Death Rites (The Lazarus Codex Book 1) Read online

  I woke to the sound of my phone buzzing on the nightstand. Groggily, I pawed at it, my eyes little more than slits that flinched away from the light filtering through the blinds. Odette’s arm tightened around my ribs, and I winced. Yep, definitely bruised. My fingers closed around my phone just in time for it to stop buzzing. For a minute, I debated just letting go of the phone and going back to sleep. What good was owning my own business if I didn’t get to open late?

  Odette decided for me when she tightened her vice grip on my ribs. I sat up, forcing her to pull her arm away. I felt like I’d been run over by a steamroller and knocked into the path of a city bus. My face ached, but no worse than if I were hung over. It was the ribs that were killing me, no thanks to Odette.

  I glared at her from the edge of the bed, considering yanking the blankets away, but she mumbled something and turned away, her dark curls forming a shadowy halo around her bare shoulders.

  Yeah, I guess it was my fault I was a little sore, too.

  The phone buzzed again. With a sigh, I retrieved it from the nightstand and squinted at the parade of numbers marching across the screen. It was a local number, but not one I recognized. Fearing it was another unsatisfied customer, I rejected the call and found there were twelve more missed calls from the same number. That couldn’t be good.

  Might be Darius, I thought. He seemed like the kind of guy who’d remind me about a past due payment. Past due, my ass. I turned the phone off. He’d given me twenty-four hours, and I’d be damned if I didn’t take every last minute of his time I could. Not that I planned on refunding his money. His forty bucks wouldn’t mean jack to him. What he really wanted was access to his mom’s buried savings. If I got him that, not only would he get off my back, but he’d owe me one. Maybe he’d send a few more clients my way, and I’d be able to keep the lights on another month.

  I got out of bed and did a small stretch, wincing when the muscles in my ribs pulled. Navigating around all the fallen clothing on my bedroom floor, I plodded to the bathroom and turned on the shower. Odette wouldn’t be up for another hour or two, long after I had to go and open the shop if I wanted to make anything today. Saturdays were my best days.

  After showering and dressing, I scrawled a quick note to Odette telling her to meet me later, grabbed my keys and headed out the door.

  Everything went as normal on a Saturday morning until I came around the corner in front of my shop and nearly slammed into two police cars blocking the road. The front of my car veered right when I slammed on the brakes, and the back went left. Behind me, a horn blared until the car following too close finally managed to inch around me. A uniformed officer approached my car, hand on the gun in his belt.

  I rolled my window down.

  “Sorry, sir,” said the officer. “Street’s closed.”

  I surveyed the scene. A whole gaggle of officers stood outside my office with notebooks and coffee cups along with a woman in black pants and a dress shirt. A detective? What was a detective doing…

  Oh, shit.

  “Tell me there’s not a body over there, Officer,” I said.

  “I’m not at liberty—”

  “That’s my shop, man!”

  “Well, now it’s a crime scene.”

  I put the car in park, yanked out the keys, and threw open the door.

  “Excuse me, sir, you can’t—”

  I paused halfway out of the car while he finished telling me I couldn’t just barge into a crime scene, and not because I was suddenly struck with the overwhelming urge to do as I was told. A spirit hung over the shoulder of this cop like a dark shadow.

  Normally, spirits aren’t that easy to see, not even for me. It takes effort on my part to open a channel with the dead. On rare occasions, the dead muster up the courage to make themselves known to me without invitation, and when that happens, I pay attention because they usually have something to say.

  I focused on the spirit, trying to make something out of the vague shape and form, a name, a date, a gender…anything could be helpful in determining why this spirit was attached to this man as it clearly was. The thing had no interest in anyone but him, just floated over his left shoulder with a general air of sadness and regret. I took in a deep breath through my nose. Under the normal salty bog smell of the city, I caught another whiff, one that told me everything I needed to know.

  “You need to see someone about your drinking problem,” I said and shut the door.

