“City?” Lyons’s smile didn’t falter. “Thinking too small, son. Austin’s just some provincial little cow town. I’m taking the state. Then I’ll take the country. Wait until you see what’s coming, Andy. Just you wait.”
He drained the tea and put the glass down, then offered his hand for a shake. I stood up and retreated, well out of range. Lyons made the same gesture to Andy and got the same response. “Well, then,” he said. “Guess we all know what’s what. Thank you kindly for the tea.”
“Get out,” I said flatly.
He didn’t object, and he didn’t linger. He walked straight to the door, opened it, and stepped outside. He gestured toward the people on the sidewalk—a peculiar little circular gesture—and as if he’d flipped a switch, they all stopped staring at our house, began chatting amiably with one another, and headed toward their assorted vehicles.
“Tell you what,” he said, turning to face Andy and me. “If you two pack your things and leave town within twenty-four hours, I’ll be generous and let you live. If you don’t, I’m going to have to kill you both in a very bad way. Then I’ll bring you back to serve me in the next phase of my plans.” He tapped his fingers to his forehead in a mock salute. “Good talk. See you soon, ma’am. Andy.”
I couldn’t stand that smile anymore. I kicked the door shut with a boom that must have shaken glass throughout the house, locked it, and leaned against it as my whole body started to tremble.
“Andy?” I gulped for air, trying to calm myself. “Andy, what are we going to do?”
And in that moment, when everything could have fallen apart, Andy said without a quaver, “We burn him down and salt his earth. Because that’s what needs doing.”
The ground seemed to steady under my feet. My shaking went away. I hugged him, and he hugged me back, and the magic between us—the magic that kept him here, held him in this time, in that reconstructed body—it felt strong as steel. It was love that powered Andy Toland. It was the exact polar opposite of what powered Pete Lyons.
Andy had a way of making things clear. Clear and simple. Not easy, never easy, but clear.
“How do we go about that, exactly?” I asked.
“We’re about to find out,” he said. He went to the window and peered through the curtains. The protesters had already vacated the street, and Pete Lyons was pulling away in his black Cadillac SUV, just as a courier van cruised to a halt in front of our mailbox. The uniformed driver got out and trotted up the walk with a small package and a clipboard.
Andy opened the door, signed, and accepted the package, and the driver left in under fifteen seconds, heading for his next delivery.
Inside the envelope was a small glass bottle. In the bottle was a scraping of skin.
Portia’s skin. Ed Rosen had come through.
“Let’s get to work,” Andy said.
Making the shell for a resurrection was a brutal process, requiring a ton of supplies, space, time, and energy. Like cloning, I would suppose, only vastly accelerated. The difference was that the body created was not alive; it was a simulacrum. Everything was in place, held in stasis for the moment that the spark of life entered it.
It also wasn’t something that I could do, or even help to do. So I left Andy in his private workshop, surrounded by supplies, his long steel table in the center, and went to take my mind off my worries.
I cleaned. Any spot that Pete Lyons had touched, I used a cleansing potion on it, brewed of rosemary and sage and witch hazel, activated with my own sweat and brewed with a spell. As I scrubbed, I saw the faint black stain of his presence become visible and then fade away.
The iced tea glass was a total loss, though. I handled it with rubber gloves, put it in a paper bag, smashed it to pieces, and then buried it deep in the backyard. It would kill the grass around it, almost certainly, but that couldn’t be helped. The sugar bowl suffered the same fate. I soaked the spoon in the potion and then buried that, too. The good, clean earth would absorb the darkness, eventually; earth magic was slow, but it was powerful.
When I was certain that everything was cleaned, and every window and door warded for protection, I started the resurrection potion. While that brewed, I made burritos. Hours had passed by the time I unwrapped a burrito and sat down in front of the TV to eat it.
I clicked on the local news—and was sorry I had.
“The controversy over the presence of practicing, for-profit witches in the Austin community continues to grow, with protests erupting at places of business all over the area. In Clarksville, a large crowd gathered this afternoon in front of this store, Magick Incorporated, known to supply local witches with materials used in their spells and rituals. As you can see, Jim, the police failed to contain the protest, which turned violent . . .” I watched, sickened, as the footage played of sign-wielding, screaming people throwing bricks at the windows of my favorite store, shattering the plate glass. They stormed in, pushing and stomping one another in their eagerness to destroy, and I caught a glimpse of Lois Herndon and her two employees being dragged into the street. “Two employees of the store were admitted to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. However, proprietor Lois Herndon suffered a massive head trauma and was pronounced dead at the scene.”
The news anchors didn’t even pause to shake their heads in mock sympathy. They just went on to the next story, which featured one of the protesters earnestly explaining why what they were doing was right and good, and of course they didn’t approve of the violence, but didn’t the Bible say . . . ?
The reporter seemed sympathetic.
I shut it off. I’d lost my appetite, too, though the burrito was delicious; I wrapped up the rest and put it in the fridge, along with the others. I couldn’t take anything to Andy, since he would be locked in the ritual for hours to come; any interruption, however well meant, would ruin the spell.
I went to bed cold and alone, and I dreamed of snakes slithering through the house, up onto my bed, and twining around my neck to choke me.
I woke to find Andy sitting next to me on the bed, his hand gentle on my forehead. Beyond him, the windows were still dark. The clock said it was four in the morning.
“She’s ready.”
I have to admit, this one was hard. Harder than most, because I knew Portia, at least slightly. She was an overweight, kindly lady who’d been vain about her dyed hair and her skin; she’d been obsessive about skin creams and wrinkle prevention, and given that she was lying naked, pale and still on the table, all her faults and flaws laid bare, it seemed a very sad memory to be holding. I tried to think about other things, like the way she laughed, shy and quick, as if afraid she might be caught at it.
This body didn’t hold the wounds of her death; it was her in the moments before the damage was done, as close as could be achieved.
Now for the hardest part.
Andy let me take the lead, because he’d done the tough work of making the shell, but he stayed close, in case of trouble. I opened Portia’s mouth, poured in the potion, whispered the words, and then sealed it with the kiss of life—infusing the potion with my own breath, my own will, my own energy. And through it, reaching through the other side to Portia.
I felt it when we connected; it was a physical shock, like grabbing hold of a hot wire. I felt myself spasm all over from it, and only long experience kept me there, my lips touching hers, as I felt her spirit traveling through the dark, writhing and clawing and fighting and screaming and then present, sinking into that silent form.