The Voodoo Killings Read Online Free

time: 10:30 p.m. Screw it, I couldn’t put off calling Mork any longer.
    “Back in a sec, Cameron. Stay put.” I ducked into my bedroom. I grabbed a fresh burner phone from the bottom of my underwear drawer and dialed Mork’s number from memory. No one picked up, but then no one ever picked up. I let it ring five times then hung up; no one ever left messages either. I slid the phone into my pocket, turned, then jumped a foot in the air, my heart racing. Cameron loomed in the bedroom doorway, holding the Thermos of brains.
    “Cameron, I swear to god, don’t sneak up on me….”
    He looked down at the Thermos and then around my bedroom.
    Conscious of the mess, I slipped past him and gently closed the door. No sudden moves allowed; they unnerve zombies.
    “Can I take a shower?” he said, his eyes following me back into the kitchen. “I smell awful.”
    I shook my head. “I’m sorry, but not until we fix you up a bit more. Water causes—” I stopped. There didn’t seem much point explaining that water would warp his skin until it peeled away like birchbark. “Let’s just say it won’t help any.”
    He followed me back into my less disastrous kitchen.
    “Look, as soon as I have you fixed up, you can have a nice long shower and start getting your life sorted out.”
    “I’m dead.”
    “Being dead doesn’t mean you get out of paying rent. I need to get you functional,” I said, sliding back into my chair.
    Cameron frowned. I got the distinct impression that the tidbits of his personality filtering through the zombie fog didn’t appreciate my dry sense of humour.
    “Okay, Cameron, this is what I know. Yes, you are dead. You were— are —a Seattle artist, an almost-famous one. By the looks of it, you’ve been dead a couple of days and you were probably animated this morning.”
    I waited for him to respond, then prodded: “Any of that ring a bell?”
    He stared at me as if on the verge of remembering something, and then it was gone, like every other time I’d asked him. “No,” he said. “I’m hungry. Why am I so hungry?”
    God, I needed Mork to call me back right now. Mork was never this slow—and neither was Max.
    Every single zombie I’d ever raised—and I’d been a full-fledged practitioner for almost a decade—remembered exactly how they’d died. Heart attack, murder, overdose, even dying in their sleep—a zombie always remembered. Hell, it was the first thing they wanted to talk about. Yet Cameron didn’t have a clue.
    Maybe if I took a little peek at his bindings…
    In polite paranormal circles you only look at someone else’s work if you have permission from the zombie or binder. Since Cameron’s binder was nowhere to be found and Cameron was in no condition to be giving permission to anyone for anything, polite was impossible. The bigger issue was that Cameron would feel it, and for all I knew, his bindings were already unravelling him into one big dangerous zombie mess.
    Which was all the more reason to take a look.
    “Cameron, hold still a sec,” I said. Before he could respond one way or the other, I pulled a globe.
    Pulling a globe—being able to breach the barrier to the Otherside—isn’t some kind of special talent or gift. Most people dabble in college but then give up because they don’t actually want to deal with what they see past that barrier. Me? I dabbled too, but I’m stubborn, persistent, and I have a strong stomach. And then there was the factthat there weren’t a lot of jobs out there for history majors who dropped out before they got their degrees. Whereas there was a substantial and surprising niche for practitioners willing to call up ghosts and zombies for law enforcement, for lawyers, and for good old entertainment value. And then it turned out I was already in a prime location for practitioners. Seattle is the North American mecca for all things paranormal. I blame it on the violent gold rush history and the 1990s heroin-obsessed grunge scene, though