The Dead Withheld by L.D. Lewis

Author:L.D. Lewis [Lewis, L. D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781966503088
Publisher: Neon Hemlock

six

It had been years since she’d drawn the chalk seeing circle on her bedroom floor. The dolls had been gone all day, and it was time to check on them. The sun was down and the yellows, violets, and blues of San Guin’s neon night had returned.

Dizzy was perhaps less sober than she should have been as she muttered her runes. A more devout witch would have been in this circle all day, praying for guidance or clarity until her knees were cut to bleeding on the hardwood floors or the ghosts returned, whichever came first. But over the years she’d discovered her power worked the same whether she gave thanks for it with every breath or none at all. She preferred efficiency to humility.

She centered herself in the circle and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she was seeing through I’s eyes, watching a poker game through a dusty basement window. She checked the faces of every suited, drunken man present and found none of them were Tommy or any of the brujos she recognized. She closed her eyes again and reopened them inside II staring upskirt beneath the stairs of some side-street brothel. She groaned, and with a swipe of her hand, the doll’s body slammed into a wall.

Presumably, he’d gotten the point.

When she opened her eyes in III, she was in an alley, dark and barren but for a blue-white light over an otherwise unremarkable door in a brick wall. Nothing happened for nearly a full minute. She was about to jog his memory for him when none other than Tommy walked into her field of vision. He approached the door and something from his pocket. A key, perhaps. A high-pitched beep suggested a key card. He disappeared inside. III looked around for landmarks and Dizzy recognized a cluster of billboards off an adjacent street high overhead.

Excited, she closed her eyes again, and opened them in her own body just long enough to step outside the circle before she was swept off her feet, banged into her wall and held there by a ringed skeleton hand.

“Well, if it ain’t Dizzy ‘I Don’t Know When to Quit’ Carter,” said the undead witch, Uma. If deadwalkers had covens, Uma’d have been a High Priestess. She taught Dizzy everything she knew before dropping dead of a gunshot wound at a blackjack game about a decade ago. What was left of her skin stretched smooth over the bones of her face. There was still a little brown to it. The one indomitable mole once high on her cheek had migrated southward toward her neck but tattooed eyeliner still rimmed her white eyes. And she still knew how to dress. All things considered, the old girl looked good.

“Uma, darlin’, how are you?” Dizzy choked.

“Better than you from the smell of things, and I’m dead. What are you now? 70, 80% brown liquor?” Uma grinned, revealing one of her gold teeth was still intact.

“62?”

“And still so funny. Well I’ll tell ya Dizzy girl, I wish your comedy was why I’m here.

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