Chapter Nine

Sarah couldn’t let go of Gary’s tooth. She could feel it digging into her hand as if he were trying to bite her by remote control. He held her prisoner with her own power turned against her. He let her look away for just a moment and she stared at Dekalb. Her father’s face had set in a mask of concern but he wasn’t doing anything. He should be protecting her.

Hah! My buddy here’s not much of a fighter.

“He fought you. He turned you into a bony little freak,” Sarah said, her voice stuck in her mouth. Her throat could move but not her tongue. She couldn’t move her facial muscles, she couldn’t scream for help but he was letting her talk to him, and him alone. She imagined he had the power to stop that as well, if he wanted.

She supposed if a lich were locked in his own skull for twelve years he might learn a few magic tricks. Especially when he was the second most powerful lich who ever lived.

Magic? he asked, perhaps reading her thoughts. I know all kinds of magic. Who do you think taught Marisol how to tame a ghoul? That’s right, yours truly. I sold that secret for a breath of fresh air. I knew nothing about the outside world. Your Dad kept me jailed here where nothing ever happens and I couldn’t even see the sun. So I learned to send my consciousness outward, to project myself astrally, I suppose. Marisol’s was the first brain I touched—she and I go way back, of course. She was scared, too, just like you are right now, sugar beet. When I came to her in her dreams, when I started telling her things that only Jack would know, she was frightened already. The colony here was in bad shape back in those days. People were getting sick and dying. The crops weren’t coming in. Once she realized I could teach her useful things she let me take control of her body for a few minutes a day. I never did anything drastic. Most of the time I just stood in front of a mirror and touched myself, to be brutally honest. Have you seen that woman? She’s a knockout.

Sarah squirmed against her confinement.

God! Just because I lack the organs doesn’t mean I don’t feel the itch. Don’t be such a prude, Sarah. I bet you do it. I bet you do it all the time. Hmm... but we’re getting distracted. There’s a point to my little story. I talked, and Marisol listened. Get it?

Sarah kept her silence.

Good. So let’s be civil to each other. Let’s be nice, even if we can’t be friends. There’s no reason to spoil Daddy-Daughter Day. It’s him I want to talk about, of course. Your father: my jailer. Look at him. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but he’s a gibbering idiot.

Sarah bristled, but said nothing. Gary could feel her emotions. He seemed to find them amusing.

This is the most fun I’ve had since I lost my appendages. But anyway, it’s true. Your father’s a moron. A sub-intellect. I know he has a brain—you can’t be undead without one—but we’re talking walnut-size here, at best. This whole time he’s been confronted by just one mystery, just one little puzzle to solve and he’s never worked it out. He’s had twelve years to figure out just who keeps rebuilding my aching bones every time he breaks them but he hasn’t got so much as clue one. You can tell, though. You knew it just by looking at me.

Keeping her mouth in a tight grimace she subvocalized, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Come on, sweet tart. You can see the energy, I know you can. Your friend, what’s his name... Jack? Sure. He told me all about it. You can tell who’s protecting me. You would have seen it eventually, so it doesn’t matter if I give the game away. Stop playing dumb. Unless it’s hereditary and you got your old man’s slack jaw.

Ah. Sarah let her vision relax, paid attention to the skin behind her ears, to the way the air felt. And then she saw it. Stretching away from Gary’s skull like invisible hair, long ropy tendrils of dark energy draped around the room, snaked along the platform, tying Gary right back to... to Dekalb himself.

Hot bile hit the back of her throat. Sarah wanted to scream. She wanted to smash the skull to fragments. Of all the fucked up things—this was not what Ayaan had taught her about how the world worked. Good people fought the bad things. They didn’t heal them. It was wrong, it was so wrong—

It’s not his fault.

Sarah turned to face the skull with venom in her eyes. How dare he? How dare Gary make her see that her father, the one man in the entire world she’d ever thought was worth a damn, the only human being, frankly, that she had ever loved, was in league with the monsters?

He thinks he doesn’t have any powers. He think he’s the least useful lich that ever was. He’s been healing me for over a decade, and he has no idea. Every time he develops the balls to kill me, his guilt overpowers him and subconsciously he puts me back together again.

