Carlos nodded back. “Improving,” he repeated. Then he turned his gaze to me.
This time he made no attempt to pressure me, just asked, “Please tell us what happened. What did you do and what did you see?”
“The zombie was rotten—decomposing—but it was still moving around. It had a lot of tangled energy lines on and in it, which I figured must have been whatever was keeping it animated. I could see a lot of Grey threads all over it, like a net. They were odd things without any energy to them, just some kind of soft, neutral material.” I shivered at the memory of the thing and swallowed the urge to gag. “I had to reach into the decomposing body to pull the energy strands loose and then it fell apart. The body fell apart. And I separated the strands, which broke into two distinct energy forms. One obviously didn’t belong there and took off—it seemed familiar, but I couldn’t say how—but the other seemed to be the ghost of the body. I think he was Native American and he faded out. I don’t think he stayed. I think he’s gone. The other one I don’t know about, but I’ll find out eventually. Once the energy forms were gone, the body decomposed to dust and blew away.”
Carlos frowned like storm clouds. “Is there more?”
“I’ve seen those threads around a few other places lately. The soft ones. At the site of a recently dead body and hanging on another. Neither of those bodies stood up.”
Carlos glowered as he thought. Cameron looked at me and shrugged, waiting, but still unearthly pale, even for a vampire.
“Were the soft threads in the same shape?” Carlos asked. “Like a net, as you said.”
“No. The threads were just there.”
“Ah. An unusual creation. Not truly a zombie, but the term will do, for now. Your threads trapped the spirit in the flesh so it could not rest.”
“Not my threads,” I objected, “and how do you know its not a regular zombie—if there is such a thing?”
Carlos rumbled a chuckle and sat back. “There are several kinds. True zombies are forced into form—spirit forced into dead flesh—but their binding is energetic. This binding you describe wasn’t. Only because the body was decayed were you able to remove the animating spirit from the shell of flesh. You destroyed the net that bound the body together when you reached into the body.
So long as the body retained the shape of life, the spirit in the flesh could not leave. The soft material of the net is the casting of some creature that captured and killed the man.”
“So it’s a spell of some kind?”
“No, it’s a remnant, like a spider’s silk that wraps a fly. It has no energy of its own and draws none. It is dead material, not living magic. A true zombie can be bound only in a recently dead body.”
Carlos’s voice wove a dim image before me of a dark man kneeling in a cemetery, muttering words that shook him with bleak magic and brought corpses stumbling to their feet from shattered crypts and desecrated graves. I had to shake myself free of an uncanny lethargy as he spoke, as if I might fall asleep and tumble into one of the empty graves myself. I caught myself and shivered.
Carlos continued. “Were the body so decayed, it should have fallen apart on its own. The casting held it, otherwise you would not have had so easy a time removing the energy forms but would have had to rend the body apart.” Carlos frowned again and the room seemed to grow dimmer. “The second spirit, though—that disturbs me. It should not happen. There is a third party using this for their own ends.”
I shook off the last of my daze. “Using what to their ends?” I asked. “I’m not sure what’s going on.”
“These walking dead, these strands of material come from some magical creature that kills men. I don’t know what its purpose is and can’t be sure that the castings don’t linger past its own death. If they do, then whatever zombies are created will remain even after the creature is destroyed.”
“But there won’t be more zombies without this… thing making them?”
“Correct. At least not this kind of zombie. And those that remain must be destroyed as you did this one—by removing the energy form trapped within the body by the threads. Some spirits may flee on their own once the net of the casting is destroyed, but that can’t be certain. Removing the energy strand is the only sure way.”
I shuddered and Cameron looked grim.
Carlos smiled a little. “It is magical entanglement. You know that the shapes of magic tend to linger,” he said. “Destroying them requires dismantling their lingering shape. Were it a necromantic zombie, or a vampiric turning gone wrong, the case would be different. But this is neither of those. It seems to be random. The creature does not do it deliberately, consistently, or both your other bodies would have risen also.”
“Then I suppose I’m grateful for that or the city might have more than cold and power outages to worry about. There’ve been at least four deaths and possibly more among the homeless in Pioneer Square. Do you have any idea what the creature is that’s killing people and leaving these threads?”
“No.”
“Could it have been the creature that brought me the zombie? He—it was a sort of hairy man.”
“A shaggyman, I suspect.”
“What’s a shaggyman?”
He flicked his hand dismissively. “They are the old people—the creatures in between the native animal people of legend and the living people of the normal world. The legends of Sasquatch are tales of a giant among the shaggymen. They aren’t very intelligent or dangerous.”
“That’s bull. The first time I met one it wanted to make me ‘a little more dead’ because Wygan told it to.”
That obviously intrigued Carlos and I regretted mentioning Wygan or the shaggyman. “Did Wygan send it this time?”
“No. The shaggyman seemed to be on the outs with Wygan for not harming me the first time. It was scarred and it said I owed it for those scars, which it apparently got from Wygan. Destroying the zombie was what it wanted as recompense.”
Cameron leaned forward, looking worried. “You haven’t seen any other… weird things, have you?”
“What sort of weird things?” I asked back. “Aside from vampires and zombies and ghosts and shaggymen.”
“Not—” Carlos shot him a warning glance, but Cam went on. “Not us. Other creatures that prey on men… and other things.”
“Are you saying there’s something that eats vampires out there?” That idea sent my stomach to the floor in a rush. I didn’t want to find out what was worse than Wygan and Carlos. “What? Werewolves? Demons from hell? How much worse does this get?”
Carlos shook his head and hushed Cameron with another glower. Then he turned back to me. “You have nothing to fear from the shaggyman. It did not succeed in harming you,” he reminded me. “And they cannot wield things like the thread you describe. It brought the zombie to you for dissolution. It could not have made it, but it wanted to free the spirit. If it was, indeed, one of the natives, the shaggyman would have felt pain over the spirit’s plight, since the two have long been bound together here. Since the very beginning.”
“That doesn’t help me with the problem of zombies and dead homeless people who might or might not be getting chewed on by some kind of giant, man-eating, paranormal spider,” I sputtered. Christ, there really was a monster in the sewer! “I can’t let it go on!”
“Agreed. You cannot. But we are not the ones to help you,” Carlos stated. He seemed anxious to cut the conversation short, which struck me as sinister.
Carlos was not easy to disturb or discomfit, and if he didn’t want to talk he had no compunction to find an excuse. But now he stood and made it plain that he intended to leave. “This is not a necromantic matter, nor does it belong to the realm of vampires. I do not know what creature is causing this, nor how it makes its web nor why it casts it as it does. It falls to you to discover it and to destroy it.”