The wraith took a step back and grinned, revealing blue-black gums. “It’s what I do, love. Harbinger of doom, ain’t I?”
She took a deep breath as if to let loose with another scream and there was an electric sizzle as the stun gun’s electrodes found purchase through her tatters. She dropped to the floor like a pile of damp rags.
2
The Rumors of My Demise
You can’t just shag a nun one time then dine out on it for the rest of your life,” said Charlie Asher.
“You’re not exactly dining out,” said Audrey. She was thirty-five, pale and pretty, with a side-swoop of auburn hair and the sort of lean strength and length of limb that made you think she might do a lot of yoga. She did a lot of yoga. “You never leave the house.”
She loved Charlie, but in the year they’d been together, he’d changed.
She was sitting on an Oriental rug in what had been the dining room of the huge Victorian house that was now the Three Jewels Buddhist Center. Charlie stood nearby.
“That’s what I’m saying. I can’t go out like this. I need to have a life, make a difference.”
“You have made a difference. You saved the world. You defeated the forces of darkness in battle. You’re a winner.”
“I don’t feel like a winner; I’m fourteen inches tall, and when I walk, my dick drags in the dirt.”
“Sorry,” Audrey said. “It was an emergency.” She hung her head, pulled her knees up to her chin, and hid her face. He had changed. When she’d met him he’d been a sweet, handsome widower—a thin fellow who wore nice, secondhand suits and was desperately trying to figure out how to raise a six-year-old daughter on his own in a world gone very strange. Now he stood knee-high, had the head of a crocodile, the feet of a duck, and he wore a purple satin wizard’s robe under which was slung his ten-inch schlong.
“No, it’s fine, fine,” Charlie said. “It was a nice thought.”
“I thought you’d like it,” Audrey said.
“I know. And you did save me. I’m not trying to be ungrateful.” He attempted a reassuring smile, but his sixty-eight spiked teeth and glassy black eyes diluted the reassuring effect. He really missed having eyebrows to raise in a friendly way. He reached out to pat her arm, but the raptor talons that she’d given him for hands poked her and she pulled away. “It’s a very nice unit,” he added quickly. “It’s just, well, not very useful. Under different circumstances, I’m sure we’d both enjoy it.”
“I know, I feel like a bad genie.”
“Don’t tease, Audrey, it’s hard enough without imagining you dressed as a genie.”
They’d made love once, well, a few times, the night before he’d died, but after she’d resurrected his soul in this current body, which she’d built from spare parts and luncheon meat, they’d agreed that they would abstain from sex because it would be creepy—and because he lost consciousness whenever he got an erection—but mostly because it would be creepy.
“No, I mean I feel like you made a wish, and I granted it, but you forgot to specify the circumstances, so you were tricked.”
“When did I ever wish I had this?” He gestured to his dong, which unfurled out of his robe and plopped onto the rug.
“You were pretty delirious when you were dying. I mean, you didn’t explicitly ask for it, but you did go on about your regrets, most of which seemed to be about women you hadn’t had sex with. So I thought—”
“I’d been poisoned. I was dying.”
During his battle in the sewers below San Francisco with a trinity of ravenlike Celtic death goddesses called the Morrigan, one had raked him with her venomous claws, which eventually killed him.
“Well, I was improvising,” said Audrey. “I’d just had sex for the first time in twelve years, so I may have put a bit too much emphasis on the male parts. Overcompensated.”
“Like with your hair?”
“What’s wrong with my hair?” She patted her swoop of hair, which approximated the shape of Hokusai’s The Great Wave, and would have looked more in place on the runway of an avant-garde fashion show in Paris than it did anywhere in San Francisco, especially in a Buddhist center.
“Nothing’s wrong with it,” Charlie said. How had he blundered into talking about her hair? He was a beta male and he knew by instinct that there was no winning when it came to discussing a woman’s hair. No matter where on that path you started, you were bound to stumble into a trap. Sometimes he thought he might have lost a mental step or two in the transfer of his soul to this body, even if it had been done only moments after his death. “I love your hair,” he said, trying for the save. “But you’ve said yourself that you were sort of overcompensating for having your head shaved for twelve years in Tibet.”
“Maybe,” she said. She was going to have to let it go. For one thing, as a Buddhist nun, being vain and whiny about how her hair looked was a distinct regression in spiritual evolution; plus, she had trapped the man she loved in a tiny body she’d cobbled together from disparate animal parts and a good-sized block of turkey ham, and she felt responsible. This was not the first time they’d had this discussion, and she couldn’t bear to extricate herself from it using a weak, Kung Fu of the Disrespected Hairdo move. She sighed. “I don’t know how to get you into a proper body, Charlie.”
So there it was, the truth as she knew it, laid out on the carpet as limp and useless as—well—you know.
Charlie’s jaw (and there was a lot of it) dropped open. Before, she’d always said it might be complicated, difficult, but now . . . “When I started buying soul vessels from your and the other Death Merchants’ stores, putting them into the Squirrel People, I didn’t know how to do that either. I mean, I knew the ritual, but there was no text that said it would work. But it did. So maybe I can figure something out.”
She didn’t believe for a second she could figure it out. She’d moved souls from soul vessels into the meaty dolls she constructed, using the p’howa of forceful projection, thinking that she was saving them. And she’d used the p’howa of undying on six terminally ill old ladies, thinking she was saving their lives, when, in fact, she had simply slowed their deaths. She was a Buddhist nun who had been given the lost scrolls of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and she could do things that no on else on earth could do, but she couldn’t do what Charlie wanted her to.
“The problem is the body, isn’t it?” asked Charlie.
“Kind of. I mean, we know there are people out there walking around without souls, and that eventually a soul vessel will find them, they will find it, but what would happen to their personality if we forced your soul into someone, then they encounter their soul vessel?”