From Dead to Worse

thirty minutes after that, called the police.” That was a long speech for Dawson. Amelia went back to her preparations, and Octavia read a thin book that Amelia had extracted from her little backpack.
    “Have you ever watched one of these before?” Dawson said to me.
    “Yeah, in New Orleans. I gather this is kind of rare and hard to do. Amelia’s really good.”
    “She’s livin’ with you?”
    I nodded.
    “That’s what I heard,” he said. We were quiet for a moment. Dawson was proving to be a restful companion as well as a handy hunk of muscle.
    There was some gesturing, and there was some chanting, with Octavia following her onetime student. Octavia might never have done an ectoplasmic reconstruction, but the longer the ritual went on the more power reverberated in the small room, until my fingernails seemed to hum with it. Dawson didn’t exactly look frightened, but he was definitely on the alert as the pressure of the magic built. He uncrossed his arms and stood up straight, and I did, too.
    Though I knew what to expect, it was still startling to me when Maria-Star appeared in the room with us. Beside me, I felt Dawson jerk with surprise. Maria-Star was painting her toenails. Her long dark hair was gathered into a ponytail on top of her head. She was sitting on the carpet in front of the television, a sheet of newspaper spread carefully under her foot. The magically re-created image had the same watery look I’d seen in a previous reconstruction, when I’d observed my cousin Hadley during her last few hours on earth. Maria-Star wasn’t exactly in color. She was like an image filled with glistening gel. Because the apartment was no longer in the same order it had been when she’d sat in that spot, the effect was odd. She was sitting right in the middle of the overturned coffee table.
    We didn’t have long to wait. Maria-Star finished her toenails and sat watching the television set (now dark and dead) while she waited for them to dry. She did a few leg exercises while she waited. Then she gathered up the polish and the little spacers she’d had between her toes and folded the paper. She rose and went into the bathroom. Since the actual bathroom door was now half-closed, the watery Maria-Star had to walk through it. From our angle, Dawson and I couldn’t see inside, but Amelia, whose hands were extended in a kind of sustaining gesture, gave a little shrug as if to say Maria-Star was not doing anything important. Ectoplasmic peeing, maybe.
    In a few minutes, the young woman appeared again, this time in her nightgown. She went into the bedroom and turned back the bed. Suddenly, her head turned toward the door.
    It was like watching a pantomime. Clearly Maria-Star had heard a sound at her door, and the sound was unexpected. I didn’t know if she was hearing the doorbell, a knocking, or someone trying to pick the lock.
    Her alert posture turned to alarm, even panic. She went back into the living room and picked up her cell phone—we saw it appear when she touched it—and punched a couple of numbers. Calling someone on speed dial. But before the phone could even have rung on the other end, the door exploded inward and a man was on her, a half wolf, half man. He showed up because he was a living thing, but he was clearer when he was close to Maria-Star, the focus of the spell. He pinned Maria-Star to the floor and bit her deeply on her shoulder. Her mouth opened wide, and you could tell she was screaming and she was fighting like a Were, but he’d caught her totally by surprise and her arms were pinned down. Gleaming lines indicated blood running down from the bite.
    Dawson gripped my shoulder, a growl rising from his throat. I didn’t know if he was furious at the attack on Maria-Star, excited by the action and the impression of flowing blood, or all of the above.
    A second Were was right behind the first. He was in his human form. He had a knife in his right hand. He plunged it into Maria-Star’s torso, withdrew it, reared back, and plunged it in again. As the knife rose and fell, it cast blood drops on the walls. We could see the blood drops, so there must be ectoplasm (or whatever it really is) in blood, too.
    I hadn’t known the first man. This guy, I recognized. He was Cal Myers, a henchman of Furnan’s and a police detective on the Shreveport force.
    The blitz attack had taken only seconds. The moment Maria-Star was clearly mortally wounded, they were out the door, closing it behind