The Dire King (Jackaby #4)(23)
“I should not have asked for your help,” Charlie said at last.
“I think we can plainly see that you should have,” I said. “You can’t seriously have expected to handle a thing like that all on your own—someone’s found a way to give the rotting dead the will to live. Good news, though: I do believe we’ve reached that special level of odd that Jackaby cannot possibly decline to investigate. You don’t have to go it alone.”
“I am fortunate that I did not tonight,” he conceded. “Thank you for being there for me.” His fingers brushed mine as we walked side by side, and I slid my hand up to hold his arm. He smiled shyly.
“I’ll keep saving you if you keep saving me,” I said.
Chapter Nine
When I was seven, I became terribly ill and developed a severe fever that lasted for days. My father recalls the incident as though I had nearly died, while my mother recalls the event as though I had done it on purpose to get out of piano lessons. My own memory of it is, perhaps, less coherent than my parents’, but it remains with me to this day. At the height of my delirium, as my nanny pressed cool washcloths to my forehead, I lay on my bed with a parade of horrifying visions swimming before my weary eyes. In retrospect, that vivid fever dream may have been just the thing to brace me for the scene that awaited Charlie and me upon our return to 926 Augur Lane.
“No!” Jackaby’s muffled bellow came from the other side of the door as we mounted the steps. “Take that out of your mouth! Put that down! That is an apotropaic wand carved from Egyptian ivory during the—and you’ve broken it. No! Don’t sit on that! Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
I opened the door. To say that the crowd within was pressed shoulder to shoulder would not do justice to the assortment of bodies occupying Jackaby’s foyer. The tallest among them, a hunched giant, could have put his head through the ceiling if he had stood fully upright. A tight group of very short men huddled around the umbrella stand scarcely came up to my waist, although their pointed violet hats nearly doubled their height. There were smaller creatures still, a few of them barely more than twinkling balls of light that fluttered around a lithe, angular woman with twigs in her hair—although I was not sure if I should count those ones as bodies in their own right, or if they were more adornments of hers. There were people with beards and people with gills and one with a face that my eyes refused to focus on no matter how hard I tried. Jenny was there as well, making an effort to shoo a small cloud of pixies away from the more fragile relics on the shelves. I could see by the red clay shards on the floor that she had not been successful in keeping them from toppling a Grecian urn. The motley mob stood, stooped, or flew shoulder to knee to belly button all around the cramped chamber.
“Please! If you would all simply stop moving!” Jackaby yelled. “Oh, Miss Rook—where in God’s name have you been?”
“We—” I began.
“Riveting. Please make yourself useful, would you? Douglas and Jenny and I have been coordinating temporary placements for everyone until I can sort this all out.” He waved us to step forward. I had to squeeze past the little men in violet hats, who kindly shuffled into a tighter huddle. The giant grumbled something in an accent that sounded a bit like French and a bit like a grizzly bear growling from the bottom of a very deep well.
“You heard me!” Jackaby spun and pointed a finger up at him. “I said temporary and I meant it! You’re not staying!”
The giant shrugged glumly and his shoulder blades scraped the ceiling.
Jackaby turned back to us. “What in heaven’s name took you so long?”
“Don’t get cross with me. A man rose from the dead! His corpse literally stood up at the scene of the crime! He attacked us! I had to sort of . . . squish him.”
“It’s true,” said Charlie.
“What color was its hair?”
“What?” I said. “What sort of question is that? What does it matter what color his hair was?”
“It never hurts to narrow things down. The West African ‘zombi’ is typically black-haired, while its Haitian variant can be any hue. The ‘draugr’ from Scandinavia, on the other hand, is frequently redheaded, and also typically boasts a full beard. Was your dead man bearded?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“He was a brunet, I think,” Charlie offered. “Why? Which ones are worse?”
“Oh, there’s really no difference between them beyond the hair,” Jackaby said. “Never hurts to be precise, though. Whatever he was, no good ever came of the dead rising.”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Jenny called from across the crowded foyer. “Hey! Get off that lamp! Oh—I hope you burn your wings, you little brats!”
“Sir,” I said, “may I ask, where did all of these”—I hesitated—“people?”
“People will do.”
“Where did all of these people come from?”
“The first batch came from the station house. The rest have been trickling in as word reached them in the more distant pockets of New Fiddleham’s supernatural community.”
“Might I suggest offering them the third floor to spread out a bit?” I said, as something silvery zipped and darted around my head, swimming through the air like a fish through water.