Suzanne Johnson - Elysian Fields

“Some days are better than others.” He retrieved his bag from where he’d set it on the floor inside the front door. “How ’bout you?”

I could think of Tish some days without crying now, and could remember more good times than bad. “Yeah, same here.”

“I brought dinner. Just caught these yesterday.” He led me into the kitchen and pulled a big plastic bucket out of the bag, along with a pile of old newspapers. In the bucket was a mountain of shrimp and new potatoes, both boiled with enough cayenne to clear out my sinuses for a month.

He spread the newspaper on the kitchen table and dumped the shrimp and potatoes out on it. “Is this a social call, babe, or you come up with some crazy shit for us to do?”

I pulled a couple of beers out of the fridge and set them on the counter. “Hey— the power share thing was crazy but you’ve gotta admit it was fun.”

“Yeah, you right.” He grinned, reminding me how it had felt to be in his head while he swam through the marshy waters near the mouth of the Mississippi River. “It was nuts. Want to try it again?”

“No way.” We settled in at the table and began eating the shrimp and potatoes with our hands. “But I do have another adventure you might find interesting.”

“I knew most of that,” he said after I’d filled him in on the Axeman case. He pulled the tail off a fat shrimp and popped it in his mouth. “The pirate’s been staying in the Beyond trying to find the killer, but he ain’t showed up. So Jean Lafitte thinks he’s in N’Orleans most of the time now. Jean, he’s still nosing around trying to find out what wizard is pulling the strings.”

Rene and Jean had been business partners for quite a while now, so it made sense he’d be keeping up.

I washed down a red-hot potato with my beer. “I’d hoped Jean had found something. When you see him, ask him if he can figure out why I’d be the target.” I shared the information about the numbers at the crime scene, and the Axeman’s arrival at my house. “You notice I don’t have any furniture in my living room? He broke it all.”

“So, what’re we doing tonight, babe? Furniture shopping or huntin’ down the Axeman?”

“Neither.” I smiled. Rene liked anything that might lead to a good fistfight, and he was surprisingly open- minded for a mer. As a species, they tended to be surly and pigheaded. “We’re going to summon the Axeman. Bring him to us.”

Rene frowned and scratched at his goatee. “And why would we want to do that, exactly?”

“If I can get him contained in my circle, I might be able to force him to tell me the name of the wizard that’s controlling him.” Chances were, the Axeman didn’t like being controlled any more than Jean Lafitte would, so I hoped he wouldn’t resist.

Rene shook his head, but his mouth tipped up at the edges a few seconds before he started laughing. “You are one crazy chick. What you need me to do?”

“Provide moral support.” We put away the plates and walked toward the stairs to the second floor. “Maybe kill him if he escapes the circle.” Kill being a relative term when it came to the historical undead.

Rene followed me up the narrow staircase. “I can do that.”

Only the strongest circle for this one. While Rene lounged on the sofa and did dramatic readings from a book on merpeople lore, I gathered iron shavings, unrefined sea salt, and ash, and carefully filled in the etched circles. Red candles for strength and gold for power rested at the four compass points.

Also around the circle I placed items associated with the killer. The ax he’d left in my house after ransacking the living room. A photocopy of a letter the Axeman had allegedly sent to the Times-Picayune in 1919.

Esteemed mortal, it began, They have never caught me and they never will. They have never seen me, for I am invisible, even as the ether that surrounds your earth. I am not a human being, but a spirit and a demon from the hottest hell. I am what you Orleanians and your foolish police call the Axeman.

It went on and on in that vein. I shook my head. You couldn’t make up stuff like this.

To my collection, I added a photo of one of the 1919 murder sites, a house on the Westbank of the Mississippi River. And, finally, Alex’s graphic novel about the infamous Axeman of New Orleans.

Since I couldn’t use a real summoning name to force him into being truthful, I placed two rubies inside the circle on which I’d worked a truth-inducement charm.

I laid the silver ritual knife on the worktable in my library and looked at my setup. It just needed a little of my blood as a summoning medium, and I’d be good to go. I’d have to decide whether to use my own physical magic to fuel the ritual or mix my magic with that of the elven staff.

I turned to Rene. “You ready?”

He laid the book aside and walked around the circle to study what I’d done. “Where do you need me?”

“Anywhere as long as it’s not close enough to accidentally break the plane of the circle. If he gets out, we have to catch him.”

Rene hopped on my big worktable, dangling his legs off the side. “This is as close as I’m gettin’, babe. Unless I need this.” He pulled a pistol from inside his shirt, released the safety, and laid it on the table beside him.

“Let’s hope you don’t need it.”

I knelt next to the circle and cut yet another finger. At least I didn’t have to worry about scars from cutting the same finger over and over. Thanks to the freaking loup-garou virus, I was healing everything in a few hours. Rene had sensed it in me almost immediately but had promised to keep his mouth shut, and I trusted him.

Once the blood hit the circle, I closed my eyes and called on the Axeman to come forth.

“Holy shit.”

I opened my eyes at Rene’s soft curse and stared at the Axeman of New Orleans. He had been in the Beyond; we’d lucked out.

He was well over six feet, and broad. His black suit coat had wide lapels and reached to his thighs. A black fedora cast a shadow over his eyes, but they had no light in them, no life. They weren’t the eyes of a dead man; they were the eyes of a monster.

He took off the hat and gave a slight bow, revealing dark hair slicked straight back from his forehead. “Greetings, esteemed wizard. I was most distressed to have missed you last eve ning.”

I just bet he was. “Why are you trying to kill me?”

He grinned at me. His teeth were crooked and yellowishblack. Serial killers in 1918 couldn’t afford dental care, apparently. “I am not trying to kill you.”

“You have to answer me truthfully. The stones bind you to the truth.”

He looked down at the rubies and kicked one of them with the toe of a dainty-looking button-top shoe. It bounced against the invisible plane of the circle and landed on the wooden floor with a clatter. “I spoke the truth.”

Interrogating an uncooperative prete was a thankless task.

Rene jumped off the table and came to stand beside me. “Why are you trying to attack her?”

The Axeman examined his new questioner with great interest. “You are not human or wizard. What are you?” “I’m the guy who’s going to kick your ass if you don’t answer my question.”

I bit my lip to keep from smiling. I knew there was a reason I liked Rene. He couldn’t kick the Axeman’s ass and he knew it. But it didn’t keep him from antagonizing the guy. And if called upon to do so, he’d try to kick the guy’s ass until he couldn’t kick any longer.

“I have been ordered to attack this one, perhaps to kill, but I don’t know why. Ours not to reason why; ours but to do or die.” He treated me to another big, grotesque grin. Great. We had an undead serial killer quoting Tennyson.