Broken (Otherworld 6)

"Uh, Jeremy. Hi. I...didn't know you were right there. You're so..."

"Quiet?"

She gave a nervous laugh. "Umm, right. So, what did you ask? Oh, the classic signs. Well, zombies would be the big one."

"Zombies?"

"That guy you dusted." She laughed, more relaxed now. "I've always wanted to say that. You see it happen in movies all the time, but real life? Vamps don't explode in a shower of dust."

"But zombies do?"

"Er, no. Well, not usually. But any zombie I've ever met was raised by a necro. When a spirit materializes through a portal, you've got something a bit different. Probably shouldn't even call them zombies but...well, we have enough beasties out there without inventing new names. When a formerly-human entity manifests in the living world, we call it a zombie. You get that rotting meat stink, which is a dead giveaway...pardon the pun."

"But this thing didn't act like a zombie," I said.

"Because it didn't shamble around, moaning and trying to eat your brain?"

"Let me guess: more movie fiction?"

"Yep. Not that you guys would know that. Zombies are the dirty little secret of the supernatural world. We know they exist, but we try not to think about them. Most necros go their whole lives without ever raising one. They're just...nasty. And I don't just mean the smell. A zombie is a ghost returned to a corpse. Not nice for anyone, especially the spook. Last one I saw was a dog raised by a kid necro. Like in Pet Sematary...only the dog had been hit by a car, and the kid thought the raising would fix him, and of course it didn't, so his uncle calls me in and..." She paused. "And that story, while instructive to any teen necromancer, isn't going to help you. Where was I?"

"Zombies. Which don't normally disintegrate into dust."

"Right. If yours turned to dust, dimensional zombies must be different. I'll have to look that one up."

"You said this was a dimensional portal," Jeremy said. "And that we're dealing with corporeal ghosts. So is this another door into the afterlife?"

"Probably not. You're dealing with things that just don't happen often enough to be properly documented. It sounds like you have a spell-triggered dimensional portal. Spellcasters probably have a fancier term, but that's the gist of it. A spellcaster, usually a sorcerer, creates a...balloon or a pocket, something that exists between dimensions where he can shove inconvenient things--usually people--for safekeeping. They stay there, frozen in time, until someone releases them. You'll have to check with Lucas, but I'm pretty sure the spellcaster creates a 'trigger'--some item that will let him open and close the portal."

"The letter," Jeremy said.

"Probably."

"So how did we activate it?" I asked.

"A trigger is like a combination lock, and only the sorcerer knows the code. It's usually some special sequence or event that will set off the portal, but there can be alternate ways of triggering it. Backups, in case the first one fails."

"Would blood do it?" Jeremy asked.

"Blood?" I glanced at him. "How--?"

I stopped as I remembered the mosquito, and the dark blotch on the letter. That's why he hadn't wanted me seeing it in the hotel room. Because, in the light, I'd have realized that the dark patch wasn't only mosquito guts.

"The mosquito," I murmured. "It had my blood in it."

"That's a new one," Jaime said. "But sure. That could have been the backup trigger. It's not something that's likely to happen accidentally in storage. If the primary failed, the sorcerer could break in and activate the backup."

"So some sorcerer created the letter, stuffed two people into it, and then, before he could release them, it was stolen."

"If he ever planned to release them. That can be tricky, especially if you wait too long. When you seal up people like that, it's like a mini time capsule. Release them and...weird things can happen." She paused. "You haven't had anything weird happen, have you?"

"Besides possibly releasing and killing a zombie Jack the Ripper?"

"What else could happen?" Jeremy said.

"Hard to say. Creating portals isn't something you find in every spellbook, and not many sorcerers could make one if they had the recipe right in front of them. Oh, for example, there's a documented case of a sorcerer in the Wild West who caught some outlaw, tossed him into a portal and hauled his ass back to the East for trial. Caused a minor smallpox epidemic."

"Because the outlaw had smallpox," I said. "And he was brought into an area that didn't."