Speakeasy Dead: a P.G. Wodehouse-Inspired Romantic Zombie Comedy (Hellfire Universe Historicals) Read Free

more or less destined to end up bound, gagged, and stuffed into a wingback chair in front of a pentagram.
    “Clrrrha! Clrrrha!”
    “Don’t struggle.” I shoved his feet, cross-legged, under his knees. “It isn’t going to help.”
    We’re peas in a pod, Bernard Benjamin and me. We’ve got the same September birthday, three years apart, and neither one of our mothers lived to see our squalling mugs. His dad, Falstaff’s first and only English doctor, contracted a fatal bout of King and Country and died of patriotism during the Great War. Mine, a railroad engineer, lasted a little longer. On September 3, 1918, he got off the train in Chicago complaining of aches and pains. Two days later, they shoveled him into a mass influenza grave, leaving me a charity case for my half-sisters, a penniless orphan.
    There’s nothing you can count on in this world except the gullibility of cousins.
    “Don’t worry,” I promised. “This won’t hurt a bit.”
    I covered Bernie’s legs with an old Mexican poncho, unscrewed a maple syrup tin, and dribbled blood artistically around his chair.
    That was the easy part. The hard part—I gritted my teeth and entered the pentagram—was dumping a man’s foot out of my butcher parcel onto the tray.
    “It’s from the hospital,” I assured my cousin. The Girl’s Guide to Demons says you have to include human flesh in summoning spells. It doesn’t say you have to hack the flesh yourself. “Ole Jonson lost it in a tractor accident this morning.”
    My words were wasted. Bernard had fainted again.
    I kissed Beau’s photograph and backed out of the pentagram, drawing my last breath as an ordinary human girl. From this point on, I’d be a warlock, a sort of super-witch who summons demons, and damn the consequences.
    I hesitated, holding my vial of hellfire. That was enough demonic blood to fuel a hundred ordinary spells, and Bernie was right; if I got caught, the consequences would be dire. My sisters could not ignore this sort of theft.
    “Dear Beau,” I whispered, remembering the way he looked in films, the way he looked when he’d arrived in Falstaff yesterday, perfect and whole as he waved from the train.
    The way my father looked the last time he left town.
    “Courage, Clara,” I muttered. “Full steam ahead.”
    I pricked my wrist again and circled the pentagram counter-clockwise, drizzling blood mixed with stolen hellfire onto each burning candle.
    Flames shot up. Metallic smoke writhed in the air. I knelt outside the pentagram beside my cousin and recited the incantation I’d memorized out of the Girl’s Guide . I don’t know what it meant. I’m not sure it really meant anything. In magic, it’s the drama—and demonic blood—that count.
    “Clrrrha!” My cousin began to writhe.
    “Spirits of Hell….”
    The air grew clearer, cleaner, calm. I reached inside myself, just like The Girl’s Guide to Demons instructed, and opened an inner eye, and there for the first time I saw it: hellfire, beautiful, glittering like misting creation, rising from the outline of the pentagram to form the vertical walls of a five-pointed star.
    “Clrrrha!” Bernie’s voice squeaked hysterically.
    “Abaddon.” Power began to build. “Devourer of souls.” The candles melted and ran upward, brown, red, sage, into the pentagram walls.
    “Prince of Perdition.”
    A sense of urgency filled me. I wound the summoning spell tight, tighter, as tight as I could and let it fly. Light burst inside the pentagram, a conflagration of color that flashed and then burned low, like embers.
    The pentagram walls faded. I blinked, dazzled, clearing my eyes.
    The magic goblet was empty, the picture of Beau Beauregard burned to ash. With a little imagination, the lump of roast meat smoldering on Priscilla’s tray might have been a rack of lamb.
    But there was no demon. A shock of disappointment rippled through me. I closed my eyes and crossed my fingers, counting to ten, then counted to ten again