Her eyes grew wide, and she reached out. I took her hand without thinking, and I felt her “die.” One minute she was in there and the next she was gone. What the hell?

My phone rang, and made me jump. “Blake here,” I said.

“Where are you?” It was Hudson.

“In the zombie’s room, Estrella’s room. She just went . . . dead. She’s gone. I don’t know what happened.”

“I just got a call from the hospital, Maximiliano is dead. He died of his wounds.”

“He couldn’t die of his wounds,” I said.

“I know.”

“Shit, I’ll check it out.”

“Make sure you have witnesses when you’re with the body, Blake. You have a personal connection, don’t give them room to blame you for this.”

“I haven’t done a damn thing.”

“Just be cautious, that’s all I’m saying.”

“Fine, I’ll keep a nurse or someone with me.”

“Make sure you do.” He hung up, and I went in search of our dead bad guy.

There was a nurse and a doctor with me. “One minute he was fine,” Nurse O’Reily said. “I stepped out of the room for just a minute and then his monitors sounded and he was dead.”

I put on a pair of surgical gloves. “I got a call that he’d died of his wounds, is that true?”

“He took three large-caliber rounds to the chest cavity, so yes, I’d say it’s a safe bet that they’ll list cause of death as gunshot,” Dr. Pendleton said, frowning at me.

“I need to check one thing on him.”

“What?” Pendleton asked.

“Magic,” I said, and used my gloved hands to slip the sleeve of his hospital gown away from his left upper arm. I expected the gris-gris to be gone, but it was still there. Estrella’s thick black hair was still woven tight around his arm. The colored hairs of his other victims were still there, too.

“It looks fine,” I said.

“I read the notes, and you thought that was helping him heal the bullet wounds.”

“Yes,” I said.

“The notes said it wasn’t to be removed under any circumstances, and none of us even touched it,” Nurse O’Reily said.

“You’d have to cut it off, and it’s whole,” I said.

“Did it just stop working for him?” she asked.

“I honestly don’t know, I’m not an expert on this type of charm.”

“I always hate the paperwork when magic gets in my hospital,” the doctor said.

“Magic complicates everything,” the nurse said.

“It can,” I said. I stripped off my gloves and started to put them in the wastebasket, and there on the floor was a longish white and gray hair. It was curly, and I was betting if I touched it, the texture would be coarse, because Manny’s hair was coarse, and white and gray.

“Motherfucker,” I whispered.

“Did you say something, Marshal?” the doctor asked.

I shook my head. “No, just muttering to myself.” I left the room. I did not try to pick up the hair. Maybe it wasn’t Manny’s. I mean, there were lots of other people whose dark hair was going gray and white. It didn’t have to be his, but he was the one who had said that maybe a man’s hair would undo the magic. Had he come down here? I didn’t know, and as I walked down the hospital corridor I decided I wasn’t going to ask him. Estrella was free. Max couldn’t hurt anyone else, ever again. Manny and his family, and me and mine, were safe from him, too. He wouldn’t be sending killer zombies after me the way his mother had. Maximiliano was not a loss to humanity; in fact we might be a few points ahead with him dead. So why did it bother me that Manny might have crept down here and done it? Did he look down at his grown son and wonder about what might have been, if he’d known and been a father to this one, too? Or had he only seen the man who tried to kill two of his children, and may have crippled one?

Epilogue

BY THE TIME of Connie’s wedding Tomas was on crutches, and able to walk himself down the aisle to stand with his new brother-in-law. Tomas spent most of the reception in the wheelchair Connie bullied him into, but everyone was alive and there for the wedding. That counted; that counted for a lot. No one came knocking on Manny’s door to ask about Maximiliano’s death. “It’s magic; who knows why it stops working?” seemed to be the general consensus.

But since he died of complications from the bullet wounds I finally got a full-blown Internal Affairs review just like Sergeant Hudson, who had been the other shooter. I’m barred from working with SWAT here in St. Louis until I get cleared. I think if Estrella the zombie had been “alive” to talk to they would have been more upset with me, but zombies have no rights under the law, so she couldn’t even be counted against me—legally. I’d seen these two IA detectives before and they weren’t fans of my working with SWAT. It’s made me value my fringe status with regular police procedures even more. Let’s hear it for orders of execution and being fucking assassins with badges. It makes shooting people amazingly simpler.

I’ve started using smaller blood sacrifices for raising zombies, so I haven’t gotten another one like Thomas Warrington, which is great. But even without a large blood sacrifice my zombies are getting better, more “alive.” Until Warrington, and the zombies that Max made, I wasn’t worried about my zombies being so good, but now I’m beginning to wonder what’s happening with my powers. How lifelike are my zombies going to get? I don’t have an answer, but I’m beginning to think I’m going to need one someday.