A nervous frantic voice came from the other end of the line. It was a woman, probably in her late forties. “I need you to come here as soon as possible. There is something terribly wrong with my dog and I didn’t know who else to call.”


“Please try and calm down ma’am. Have you tried to contact the A.S.P.C.A or your local vet?” I had to admit, in spite of her tone of urgency I was quite amused. I almost laughed into the receiver but quickly placed my hand over it. But I stopped laughing when she said what came next.


“My…my dog is some kind of monster, like a zombie. Mr. Edwards I know this sounds ridiculous.” she said still sounding frantic. “I locked it in the closet. It’s gone mad and bitten me!”

This meant two things; one that dog had either been bitten by something with rabies and is now infected, or someone has been toying with soul fragments. A soul fragment is a piece of a soul that has been torn into seven different pieces. You see, there are seven parts to a soul that are almost impossible to separate unless there was a seriously bad*** necromancer at work. I personally was hoping it was not the latter. Necromancers are nasty, ruthless killers and I was hoping I didn’t have to throw down with one tonight.


I got the address and collected a few things. I always carried my knives with me. I had both of them since I was a boy, which meant they were very, very old. I picked them up out of one of my desk drawers and placed them inside the inner pockets of my brown leather jacket. If the dog was in fact a zombie and had bitten the woman I would certainly need to protect myself. Biting is always part of the zombie thing. Regardless of what type of zombie it is.
You see there are two kinds of zombies; the first is the result of virus in which case the woman would be a zombie as well. And the second is something that has been dead for a long time already and has been tampered with by a necromancer who got his hands on some soul fragments. If that was the case, then she would be a lot more dangerous but not a zombie at all. Corrupted souls don’t pass on like a virus, especially not through a bite, but that didn’t mean something entirely different wasn’t going to happen either.

Next I went and picked up my car keys, and my other hand. It sat on one of the shelves on the wall next to my collection of swords from different time periods, and a few other things I had displayed in the office to attract customers. Did I forget to mention that I only have one hand? Well it’s not like I’m crippled or anything so don’t start with that s***. My prosthetic is the exact size of my other hand and it’s not one of those weird dangling lifeless ones either. It has a soul shard implanted into it and moves like part of my body, only its one hell of a lot stronger. Don’t even ask me how I lost it, that’s another story altogether. I will tell you one thing though just because I’m a death eater that doesn’t make me invulnerable. I do heal a lot faster than any mortal but it still hurts just as much.

I walked out of the office and locked the door behind me, went down the stairs and waived at the door man on the way out. His name was Jerald and he didn’t talk much. That’s why I liked him though. Most people either laughed when they heard about my business, until something paranormal happened and they came running and screaming. Anyway Jerry was an ex-boxer and more of a jumper than a door man. He is about six and a half foot tall and built like a war horse. Some of the other attendants in my building had chipped in a bit of money each to hire him after a couple of my “clientele” made a bit of a scene. I offered to pitch in but they never so much as let me finish a sentence. If it was up to them I would probably have been out of here a couple of months ago. Good thing the owner of the building’s wife got possessed by a demon a couple of months before the whole incident. That was some nasty business but it got me a few perks.

I got out front to find that my car had been towed again. There was never any parking around the building and my car was frequently being towed away. I didn’t blame them. I had been double parking a lot. I didn’t have much regard for the rules of the road. I was more adept at riding horses but within the last hundred years that had become a lot less practical.


The house was only about five blocks away from my office so I decided to walk. Five city blocks was no problem. It was the cold weather that bothered me. The dead of winter was always my least favorite time of year. I had to tough it out though; I needed the money for my rent this month. Oh and there was someone in danger, that too.

When I finally got to the apartment with the address the woman had given me I was freezing my a** off and my black hair was white with frost from the bitter winter air. There was a moving van parked outside, new neighbors I guessed, unless someone was moving out.

The apartment was on the fourth floor so I decided to take the stairs. Elevators freaked me out. When I was alive we didn’t even have second floors. By the time I got to the third floor I began to hear barking, loud ferocious barking. I ran the last flight of stairs to find most of the other tenants up and out of their apartments. They were all huddled around each other the way mortals do when something serious is going on.


As I walked past them to the room there hushed and worried bantering fell silent. They all stared as I made my way down the hall. The building was an old one and looked like it hadn’t been very well kept up; the same went for most of the people in there. The wallpaper was peeling off. The fake tile on the ground stuck to my shoes and made an irritating sound with each step. It smelled of body odor and old cup o’ noodles. That alone was enough to make me feel sick to my stomach.

To top all of it off the door was locked. I fumbled with the doorknob a bit and then decided to enter by force. With one faint effortless squeeze of my metallic hand I tore it out and swung open the door. As I did so the mortals in the hallway rushed back into their apartments slamming doors behind them and making whimpering sounds. I wasn’t so sure if it was the fact that I had opened the door and possibly released whatever it was that was lurking inside, or on the other hand it could have simply been the manner in which I opened it.

The barking died out and grew quiet when I entered the room. I walked in cautiously through the small living room where a children’s television show still played at a low volume on the set. I shuddered. I hoped there wasn’t some little infant undead baby running around too.

Finally I came around into the kitchen. I saw the dog that had been so ferociously barking. A very large pit-bull, of course it had to be a freaking pit-bull. Not a Pomeranian or maybe even a poodle.

It was lurched over something or someone. Most of its fur had already shed off, just one of the many side effects of being undead. There was something strange though about this one. Unlike most of the other zombies and undead beings I encountered, its soul- or fragment of it- was placed very neatly inside of it, right where it should be. It couldn’t have been a necromancer. They were usually sloppy, like a fourth grader trying to sew their own costume together for a school play. Something really powerful had to have made this beast.

There wasn’t much more time to ponder once the thing turned around and revealed what it was lurching over. A woman that was covered in blood and gasping for air. But I didn’t have time to help her right at the moment because the beast was concentrated on me now. It was staring me in the eyes and its mouth foamed with a greenish substance. It crouched down to pounce at me. And then it did.