1 Heathcliff
It’s fucking miserable outside. Rain dashes against the windows, like some big-ass god is tossing bucketfuls of the sea over the land—a storm off the coast, moving inland. We’re only an hour’s drive from Hunting Island, so we get the storms quick and hard, before they’ve had time to go gentle.
I’m nursing a beer. Running my thumb up the slick amber glass, watching condensation pool along my nail, then slide down in fat drops. The TV’s off, and I’m just chilling, listening to the rain. I like the way it sounds, hammering against the windows, as if it wants to be let in.
A log on the fire pops and splits, its edges crumbling. I shake myself a little, tip the bottle against my lips for another swallow. Lockwood microbrew, dark and smooth and rich. Best in the county.
Then a door slams and I startle for real. Feet stomp through the big house, and Hindley storms into the living room. I’m a couple inches taller, but he’s thickly built, his broad body stretching out the dirty white tank top he’s wearing. He rakes a hand through his greasy red hair.
“What you doin’, boy?” he growls.
“Watching the rain.”
“You’re weird as fuck. Get up. We’ve got a job to do, a big one. Gonna need your mojo.”
I gulp my beer again. “You gotta be more specific. You talking my rizz or the other thing?”
“The other thing, moron. Get your ass off the chair and let’s go. His tattoo’s almost six months old, probably near faded by now, so it’s gonna be a tough one.”
“Faded?” I rise slowly. “What do you mean? Faded after six months?”
“This ain’t no ordinary guy, okay? He’s something different.”
“What different?”
“Didn’t ask. Money was good. He’s one of the customers who pay for the roof over your goddamn head, so get your jacket and let’s go!”
“Fine, fine. Keep your panties on.” I swallow the last of the beer and hurl the bottle into the fireplace. It smashes, and the flames leap for a second.
“You’ll be cleaning that up,” warns Hindley.
“Sure.” I grab my jacket off a peg in the hall and follow him outside, hunching down under the pelting rain. The truck door creaks loudly as I pull it shut, and the engine coughs as Hindley tries to start it. I want to ask why Hindley doesn’t buy a new truck, if our clients pay so well. But I know where the money goes—trips to Vegas, online gambling, whiskey poured down his throat, and coke sniffed up his nose. There’s a whole bunch of ways to make yourself poor real quick, and Hindley’s an expert at all of them.
“How far away is this guy we’re supposed to raise?” I ask over the roar of the motor as the truck finally starts.
“Hour and a half. Then we go by boat.” Hindley clears his throat. “He’s on the island. At the old Lockwood mansion.”
“Why is a client of yours at the Lockwood mansion? And why the fuck is he lying dead there?”
“He’s a friend of the guy who bought the house off the family a while back. As for how he died, you know that’s none of our business. We do the job. That’s it. We ain’t detectives.”
He’s getting too riled, so I switch to a safer question. “How long has he been dead?”
“Couple of hours, maybe? I was busy. Didn’t feel my tattoo buzzing until now.”
“Shit, Hindley. You were high, weren’t you?”
“Shut up.” His hand flies before I can stop it, cuffing the side of my face. “You may be drinkin’ age now, but I can still whup you, got it?”
“Whatever you say,” I mutter, glaring out my window. A dull pain blooms through my cheekbone. He knows I’m stronger than him. Always have been. He also knows I don’t fight back. He thinks that’s weakness, but I tell myself it’s power. It’s a mercy I don’t cave his face in with a single punch.
I’m unnaturally strong. I’ve learned to manage it, but if I ever give in completely to my rage, I might kill him. And staining my soul with Hindley’s toxic blood isn’t something I want to do. So I’ve always let him use me as a punching bag, ever since we were kids. It’s a habit now. Uncomfortable…but hell, I’m used to it.
“Any idea what state the body’s in?” I ask.
“Could be bad.” He sniffs, rubs a hand across his eyes, and peers through the streaming windshield and the swishing wipers.
Hindley is one of the last of the Charleston Lockwoods—one branch of a once-sprawling family tree, gifted with the power to drag souls out of the grave and put them back in their bodies. The gift has deteriorated with each passing generation. Now it’s so weak, he can barely manage to perform basic necromancy on his own. He can serve as a tether, carrying one half of the matching tattoo that links him to the person being raised, but he needs an external power source to complete the task. A generator, as it were, to give him extra juice. The generator—that would be me.