  The cop in front of me started, his eyes wide. This close, I could make out the dark circles of a late night under his eyelids. “Excuse me?”

  “Your ex-wife is worried about you. She says lay off the booze before you kill yourself.”

  His jaw shook. “My ex-wife’s been dead three years. How’d you…?” He shook his head. “Never mind. You said that’s your shop? The detectives will want to talk to you.”

  “Good, ’cause I want to talk to them.” I barged into the crime scene, making a beeline for the chick in the dress pants with the alcoholic officer trying to chase me down. He had no chance of catching me; my strides were longer than his, and I wasn’t fighting a hangover. Although the sore ribs slowed me down a little, my determination to reach the detectives first almost won out.

  Then I saw the body.

  When you work with the dead, you get over being squeamish pretty quick. Not all spirits appear as they were in life. Some choose to appear twisted, broken as they were at the moment of their deaths, or rotten as they were in their graves. The worst spirit I ever dealt with was a shotgun to the face suicide. Guy regretted pulling the trigger just a millisecond after he did it and his family had me call him up to explain himself. Messy picture. I was just glad I’m the only one who had to look at him. It left me with nightmares for weeks after.

  But dealing with a physical body is different. Spirits don’t have fluids. You can’t step in their blood spatter. And best of all, when dealing with spirits, there’s not usually a smell.

  The body sprawled over the steps to my shop smelled terrible, and there was enough blood splatter that I thought maybe she’d exploded from the inside out. She was flat. I don’t mean lying down flat, I mean crushed with a steamroller flat. It was as if someone had dropped an enormous weight on top of her. Parts of her were disconnected at the joints, leaving a big red space between where one joint ended and another began. Her face, though, was left intact, allowing me to recognize her. It was the blonde from the day before who’d been asking for my help.

  I took one look at the scene, down at my shoes, lifting them out of the sticky, drying blood, and then turned my head to heave into the bushes.

  “Lazarus Kerrigan?” The detective at least had the decency to let me finish before she said my name.

  I spat and wiped my mouth with my sleeve. “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “This is your shop?” She pointed a pencil toward the door and read aloud what was written in gold lettering. “Medium and occultist?”

  “What happened to her?”

  The cop lowered her pencil. She wasn’t much younger than me. Big, dark eyes behind which lurked the ferocity of a dragon and the wit too many people were lacking. Her short, dark hair hung in tight ringlets, like springs about to bounce away. “Let’s start off again. I’m Detective Knight with the New Orleans Police Department. You’re standing in the middle of an active crime scene. You want to tell me what you’re doing here, Mr. Kerrigan?”

  “I was trying to go to work.” Don’t look down, I thought. Don’t look at it. Pretend you’re just having a nice, relaxing conversation with Detective Knight. Routine. It wasn’t working.

  I debated mentioning I’d seen the dead woman the day before but held off. Knight looked like she might be more interested in arresting me than hearing my side of the story.

  “Do you recognize the victim?”

  I took a deep breath and shook my head.

  Knight raised an eyebrow. “You sure? Take a good look, Mr. Kerrigan. Go on.”

  My stom
ach churned. “I’d rather not if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Maybe this’ll jog your memory. One of the neighbors said he saw you outside yesterday afternoon arguing with a woman that matches the victim’s description. Remember now?”

  Shit. Someone must’ve seen her chasing me down. To an outsider, I supposed it might’ve looked like an argument, which meant I was in deeper trouble than I thought.

  I held up a hand. “She came by the office yesterday. I tried to give her a ride to the police station, but she turned and stormed away.”

  “What’d she want from you?” Detective Knight put the pencil to her tiny pad of paper.

  I sighed. There was no good way to put it so it wasn’t incriminating. Might as well be honest. “She offered me a handful of cash in small bills to protect her from something. Something magical she said was after her.”

  “Something magical?” Knight crossed her arms. “What, like a vampire or a wizard?”

