Walking Dead

“What did you do to your hair?”

Self-conscious wasn’t a look I was accustomed to seeing on Captain Michael Morrison. He touched his head, then glowered at me. “What’d you do to yours?” “It’s a wig!”

At a loss for moral high ground wasn’t a look I was used to seeing on him, either. “It’s temporary,” he muttered.

I laughed, and, without thinking, slid my fingers through the tidy brown cut. It wasn’t a bad color. I just thought of the silver hair and the damn blue eyes as part and parcel of Morrison’s aging-superhero look. Changing the hair made him look younger and more human. “You’ve even got stubble.” Stubble no more belonged in Morrison’s universe than, say, animistic-based shamanic magic did. It didn’t stop either of those things from being in his universe, but they didn’t belong. “Look at you, Morrison.”

Instead, he looked at me, which made me notice I still had my fingers in his hair.

I said, “Shit,” and pulled my hand back, focusing on his shoulder while I tried not to blush. It didn’t work, and the best I could do was hope nobody called me on it. Hoping nobody’d noticed I’d been feeling up Morrison’s head was asking too much. “Sorry. Is, uh, is that the color it used to be?”

“It was blond.”

“Really?” Silver-shot suited him, and I couldn’t imagine him with anything else. Even seeing it, I couldn’t quite imagine it.

“Really,” he said with a hint of amusement, then helped me get my footing back by saying, “Look at you, Detective.”

I regained enough equanimity to give him a severe look. “I’m a princess warrior. You’re the detective here, Captain.”

“I’m in disguise,” he told me. “You’re not supposed to call me captain.” He hesitated a moment, looking a couple inches up at me. My boots were heeled, giving me a rare height advantage. Unshod, Morrison and I were the same height down to the half inch, and I’d been known to wear heels just for the satisfaction of looking down on him. Not recently, though, so finding myself taller than he was disconcerting.

He let his hesitation out in a breath, said, “Looks like a good party, Walker. Thanks for inviting me,” and reached past me to accept a drink from somebody.

I stayed where I was a few seconds too long, convinced he’d been going to say something else entirely and still waiting for him to say it. Morrison, and the party, moved on, leaving me wondering just what it was I’d thought he’d been going to say, and what I thought I’d have said in return. Not that long ago Morrison and I had had a wholly antagonistic relationship. Like everything else in my life, it’d gotten more complicated lately.

No, that wasn’t true. We’d drawn some lines in the sand, the captain and I, that was all. I, had drawn a line in the sand. I’d taken a promotion to detective instead of taking a chance on something else entirely, and Morrison respected the decision I’d made. Which meant whatever it was I thought he’d been going to say, he wouldn’t have, and I needed to stop worrying about it.

I nodded, a too-visible acknowledgment that I’d given myself a firm talking-to, and turned around to find all my friends looking as if there were many, many unspeakably interesting things going on in their minds, and as if they would all very much like to speak them. Even Thor had a hint of that look about him, and while picking up on subtle social clues wasn’t my strong point, I was pretty sure the guy who was more or less my boyfriend wasn’t supposed to look like that with regards to me having a conversation with another man.

He, however, was also the only one who put aside that gossipy look and offered me a hand. “I have it on pretty good authority you can dance.”

“I have it on better authority that I’m an embarrassment on the dance floor.” I put my hand into his anyway and he tugged me through the crowd to a space where the pressed bodies played against each other in more graceful rhythms. Music dominated that corner of the room, compliments of someone willing to play the parts of both Frankenstein’s monster and DJ at Phoebe’s party. It was her party; the fact that I’d invited half the police department and they’d showed up didn’t make it any less hers. I wouldn’t have known where to start in renting a hall or getting a caterer, but providing a significant portion of the guests defined me as co- host. The dance floor was a bit less crowded than the rest of the room, and I alternated between taking cues from Thor—I really wasn’t a very good dancer, but I could manage to follow a lead, at least some of the time—and watching the room.