I was never asked if I wanted to join the Lockwood family. Like most things in my life, shit just happened to me. Hindley’s dad, Buckland, told me he was at some mountain gas stop in Tennessee when he saw me, a dirt-stained boy of five or six, crouching over a mangled dog that some truck had just smashed into pulp. I had my hands on the corpse, eyes closed, blood dripping from a bite on my hand, self-inflicted. A few minutes later, the mutt got up, good as new and perfectly healed, and started bounding around me.
“I didn’t ask who you belonged to,” Buckland used to say. “I knew whoever let you run loose on your own that young, so close to the road, was too damn careless and deserved to lose you. With a gift like yours, you belonged to us.” Then he’d ruffle my hair and laugh as though he’d done me some great favor by kidnapping me.
I didn’t understand that it was kidnapping until I was maybe eleven. At that point I thought about telling the police, but the cops in this neck of the woods have got clay for brains and red brick for hearts, and I figured they wouldn’t much care. Besides, I had a roof over my head and work to do, which is more than some folks get. Plus, if I told someone about the kidnapping, the Lockwoods might tell the authorities about my abilities, and that could only lead me into way deeper shit. So I kept my mouth shut.
But as Hindley drives us toward the coast, I let myself wonder what my other life might have been like. Different family, different business. A mom, maybe. Siblings I might have actually liked. Christmases that didn’t involve drunken brawls among Hindley, Buckland, and the cousins from Coosaw. Birthdays with actual presents and a cake, instead of me sitting in my closet, hiding from Hindley so he couldn’t give me more bruises.
Imagining another life is a fool’s pastime, though. Who’s to know if it would have been any better? People suck no matter where you live.
When we get to the marina, we rent a boat and head for the island. The rain has slacked off, and there’s a sickly yellow dawn leaking from under the bellies of the thick, gray clouds as we skim over the surface.
“Smell that?” Hindley sniffs the air.
“Smoke.”
“Whoever killed him burned the place afterward. Probably thought it would get rid of the body.”
“Wouldn’t it?”
He shakes his head. “Normal bodies, sure. Not our guy. His tattoo links him to a Lockwood, and the house knows it. It’ll keep him intact…mostly. Gonna be tough to bring him back in prime condition, though. You good for it?”
“Am I allowed to say no?”
Hindley cuts me a glance, keen as a hunting knife. “Nope.”
“I didn’t think so.”
My help on these missions is never a question, always an expectation. And my well-being afterward—that’s of little concern to Hindley as long as I recover quickly enough to be ready for the next resurrection, whenever that comes.
The Lockwood mansion rears up, solemn and eternal, from the crest of the island as we pull up to the dock. A couple small boats are already there, bobbing on the choppy waves. The bittersweet smoke of charred wood hangs in the air, but there’s not a flake of ash on the sloping lawn or on the porch.
I try the door. Locked. But when Hindley touches the handle, it opens easily.
“Thought you said this place was sold,” I comment as Hindley leads the way inside.
“You can’t truly sell a house like this. Sure, we sold it on paper, but like I said—the place knows Lockwood blood. Shit…there he is.”
The body lies near a sofa that looks like it’s seen at least a century. In fact, all the furnishings in the place are super old.
“It resets to its original condition every time it gets destroyed,” Hindley says. “Everything goes back exactly like it was on the day it was first spelled.”
I’ve heard the Lockwood family discuss this place before, though they’ve never explained its origins. As much as I want to ask Hindley more questions about it, I know better. All I’ll get for my trouble is another slap, and I’m gonna be in enough pain soon, judging by the state of the corpse.
Once, a couple years ago, I hit Hindley back. I thought I’d won the fight, too, until I woke up in the middle of the night with the muzzle of his favorite revolver jammed into the soft tissue under my jaw.
“We got a good thing going here, Heathcliff,” he said hoarsely, his face hovering near mine in the darkness of my bedroom. “You and me—we’re sym-by-tick, you might say.”
“Symbiotic,” I whispered.
“Shut up. You sass your mouth at me one more time—raise your hand to me once more—and you’ll be out on your ass. You won’t have a pot to piss in, and I’ll send the cops one of them nonny-muss letters, telling them all about your powers. They’ll catch you and lock you in a lab somewhere, if I don’t kill you myself first.”
