Chaos Bites Read online

  I’d tried to call Luther then Summer, but no one answered. Not uncommon. Residing in the shadow of Mount Taylor often screwed up cell reception. Living in an enchanted cottage didn’t help, either. If I still couldn’t reach them by late tomorrow morning I’d start to worry, and by then I’d be halfway home.

  I listened to the storm as I sipped the rich red wine I’d ordered from room service. Eventually my exhaustion, combined with the alcohol, made me nod, so I dropped all my clothes on the floor and crawled into bed. The rhythm of the rain followed me into the darkness.

  I badly wanted to talk to Sawyer. Instead I got Ruthie. I should have been happier about it. I’d been wishing Ruthie back since I’d lost her.

  When I spoke to Ruthie in my dreams I went to her. The house with the white picket fence wasn’t the one she’d lived in, and died in, but I knew it was hers just the same. Even before I strolled up the walk, and she opened the door.

  “Lizbeth.” Ruthie spread wide her arms.

  Despite being skinny, with elbows, knees, and hips like razors, Ruthie gave the best hugs in this world as well as the next. God, I had missed them.

  How being hugged by a woman who was built like a bag of bones could be so soft and gentle, I had no idea. But as I stepped into Ruthie’s embrace my exhaustion fled, my sadness lifted, and I felt again like I could do anything. She’d always had that effect on me.

  Ruthie rubbed my back, murmuring nonsense into my hair as she held me. As always, I pulled away first, never her. Which might just be the secret to those hugs.

  She kept hold of my hand, hers thin and heavily veined—but still as strong as her heart, which I’d felt thumping steadily against my chest despite her being dead nearly three months now. She drew me inside and closed the door.

  “I’m so glad you’re back,” I said.

  Ruthie smiled, white teeth flashing against the rich coffee hue of her face, her puffy, graying Afro swaying as she shook her head. “Been here all the time, child. You were the one who was gone.”

  “Not gone. Not really.”

  “Occupied?” She shrugged. “Don’t matter now. Plenty of time for me to come and visit between every full moon.” Ruthie’s eyes narrowed. “Though I don’t recall telling you it was okay to confine that demon.”

  Annoyance flickered. It hadn’t been my idea, and besides—“I didn’t realize I had to ask. Isn’t that what being ‘the leader’ means?”

  She lifted a brow. “You don’t think you need my help?”

  The annoyance died, like a flame in a high wind. “I didn’t say that.” I needed all the help I could get.

  “Come on,” she said, then moved down the hall toward her sunny kitchen.

  On the table sat two cups of tea. I wasn’t a fan, but Ruthie was, so I took a seat. Beyond the big windows at the back of the house, children played in the steadily changing yard, first with a huge play set made of wood. Then a large field appeared and the kids—all shapes and sizes—chose sides for some kind of game.

  Ruthie’s place today was as full of lost souls as it had been when she was alive. The only difference now was that everyone in her house—except for me—was dead.

  Every time I came to Ruthie’s heaven, guilt pulsed. Lately every time I came, the kids were in residence because I’d failed to save them.

  Ruthie sat. I took a swallow of tea. Refreshingly minty. I still didn’t like it.

  “Why am I here?” I asked.

  “I thought you missed me.”

  “I did, but—” I shrugged.

  “You’d rather see Sawyer.”

  “Yeah.” I took a deep breath. “Thanks to Sanducci, I won’t be.”

  Ruthie took a sip of tea and didn’t answer.

  “Right?” I pressed.

  She set down her cup then stared out the window. Her charges were kicking a soccer ball—back and forth, back and forth.

  “Ruthie?” I tried again. “Why am I here?”

  “Trouble’s comin’,” she said.

  “If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that,” I began.

  “You’re gonna have to live with the choices you make; you’re gonna have to make them on your own,” she murmured. “And soon.”

  “When?” I asked. “What?”

