Kicking It

The ground seemed to steady under my feet. My shaking went away. I hugged him, and he hugged me back, and the magic between us—the magic that kept him here, held him in this time, in that reconstructed body—it felt strong as steel. It was love that powered Andy Toland. It was the exact polar opposite of what powered Pete Lyons.



Andy had a way of making things clear. Clear and simple. Not easy, never easy, but clear.



“How do we go about that, exactly?” I asked.



“We’re about to find out,” he said. He went to the window and peered through the curtains. The protesters had already vacated the street, and Pete Lyons was pulling away in his black Cadillac SUV, just as a courier van cruised to a halt in front of our mailbox. The uniformed driver got out and trotted up the walk with a small package and a clipboard.



Andy opened the door, signed, and accepted the package, and the driver left in under fifteen seconds, heading for his next delivery.



Inside the envelope was a small glass bottle. In the bottle was a scraping of skin.



Portia’s skin. Ed Rosen had come through.



“Let’s get to work,” Andy said.



—



Making the shell for a resurrection was a brutal process, requiring a ton of supplies, space, time, and energy. Like cloning, I would suppose, only vastly accelerated. The difference was that the body created was not alive; it was a simulacrum. Everything was in place, held in stasis for the moment that the spark of life entered it.



It also wasn’t something that I could do, or even help to do. So I left Andy in his private workshop, surrounded by supplies, his long steel table in the center, and went to take my mind off my worries.



I cleaned. Any spot that Pete Lyons had touched, I used a cleansing potion on it, brewed of rosemary and sage and witch hazel, activated with my own sweat and brewed with a spell. As I scrubbed, I saw the faint black stain of his presence become visible and then fade away.



The iced tea glass was a total loss, though. I handled it with rubber gloves, put it in a paper bag, smashed it to pieces, and then buried it deep in the backyard. It would kill the grass around it, almost certainly, but that couldn’t be helped. The sugar bowl suffered the same fate. I soaked the spoon in the potion and then buried that, too. The good, clean earth would absorb the darkness, eventually; earth magic was slow, but it was powerful.



When I was certain that everything was cleaned, and every window and door warded for protection, I started the resurrection potion. While that brewed, I made burritos. Hours had passed by the time I unwrapped a burrito and sat down in front of the TV to eat it.



I clicked on the local news—and was sorry I had.



“The controversy over the presence of practicing, for-profit witches in the Austin community continues to grow, with protests erupting at places of business all over the area. In Clarksville, a large crowd gathered this afternoon in front of this store, Magick Incorporated, known to supply local witches with materials used in their spells and rituals. As you can see, Jim, the police failed to contain the protest, which turned violent . . .” I watched, sickened, as the footage played of sign-wielding, screaming people throwing bricks at the windows of my favorite store, shattering the plate glass. They stormed in, pushing and stomping one another in their eagerness to destroy, and I caught a glimpse of Lois Herndon and her two employees being dragged into the street. “Two employees of the store were admitted to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. However, proprietor Lois Herndon suffered a massive head trauma and was pronounced dead at the scene.”



The news anchors didn’t even pause to shake their heads in mock sympathy. They just went on to the next story, which featured one of the protesters earnestly explaining why what they were doing was right and good, and of course they didn’t approve of the violence, but didn’t the Bible say . . . ?



The reporter seemed sympathetic.



I shut it off. I’d lost my appetite, too, though the burrito was delicious; I wrapped up the rest and put it in the fridge, along with the others. I couldn’t take anything to Andy, since he would be locked in the ritual for hours to come; any interruption, however well meant, would ruin the spell.



I went to bed cold and alone, and I dreamed of snakes slithering through the house, up onto my bed, and twining around my neck to choke me.



I woke to find Andy sitting next to me on the bed, his hand gentle on my forehead. Beyond him, the windows were still dark. The clock said it was four in the morning.



“She’s ready.”



—



I have to admit, this one was hard. Harder than most, because I knew Portia, at least slightly. She was an overweight, kindly lady who’d been vain about her dyed hair and her skin; she’d been obsessive about skin creams and wrinkle prevention, and given that she was lying naked, pale and still on the table, all her faults and flaws laid bare, it seemed a very sad memory to be holding. I tried to think about other things, like the way she laughed, shy and quick, as if afraid she might be caught at it.



This body didn’t hold the wounds of her death; it was her in the moments before the damage was done, as close as could be achieved.



