Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,43

had never started my feet skipping and hopping to the beat like I was dancing some kind of folk dance.

I couldn’t stop, but I still had enough control over my legs to dance around to face A’marie. Her cheeks bulging, she was puffing away on a set of panpipes, and her left hand was also holding a white handkerchief. I couldn’t see the spot of my blood on it, but I was pretty sure it was there.

I know what you’re thinking: For somebody who’s been telling you what a kick-ass poker player he was, I hadn’t done very well at picking up tells on A’marie. She’d conned me from the moment she claimed to have burned the handkerchief right up until a second ago, when the whistles had given her the chance to pull the pipes out of her coat without me seeing. What can I say? I liked her, I was so worried about Vic that I wasn’t thinking straight, and besides, people who want to set you up don’t generally hand you a loaded pistol.

Which I now pointed at her as best I could. Even with her hexing me, I didn’t know if I had it in me to shoot her. I hoped she’d back down so we wouldn’t have to find out.

She didn’t. She kept playing, and suddenly my arm bent. I aimed the gun at my temple.

That was when I remembered that for the past couple days, I’d had magic powers, too. I called for the Thunderbird, and there it was, instantly, in my eyes, anyway. I only wanted to get back control of my body, but the ward sent A’marie staggering backward, too, like someone had shoved her.

She was game, though. As soon as she caught her balance, she sucked in a breath to start playing again.

“Damn it, don’t!” I said. “I swear—”

Something boomed like an anti-aircraft gun. Startled, I turned my head, and an object slammed into me. The impact knocked me at least ten feet, and then I slammed down on the grass.

As I lay there stunned and hurting, I realized I was spattered with scraps of filth and chips of bone, with more littering the ground around me. After a second, they started floating up into the air, drifting toward a spot a couple paces away. I realized that A’marie had brought me to meet a living corpse like the Pharaoh, and the dude had smashed himself to pieces flying into me. But no big deal. He knew how to put himself back together.

I needed to pull myself together before he did. I tried to lift the gun and realized it wasn’t in my hand anymore. I rolled onto my hands and knees to look for it. That brought me nose to empty nose hole with A’marie’s next surprise.

And I do mean nose. He rushed me wrapped in a rotting-fish stink that made Timon’s funk seem like Chanel No. 5. His legs ended at the knees, and he swung himself on his stumps and hands like an ape or a man on crutches. The hands were deformed, too, with just two thick fingers each that made them look like crab claws. The fingers were mostly bare bone now, just like the skull with the bullet holes in it.

I threw the Thunderbird at him. It didn’t stop him. I’d burned through a lot of mojo helping Rufino, I was still half dazed, and this time the magic just didn’t take. The zombie, if that was the right word for him, plowed into me and grabbed me by the throat.

We rolled around the ground tangled together. Those claws were strong. I managed to break his stranglehold on my neck, but couldn’t shake him loose entirely. Partly because I was teary-eyed blind and gagging on his stink.

A bass voice with an Italian accent said, “That’s enough.” I turned my head to see the Model 439 pointed at me.

The zombie holding it looked like the Pharaoh might have looked if he’d let himself go. In other words, on the surface he was pretty much all mushy-looking rot. But you could see that he’d been a big, strapping guy when he was alive, with a big curved mustache that looked like fungus now.

He was too far away for me to make a grab for the automatic even if the crab guy hadn’t been holding onto me. I froze.

“You can let him up,” said the Italian zombie. I figured he was the same one who’d smacked into me,