Up from the Grave (Night Huntress 7)

“Come in. Want to get this over with so I can get back to bed.”

From his pajama pants and robe attire, that was obvious. Dexter was more enthusiastic in his welcome. He danced around my feet, sniffing madly where Mencheres’s mastiffs had brushed up against me.

I petted him, missing my cat once more. One of Bones’s associates had Helsing, since my cat hadn’t liked living in close quarters with Dexter. Then we sat on the floor by a Ouija board set up on his coffee table. Like most in-city condos, Tyler’s was set up studio style, with the kitchen, bedroom, and living area all occupying the same small space.

“Wish I could teach you to do this yourself,” Tyler said, placing his fingers on the planchette. “Too bad you lost your ghost juju.”

Some days, I regretted that. Most, I didn’t. “Everything ends eventually.”

Then we swished the planchette around the board while Tyler began his invocations. Since I didn’t have any personal items of my uncle’s this time, we had to weed through a few random spirits before Don materialized in the room.

When he realized who’d summoned him, he looked surprised. Then guilt pierced me when his next expression was fear as he glanced about.

“There are no Remnants, no Marie,” I said steadily. “Just us, Don.”

His form wavered, blurring at the edges. Now that he knew we had no means to stop him, was he leaving?

Then his haziness cleared up, revealing his faultlessly combed hair and sophisticated-yet-understated business suit. A knot inside me eased. For more reasons than needing his help, I hadn’t wanted Don to vanish as soon as he saw us. I was still angry at him and not sure where his actions had left our relationship, but it appears that hadn’t stopped me from missing him.

“What do you want, Cat?” he asked in guarded tone.

Don didn’t even look at Bones; a good thing since his stare was cold enough to flash-freeze steam. I took my fingers off the planchette in favor of drumming them against the Ouija board.

“Madigan burned his hard drives beyond usability and killed himself when we infiltrated his secret facility,” I summarized briskly. “Bones brought him back as a ghoul, but something went wrong. His mind’s vegetable soup, and we were hoping you could pull some meat out of it.”

Tyler’s mouth dropped upon hearing this. Maybe he’d thought I wanted him to raise my uncle just so I could bitch at him again. Don’s expression didn’t change though his outline wavered for a moment.

“Why?” he asked at last. “You shut down his operation like you wanted to, and now he’s your prisoner. What else is left?”

“Stopping whoever’s been backing him,” I said, deliberately not mentioning Katie. I didn’t want Marie finding out about her, and she was one of the only people in the world who could successfully interrogate a ghost. “Someone shelled out countless millions to keep Madigan’s operation running, not to mention the money that person spent to keep you from finding out about it.”

I was poking his pride with that last comment. When he was alive, Don’s clearance had been above Top Secret, yet he’d been unaware that Madigan was continuing his experiments with the full blessing of Uncle Sam. Meanwhile, Madigan had known all about Don’s operation and had even been put in charge of it after his death. That had to rankle.

“If we don’t stop him, that same person will find someone else to replace Madigan,” I continued. “We can’t let that happen.”

“What if the backer is too high-ranking to take on?” Don asked.

Bones’s voice held the same resonance as low, ominous thunder.

“For this, no one’s too high-ranking.”

Don stiffened, glancing once at Bones before his gaze flicked back to me.

“This has never been his country, but it is yours, Cat. You’d really assassinate whoever’s behind this, no matter who it is?”

Even dead, Don’s allegiance to his nation was undiminished; an admirable quality. If only he’d shown the same loyalty to his family.

“You ran a secret operation that protected American citizens from dangers they didn’t know existed,” I replied, holding his steel-colored gaze. “Whoever’s behind Madigan knowingly funded the kidnapping, torture, and death of thousands of Americans, all for the purpose of illegal genetic manipulation. That’s reprehensible enough, but what’s worse is the war it could trigger if word leaked to the wrong undead ears.”

Then I got up and walked over to him, almost daring him to leave as I spoke the next part.

