The Reburialists Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  THE GRIMM AGENCY

  “What begins as a deceptively cutesy urban fantasy soon ups the ante with the gathering darkness and sharp details of the ongoing price of magical servitude. This is a fireball of a start to Nelson’s Grimm Agency series.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Nonstop action, an awesome cast of characters . . . an excellent opening to a new series!”

  —All Things Urban Fantasy

  “The plot moved quickly and the pacing was steady, keeping me well entertained, and the characters, specifically Marissa, were fantastic . . . A good read.”

  —A Book Obsession

  “There is a dark edge to this intriguing tale, lending a sense of gravity to the fantastic happenings taking place. Keep an eye on Nelson!”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “The twist on our world, on fairy tales, on society in general, is great fodder for some fantastic escapism . . . [Nelson] has obvious talent.”

  —Bookworm Blues

  “An exciting, action-packed debut that will have you up till the early morning and laughing out loud till your inside[s] hurt.”

  —Short & Sweet Reviews

  Ace Books by J. C. Nelson

  FREE AGENT

  ARMAGEDDON RULES

  WISH BOUND

  THE REBURIALISTS

  Specials

  SOUL INK

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  THE REBURIALISTS

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2016 by Jason Nelson.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  For more information, visit penguin.com.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-425-27819-2

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Ace mass-market edition / March 2016

  Cover art by Tony Mauro.

  Cover design by Danielle Abbiate.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Isaac

  Contents

  Praise for the Grimm Agency

  Ace Books by J. C. Nelson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not exist without the aid of a number of people who listened as I bounced my ideas off them, read drafts so raw they contained splinters, or helped me revise and polish until this became something I’m proud of. Thanks to the gang at CC. Laurel, Andy, John, Lexi, and Chris, I really appreciate your time.

  My agent, Pam Howell, remains a bundle of awesome. My editor, Leis Pederson, gave me great insights into how to make the story even better.

  And my family, who put up with me getting up early and going to bed late as I told yet another story. Thanks to you all.

  One

  BRYNNER

  Putting the dead in their graves was easy; keeping them there gave me a full-time job. A job that came with hazard pay, full medical coverage, and a life insurance policy that covered every form of death from being buried in a lost tomb to stung to death by scorpions. It didn’t cover getting stabbed on a fire escape by a jealous woman. So I climbed the fire escape of a hotel in Greece like the building was on fire (it wasn’t) and like my life depended on making it to the top (it probably did).

  Beneath me, my date from last night’s champagne ball cursed in Greek. The only part I understood for certain was my name, Brynner, and that her name was most definitely not Athena. Athena would be her sister, my date from the night before.

  I patted the knives sheathed on my hips and checked my messenger bag. Wallet? Check. Passport? Good. Cell phone? Thank God. Fresh pine branch, sharpened to a point? All the essentials. Not that any of those would help me against an angry woman or her sister.

  On the rooftop, I crouched behind two air conditioners. They rattled and labored against the summer night.

  “Brynner?” She insisted on mispronouncing my name. Briner is what you soak a ham in before you cook it. Brynner, like the grin I’d turned on her the night before, was mine. She looked over the edge of the far side. All I had to do was wait for her to climb down, and I could make a dash for the roof access door.

  My cell phone rang from inside my bag, like the worst-timed game of Marco Polo ever.

  She spun, zeroing in on the noise. “Brynner.” She circled the air conditioner to where I crouched, my shirt unbuttoned, the white bandages across my chest barely concealing fresh stitches.

  “Hi . . . Elena.”

  She pointed the knife at me, trembling with rage. We’d enjoyed a wonderful room-service breakfast until she answered the hotel door and had an awkward conversation with her sister. “What is my name?”

  My cell rang again, the emergency tone. I flipped it out with one hand and kept my eyes on Dimitra. Dina? Now that I thought about it, it wasn’t clear which of the two lovely embassy representatives had chased me out the window. “Can you give me a moment?” I asked her, holding both hands up as I backed away. Jealous women and angry badgers deserved their space. “Brynner Carson speaking.”

  A computerized voice on the other end barked out, “We have a situation, asshole. Get a move on to the shipping district. Car’s out front.” That would be Dale Hogman, field team commander of the Bureau of Special Investigations.

  “Call someone else. We just had a situation, and I’m in a bit of a situation myself right now.”

  Elinda? Athena? She yelled at me in Greek, something about a goat and my mother.

  “Is that the native you had draped over you last night? Saw her on the telecast.” Dale didn’t bother hiding his amusement. Or his familiarity with the scenario.