People were having fun. At my party. I imagined telling my fifteen year old self that a dozen years later she’d be what she’d have called popular, back in the day, and knew she’d never believe me. I didn’t quite believe it myself. On the other hand, my plastic cup full of foamy pink stuff was gone, and having a cup of heavily spiked punch inside me made it easier to believe almost anything. I said, “Six impossible things before breakfast,” aloud, and when Thor crinkled his eyebrows at me, snorted. “I need another drink. Water this time. Oi.”

“The bar’s over by the dunk tank. Lead on, MacDuff.”

“That’s lay on,” I said, suddenly cheerful. A man who was into cars and misquoted Shakespeare was a good guy to be dating. I squirmed forward through the crowd.

Squishing through partygoers was good for my ego. People who could barely move in the crush did double takes and stepped back to admire the whole costume. I heard an “Ow!” and Thor’s innocent whistle, like he’d maybe prevented a wandering hand from copping a feel. Overprotective boyfriends should probably be scolded, but instead I grinned and looked back to thank him even as I kept pressing forward.

All of a sudden the crowd disappeared around me, sending me stumbling. Thor let go of my hand, which didn’t help at all, and I caught myself on the edge of a cauldron.

I said something clever like, “Buh?” and got a laugh for it, but I was genuinely surprised. I didn’t remember us ordering up a gigantic pot—and it was gigantic, coming halfway up my thigh and an easy four feet across at its bulge—but Phoebe stood on its other side, looking pleased with herself.

Nervous instinct made me glance around for a third witch. I’d spent a bit of time in a coven, and had absolutely no doubt of their goddess-granted earth power, but I didn’t have any particular need to hoe that row again, particularly at a party. To my relief, it appeared that it was just Phoebe, me and the cauldron at center stage. I knew I wasn’t a witch and I was pretty sure Phoebe wasn’t, so I straightened up and dusted my hands against my skirt, all take-charge and businesslike. The minor detail of not knowing what business made me stage-whisper, “Are we boiling somebody for dinner, then?” across the cauldron.

“Sure! Boil, boil, toil and trouble!”

Nobody ever got that line right. I muttered, “It’s ‘double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble,’” and the cauldron erupted.

My first thought, through the green smoke and the coughing and hacking, was that I really should’ve been allowed to complete the couplet and set the charm before anything exciting like an explosion happened. My second was to notice that the shrieks around me were turning to laughter, and my third was to notice I didn’t seem to be missing any body parts. In the grand scheme of things, that was good.

The undead rising gracefully from the cauldron were less good. There was something inhuman about the way they came up: smooth, effortless, as if they floated instead of climbed like normal human beings. They didn’t seem to be intent on flinging themselves at anyone in search of human flesh, but rather twined around one another, sensual in every move.

I didn’t especially like horror movies, but I was fairly certain your average zombie didn’t have abs of steel, or an ability to undulate the way the pair in the cauldron did. Zombies were more about body parts dropping off than rhythmic motions. I held off panic another few seconds, giving reality just enough time to set in.

Under the gray-green skin makeup and the extremely well-done painted-on innards rotting out, the couple in the cauldron were pretty much beautiful. The Sight swam into place, assuring me that nothing was untoward about their psychic presences, and swam out again, leaving me to see with normal eyes and grasp that the duo were, in fact, exotic-dancer gorgeous.

The music took a turn toward a spooky bump and grind, and they moved to it, nothing alarming in their dance, except that I was four inches away from pelvic thrusts. The pelvises in question moved higher, the dancers still rising toward the ceiling with inexplicable smoothness. I admired an especially nice pair of thighs before Phoebe lifted her hands to clap and hoot and sway along with the music.

As if she’d given the crowd permission, other people joined in, laughter turning to shouts and cheers of approval. A ripple effect went through the party hall, overhead lights shutting down while black lights and tiny,