Christopher Moore - Secondhand Souls

“Well, at least take this with you.” Charlie held out the cane. “It’s my sword cane.”

“We look like we need more weapons?”

“It was my soul vessel — where my soul went before Audrey put it into that little body. It might be good luck or something.”

“Didn’t you have this with you when you got killed?” the Mint One asked.

“Kind of.”

Minty took the cane from him and tucked it into his belt. “Thank you.”

“Give a brother a pound?” Charlie held out his fist to receive a pound. The Mint One left him hanging.

“Don’t do that,” said Minty.

“Sorry.” Charlie turned to Rivera, started to go in for a hug, which Rivera intercepted and turned into a handshake. “Something happens, you can have my suits,” he said.

“Nothing’s going to happen,” said Charlie.

Rivera smiled. “If you’re going to stay out here, tell anyone who comes up that we’re animal control and they should move along because of the chemicals.”

“What chemicals?”

“The dangerous imaginary ones,” he said. Rivera looked to Minty Fresh. “You ready?”

Rivera started for the doors, Minty Fresh followed, the bolt cutters in one hand, the shotgun in the other.

Minty Fresh said, “Are you absolutely sure you want to do this? Seems like maybe it would make more sense to call in a SWAT team or Special Forces.”

“That won’t work, isn’t Special Forces where everyone gets a hug?” Charlie called.

“That’s the Special Olympics,” Rivera said over his shoulder. To Minty he said, “How are you going to explain this, the Morrigan?”

“Just so we’re clear, then,” said the Mint One, “we’re only doing this because we want to avoid an awkward explanation to other police, right?”

Rivera paused. “No. We’re doing this because they murdered my partner and I don’t think they’re going to come along quietly if I try to arrest them. They’re going to come for us, eventually, and if we wait, it will be on their terms. Now is better.”

“You don’t never be lyin’,” said Minty Fresh. He stopped at the doors and leaned the shotgun against the concrete wall. “Do you smell something burning?

“Oh, hell,” said Rivera. He cringed and braced himself.

“AIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” called the banshee.

Minty Fresh dropped the bolt cutters, snatched up his shotgun, and brought the sight down on the sooty wraith.

“Don’t shoot her, don’t shoot her, don’t shoot her.” Rivera stepped away from the banshee and pushed down the barrel of Minty Fresh’s shotgun.

“What do you think you’re doing, ya ninny?” said the banshee. “Ya can’t go in there.”

“We have to,” said Rivera.

“I tried to warn your great fat friend, and ya know how that turned out. And the harpies are even stronger now than they were then.”

“I know. Thank you,” said Rivera. “But we have to do this.”

“Fine. I’ll nae sing at your funeral, you bloody loony.” The stun gun crackled in the air and she was gone.

“She thinks it’s a box of lightning,” Rivera explained. “She thinks it adds drama to her entrances and exits.”

“Right, ’cause what the bitch need is more drama.”

Because the Morrigan were goddesses of war, they were attracted to the sound of war drums. So when they first rose in the modern world, a pocket of the Underworld opened under the rumbling boom they followed. As it turned out, they had entered the world under a bowling alley, and it was there that they absorbed the dialect of English that they now spoke.

“This sucks,” said Babd. “I don’t know why we have to stay down here now.” She was reclining in the bucket of a skip-loader, methodically licking the last remnants of some Squirrel Person from her claws.

They were all strong, and lithe, and they shimmered in the dim light of the tunnel like swaths of starry night. Macha leaned against the tunnel wall and preened her breast with her claws, retracted to the length of a cat’s claws.

“We can go into the light,” said Nemain, who was crouched over a wolf spider, dripping venom from her talon as the creature tried to escape, then blocking its path with another sizzling drop as it bolted the other way. “What does Yama know?”

They had flown in their raven forms to the tunnel while it was still dark. Bloated with the power of new souls, moving again as shadows was beyond them, at least for a while.

“We could find the rest of the soul stealers,” said Babd. “Take their souls. Kill them.”

“Yama says if we go into the light we’ll attract the attention of humans,” said Nemain.

“I thought that was the point,” said Macha. “Have our names on their breath as they die. Have them cower when a raven passes over them.”

“Why can’t we just kill everybody?” said Babt, pouting.

An inhuman shriek sounded from the far end of the tunnel.

Nemain impaled the spider she’d been torturing with her talon and stood. “Did you hear that?”

Babd climbed out of the skip-loader basket, looked down the tunnel around the column of heavy machinery. “There’s too much light. Someone’s moving down there.”

“Snacks,” said Macha, grinning in anticipation, her fangs showing against her lower lips.

Something clattered against the wall on Macha’s left and fell at her feet, it looked like a green soup can. Another object rattled and bounced down the other side of the tractor and settled a few feet from Babd.

The flash bangs exploded. Deafening concussion. Blinding light. Babd was thrown back into the bucket of the skip-loader. Macha staggered, spun, bouncing off the wall, her arms up by her ears as she willed them not to turn into wings to flee—not in the tunnel.

Babd shrieked, her most ferocious battle cry, the call that had made warriors soil themselves and cower in terror on the battlefield as their enemies harvested their heads. She was answered with a flash and a shot and her left arm was shredded. Another shot, her foot blown out from under her.

“You fuckers!” Her scream resonated in the metal of the machines.

On the opposite side of the tunnel Macha fell into a crouch, having deduced where the attack was coming from. A light and a red dot panned up the side of the tunnel, settled on her as she dove and the projectiles took her full in the side, rolling her over in the air to land against the bucket of the skip-loader.

Nemain fell between the unused train tracks. Light and lasers and explosive fire were blazing down either side of the tractor in front of her. She watched as parts of her sisters were shaken and shredded with impact. Flares smelling of sulfur came bouncing down the tunnel and projected shadows of her sisters’ torment across the ceiling. She scuttled forward under the tractor, rolled onto her back, pulled herself up onto the driveshaft, and hung there, perhaps a foot off the ground, as the conflagration raged on either side of her. Fear was foreign to her—in a thousand years on and over the battlefields of the North she’d never had to defend herself. It was war, someone was going to die and she was Death; it had always been win-win.

The roar of gunfire paused. Human footfalls, the hiss of the burning flares, a mechanical clicking noise. Light beams bouncing in the sulfur smoke.

“Anything?” A man’s voice.

“Something on my side headed away—further down the tunnel.”

“One here, too. The tunnel is walled up at the other end, heavy wooden slats, into Fort Mason parking lot. Reloading.” Click. Click. Click.

Then she saw them, human legs moving up the tunnel, one man on either side of her, the one on her right closer. Take down one and then make a dash after Macha and Babd.