  “Could be her twi
n from the night before.” I’d consumed more than my share of wine even before moving to a more private celebration.

  “Love her and leave her. We’ve got a moldy-oldy on its feet. Trust me, no one else is going to be able to handle this one.” Dale cut the call off, right as Etria came for me.

  She swung the knife at me in a high overhand arc, not bad for killing a mummy, but not the best way to carve out a man’s heart.

  I stepped to the side and caught her wrist, spinning her around.

  A younger me would have leaned in to kiss her before dashing away. A younger me once got kicked in the family jewels for doing exactly that, so I let her land rump first and ran for the stairwell. Two nights ago I was a celebrated hero. Last night I was an honored guest, and by tomorrow morning I wouldn’t be able to smile at a waitress in the city without getting spit on.

  Women talk.

  And that is exactly why I preferred my day job, my night job, my going-to-get-me-killed job. I sprinted down the stairs, met the driver at the front door of the hotel, picked up my bag of equipment from the passenger seat, and called back in to headquarters on my phone. “Brynner Carson. Give me the details.”

  “Now you’re in a rush? Sure you don’t want some more time to work things out?” The strangled gasp from the other end sounded like a man’s throat being crushed, but I knew better. I’d seen Dale in person enough times to know he was just taking a cigar puff through his tracheal tube.

  “I don’t think couples counseling will help. I’m on my way.” I strapped on my Kevlar and titanium body armor while the driver careened down cobblestone streets. “Situation report?”

  “Like I said: Corpse woke up a few hours ago. Took apart three guards and half a cargo crew.”

  We continued downhill into the port, veering past cranes and loading trucks. “Near the water?”

  “Better. On a boat.”

  “Bullshit.” Even on my first day working for the Bureau of Special Investigations, even on my first assignment, I knew better than to think you’d find a meat-skin going for a swim, or even a stroll on the beach.

  Dale waited so long I thought he might’ve dropped the call. “No. And that ain’t the freakiest part. It knows you.”

  My hands froze, leaving one boot untied. Freakiest part in this particular conversation was a series of contests. Freaky that a three-week-old corpse had reanimated and gone on a rampage? A little. Well, not really. More like just about every day working for the BSI.

  Freaky that one had done so on a boat? Completely. Contact with living water could drive the Re-Animus straight out of the shell. That scored an eight on the scale of batshit crazies, where one would be the homeless guy at the grocery store, and at about five we hit dead things. “How can you be sure?”

  “This one’s talking.”

  I yanked my boots tight and shook my head. “Bullshit.”

  “And writing hieroglyphics in blood.”

  “Bullshittier.”

  Dale laughed, a rumbling cough that sounded like he’d need to tweeze a piece of his lung out of his breathing tube. “And if you believe the cargo guys who got away, this one’s asking for you by name.”

  That killed the friendly banter deader than the corpse had been a few hours earlier. Because meat-skins, or the Re-Animus running them, never spoke. Though I wanted to sleep in the sun for a month, I couldn’t let this one get away.

  “Happy hunting. Don’t get dead.” Dale clicked out.

  I rode the rest of the way in silence, wondering where my life went wrong. Probably around eighteen, when I walked into a BSI field office, signed my name, and asked where the nearest dead thing was.

  The car pulled to a stop and I got out, a walking armory of wood and religious symbols from damn near every religion on earth, including a few that sane folks didn’t practice anymore.

  The police stepped out of my way. Sure, the cops might handle normal criminals, but they left the dead to us. Donuts didn’t have a habit of ripping your insides out and playing with them. As I passed, they made the sign of the cross, which was fantastic, assuming the meat-skin I was up against had been Christian. Not a bad guess, for Greece, where Orthodox Catholics made up the majority.

  I tore the cordon out of my way and walked up the cargo ramp alone.

  I hated cargo ships, and not just because they housed warrens of steel boxes with narrow pathways, perfect for a meat-skin to hide in. I hated them because I could get seasick just standing on a boat. Hell, I puked in a canoe at summer camp.

  At least it let me tell a lie, that my stomach was roiling because of the waves, not because I was hunting something that killed six men less than an hour ago. Something that might well be hunting me in turn.

  Closing my eyes for one moment, I listened, threading my way through a forest of sound to find the one that didn’t fit. Dale hadn’t lied. Beneath the undercurrent of traffic and the splash of waves, a voice like gravel and coffins echoed in the hull of the ship.

  Which meant I wasn’t dealing with your garden-variety walking corpse. Dale had been right to call me. It was a Re-Animus. An unholy spirit known for animating the dead and tearing apart the living. Again.

