” Noah asked again.

  I rolled across my bed and looked at the pile of stuff I’d dumped out. Noah had placed the hex bags around the room and put the roll of salted tape back on the table after he put a line across the door threshold and the window ledge. I pulled the map out of my back pocket and flung it on the table. “We’ll use a pendulum,” I said, picking the gold chain and the metal stand out of the pile of stuff on my bed. I set it on the table but turned when I heard his bed squeaking again. Noah was standing with one foot on the bed’s headboard tugging the cover off the smoke detector.

  “Noah, what are…”

  “Fire?” He said, looking down at me. “You light the map on fire, right?”

  I nodded. He disconnected the clips and took down the detector. I spread out the map on the table and set up the pendulum on its metal tripod.

  “Now what?” Noah said at my elbow.

  “Well, with no Stacks, you and I have to do our own research,” I said, handing Noah a book.

  “Haven’t you ever done this before?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “but I never remember the spell. I always have to look it up. I used to have a sticky note on the page but Stacks saw it and got all indignant and pulled it off. Now I have to try to find it again. And I can’t remember which of these books it was.”

  “So what should I look up?” Noah asked, holding up the book in his hand.

  “Anything that says ‘witch’. I haven’t hunted this flavor of witch in a couple of years.”

  “Well, what did you do last time?”

  “Hit her with Lucy,” I said. Noah looked at me. “It was an accident. I was actually looking for her and she was in a spell trance, following her corpse army. She walked right out in front of me.”

  “Corpse army?” Noah asked, his voice cracking.

  “Yeah,” I sighed, squinting at the street names on the map. Even with the pendulum, it was going to be hard to find her, “Necro-witches channel their power through their conduit, the headless huntsman. And yes, before you ask.,” I said holding up a hand. “That’s where the legend comes from. A necro-witch becomes the head directing the corpse who raises other corpses and kills the living to make her army bigger, etc., etc., good night.”

  “So that explains the head we found,” Noah said.

  “Yep, she left it with the rest of the garbage, because she didn’t need it.”

  I cracked the book open and sat down on the edge of the bed. The pages were thin and I felt two of them rip slightly as I turned them. I glanced up and grimaced at Noah. “Don’t tell Stacks.”

  “Gonna file that away for blackmail later,” Noah said with a grin.

  I turned back to the book. Later. I almost wished he was going to have the chance to use it against me later. We sat side by side in silence, reading for about twenty minutes.

  “Here’s something,” Noah said. “The witch that walks with the dead carries the mark of night.” Noah looked up at me. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Well,” I said. “I know that you can usually save the human if you’re able to burn the mark off them that ties them to the demon that owns their soul.”

  Noah looked up suddenly. “Will that mean they don’t go to Hell?”

  I shook my head. “It just takes away the benefit of what they sold their soul for. The sale is still final.”

  “Oh,” Noah said, looking back down at his book.

  I flipped through a few more pages. “Here it is.”

  It took me three tries to get the spell right.

  “Finally,” I said when the stupid pendulum began to swing. “Ok,” I began feeling around in my pockets, searching for my lighter.

  “Just tell me when,” Noah said, moving his hands just beyond opposite corners of the map.

  “Let it rip,” I said. Noah pinched the paper between his fingers. The map began to smoke and flames licked down the side streets of Louisville. The pendulum was swinging faster and faster, circling the three-legged stand, the map below it burning from the edges, one side burning faster than the others. The flames crossed the halfway point and I watched the pendulum slowing and standing straight out to the side, the chain taut.

  “Extinctus,” I said. The flames disappeared. Noah went and opened the door to let the smoke out.

  “Success?” Noah asked.

  I moved the pendulum and stared down at the map. “Vine Street.”

  “Where’s that?” Noah asked.

  “Damn. I should have gotten two maps,” I said, looking at the rest of the paper which was now a pile of ash.

  “If you had a cell phone from this decade, you’d be able to look it up on your phone,” Noah muttered.