I could have fought him then. But I knew an all-out fight with Hindley would end with one of us dead, and I wasn’t ready to go that far. Not without a plan and some cash to carry me far away. So I yielded, and I waited.
Since then I’ve been waiting, saving, drinking. Dying.
Hindley snaps his fingers in front of my face. “What’s wrong with you? Let’s do this.”
I shake myself a little. “Yeah. Where’s his tattoo?”
“On his hip.”
Hindley kneels beside the corpse. All the hair and most of the skin are burned off, and everything’s crispy black and raw red, but I can see the bullet hole in his skull. Somebody shot him and then burned him. The house kept him mostly intact, like Hindley said, but it let the flames chew at him, making my job harder.
With the help of a relative, like one of the Coosaw Lockwoods, Hindley could probably manage to drag this guy’s soul back out of the Vague. But the client would wake up in a disintegrating body. We’re talking the worst kind of zombie-revenant shit—organs barely functional, skin sloughing off, a body so desperate for nutrients that its natural hunger morphs into something way worse.
That’s where I come in. I don’t just bring people back from the dead—I can restore the bodies to like-new condition. The Lockwoods used to have that gift too, way back, but it’s faded over the generations. Which is why Buckland felt like he’d struck gold when he found me.
Hindley may hold the tattoos for all our clients, but I’m his meal ticket. Without me, he’d have a fuck-ton of dissatisfied customers, and he’d never get the juicy post-resurrection payout that’s included in every contract.
Much as I hate it, Hindley’s right—he and I depend on each other to survive. The brewery does a half-decent business, considering we both suck at marketing, but the way Hindley spends money on stupid shit, there’s no way we could live on that income alone.
Steeling myself, I kneel beside Hindley. He drags down the remnants of the guy’s pants at the hip, and the fabric pretty much disintegrates into ash, exposing a swath of discolored skin and a tattoo of a cross-shaped Celtic knot, smudged-looking but still distinguishable.
Hindley yanks his hunting knife out of its sheath on his belt. He’s a big hunter, Hindley. Hunts for the hell of it, and most of the meat goes to waste. Me, I’m damn good with a gun, better than he knows, but I don’t hunt. I’m a meat-eater, sure, but I can’t stomach killing things myself.
After carving a thin line in the top of his forearm, Heathcliff dampens his fingers with the blood, then lifts his shirt and claps one hand over a tattoo on his ribs. He places his other hand over the dead man’s tattoo. The twin marks will serve as his guide, allowing him to locate this guy’s soul in the Vague and pull it back into the body.
The dead guy’s tattoo starts to glow red, the light leaking between Hindley’s fingers.
“You ready?” he asks.
I nod, angling my body so I can place one hand over each of his.
This is gonna hurt. It always hurts worse when someone else is siphoning my power through themselves. When I’m performing a resurrection on my own, it’s better. Not that I’ve had the chance to do it on my own very often. The Lockwoods don’t usually trust me with the names or tattoos of their clients.
I don’t remember when I first learned to perform a resurrection. But I must have known something before I came to the Lockwoods, because I healed and resurrected that piece of roadkill. Animals are easier to revive. They’re part of nature, so there’s no need for a tattoo or a link of any kind. I can just pull some energy from the nature around me, condense it, and put it into the animal while I’m reviving it. Simple. Sure, a few plants might die—maybe a tree or a bush, but the toll isn’t too high.
People are not animals…not exactly. They have immortal, individual souls. As much as I wish that weren’t true, there’s no way around it. I don’t like to think about what that means, afterlife-wise. All I know is, you gotta have a link of some kind to the person you’re trying to resurrect—like an address to where the soul’s located.
I’ve been into the Vague a few times. It’s confusing, but not as scary as some might think. The tattoo’s like a line, leading me to the soul I need, and as long as I follow it, I’ll find the right person. Then I just have to reel ’em in, like a fisherman reeling in his catch. Problem is, the longer you wait, the farther away the soul gets, until eventually the line dissolves and you can’t find them at all.
This time, I won’t be going into the Vague myself. My job is to give Hindley the fuel he needs to do this. It’s his consciousness heading into that other place.
“Mors aperit ianuam,” mutters Hindley, butchering the pronunciation as usual…and he closes his eyes.