  It whispered into the shadows, mumbling at times and moaning at others.

  Dad said Re-Animus never spoke, for fear of what secrets might slip out. That the act of stealing a body was so heinous that their very souls cried out to be imprisoned the way they imprisoned others. Controlled the way the Re-Animus did the dead.

  Someone never mentioned that to this one.

  Stake in hand, I jogged along the deck till I came to a cavernous hole leading to the cargo bay. Imagine a football field inside a boat. Now turn off the stadium lights, and turn loose one recently live corpse run by something so foul we had to invent a word for it.

  That, right there, is why I looked forward to vacation.

  I hopped down stacks of cargo containers, well aware each hop sent a booming echo through the hold. The meat-skin might be dead. The Re-Animus in the driver’s seat would have had to be to miss my coming.

  And things grew weirder still.

  In the distance, at the far end of the hold, a torch flickered. Not a flashlight. The Re-Animus had lit an honest-to-God torch, like a tiki torch. It illuminated a dim circle on the vast hull of the ship, and in the flickering light, the meat-skin shambled back and forth.

  Dale called it a moldy-oldy. Meaning someone dead a few weeks. Plenty strong but not exactly a threat so long as people did the sane thing and ran. Away, not toward it like I did. Fresh corpses could be downright deadly.

  The ones everyone feared, the mummies, could barely move, let alone threaten someone. The worst they might do is get dust all over you when they disintegrated. This body had all the signs of a grave robbery gone wrong. The grave cuffs still hung from one wrist.

  It turned toward my light, one eye sagging and the other wild. And began to laugh. “Carson. Finally.” So the Re-Animus was still on board this corpse. Fully present. Fully capable. Odds were, it was the same one I’d dealt with two nights before, though it hadn’t been so talkative then.

  “That is one ugly ride you picked. It’s an island. Couldn’t you find someone who’d spent at least an hour in the sun?” I stayed just beyond the torchlight, hopefully farther than it could leap.

  It took a step forward, staggering to the left. “I had a great body. I had a whole collection of them, before you showed up to ruin things. We’ll settle that some other time. I’ve come to speak with you, Carson.”

  “I’m not really in a mood to talk, but I could arrange for a therapist to call you, if you want.”

  The corpse turned away, slouching back toward the hull, where it resumed painting by gnawing a finger and dabbling the blood that oozed out.

  Score: Dale, 3. The thing wasn’t writing. It was drawing. Technically, it was writing as well, since the pictures were hieroglyphics.

  While it had its back turned, I crept up on it as stealthily as I could, my stake
drawn. Green pine could suck the power right out of the meat-skin, killing a chunk of the Re-Animus. The key? Getting in the first blow. I leaped forward, driving the stake down in an arc meant to strike just above the shoulder and continue down into the rib cage.

  The Re-Animus caught my hand without looking. “Carson, you killed one of my favorite bodies that way not three days ago.”

  I was in trouble.

  The last body was fresh and fast, designed to ambush the unwary, but this one had been chosen for a different purpose. After I’d destroyed its last host, the Re-Animus must have spent the last three days pouring itself into this body, building it up for pure strength. Under the force of its grasp, the armor on my wrist crackled and shifted.

  It swung another hand around, gnarled fingers grasping at my throat. I didn’t wear a titanium neck brace for style, but neither could I keep my feet on the floor as it lifted me higher, then twisted my head so I couldn’t look away.

  “I came to deliver a message.” Its foul breath washed over me, the stench of rotten fish and clogged toilets. “The old man’s body molders, and now she stirs. Give back the heart, Carson. Carson’s blood took it, she whispers in dreams. Carson’s blood will pay if it isn’t returned.”

  He liked to talk, so while I could still breathe, I wanted to set a trap, luring information from it that might lead me to its true home. “Let’s say I had it, and I wanted to give it to you? Who would I send the heart to?”

  “The darkness follower. The edge walker. The eater who lives in sin and walks the new temple. You know only what I am commanded to tell you, lesser Carson.”

  And that right there, that pissed me off. With my free hand, I drove a stubby silver blade into the arm holding me, and when my feet hit the floor, I hurled myself at the meat-skin. Four years of high school football taught me how to lead with my shoulder, drive with my feet.

  Using my momentum to drive a stake through an animated corpse when we hit the hull wasn’t covered in physical education, though. Thank God my dad had homeschooled me in corpse killing.

  The stake sizzled and popped as it drove the Re-Animus out. Black clouds of smoke billowed out into the night. To me, dying Re-Animus smelled like burning hair. Three breaths later, I stood alone. Me, a once-again dead body, and the lap of the waves.