  “Monday morning quarterback,” I said. I looked at Noah who was barefoot and picking at his frizzy hair. I rolled my eyes. “I’ll be right back.”

  The manager was at the door when I arrived. “Was that smoke coming from your room?”

  I turned to look back at the haze rising in the air outside our room door, illuminated by the wash of light from the parking lot. “No, steam. I mean smoke would have set the alarm off, right? My uh..brother loves a hot shower! Heh, well I forgot to get a map of the city.” I moved to get one.

  “You got one already,” He said, closing the gap between us. I took a step back.

  “I meant for me. That brother of mine just had to have his own. Sibling rivalry and all that.” I snatched a map off the counter before he could say anything else and turned for the door. “Have a good night!”

  I scanned the parking lot on my way back, still feeling a slight uneasiness that someone was watching me. The lot was quiet and I did my best to give my paranoia a ‘talking to’ as I climbed the stairs. “Here you go, brother dear,” I said, closing the room door behind me and handing Noah the map.

  “Brother?”

  I sat down on my bed. “Yeah, the office manager saw the smoke leaving the room and I had to think fast. You’re now my brother who likes hot showers and is extremely selfish about sharing maps.”

  “Well you never refold them correctly, Sis,” He said, raising an eyebrow at me. He sat down next to me and opened the map, “Well we just have to figure out where we are.”

  I pointed a finger to a big logo just off-center on the map. “So we’re here.”

  Noah glared at m
e. “Smartass.”

  “Well it is the Motel 6’s map,” I said, standing up. “Can you trace a route to Vine Street?”

  I moved back to the table and squinted at the tiny unburned spot under the pendulum, “Looks like North Vine, before…” I leaned closer. “7th.”

  “Got it,” Noah said. I turned back to him and he looked up at me. “Shall we go?”

  I grinned. “All gung-ho on this one? Where was this enthusiasm when we were hunting the Hayman?”

  “I blame Stacks for that,” Noah said. “And I had just found out about this stuff, so I was a bit overwhelmed.”

  One more hunt.

  “Saddle up,” I said.

  2

  We took the duffle bag with the guns back to the truck and climbed in.

  “So zombies,” Noah began.

  “No,” I said, turning the key in the ignition. “Not zombies. Zombies don’t exist.”

  “What do you call them, then? They’re the undead, aren’t they? They’re mindless bodies that just…” He held his arms out in front of him and moaned.

  “No,” I said. “That would be too easy. These are the corpses or what’s left of the corpses of the dead and when they rise, their souls are pulled back into their bodies. They’re wounded and there’s no reasoning with them. They’re just angry, and in pain and they’re strong. Last time, one of them ripped a mailbox out of the ground, concrete and all.”

  “Why?” Noah asked.

  “He thought it would be fun to beat me with it,” I said.

  “I can see that,” Noah said.

  Noah directed me and twenty minutes later, we turned down a quiet residential street. “Doesn’t exactly look like one of Hell’s Own lives here,” I said as we looked from one white bungalow to the next. The sign for 7th street reflected in our headlights and I slowed down. I pulled to the curb and we looked from the house on one side of the street to the other. “Ok, so it’s probably one of these.”

  “Now what?” Noah asked.

  “We need to figure out which one she lives in,” I said.

  “Obviously,” Noah said. “And then what?”

  I had hoped he wouldn’t ask this part. If all went well, we would subdue her, burn her mark off and then do a little corpse clean-up. I didn’t want to tell him that if things went tits up, we might have to shoot her. In front of her kids, her family, her neighbors. This was the part of the job that I had hoped Noah would never have to see.

  “Let’s start with step one,” I said. Both houses were dark. There was a green SUV in front of the house on our side of the street and a red Taurus in front of the house across from us. “Eeny, Meeny?” I asked.

  “Really? There’s no other spell or test or something?” Noah asked.

  I shrugged. “We could have a look around, I guess.”