  I didn’t like making decisions that saved or ended people’s lives, that could, in the long run, mean the beginning of the end of the world. Especially since half the time I had no clue what I was doing.

  “You’re right,” she said. “You’ve come for a reason. There’s somethin’ I’ve gotta tell you.”

  Fear trickled over me, leaving behind icy sweat and a thick nasty taste at the base of my throat. “Jimmy—” I began, then—“Luther.”

  I started to get dizzy, realized I wasn’t breathing, then did with a huge, loud gasp on the word, “Faith!”

  Ruthie snapped her fingers in front of my face. “Focus, Lizbeth!”

  It wasn’t easy, but I got it together. “I’m okay.”

  “If the Nephilim believe you have a weakness”—she narrowed her eyes—“or three. They’ll use it.”

  I knew that. Had been warned over and over not to care too much. But I couldn’t help it.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Everything,” Ruthie said, then touched the center of my forehead with her thumb.

  My eyes crossed, I blinked, and in that instant I was somewhere else.

  A dark, deserted street—sidewalk broken, a few streetlights, too. The air thick and hot; it still smelled of rain.

  “New Orleans,” I whispered. I’d know that scent anywhere.

  Rows of buildings seemed to hunch with age. Ahead I could just make out the towering spires of a church, and across the way—

  “Saint Louis Number One.”

  The oldest existing cemetery in New Orleans, and a very dangerous place to visit after dark. Good thing I wasn’t really there.

  St. Louis Cemetery Number One had been built on what had once been Storyville, the only legal red-light district in the country. The place was a helluva lot quieter now. Although as I watched, lightning began to sizzle and thunder to rumble. Both seemed to be focused directly above the cemetery. A low, deep voice lifted from beyond the white brick walls—a voice I recognized.

  “Mait.” I started for the gate.

  He did say he’d been reading the book.

  Was that Ruthie’s voice, or my own? And what did it mean?

  I inched closer. The gate was closed, locked, but that didn’t matter. I wished to be within and I was.

  I’d been here before, but in the daylight and on a tour. The place had been spooky then, now it was downright unearthly.

  Since New Orleans had been built below sea level, they buried people aboveground; otherwise their coffins popped up and floated away during the rainy season.

  Interestingly enough, the cemeteries were the most desegregated places in the city. In death, folks were separated by religion, not race, and every single one was treated the same.

  After a year and a day spent on a shelf inside a brick monument, quaintly called an oven, their remains were dumped into a well with whoever had been there before to make room for the next occupant. Though St. Louis Number One spanned only a single block, it was the resting place of more than a hundred thousand souls.

  White monuments shown luminescent in the moonlight. Shadows danced across the rock-strewn ground. Here the outline of an angel perched atop a tall thin crypt. There the ghostly form of the Virgin cast by a statue surrounded with sunburned grass.

  I followed the sound of Mait’s voice. He wasn’t trying to be quiet. No one was really here but him.

  “Arise!” he shouted.

  Uh-oh.

  The figure of a man darted toward the gate. At first I thought it was Mait; then I heard the sosye speak again nearby. “Not all has been lost.”

  Two more silhouettes sprinted between the crypts. The gate rattled. I peeked around a statue. Mait clapped once, and something cr
eaked—very Addams Family—followed by the rhythm of retreating footsteps. A quick glance toward Rampart Street revealed the gate now stood wide open as half a dozen figures scooted through then scattered in different directions.

  Damn.

  He had been reading the book.

  I watched, both repelled and enthralled, as Mait set his hand against another glistening white tomb and murmured, “Arise.”

  I waited for the door to open, or perhaps for the stone to fall away. Maybe smoke would trail out of a crack and form the shape of the undead, becoming more and more solid until the newly risen spirit could cause the footsteps I’d so recently heard as it ran away to Samyaza-only-knew where.

  Instead, another human-sized shadow flitted between the tombs and out through the gate. Now you don’t see him, abracadabra, now you do.

