“Don’t even start,” I told him. “It’s working. If it weren’t working, you couldn’t drag me into that place.”
“What did you write on here? ‘Don’t die’?”
“No, I wrote, ‘Don’t be an a-hole!’” I headed for the house.
“On yours or mine?”
“On yours.”
“Well, in that case, your magic isn’t working. I’m still an ass**le.”
Grr, grr, grr.
Twenty feet to the house. A shiver shook me and I clenched my teeth. You can do it, White Tiger. Don’t be a wuss.
Fifteen feet. I could see it now, the translucent mess of sliding tendrils, ready to grab us, like a nest of colossal dark snakes about to strike. The bad magic would hit us any second.
Ten feet. The tentacles rose as one.
Screw it. I reached over and grabbed Jim’s hand. His fingers closed on mine, warm and strong.
The magic shot toward us. I clenched Jim’s hand. The paper on my chest sparked with pale blue and the tentacles fell away, as if singed by fire.
Oh gods. Oh phew. My heart pounded in my chest at about a million beats per minute. Pheeeww. Okay, alive. Alive is good.
I realized I was still clutching Jim’s hand like a moron and let go. He was looking at me. “Is everything cool?”
“Mhm.” I nodded, my voice a little too high. “Everything is great. Let’s go.”
We walked between the tendrils of magic to the door. A long scrape marked the dark green paint, exposing steel underneath. I could tell by Jim’s face that he didn’t remember it. We both leaned close and sniffed.
Smelled like paint.
Jim tried the handle. It clicked under the pressure of his thumb. The door swung open slowly, revealing a gloomy large room, as if the house had yawned and we were staring straight into its maw.
He said he had left the door locked and I knew he would have.
Jim stepped through the doorway and I followed him.
The inside of the house smelled wrong: hot and sharp with an undercoating of dust, like rusty iron scrap left to bake in the sun. Through it floated the stench of burned coffee and a faint scent of blood, fouled with a hint of decomposition. The blood was old, at least twelve hours, probably more.
The front of the room lay empty. Ahead, a large counter cut the room nearly in a half. To the right, a small stove supported a teakettle and a coffeepot. Gloom pooled in the corners, and if I squinted just right, I could see the faint tentacles of magic snaking their way in and out of the walls.
Jim skewed his face in a silent growl, stalked over to the counter, and leapt on it, landing with easy grace. He did it in absolute silence.
Wow.
I would’ve given anything to be able to match him, to be sleek and elegant, like a supple phantom. But no, even in my animal form, I was a klutz. The change dazed me and it took me about two minutes to figure out where I was or why. It took Jim about two seconds to kill something. If we both shifted in the middle of a room full of ninjas, by the time I could see straight, they would all be dead and Jim would be wiping blood from his hands.
All my life I was told I was special, the mystical white tiger. Guardian of the West, King of Beasts, Lord of Mountains, Slayer of Demons. Majestic of bearing and fierce in battle. The irony was thick enough to swim through.
Jim pointed at the floor. I looked down. Gashes scored the wood, digging deep into the floorboards. Something had clawed the floor, something large and powerful. Here and there small sections of black marker lines peeked from under the scratches, but no force on earth could decipher what had been written there.
I glanced at Jim and shook my head. He jumped down and I followed him deeper into the house. We passed a small file room on the right, separated from the counter by a partition. If people had died here, something must’ve taken their bodies.
The doorway to the stairs waited, a darker rectangle in the dark wall. I took a step forward. Magic washed over me, bad, terrible magic, smelling of death and blood and corpses, as if someone had taken a piece of ice and dragged it from the base of my neck all the way down my spine. The paper on my chest shivered. I froze, trying to catch every tiny noise, every hint of movement.
Jim was looking at me.
“Bad,” I mouthed, letting him read my lips. “Bad magic.”
Above us the ceiling creaked. We looked at it.
Another creak. Something heavy moved across the floor over our heads.
Jim pushed ahead of me and we padded up the wooden steps upstairs.
*
THE STAIRCASE WAS narrow and Jim’s muscular back took up most of it. I gave him a couple of feet to make sure he had room to strike if we ran into something unpleasant.
Magic saturated the staircase. It dripped from the rail in long viscous droplets, it slimed the steps, it boiled in long coils along the wall so thick and potent I wished I’d brought a rain slicker. Now, that was a totally irrational thought. It seemed insane Jim couldn’t see it, but I knew he couldn’t.
We reached the landing. A hallway ran perpendicular to the staircase, and right across it, a doorway was lit by a pale yellowish glow. I smelled lamp oil.
Jim paused for one long second on the upstairs landing and strode on, through the hallway into the room. I padded after him.
A lone lamp burned on the floor at the far wall, illuminating a naked woman, who sat cross-legged on the grimy boards. Her dark honey hair hung in ragged strands down her back. I inhaled, sampling her scent. Michelle. But the scent was wrong. A living scent is hot, vibrant. This was a cold odor, laced with traces of toxic stenches: feces, a touch of urine, and a revolting patina of putrescence, like a meat broth left out for too long. Degrading amino acids. I’ve smelled this nauseating cocktail before: cadaverine, putrescine, and a dose of indole for good measure. My eyes told me Michelle was alive and sitting in front of me. My nose told me she was dead and had been so for at least two days. I trusted my nose. It never lied.
Jim pulled a knife from his sheath. It was his giant G.I. Joe knife, dark gray with a wicked curved tip and a serrated edge near the handle.
Michelle turned and looked at us. Her eyes were empty. Dead eyes, like two dark holes in her head. And I had really liked her, too.
Behind Michelle, another body lay in the corner on its side, long dark hair fanned out on the filthy floor like a black veil. Roger, a werelynx. Dead as well.
Michelle’s left arm jerked up and forward, resting on the floor. Her right followed, like she was a puppet on a string.
“What do you want?” Jim’s voice was a low snarl. That’s why Jim was in charge. I didn’t have to explain that something was controlling the dead. He figured it out all on his own and wasted no time on being weirded out by it.