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Chapter 1
Creepy Mabel
They call me Creepy Mabel.
I’m such an awful sight.
And if you’re acting naughty,
you will not last the night.
Ten steps to the stairs. Twenty to the door.
Three to the corpse on the concrete floor.
I grin as I sway back and forth to the music of Mardi Gras coming from the streets outside. It’s party night again here in the city. People in funny masks dancing and laughing everywhere you go.
I like to laugh.
I don’t wear a mask.
Well, besides the other, but then, she would say that about me.
I’m no mask.
The corpse gurgles.
I stop swaying. I bend at the waist, my hands clasped behind my back like the teachers used to do when they were getting our attention as we played on the floor in preschool. They weren’t fun, though. They talked like we weren’t both there. They made us sit at a table and smile pretty.
They didn’t like it when I made the bad principal scream.
I cock my head to the side, sending my dark hair swaying. He’s an interesting corpse, in a way. Well, an interesting not-yet corpse, but that part will happen soon. He carried a special keychain, for one. All twisty and shiny like brass. And he has freckles on his cheek that form the shape of the other’s favorite constellation, Libra. His brown hair was made of boingy curls before his blood turned them into a mop, and he has three earrings in his left ear and none in his right. Tattoos of roses cover his left arm, but there’s only plain tan skin on the other. Keeping the sides of himself apart, maybe.
Silly.
But in every other respect, he’s the same as any other soon-to-be corpse. He has keys for a rental car on his twisty little keychain. He stayed in a hotel that takes cash, not card. He knew what he wanted, and he’d had a plan—to find somebody at the party, have fun in his special way, and then return to his life of boingy curls and triple earrings, where maybe he’d get a brand-new tattoo.
And same as every time before, he thought no one would ever know a thing.
But I knew. I saw him in the alley. I heard the scream past the music, past the party, and I heard the struggles and the cries. Figures twisted around him, ghostly and half lost to the dark, wailing in voices no one else could hear. They sobbed because they were his roses, each as unable to stop him in death as they had been in life.
But that’s why they have me.
I am the vengeance and I am the blood, the one to whom dead souls cry.
I am the one who lives in the dark, born to set the wrong things right.
Slinking along the wall, lost in the shadows and the garbage and the stink, I stalked him and he never saw me coming. The dead did. The dead always do. Not all the dead are tied to those who killed them, but sometimes they linger out of pain or rage or because they’re trapped until justice can be done. Their wails grew louder at the sight of me, begging me to act, begging me to stop him from adding her to their number.
The other tries to give them a different kind of vengeance. She calls police and talks to lawyers. She seeks justice from the living on behalf of the dead.
I am not as patient as her.
I act now.
When I rose up behind him, the one he’d made his prey spotted me first. She was pressed to the brick wall, her cheek bloody from where he’d hit her. The horror in her eyes when she saw me was unavoidable.
His horror was candy.