“You still love your country, Don? Prove it.”

He smiled then. Sad, jaded, and so weary that guilt struck me once more. Humans, vampires, and ghouls could find brief respite in sleep, but could ghosts? Or was their existence one endless day that stretched pitilessly into eternity?

Even if it wasn’t, as I stared at Don, sympathy began to outweigh my anger. He’d lied to me, manipulated me, and allowed a ruthless bureaucrat to use my DNA for secret experimentations, yet there was more to him than that. Don had protected the soldiers who worked for him, not experimented on and killed them like Madigan had. Once Brams was invented, Don turned down untold millions in pharmaceutical patents because he refused to release the drug to the public. When Madigan broached his forcible-breeding idea, Don fired him and kept him from me. Years later, when I revealed that I was in love with a vampire, Don allowed Bones to join the team. Then he lied to his superiors about my length-of-service agreement so I could quit when my life took a different direction, not to mention all the times he used his influence when vampire conflicts put me on the wrong end of the law.

His good deeds might not outweigh his bad, but Don’s greatest offenses occurred while he was still under the misconception that all vampires were evil. Through my teens and early twenties, I’d done some awful things under that misconception as well. In the years since, I’d tried to make up for that, and so, in his own way, had Don.

Even if he hadn’t, he didn’t deserve this fate. One day I’d be gone, yet he’d still be chained between a world he could never cross into and one he could never return to. Inadvertent or not, that was because of me—a punishment that far exceeded his crimes.

Above all else, Don was family. Flawed almost to the point of brokenness, yet family. I might not be able to forgive him today, but eventually, I would. Family was too precious to throw away if there was even a chance for reconciliation.

Don proved that when he finally gave his answer.

“Don’t bother playing on my patriotism, Cat. My country’s lost to me now, but if this helps you with something you’re determined to do anyway . . . well, then take me to him. I’ll see what I can do.”

Twenty-six

Madigan did recognize Don. As soon as he saw him, he let out an excited squeal of “Donny!” My uncle winced, either in sympathy at what his nemesis had become or in aversion to the horrid nickname.

Didn’t matter. Donny he was and Donny he stayed, day and night as Madigan rambled on about nonsensical things, such as how sad he was that the ice cream here was terrible (it wasn’t; Madigan’s taste buds only loved raw meat, a fact his mind hadn’t caught up with yet) or how he wanted to play in the yard (not happening; we didn’t want him to eat Mencheres’s neighbors). After the first few days of skull-numbing inanity, I wouldn’t have bothered eavesdropping except every once in a while, like a flash of lightning into a darkened room, something lucid would pop up.

“I’m very unhappy with their progress, Donny,” Madigan had said the other day. “They should have been able to replicate her DNA by now.”

“You mean Crawfield’s?” Don replied in a carefully neutral tone.

“Hers, too.” Madigan sounded churlish. “But after seven years, nothing! Can’t have all my eggs in one basket . . . heh. Eggs. Have to wait years for more of those . . .”

Despite Don trying to steer him back on topic, Madigan veered from eggs to being hungry again, and once that happened, nothing else mattered. Then when he was done eating, he fell asleep. For all I knew, he now slept while sucking his thumb. I couldn’t tell because I never entered his lockdown room. I’d become synonymous with Bones in his shattered mind, and Bones incited sobbing, incoherent terror.

Don, however, seemed to soothe Madigan, sometimes by the other man remembering past cruelties.

“I stole your job after you died,” Madigan said yesterday in a gleeful whisper. “Stole your soldiers, too. They’ll be dead soon.”

Before Don could respond to that, Madigan was playing I Spy. That shouldn’t have taken long since his room was windowless concrete, but Madigan stretched it out for hours. If Don was solid, he might have banged his head against the wall just to block out the endless chatter. I wanted to, and that was only after twenty minutes.