Now for the hardest part.



Andy let me take the lead, because he’d done the tough work of making the shell, but he stayed close, in case of trouble. I opened Portia’s mouth, poured in the potion, whispered the words, and then sealed it with the kiss of life—infusing the potion with my own breath, my own will, my own energy. And through it, reaching through the other side to Portia.



I felt it when we connected; it was a physical shock, like grabbing hold of a hot wire. I felt myself spasm all over from it, and only long experience kept me there, my lips touching hers, as I felt her spirit traveling through the dark, writhing and clawing and fighting and screaming and then present, sinking into that silent form.



Her lips warmed beneath mine, and she took a breath like a sob, and I tasted death flooding out of her and into me, a taste like rancid meat and grave dirt. It was a natural part of the spell. That didn’t make it any better, and I swallowed convulsively, my eyes pressed shut, to make it pass faster.



By the time I’d managed to control myself, she was breathing normally, and her own eyes were fluttering open.



I helped her sit up. She was as clumsy as a newborn, and just as confused; the colors and sharp edges of the world sat hard on those resurrected.



I glanced at Andy, and he moved forward with a warm, soft blanket that he wrapped around her. She tried to help him, but her hands were still too weak to grip things firmly, so I took charge and held it for her, tucking it into a tasteful approximation of a toga.



“Portia,” I said then, as I took both of her cold hands in mine. I could feel her pulse. It was racing fast, very fast. I could also feel the magnetic pull of the dark inside both of us—a pull that would draw her inexorably back to it. There was no such thing as cheating death, in the end; there was only a way to fool it for a while. As a witch, she knew that as well as I did. “Portia, honey, do you know who I am?” Often they didn’t, even if I’d known them before. They had to be reminded, over and over. “It’s Holly Anne Caldwell.”



She licked her pale lips and said, “Resurrection witch.” Her dark eyes shifted focus, to Andy. “Mr. Toland.” That was a very good sign, I thought. I kept holding on. Physical contact helped, in the early stages. “Am I dead?”



That was a question they all came to, eventually. It usually happened right before the memories rushed in—the ones that death held back, at first, out of kindness.



“Yes,” he said. “I’m right sorry, Portia. Do you remember?”



That was the trigger. I felt it hit her through the link we shared. You can’t keep yourself truly separate in this kind of business; it’s messy and sweaty and intimate and personal.



I not only felt her remember it.



I felt it.



A crush of terror, blind and unreasoning terror. The smashing impact of a crystal ball on my upraised arm, shattering bone. Then again, on my shoulder. My ribs, breaking like glass. My skull cracking, then bursting.



And then, as life ebbed, the hot line of the cut across my throat. A sacrificial bloodletting, unnecessary except for ritual, because he’d already done enough damage to kill me. No, her. Portia.



She was staring at me with huge eyes, shadowed with horror. “I know,” she whispered. “What he did, what he did to me, I know—”



“Who?” I had to keep her focused. This was the hardest moment of all, harder even than the pain of her death. “Who was it, Portia?”



“You know,” she said. “It was the man in the boots.” She shuddered, and her eyes rolled up until the whites showed. “He isn’t a man.”



“No,” Andy agreed. “He’s a demon. Portia, you have the gift, and we need you to tell us. You know what we need to know.”



It was shocking, how suddenly her eyes rolled down to focus on his face again. “Yes.” The dark pupils expanded, consuming the brown around them until her irises were completely eclipsed. “There’s an abandoned train station next to the Amtrak station. That’s where he’ll be. But you have to get there fast.”



“Does he know we’ll be coming?”



“He made me tell him where you’d come to kill him,” she said. “Before I died. But I lied. I told him you’d kill him at your house.”



That made me cold, because she’d warned him we’d kill him in our house, and his response? Go to our house. Spit in the face of destiny.



That was just how confident our serpent was of his ultimate survival.



“Thank you,” I said, and I pressed a kiss to her forehead. “You’ve been very brave, Portia. You’re a hero.”



She smiled, just a little. “I just got murdered, that’s all. But you’ll get him for me, Holly.” The smile faded, and the darkness in her eyes grew to terrifying proportions. “Beware the dog.”



I couldn’t hold her, and I knew it. Some resurrections are like that—minutes, at best. I’d been able to manage more than a day only a handful of times—and one of them had been Andy Toland, resurrected from his Old West slumber, more than once.

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