  The heated, overripe night suddenly felt far too cool. No matter what we did, we couldn’t seem to get ahead in our battle against the forces of darkness. I knew everything was inevitable, but sheesh, couldn’t we just once catch a break?

  Burn the book to keep them from raising another army of the undead only to discover that the keeper of the book had memorized the freaking thing.

  The next instant I sat across from Ruthie at the kitchen table. Her tea was gone; mine was cold.

  “What the hell?” I muttered. “All he has to say is ‘arise’ and they do? What kind of spell is that?”

  Her dark eyes contemplated me for several seconds, as if she was trying to decide if she should tell me the truth or not. Then she sighed.

  “The spell in the Book of Samyaza doesn’t raise the dead, child, it creates someone who can.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Me of the pithy comebacks stared at Ruthie and said, “Huh?”

  “Mait has the ability to raise the dead.”

  The light in my brain finally flickered. “Armageddon here we come,” I muttered. “What the hell else was in that book?”

  “We’re never gonna know.”

  Maybe I was glad Jimmy had burned it. But what about Ruthie?

  “Did you tell him to burn the book?” I asked.

  “Me?” She seemed genuinely surprised. I didn’t buy it.

  “Did you?”

  Ruthie shook her head. “Didn’t know you’d found the thing until it went up in flames.”

  “You and me both,” I muttered. “Just once I’d like to find out something before it’s too late to stop it.”

  “Who said it’s too late?”

  I tapped my temple. “I just saw the guy raising zombies—”

  “Not zombies,” Ruthie corrected. “People.”

  “People,” I repeated.

  “You saw what he did. Were the beings that Mait raised shambling, moaning, dropping body parts across the ground as they ran?”

  “No,” I said slowly. That they were running at all was a pretty neat trick considering. “They moved normally. Silently. I didn’t see them well enough to know if they had rotten ears and fingers, but—”

  “They didn’t,” she said. “They won’t need to eat human flesh to survive, either.”

  “Always a plus,” I murmured. “What will they eat?”

  “Same thing they always did. Mait raised them to life.”

  “He can raise anything?”

  “Anything with human blood.”

  “Nephilim, too, then?”

  “In theory,” Ruthie said.

  “I bet he makes that theory into a fact real soon.”

  The Grigori wouldn’t even need to escape Tartarus to replenish their Nephilim army. All they’d have to do was raise their cohorts back to life and everything the federation had done would be erased; all those who’d died for this cause would have died in vain.

  “Not on my watch,” I muttered. I was so going to kill this guy. But first he and I would have a chat.

  Ruthie stared at me, waiting to hear more questions, or perhaps just my plan. I didn’t have one, but I would. I always did. I liked plans.

  “Once these beings are raised they’re exactly as they were before they died?” I asked. Maybe Sawyer wasn’t gone forever after all. Which, considering what we were up against, was such good news.

  “I doubt anyone’s been dead would come back exactly the same.”

  “But you just said—”

  “Physically yes. Mentally?” Ruthie shrugged. “They were dead. No tellin’ how that affected their minds.”

  “Terrific,” I muttered. “We’ve got crazy un-zombies running around New Orleans.”

  “Not yet.”

  “I saw them, Ruthie.”

  “You saw the future.”

  I frowned. “How far in the future?”

  Ruthie’s sober dark eyes met mine. “Mait’s been cooped up in that church for a while. Right now I’d say he’s gettin’ lap dances on Bourbon.”

  I stood so fast my chair skidded back and nearly fell over.

  “Calm down. Sit down,” she ordered.

  “If he’s on Bourbon, I could grab him tonight. No one would even notice.”

  Not that it would matter if they did. It would just be easier if they didn’t.

  “It’s August in New Orleans, Lizbeth, not Mardi Gras. Someone would notice.”

  She was right. I sat down. “I can’t afford to let him slip away.”

  “You know where he’ll be.”

  “I’ll stake out the cemetery,” I murmured.

