Dave had grown since then, and I’d never seen him so fit. But I didn’t think he’d appreciate me oohing and aahing over his amazing abs in front of his unit. My suspicions were confirmed when he asked in a demanding and somewhat annoyed tone, “What’re you doing here?”
That’s the CIA for you. Don’t even tell your partners who’s coming until they get there. I was tempted to strike a dramatic pose, hands on hips, hair floating on a well-timed breeze as I declared, “We have come to vanquish the Wizard!” But there would be no awed intakes of breath if I took that approach. According to our pentagon briefers, these guys had been chasing the bastard for a year. But he’d been killing long before that.
The Wizard had caused more U.S. and allied soldier casualties in the past decade than entire countries during official armed conflicts. He’d murdered thousands of innocents during terrorist attacks — his own people and ours. He made few distinctions. Anyone who denied his god, Angra Mainyu, as the Big Kahuna, made himself a target. And the Wizard, well, he didn’t exactly call Angra Mainyu Daddy, but he’d begun to drop hints. Frankly, it did seem as if he had some divine assistance at times. He’d slipped so many traps locals said he ate shadows and drank starlight. He also made the dead walk. Which meant our training for this mission had included a crash course in necromancy that had left me with a bad case of the gag-a-maggots. Cassandra, of all people, had been our instructor. Pete had set us up in an empty meeting room around a scratched table with a fake wooden top on which she’d gently set the Enkyklios. The size of a makeup case, it held hundreds of years’ worth of histories and lore gathered by Seers from across the world. Though I’d seen it work several times before, I still marveled at the unseen power that moved its parts, which resembled rainbow-colored glass balls. The kind hip women put at the bottom of vases. Don’t ask me why. I’ve never been hip.
Bergman had still been buried in his lab, so only Cole, Vayl, and I had watched as Cassandra whispered,
“Enkyklios occsallio vera proma,” triggering the marbles to change, rearrange, and reveal their zombie-making secrets.
Out of a grouping of orbs shaped like a bell came a hologram so clear I was tempted to reach out and touch the weeping woman wearing a faded flower-print housedress. She strode down a narrow dirt path, her sensible shoes raising small clouds of dust with every step. Her wheat-colored hair had begun to escape from the bun she’d arranged at the nape of her neck. Tendrils of it brushed across her shoulders, pointing down to the dead girl she carried in her arms. She headed toward a thatch-roofed cottage, the garden of which was so wild and dark it looked like it belonged in a painting by van Gogh. When she got to the door she kicked it twice. “Lemme in, Madame Otis!” she cried in a harsh cockney accent. “I need your help! I’ll pay, I will!”
After she’d kicked a couple more times the door flew open. “What —” A narrow-eyed, stringy-haired woman took in the scene before her and crossed her arms. “Go home and bury that girl,” she said flatly.
“She’s my only child,” the mother replied, desperation making her voice crack. “I know you can bring her back.” The woman spat into the tangle of weeds and hollyhocks next to the doorway. “I won’t.” We exchanged interested looks around the table. Not “I can’t,” but “I won’t.” Madame Otis was a necromancer. “I need her!” wailed the mother. “I can’t live without her! You can’t imagine the pain!”
“What’s your name, woman?” demanded Madame Otis.
“Hilda Barnaby and this here is Mira,” she added, nodding to the burden in her arms.
“Don’t imagine you’re the first woman to fall to her knees under the crush of a child’s loss,” snarled Madame Otis. “What you’re asking me will bring you horrors beyond imagination. Wrap up that child, shoulder your grief, and move on. Because, believe me, you cannot be rejoined to her on this earth without conjuring yet more pain and an eternity of regret.”
The women stared each other down. Almost at the same moment Hilda got that aha! look on her face; we realized Madame Otis had experienced a much similar loss and a parallel reaction. With one exception. She’d become a necromancer so she could raise her own dead. The nightmare of that experience still played across her face, though instinct told us it stood many decades in her past.
The picture faded as Hilda’s voice came in unrelenting monotone through the misty gray fog that replaced the images. “I convinced Madame Otis to raise Mira in the end. All it took was everything I had. And it seemed so little to give. Even though Madame Otis explained to me that Mira would not be the same, I couldn’t bring myself to care. My little girl would walk and talk once more. I would be able to hug her. Cook for her. Watch her walk down the aisle.” Bitter laugh. “I couldn’t have been more wrong.”
New picture now, of Mira lying on a bed of rose petals on the floor of Madame Otis’s cramped living room. Hilda’s job seemed to be to keep the wood stove in the corner packed full. Every few minutes she’d pull open the black cast-iron door and throw in a foot-long piece of maple. Hilda spoke again. “Looking back, I think most of this was for show, or just to keep me busy. The important part was something I never could have grasped and should have stopped before it began.”
I could’ve keeled over when Madame Otis went to her knees beside Mira and began speaking the words Raoul had taught me. “I recognize that chant!” I said. “She’s going to separate from her body!”
Within moments she proved me right, though I was the only one who saw her rise, a jagged red crystalline dagger shot with black hovering over her inert and uncaring body. An unearthly scream filled my ears, as if the first violinist in the New York Philharmonic had taken a saw to her strings as a tiny piece ripped from the whole of Madame Otis’s soul. It shot straight into Mira’s body, making it spasm.