Dead Man Rising

Huh. That's odd.

The entry hall, the dining room, and the two bedrooms were carpeted. The bathroom was tiled, the kitchen and the living room in mellow hardwood. The second bedroom was a meditation room, a round blue and silver rug in the middle and the ceiling painted with a wheeling Milky Way.

Quite an artist, Christabel. I did not turn the lights on yet.

I inhaled deeply. I smelled traces of Gabriele's kyphii-tainted scent, the Reader's jasmine, other faint human scents overlaying a more complex well. Closing my eyes, I shut away all the more recent smells, including the sweet, decaying fruit of the blood drying on my ruined dress.

That left me with a powerful brew of female psion, a healthy astringent scent. Christabel had smelled like molecular-drip polish on long nails, slightly-oily hair, and strong, sweet resin incense. Resin was cheap and high quality, readily available in metaphysical supply stores, and it brought back a swirl of memories from my school days.

So you used schoolgirl incense. A little surprising, but I suppose it isn't any stranger than Gabe and her kyphii. The furniture was overstuffed, no hard edges. Her bookshelves weren't dusty, but there were no houseplants. No pets either, not even cloned koi.

The altar in her meditation room held a bank of white candles in varying heights, and a statue of Angerboda Gulveig Teutonica, glittering gold leaf on Her robe worked with flames and the Teutonica heart symbol. There was another statue set off to one side, a black dancing Kali of the old school, graphic and bloody.

There was a fresh offering in front of Kali, a shallow dish of something sticky that smelled of wine and faint traces of human blood. Also interesting.

Christabel's bed was neatly made. A copy of Adrie

To go from this order to the chaos of the living room was a shock. Great gouges had been torn into the wooden flooring, and the waning chalk marks on the hardwood were barely visible under a dark stain no amount of cleaning could scrub away. The couch was destroyed, the table reduced to matchsticks. Little drawstring bags of herbs, protective amulets all, hung from the dark ceiling fixture. Splashes of blood had baked onto the full-spectrum bulbs;

I was glad I could see in the dimness. There had been a hell of a fight in here.

I let out a long, slow breath. Both Gabe and a Reader had been here. There was nothing for me to see. Wherever Christabel had allowed herself to truly live, it wasn't here. This place was more like a stage set than anything else.

Paper lay scattered across the gouged floor, the same parchment she had written her last message on. A spilled bottle of dragonsblood ink lay near the entrance to the kitchen. Try as I might, I couldn't find the pen among the drift of chaos.

My own voice startled me. "I'm here." It was a whisper, like a child's in a haunted house. "If you want to talk, Christabel, I'm listening."

Silence gathered in the corners. I felt like a thief, here in the middle of this carefully constructed world. I didn't want to resurrect her mad raving ghost; I wanted some breath of the living Necromance.

None came. Even the flowering stain of thick-smelling violence in the air was smooth and blank, nothing for my intuition to grab onto.

The other scenes won't tell you anything either, the deep voice of certainty suddenly spoke inside my head. I paused, velvet and silk rustling as I turned in a slow circle, my eyes passing over the chiaroscuro of protection runes painted on each wall. The answer to this puzzle doesn't lie here. You know where it lies.

I did. The only clue I had likely to unravel this tangled skein was encapsulated in three words scrawled on parchment by a terrified dying Necromance.

Remember Rigger Hall.

"I would much rather not," I muttered, and the air swirled uneasily just like my skirt. I suddenly felt ridiculous, overdressed, and very, very young for the first time in years.

But if remembering the Hall would keep someone else from dying, I would do it. I'd survived that place once. How hard could remembering it be?

The three stripes of phantom fire down my back twinged in answer. So did the vanished scar along the crease of my lower-left buttock. The scar on my shoulder burned, burned.

My hand tightened around Fudoshin's scabbard. I was no longer weak or defenseless.

"All right, Christabel." My voice bounced off the walls. "You're my best clue. For right now, you lead the dance."

I had the not-so-comforting feeling that the air inside her wrecked living room had changed, becoming still and charged with expectation. As if it was… listening.

My knuckles were white on the scabbard. My mouth had gone dry, and when I slipped out again through the temporary magseal door I should have felt relieved to leave the scene of the carnage behind.

I wasn't. All I could think of were three little words, chanted over and over again by a shrieking, insane ghost who had once been a woman inhabiting a neat, orderly, soulless little apartment.

Remember. Remember Rigger Hall.

I knew what I had to do next.

Chapter Sixteen

The night was getting deep when the hoverlimo dropped me off on the concrete landing-pad in my front yard, and I tipped the driver well. He muttered his thanks and lifted off before I reached my front door. The garden rustled uneasily, dappled with darkness and the orange glow of citylight.

My hands were shaking. Not much, but enough that I could see the fine vibration when I held them out in front of me. Even my right hand, that twisted claw that had so gracefully held a sword and defended me tonight, was shaking, the fingers jittering as if I was typing a Section 713 Bounty Report.

I made it inside, shut the door, and leaned against it, scabbard digging into my back. The dress was stiff and crusty with blood along my left side that I noticed for the first time. "Anubis et'her ka." The god's name made the air stir uneasily. "That was unpleasant."

Jace wasn't home. He was probably off digging through public records. Because psions so often worked at night, public buildings rarely closed before two in the morning.

It was a pity. I could have used some easy banter.

I lifted my left hand because my right was shaking too badly, examined the black molecule-drip polish and the graceful wicked arches of my fingers. The fingers flexed, released.

The smell of lilacs still clung to my dress. Lilacs, and terror. The quiet dark inside my house suddenly made the flesh hang traitorously heavy on my bones—slender, arching frames, architecturally different than human bones but not agreeing with demon physiology in any of the books I read. Stuck in between, trapped like a butterfly halfway out of a glass chrysalis and frozen, popped into a kerri jar stasis. I didn't belong here in my old life, had nothing and nowhere to move into despite all my frantic thrashing on bounties. Stopped, frozen between one step and the next like a holovid still.

What butterfly wants to go back into the chrysalis? Or revisit being a caterpillar?

Remember. Remember Rigger Hall.

Bile rose, I forced it down. A rattling tremor slid from my scalp to my booted toes. I could feel it circling, the panic attack deep and needle-toothed, combat and the shock of memory both catching up to me.

Hey, Da