  Just my luck she’d be a skeptic. The world was full of people like her that claimed they couldn’t believe what they didn’t see, smell, touch, or taste, yet magic was all around them. Non-believers only saw what they wanted to see. A world without magic was a world full of logical explanation, which our world most certainly wasn’t. We all want to believe things happen for a reason when ninety percent of it is random chance. Sometimes, humans just kill each other because they like it. Nothing makes them evil. Not even magic can change that. Arguing with Detective Knight about it wasn’t going to change her position on it either.

  I shrugged. “I’m just telling you what she said. I told her I didn’t do that sort of thing and offered to take her to the cops. Next thing I know, she’s gone. That’s all I know.”

  Knight glanced at my shop door and then back at me. “Don’t suppose you can just ask her who killed her?”

  With a sheepish grin, I replied, “And do your job for you? If I could use magic to solve all my problems, why would I need to pay my taxes? Thanks, but no thanks.” I saw her open, glazed over eyes and quickly looked away. “Who was she?”

  “Thank you, Mr. Kerrigan. That’s all I need from you. Don’t leave town in case I have more questions.” She nodded to the drunkard cop from before behind me, and he stepped forward.

  “Let’s go, pal.”

  I took a step away but paused when a cold wind swept by that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. At first, I chalked it up to the spirit following the alcoholic cop around. Sometimes spirits trip that sense in me, but not often, not if I’ve already sensed them. When I paused, I heard a faint voice calling my name.

  I turned back and saw her kneeling there over her body, as real and solid as the detective, a sad look on her face. Her fingers reached out to brush some hair away from her body’s death-clouded eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I offered to the spirit, but she acted as if she could neither see nor hear me. “I should’ve done something for you. Not that it means much now, does it? An apology after the fact isn’t much good.”

  Knight frowned. “What are you going on about?”

  I raised a finger to silence her. The victim and I had a connection, though it felt faint. One wrong move and I’d lose the signal without getting anything useful.

  The spirit stood and put a hand in her pocket, mimicking movements she would have made while alive. She drew out a small white rectangle and leaned against the porch railing, scribbling something on the back of the card. About halfway through, her head jerked up, and she focused on the front door.

  I was seeing our meeting the night before. Where she stood, I wouldn’t have seen her when I first glanced outside.

  The spirit tucked the card she’d been writing on back into her pocket and started up the stairs.

  Alcoholic cop’s hand closed on my shoulder, and the connection broke. The girl’s apparition faded from existence as if someone had unplugged the projector.

  “There’s a card in her right jeans pocket,” I said, shrugging his hand off. “It’s important.”

  Knight nodded to the officer behind me and pulled a pair of latex gloves from a baggie in her pocket, snapping them on. I had to turn away as she shifted the body, searching for the card I’d seen in my vision. The sound of rustling wet fabric alone made me want to gag.

  “Brandi Lavelle.” Knight held up a blank scrap of cardboard with some blood splatter and ink on it. “There’s a phone number here.”

  “It’s hers,” I said plainly, a pang of guilt stabbing me in the gut. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry to rush home and get laid, Brandi might still be alive. “She came after hours. Must’ve thought I was already gone for the day. She was going to leave her name and number for me, but I surprised her by coming out of the shop and interrupting her.”

  “So that wasn’t just a vision?” Knight dropped the card into a plastic baggie printed with red letters that read EVIDENCE.

  I was too busy focusing on the name. Brandi Lavelle. That had to be her. With a name, there was a lot I could do to find out more about her given half the chance.

  Knight made a disgusted face and waved me off. “Please escort this scam artist from my crime scene.”

  Alcoholic cop tried again to put his hands on me, but I pushed them off and turned on my heels. “I’ll show myself out.”

  I held Brandi’s name and face in my mind all the way back to the car. She’d been running from something magical, something she thought I could help her with, and I’d dismissed her. She was dead because of me and my hurry to get home on a Friday evening. If I’d just stopped and taken the time to hear her out, they wouldn’t be scraping her remains off my front steps.