She forced herself to calm down. “That must be... unpleasant.”

It’s fucking agonizing, is what it is. I’ve been crushed, I’ve been burned, I’ve been impaled on a spike. But it’s better than the alternative. I have a right to exist, sugar shorts. I have a right to live, whatever you may think of my current status. I don’t know. Maybe you’re thinking you’ll just tell Daddy what you’ve learned. Maybe you think that if he knows what’s going on he can fight it, and he can finally do me in. And maybe, just maybe, he can. Then again, maybe his subconscious is stronger than you think.

“You expect me to keep your secret,” Sarah spat through gritted teeth.

Yeah, I do. The skull grinned up at her. Oh, not for my sake. You probably hate me. That’s alright, it comes with the job. I expect you to keep your fucking hole shut for him. Because, snack pack, he’s spent the last twelve years pretending that he’s a hero. That he brought down the nefarious Gary, the lich king of New York City. You see, there’s not much else to do in this place except sit around talking about what used to be. After a while, memories are all a man has. That and the occasional slack that wanders by in the tunnel down there. If he knew how much time he’s wasted, playing at the vigilant guardian up here, if he knew what he’d done, well. It might just break his heart. Granted he isn’t using it right now, but I expect you’d rather keep it in one piece. Do we have a deal?

He released her, as easily as that, without any kind of agreement on her part. Obviously he thought he knew her answer already.

It burned a little that he was right.

“Did you have a nice chat?” Dekalb asked. She saw worry written on his face. On the rest of him she just saw weakness. She’d forgotten how fragile he must be. That he was one of the people from the old time, from before the end of the world. Nobody had been tough back then. The slightest emotional shock could destroy them.

“Yeah,” she said. “It was great. Listen.” She shoved the tooth into her back pocket, not knowing what else to do with it. “I’m a little tired. I think I’m going to back to, you know, the others. Get some sleep.”

“I’ll be here when you wake up.” He smiled. “I don’t get to rest, pumpkin. I don’t even get to sleep anymore.”

She put her hands on his cheeks, leaned forward until their foreheads were touching. She couldn’t quite bring herself to kiss his rotting lips.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said, and she wanted to sag into those words. She wanted to curl up in them and let everything go right for a while. Then she realized he wasn’t talking to her. He was addressing himself. “Now that you’re here, everything’s going to be okay. So where’s Ayaan?” he asked.

She closed her eyes because she didn’t want to look at him while she lied to him. “Back in Somalia. She’s fine, doing great, actually. She sent me to check up on Marisol, see if Governors Island was still thriving.”

“Oh. Is it? I don’t get out much.”

She nodded. “It’s doing great.” Such a ludicrous idea—that anyone would launch such a dangerous expedition just to see how old friends were getting along—didn’t seem to strike him as odd at all.

She left him in the tower with Gary and the mummies, unsure when she would come back. Jack had said to look for help, but what could one dried-up old lich and a skull with insect legs do against the Tsarevich? She wondered about what to do next as she headed back down the causeway and onto the Island. She noticed something strange about the buildings on the north side of the island, those that faced Manhattan, but she couldn’t remember what they had looked like when she went in.

Dark stains seemed to creep across their facades. Patches of a very light green had grown in circular patterns on the bricks—lichens, she thought, like you would see on very old tombstones. The dark stains were moss or mold or mildew or something. Come to think of it she didn’t believe the buildings had looked like that when she entered the ventilation tower.

Strange. And Ayaan had taught her never to ignore the strange. She scratched a sudden itch in her left armpit and pondered what to do next.

She made her way toward Building 109, the Island’s former welcome center where she was supposed to sleep that night, keeping one eye on the water. She half expected an army of ghouls to come dribbling up out of the harbor. When Marisol’s sickly little son Jackie grabbed her from behind she automatically reached for her pistol. She stopped herself in time, because she’d had proper training in who and whom not to shoot.

“What’s up?” she said, and tousled Jackie’s hair. It took her a second to realize something was wrong. He coughed and a cloud of black spores erupted from his throat. His skin looked patchy and even fuzzy in places. She grabbed his chin, trying to discover if he was choking, and her hand came away covered in musty-smelling powder.

The itch in her armpit got a lot worse, all of a sudden.