  “I would.”

  “Just to be safe, how do I kill an un-zombie zombie?”

  “No special way. They’re the same, physically, as when they died the first time.”

  “Plain old murder then.”

  “Lizbeth,” Ruthie said on a sigh.

  “I need to know. What if something happens on the way to the cemetery? What if I fall and I can’t get up? What if Mait does his dirty deed and raises a hundred thousand souls? Then what?”

  “Chaos,” Ruthie whispered.

  “Worse. The only reason to raise the dead is to create an army for the final battle.”

  “And they gathered them together to the place called in Hebrew, Armageddon,” Ruthie quoted.

  Everyone’s heard about Armageddon—and I don’t mean the Bruce Willis movie, but the OK Corral of the Apocalypse. Technically Armageddon is where the last battle between good and evil should take place.

  As stated in Revelation 16:16, the word harmageddon means “the mount of Megiddo,” literally the mountain of slaughter, and it’s located in northern Israel. More than two hundred battles have been fought on that extended plain near the mount. Napoleon once called it “the most natural battleground on the whole earth.” He believed all the armies of the world could maneuver across such a vast space, and from the photos I’ve seen they could. From what I’ve read, they’ll have to.

  Sounds like I paid attention the day they taught Revelation, doesn’t it? Wrong. I looked it up last week.

  “I need to get to Mait before he stops practicing on people and starts bringing back half demons.”

  “He won’t,” Ruthie said. “At least not right away.”

  “Of course he will. What good is an army of humans who can easily be demolished by anyone with supernatural powers?”

  “We don’t much like to kill people, Lizbeth. We’re supposed to protect them.”

  “Which makes them the perfect foot soldiers.” I rubbed at the pulse pounding between my eyes. “Why would human beings fight for the dark side?”

  “What would you do for someone who raised you from the dead?”

  I dropped my hand. “There’s a price.”

  “Ain’t there always?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Remember that.” Ruthie held my gaze. “Nothing on this earth ever comes for free.”

  “So the risen dead will pay their debt on the front lines.”

  “They were trampled in the winepress outside the city,” Ruthie quoted, “and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for
a distance of sixteen hundred stadia.”

  “You wanna translate?” When she started talking about stadia, my head just spun.

  “In the final battle blood will rise as high as a horse’s bridle.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.” The last time I’d stood next to a horse, the bridle’d been as high as my chin.

  “A stadia is like a furlong,” Ruthie continued. “Sixteen hundred stadia would be about a hundred and eighty miles.”

  “Blood as high as a horse’s bridle across a distance of a hundred and eighty miles,” I repeated.

  Ruthie spread her bony, bird-like fingers. “So it was written.”

  Since a lot of what was written had come to pass, my stomach pitched like the Red Sea. Prophecy is tricky, but once it starts to make sense, things fall into place like the last few pieces in a very big puzzle.

  “Nephilim would be ashes,” I murmured. “No blood.” Which only lent weight to Ruthie’s belief that Mait would raise humans—at first.

  “For centuries scholars argued over the meaning of Revelation nine-sixteen,” Ruthie said. “And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand.”

  “Two hundred million,” I translated.

  “The number was too big to be taken literally for a very long time. But then came a nation with not only a huge population, but a mammoth standing army with uncountable reserves.”

  “China.”

  “Yes. The force will come out of the east, and the population in what is now considered the east is more than three billion.”

  “The scholars focused on China,” I said. “But they were wrong.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “What about the coming out of the east part?”

  “East is relative, child. March east-to-west and bam,” she smacked her palms together, “you’ve got an army from the east. All the Bible really says is that the big ol’ army will march across the Euphrates.”

  “Which happens to be east of Israel.”

  “Last time I looked,” Ruthie agreed.

  “I gotta go.”

  “Hold on.” Ruthie laid her hand over mine. “The book is gone. The only being capable of bringing back the dead is Mait. You know what that means?”