She was going over everything they had on Meacham’s and Hodge’s backgrounds one more time. There had to be something the two men had in common other than a Y-chromosome. Something that had caused them, rather than two others, to be possessed by the wraith.
She finished the physical findings and set them aside. Nothing helpful there. Meacham had AB positive blood; Hodge had O negative. One drank; the other was a teetotaler. One was of European extraction; the other, African American. Neither smoked, but that was true of too many others to be useful.
Moving on to the statements from friends and relatives, she found that Meacham had spoken of being allergic to cats. Nothing about any allergies in Hodge’s records, but she made a note to find out. Unlike Meacham, Hodge was still alive, so they could just ask him.
Though he was showing signs of neurological damage—slight, but it was there. Just like Meacham. Just like the dogs.
She started slogging through a long account by a woman who’d known Meacham since he was a kid and had felt compelled to share everything from the third grade on up. Meacham hadn’t gone to the same school as Hodge, not until high school, but the town had only one high school, so that wasn’t significant.
Sounded like Roy Don had been something of a hell-raiser . . . several tickets for speeding, and the woman said he’d totaled his car when he was seventeen, and . . . wait. Wait. Might be something here.
Quickly she shuffled back through the official medical reports. Yes, there it was—a record of the emergency room treatment he’d received. It took her a moment to translate the doctorese, but it sounded as if the impact of the steering wheel had bruised his heart, causing fluid to build up. His heart had stopped beating briefly.
Hodge’s heart had stopped, too. Wasn’t that what the chatty Dr. Patel had said? Last year Hodge had a heart attack on his way to the operating room, and his heart had stopped beating.
Check it, check it. She dived into another stack of papers, rummaging for the medical report on Hodge.
Her phone rang in her jacket pocket. Beethoven’s Fifth. She grabbed it. “Yes?”
“He’s mine.” The relief and joy in Rule’s voice jigged her heart into a quick flip. “The judge signed off on our custody arrangement. Toby is fully mine now.”
Yes! No bobble-heads in that courtroom! “We’re celebrating, right?”
“With dinner out. I know it’s hard for you to get time clear right now—”
“I’ll be there. Unless someone else gets killed, I will absolutely be there. Um . . . there’s that Leidolf deal tonight.” The secrecy bug was catching. Even though no one was in the room, she avoided saying anything specific about clan stuff. “Maybe we could have dinner a little late and go directly there after?”
Rule suggested seven thirty. The door opened and Brown Two marched in, brimming with purpose and urgency.
Lily said a quick goodbye and disconnected. “What?”
“One of the graves on the list has been disturbed,” Brown Two said crisply. “The groundskeeper notified the local police, who are out there now.”
THIRTY-ONE
“SO it was just kids doing a little freelance gardening?” Rule asked.
“Yeah.” Lily sighed. “They messed with several graves, not just the one that’s on our list. That’s the problem with going to the public for help. Before you know it, a few enterprising teens decide we’ve got a zombie outbreak on our hands and they’d better plant garlic on graves at midnight. Garlic.” She was disgusted. “They couldn’t even get their myths right. That’s for vampires, who also don’t exist.”
“Zombies aren’t a myth,” Cullen said from the driver’s seat of Rule’s Mercedes. “They aren’t affected by garlic, but they aren’t a myth.”
Lily stared at the back of his head. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Rule sat in the backseat with Lily. It wasn’t his preferred spot, though being able to put his arm around his nadia was welcome. But the dignity of his role tonight required some touches of pomp.
Cullen was acting as chauffeur, Alex as bodyguard. Normally Cullen would have been seriously unwelcome at a Leidolf ceremony, but with the Rhej unable to attend, the families had been glad of Cullen’s offer to provide the ardor iunctio. The magical fire wasn’t essential, but it was traditional.
“No one makes zombies,” Cullen was saying, “because they’re entirely too much trouble. It takes an ungodly amount of power and the spell’s a son of a bitch, and what do you get? A shambling corpse that stinks to high heaven, loses fingers and toes, and doesn’t come with a remote control. What good is that?”
“You haven’t. Tell me you haven’t tried.”
Cullen snorted. “Am I an idiot? Of course not. Like I said, too much power, time, and trouble for very little results. What would I do with a zombie once I raised one?”
“What would anyone do with one?” Alex asked. “Someone must have thought they’d be useful. They created a spell for it.”
“People keep trying to use magic to skip over death the way you can skip commercials with TiVo. It keeps not working. Whoever created the first zombie-raising spell back in the pre-Purge days wasn’t trying to raise a corpse to make it walk. They wanted to bring the dead to life.” He shrugged. “Not all sorcerers were as sane and sensible as yours truly.”
Rule grinned. “Everything’s relative. Turn’s coming up on the right.”
They were winding along a narrow gravel road, headed for a parking area near a campsite. The others would already be there.
They’d celebrated Rule’s custody victory at the local pizza place, an incredibly noisy place with arcade games and truly wretched salads. Toby’s choice, obviously. Alicia had behaved with great dignity in the judge’s chambers; afterward she’d asked to spend some time with Toby before she headed back to Washington. Of course Rule had agreed. Toby wanted his mother to be part of his life. He needed that.
Tonight, though, Toby was home with Louise. Children did not attend a gens compleo.
It would be held inside the Uwharrie National Forest in a picnic area where hikers were allowed by day. Technically the area was closed at night, but one of Leidolf’s members was a senior ranger. They wouldn’t be bothered.
Not that Rule had explained this in detail to Lily. The informality of their arrangements—which hadn’t included applying for permission—might worry her.
“You’re jazzed about this ceremony, aren’t you?” Lily asked softly.
He had one arm around her, the better to play with her hair when the mood struck. So he did. “The gens compleo is a joyous occasion. I’ve performed it once before, standing in for my father when he was healing. Ah, not the most recent healing, when we met.” Which had been the result of an attempted assassination by Leidolf. “This was years ago.”
“And it’s joyous even when it’s Leidolf.”
He knew the point she wanted to make. “I haven’t rearranged my thinking yet, but it is . . . changing. And the mantle is in no doubt. It rejoices.”
“You make it sound sentient. Like it knows about the ceremony.”
“It isn’t sentient, but it isn’t precisely not sentient, either.” As usual when trying to describe a mantle, he ran out of words. “It . . . recognizes what is to happen. Lily, I haven’t thanked you for making time for this tonight. I know it wasn’t easy.”
“No, it wasn’t, but this is what we came here for. This and Toby.” She gripped his hand and squeezed once. “Who is now ours.”
“Another place where I must rearrange my thinking,” he murmured. “When I called you, I said Toby was mine.”