The reality was, I didn’t have much else to do. Tate, Ian, and Fabian hadn’t found Katie yet. How a child with no money and no experience in the normal world could evade two vampires and a ghost, I had no idea, but she’d done it. Mencheres’s people were still coming up empty on the fried hard drives, so no leads to chase down there, either. Bones could barely stand to be under the same roof as Don, let alone listen to him and Madigan talk nonsense for hours, so I couldn’t ask him to spell me. Plus, the few rational bits Madigan did say would probably cause Bones to beat him again.

After six days of learning nothing more than what we already knew, I was fed up. Madigan appeared to be a dead lead for gleaning information on his shadowy backer, but perhaps there was something else we could do to locate Katie. I knew someone who was very good at tracking paranormal activity, and as a bonus, he wasn’t a member of any undead line.

That’s how Bones and I ended up at Comic Con in San Diego.

I’d seen a lot of unusual things in my life, but this science fiction and fantasy extravaganza still managed to surprise me. Let’s face it; corpses raised by magic into unkillable assassins paled next to rubbing shoulders with Wolverine, Xena, Chewbacca, The Joker, Wonder Woman, and an iron-bikini-clad Princess Leia—and that was just waiting in line to get our badges.

Once inside the massive, multilevel complex, we worked our way through thousands more people dressed as their favorite character from a movie, television show, video game, or comic book. Some costumes were simple, such as body painting, and some were so elaborate, they had working robotic accessories.

“I’m vamping out,” I told Bones, the thundering background noise causing me to yell even with his hearing. “No one will notice.”

“Likely not,” I thought he replied, but couldn’t be sure. The nearby booth started blasting an exclusive movie trailer. If that wasn’t enough, the instant cheers and applause drowned out everything else.

I might not have the dedication to spend hours applying makeup and prosthetics to resemble my favorite fictional character, but the idea of leaving my cares behind by dressing up as someone else for an afternoon held definite appeal. Doing it with over a hundred thousand like-minded people must have contributed to the energy in the room being almost palpable. My senses went into overdrive from the carnival of sights, smells, sounds, and continuous contact as people brushed by us on their way to the panels, booths, signings, or exhibits. From the hum starting to generate beneath my skin, I’d almost swear this place was a supernatural hot spot.

Unfortunately, we weren’t here to get a contact high from all the frenetic energy. We had to find a reporter, and according to his text, he was in the video games section.

Easy enough, except we had the equivalent of eight football fields filled with fans and exhibitors between us. We either had to out ourselves as vampires by flying over everyone, or push through people as slowly and politely as we could.

We chose the latter, although here, flying could be brushed off as a mildly entertaining gimmick. It took over thirty minutes to reach the video game area, then we had to search through the throngs of people there. Finally, toward the back wall, I saw a slim, sandy-haired man, the stubble on his face adding a rougher edge to his naturally boyish looks. Thank God he hadn’t disguised himself by wearing a costume; there was no way to track people by scent in this olfactory smorgasbord.

“Timmie!” I yelled.

My neighbor from my college days didn’t look up. After all, I was only one raised voice among thousands. A few more minutes of polite pushing later, and we reached him at last.

“Why the bloody hell didn’t you meet us outside?” were Bones’s first words.

Timmie flinched at his hard tone. Then he glanced at me and squared his shoulders, as if remembering that I’d never let Bones harm him.

“I’m on the clock here. Besides, I thought you’d like this. There’s a True Blood panel starting soon.”

“Really?” I blurted.

Bones’s raised brow had me reluctantly adding, “We’re not here for fun. We came to ask if you’d help us find someone.”

A grin tugged Timmie’s lips. “Not that I don’t enjoy seeing you, Cathy, but you could’ve texted me that.”

“We’re not putting any of this in writing,” I said a trifle grimly. “Or trusting it over the phone.”

“Ah, paranormal-related.” Timmie snapped a photo of someone walking by, then let his camera hang from the strap around his neck. “Is it safe to talk in public?”

“In this place? Yes. Anyone overhearing won’t believe a word,” Bones replied dismissively.

True, plus so far, I’d only seen humans here. Shame. The undead were missing a good time.