Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(104)

I’d always assumed that taking on a zombie would pretty much be like fighting a human—one that was relentless and didn’t react to pain—but basically a human. When it moved on Kyle, it was moving a lot faster than I’d seen any mundane human move and now it was proving stronger, too.

It didn’t so much try to get away from me as it did to get to Kyle. I’d have thought that would make it easier to subdue. Finally I got an arm wrapped all the way around its shoulders, pulling it tight against me. Then I could put my other hand to work on prying her teeth apart. Its teeth. Its jaw broke in the process—and I got my thumb gnawed on a little.

Kyle staggered back, white to the bone, but he stripped off his shirt and wadded it against the hole she’d dug in him. “What is she?” he asked. “Why isn’t she bleeding more?”

He was looking at it in quick glances. I understood. It wasn’t pretty anymore with its jaw hanging half off.

“Zombie,” I told him a little breathlessly. It was now trying to get away from me, and that did make things a bit more difficult, but at least I wasn’t trying to pry it off Kyle.

“Your business, then?” he said.

Usually I’d agree; not even shark-sharp lawyers like Kyle were so exotic as to call for assassination by zombie—it was too flamboyant, too blatant. The witches and supernatural-priest types who could create zombies had never been hidden the way the werewolves used to be, but they lived among the psychics, Wiccans, and New Agers where the con artists and the self-deluded provided ample cover for a few real magic practitioners. They didn’t give up that cover lightly. Somebody would have had to have paid a lot for a zombie assassination.

I shook my head. “Don’t know. Seems awfully set on you, either way.” The zombie hadn’t managed to get a limb free for the past few seconds, so I chanced turning my attention to Kyle. His wound worried me.

“You get out Howard’s good malt,” I told him. “He keeps the key behind the third book on the top left shelf. Clean that wound out with it. It’s liable to have all sorts of stuff in its mouth.” I didn’t know much about zombies, but I knew about the Komodo dragon, which doesn’t need poison to kill its prey because the bacteria in its mouth do the job just fine.

Kyle didn’t argue, and took himself out of the conference room. As soon as he was out of sight, the zombie started crying out something. Might have been Kyle’s name, but it was hard to tell, what with its jaw so badly mangled.

I held on to it—by now I’d gotten a hold that prevented it from hitting me effectively or wiggling loose. That gave me the leisure to be concerned with other things. Kyle had shut the door gently behind him. I tried not to speculate about Kyle’s reaction, tried to wrap up the panic and bury it where it could do no harm. He’d seen weird things before, even if none of them had drawn blood.

I could have destroyed the zombie and left it in the conference room for later retrieval with no one the wiser; could have hidden all of this from my lover as I used to do. But it had been different with Kyle from the beginning. The lies I’d told to him about who and what I was, lies that necessity dictated and time had made familiar, had tasted foul on my tongue when spoken to him. Now he knew my truths and I wouldn’t hide from him again. If he couldn’t live with who and what I was, so be it.

But none of that was useful, so I forced my attention to the matter at hand. Who would send a zombie to kill Kyle? Was it something directed at me? The zombie was pretty strong evidence that it was someone from my world, my world of the things that live in the dark corners, and not Kyle’s; he was as human as it got.

Still, I couldn’t think of anyone I’d offended so much that I’d made Kyle into a target. Nor, with the possible exception of Elizaveta herself—who was, as Winston Churchill said of her mother Russia, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”—could I think of who could even create a zombie in the Tri-Cities. Eastern Washington State was not a hotbed of hoodoo or voodoo.

Maybe someone had hired it done? Hired an assassin, and the assassin had chosen the manner of death?

Kyle had a lot more enemies than I did. When he chose to use it, his special gift was to make the opposing parties in a courtroom look either like violent criminals, or like complete idiots—and sometimes both. Some of them had quite a bit of money, enough to hire a killer, certainly.

Maybe it wasn’t my fault.

A zombie hit, though, screamed expensive, a lot more expensive than someone like Kyle would normally command. Which meant it was probably my fault.

I heard Elizaveta arrive and stride down the hall to the conference room. The lack of talking led me to believe that Kyle was still cleaning up.

Elizaveta opened the conference room door and entered like the Queen Mary coming to port in a wave of herbs and menthol instead of salt water, but with the same regal dominance, a regality accompanied by enough fabric and colors to do justice to a Gypsy in midwinter—and it was hotter than sin outside.

I’d always thought that she must have been beautiful when she was young. Not a conventional beauty, something much more powerful than that. Now her nose looked hawkish and her eyes were too hard, but the power was still there.

“Warren, my little cinnamon bun, what have you found?” She never spoke to me in Russian as she did Adam, who understood it; instead she translated the endearments that peppered her speech—probably because they made me squirm. Why would you compare a grown man to a sweet roll?