  What could crush a person like that anyway? Whatever it was, it’d happened on my steps in front of my shop. There was too much blood for the body to have been moved. I’d seen a few jumpers whose bodies wound up like that thanks to the sudden stop at the end, but even if she’d jumped from the roof of my building, it wasn’t high enough to have broken her body apart like that. That’s the sort of damage you see from skyscraper and bridge jumpers.

  The right curse could do it, but you’d need to be extremely powerful to pull it off, and you’d need DNA from your target, as well as a direct line of sight. I didn’t know of any powerful witches in the area, at least none capable of throwing around a curse like that. With the right ingredients and enough prep work, I could, but I knew I hadn’t done it. Maybe there was another necromancer in town. Or maybe I was looking at taking down a whole coven of witches.

  Rest assured, I’ll be taking you down whoever you are, I thought, climbing back into my car. I glanced over at the police now closing off my view of the body. It couldn’t be chance that she was killed on my doorstep. Not like this. They could’ve killed her anywhere. This felt like a message, one I couldn’t let go unanswered.

  Chapter Two

  The first thing I did once I found a decent place to pull off was call all my reading appointments for the day and reschedule them. That took almost an hour on the phone, during which time I found a comfortable booth at a local fast food eatery and sat down with my laptop. That done, I decided to do a little digging into Brandi Lavelle.

  A complete stranger can find a surprising amount of information about anybody online for a small fee in the age of the internet. For less than the price of my fancy coffee, I was able to get Brandi’s addresses going back ten years. Her most recent address was a halfway house not too far away, but that wasn’t the most interesting thing about her. Brandi had money problems. Big ones. Garnishments, judgments, and more sat on her public record, easily found by searching court documents.

  I hit a gold mine when I found her social media. Her most recent profile pictures were taken in what looked like a club, surrounded on either side by girlfriends. Normally, that wouldn’t amount to much, but I recognized the décor in the background. It was a place I hadn’t been to in years, partly due to an unspoken understanding I had with another wizard in the city.

 
Karma, a gentlemen’s club on Bourbon Street. A quick trip to their website told me Brandi was one of their highlighted performers performing under the pseudonym Bea Bliss. She hadn’t struck me as an exotic dancer as timid as she’d seemed, but then again, I’d been dealing with her scared.

  It was all good information, useful both to the police and to me. The cops likely already knew all this, since they had better resources than me. While I could let them handle the case, they probably wouldn’t get too far. Mundane law enforcement tended to hit a wall when dealing with the supernatural. They’d give up as soon as things stopped playing by non-magical rules, and the case would sit unsolved in their records room for decades.

  If I got involved, I might be able to do right by Brandi and stop whatever had killed her from killing again, but only if I beat the police to the punch. Once the cops started sniffing around, the witnesses would clam up, and I’d never get anything useful.

  I looked down at the clock in the corner of the screen. It was closing in on time for the restaurant to get its lunch rush, a perfect time for me to clear out. The cops had probably already been by her last known residence. That meant I had to go to Karma if I wanted fresh info. I closed the laptop, shoved it into its bag, and made for my car.

  When most people think of New Orleans, the first place that comes to mind is The Quarter. It’s charming enough, even if the whole area is a tourist trap designed to get unsuspecting out-of-towners to spend as much money as they can in as short a time as possible. Jazz clubs, absinthe bars, and voodoo shops work together to create an alluring atmosphere that most find exotic.

  Underneath the veneer of a quaint little town full of mystery and history lies another city, my city, where the voodoo shops sell powders made from dried human bones instead of white face paint. Instead of scented candles with pictures of saints painted on the outside, the shops I frequent sell all-natural beeswax candles and dried puffer fish powder. These shops are owned by hedge witches mostly, or people touched by the supernatural who know what’s safe to sell to whom and why. Use something in an unintended way or put someone at risk, you became a pariah.