A raw, choking, mind-numbing pain rushes through my body as Hindley sucks power out of me and into himself. It feels like having my heart vacuumed right out of my chest cavity, like having every vein and nerve ending zapped with electricity all at once. Worst thing I’ve ever endured.
“Shit-bag’s already way out there in the Vague,” Hindley mutters. “These fuckers never make it easy. Once I grab him, you do your thing.”
I clench my teeth and hiss through the pain. That’s the only acknowledgment he’s going to get.
The inside of my nose is burning unbearably, crinkling like it’s being singed with flames, sending hot spikes of pain up into my sinuses. The sensation of my heart being compacted and suctioned through my ribs increases until I can’t stay quiet. A groan grates through my clamped jaws.
“Shut up,” snaps Hindley. “I’ve almost got him.”
A white flash of pain blots out my vision, blazes in my brain like a searing supernova. “Oh fuck,” I gasp. “Fuck, I can’t…”
“Don’t you dare let go!” Hindley barks. “I got him. I got him. Once we reset this guy, that’s a nice fat payout. You’ll get your cut, too.”
The agony I’m enduring isn’t worth a measly ten percent. There’s a slick metal taste coating my tongue, acidic bile inching up my throat, shudders wracking my body. Wrong, wrong, something is wrong . This isn’t normal, isn’t right. This one shouldn’t be allowed to come back…
“He’s back in the body,” shouts Hindley. “Do it, Heathcliff.”
I can feel the shape of the soul now. In my mind, it’s an oily thing with needlelike claws and a hissing maw, clinging desperately to the inside of the body. There’s something real messed-up about this one.
“Not sure about him, Hindley,” I protest. “Feels wrong this time.”
“Set him right, or I swear I’ll cut off your balls and serve ’em to you with sauce on a pile of fucking spaghetti!”
Don’t do it. This is wrong, wrong, wrong…
But I have spent years telling that voice inside me to shut the hell up. Years working for the family that calls me theirs, doing what they want. When Hindley yells at me again, I silence my inner voice, and I obey.
I bend my will to the job. I heal the charred flesh, repair the organs, recreate the torn skin. The drain on my energy is enormous, a flood of power gushing from my body into the corpse of the client. A roar of sheer anguish bursts out of me as my own vitality feeds into the damaged body. Makes it whole.
When it’s done, I can barely see. Blurred vision happens sometimes, especially with the worst cases. Should clear up in a bit. I peel my clammy, shaking hands away from Hindley’s, and I collapse onto the floor.
It’ll take hours for my energy to return to normal levels. But at least I’m conscious. Sometimes I pass out.
I lie there for a while, waiting for my vision to clear, listening to the ticking of the grandfather clock. Hindley starts pacing the room, muttering.
As the pain-fog lifts from my brain, I start to understand why he’s worried. Our guy should be up and talking by now.
Stiffly, I manage to sit up. The moment I do, Hindley lunges over and smacks me.
“The fuck?” I exclaim.
“You did it wrong,” he snaps. “The guy isn’t waking up.”
I blink at the body on the floor. The client looks good. There’s even a tinge of healthy color in his cheeks. But he’s still unconscious.
I run my tongue through my mouth, tasting the coppery essence of blood. “I did everything right.”
“He’s supposed to be awake, and he’s not . You know what a sleeping guy can’t do? He can’t pay what he fucking owes us!” Hindley kicks the sofa furiously, then yelps and grabs his foot, swearing again.
“I got nothing left, okay?” I rub my forehead. “He’ll wake up sometime. They all do. We just gotta be patient.”
“And what are we gonna do while we’re waiting on Sleeping Beauty to join us?” A vein in Hindley’s forehead bulges with rage.
“We could bring him back home, put him in the spare room, wait for him to come around.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“If he doesn’t…once I’ve recovered, I’ll take another look, see if I missed something. I can’t do anything else right now, man. It’ll kill me. I need food, then rest.”
Another thing about resurrecting corpses—leaves me with a hell of an appetite.
Hindley seems as if he might argue, but then he stares at me long and hard. I must look like shit because he grumbles something and then nods. “Fine. We take him back with us. But the second you got your energy back, I want him awake and paid up, got it?”
Slowly I climb to my feet, gripping the back of the sofa to steady myself. “Sure, boss. Whatever you say.”