But it was a distraction. “Ain’t the tie as worries me,” Andy said. “It’s you wearing a dead man’s boots.”
“You’re welcome to try to take them,” Lyons said. There was that smile again, warm and deceptive and deadly. “Can’t promise you’ll be the same afterward, though. Once you touch them, you’ll have to have them. I killed a man for them. Wore them walking away from his corpse, still warm from his feet. They change you. They give you everything you want.”
“They burn you black inside,” Andy responded. He didn’t seem afraid, or angry. He just studied Lyons now with what I could only think of as pity. “Ain’t nothing of you left in there, Mr. Lyons. So what’s your plan? Drive out the witches, kill what resists like you did Portia, then claim this city for your own?”
“City?” Lyons’s smile didn’t falter. “Thinking too small, son. Austin’s just some provincial little cow town. I’m taking the state. Then I’ll take the country. Wait until you see what’s coming, Andy. Just you wait.”
He drained the tea and put the glass down, then offered his hand for a shake. I stood up and retreated, well out of range. Lyons made the same gesture to Andy and got the same response. “Well, then,” he said. “Guess we all know what’s what. Thank you kindly for the tea.”
“Get out,” I said flatly.
He didn’t object, and he didn’t linger. He walked straight to the door, opened it, and stepped outside. He gestured toward the people on the sidewalk—a peculiar little circular gesture—and as if he’d flipped a switch, they all stopped staring at our house, began chatting amiably with one another, and headed toward their assorted vehicles.
“Tell you what,” he said, turning to face Andy and me. “If you two pack your things and leave town within twenty-four hours, I’ll be generous and let you live. If you don’t, I’m going to have to kill you both in a very bad way. Then I’ll bring you back to serve me in the next phase of my plans.” He tapped his fingers to his forehead in a mock salute. “Good talk. See you soon, ma’am. Andy.”
I couldn’t stand that smile anymore. I kicked the door shut with a boom that must have shaken glass throughout the house, locked it, and leaned against it as my whole body started to tremble.
“Andy?” I gulped for air, trying to calm myself. “Andy, what are we going to do?”
And in that moment, when everything could have fallen apart, Andy said without a quaver, “We burn him down and salt his earth. Because that’s what needs doing.”
The ground seemed to steady under my feet. My shaking went away. I hugged him, and he hugged me back, and the magic between us—the magic that kept him here, held him in this time, in that reconstructed body—it felt strong as steel. It was love that powered Andy Toland. It was the exact polar opposite of what powered Pete Lyons.
Andy had a way of making things clear. Clear and simple. Not easy, never easy, but clear.
“How do we go about that, exactly?” I asked.
“We’re about to find out,” he said. He went to the window and peered through the curtains. The protesters had already vacated the street, and Pete Lyons was pulling away in his black Cadillac SUV, just as a courier van cruised to a halt in front of our mailbox. The uniformed driver got out and trotted up the walk with a small package and a clipboard.
Andy opened the door, signed, and accepted the package, and the driver left in under fifteen seconds, heading for his next delivery.
Inside the envelope was a small glass bottle. In the bottle was a scraping of skin.
Portia’s skin. Ed Rosen had come through.
“Let’s get to work,” Andy said.
—
Making the shell for a resurrection was a brutal process, requiring a ton of supplies, space, time, and energy. Like cloning, I would suppose, only vastly accelerated. The difference was that the body created was not alive; it was a simulacrum. Everything was in place, held in stasis for the moment that the spark of life entered it.
It also wasn’t something that I could do, or even help to do. So I left Andy in his private workshop, surrounded by supplies, his long steel table in the center, and went to take my mind off my worries.
I cleaned. Any spot that Pete Lyons had touched, I used a cleansing potion on it, brewed of rosemary and sage and witch hazel, activated with my own sweat and brewed with a spell. As I scrubbed, I saw the faint black stain of his presence become visible and then fade away.
The iced tea glass was a total loss, though. I handled it with rubber gloves, put it in a paper bag, smashed it to pieces, and then buried it deep in the backyard. It would kill the grass around it, almost certainly, but that couldn’t be helped. The sugar bowl suffered the same fate. I soaked the spoon in the potion and then buried that, too. The good, clean earth would absorb the darkness, eventually; earth magic was slow, but it was powerful.