  “Such science,” Noah said, climbing out of the truck. We both grimaced as the passenger side door groaned when he shut it. “We really need to oil that,” Noah muttered.

  We. Tomorrow was going to suck. But that was tomorrow. Tonight, we had one last hunt.

  I grabbed my penlight off the dashboard and followed him around the car. We decided to check the house on our side of the street first. The front yard was well-maintained, but nothing special stuck out about it. We moved around to the side yard. A kid’s tricycle with streamers on the handles was on its side in the grass. Please let this not be the house.

  “What are we looking for?” Noah asked. “Are there signs on a house when a witch lives there?”

  I shrugged. “I mean they use a lot of herbs for spellwork, so I guess if you see a lot of strange herbs growing in a yard, that could be a sign.”

  “Or a sign that they like gardening,” Noah muttered.

  We peeked into the back yard but the penlight didn’t land on anything that screamed ‘witch’ and so we moved on.

  “Other house?” Noah asked.

  I nodded and we circled Lucy and crossed the street. This one had a perfectly manicured front yard. The bumper sticker on the red Taurus advertised one of those door-to-door cosmetics companies and glancing in the windows, I could see that the car was immaculately clean.

  “Spidey sense is tingling,” I whispered.

  “Why?” Noah asked, peering in the Taurus’ backseat window.

  “Necro-witches dig graves and work with rotting flesh and bile all day and, well, usually night, so they tend to be obsessed with keeping other parts of their lives orderly and clean. It’s some psychological thing Rosetta tried to explain to me once.”

  “Good to know,” Noah said. “Of course, she could just be an uptight cosmetics saleswoman.”

  I didn’t say anything. He could be right. I doubted it, but what if I’d screwed the spell up and asked for a good cosmetics dealer in my area instead of the neighborhood necro-witch? To say my Latin needed some work was a gross understatement.

  We moved around the side of the house. There was a six-foot privacy fence blocking the backyard from view. I shined the penlight on the fence and when my brain figured out what I was seeing, I froze.

  “I think it’s safe to say that we found her,” I breathed.

  “What do you…” Noah started and then I saw his head turn to follow the penlight. “The fence is black. Is it…” he took a step forward and touched a post with his finger which went straight through the wood. “Rotten.”

  I nodded. “I’m guessing there’s not a single blade of grass growing in her backyard.”

  Noah reached for the handle to open the back gate. He tugged and the whole metal lock came off in his hand, leaving a sizable hole in the sagging gate.

  “Nice one,” I muttered. “It’s hardly noticeable.”

  “Screw off, Bane,” Noah whispered. He dropped the lock into the grass and I gingerly pulled the gate open. We looked inside and what we saw didn't look good.

  “Looks like a bomb went off back here,” Noah said.

  The yard was just hard-packed dirt. I shined the penlight around. I recognized the necromance symbols carved deep into the ground. A flat, plastic, pink garden bench sat in the middle of the yard.

  “Guessing that’s what she uses as an altar when she’s casting,” I said, nodding at the bench. “Probably not the manufacturer’s intended use.”

  “Now what?” Noah asked, keeping his voice low. “Do we break into the house and...uh, kill her?”

  We’d been fairly quiet and the lights in the house were still off, so I felt pretty sure that we hadn’t been detected, but I wanted to get us out of there sooner rather than later. I motioned for Noah to follow me and we hustled back through the side gate and closed it as gently as possible. We tried to arrange the lock on the ground so that it would look like the weight of the metal just collapsed the rotten wood, causing it to fall off, and then we hustled back to Lucy. I left my headlights off until we were two blocks up.

  “Ok,” I said, flicking them on and handing the map back to Noah. “Unfortunately, step two is finding our headless friend and stopping him first. The witch uses him to build an army, but if you kill the witch before you kill her conduit, it only frees the conduit to act as it wants which is usually like a rabid bear. So, onto step two.” I handed him my penlight and the map. “Find me a cemetery.”