Chapter 28
I was expecting darkness, but as the door crashed open, light from a dozen lamps flooded out, blinding me momentarily. Briar didn’t have the same issue. I heard the ping of her crossbow release before I even had time to blink. It pinged again as I squinted into the room, which was actually rather dim, I realized, as my eyes adjusted.
The two foam darts, though they’d been perfectly aimed, hung in midair several feet from their intended targets. The potions in the darts, which were designed to splatter the target, were instead dripping down the invisible barrier of the magic circle the darts were caught in. Two stunned male faces stared at us from several feet behind the suspended darts. A dark cauldron stood between them, and beside it, bound to a chair, sagged the form of a woman. Her back was to us so all I could see was the slump of her shoulders and her red curls caught in a dingy cloth that must have been used to gag her.
“Who the hell are you?” Rue Saunders yelled, taking a step toward the edge of the circle.
The other man, presumably Gauhter, caught his arm.
“We are at a delicate transition. We must finish.” He turned back to the cauldron, consulting the book he held in his hand. A book that looked a hell of a lot like the alchemist’s journal. In the cauldron, something moved, lifting what looked like a half-formed arm, the skin translucent and clinging to bones that didn’t appear quite sturdy enough.
A homunculus.
We rushed into the room. The men were behind a circle, but circles could be overloaded. The process had already started, sparks of magic breaking in lightning flashes around where the potion had spilled on the barrier. Briar shot the circle again, this time with a steel-tipped incendiary round. Fire crawled over the circle, sending more flashes of light through it, but the barrier held.
“FIB,” Falin called out. “I suggest you drop the circle and surrender.” He lifted his gun and aimed at Saunders. “There is no magic in these bullets, and your circle won’t stop them.”
As he spoke, I was still staring at the woman in the chair. She looked just like . . . “Rianna?”
Her head jerked up at the sound of her name, and she twisted, the one green eye I could see wide with terror, the other swollen shut. Blood dripped from her nose onto the gag. I hadn’t noticed what looked like another shadow in the back of the circle before, but now I could make out Desmond’s hulking furry shape at the edge of the corner. His paws and muzzle were bound with duct tape. A dark pool of blood had gathered around him.
“That’s Rianna,” I yelled, running toward the circle. I wasn’t sure what I would do when I reached it, throw everything I had into it most likely, but I had to get to her. Derrick had said I had to beat the sunset. Now I knew why. Rianna would die if she wasn’t in Faerie at sunset.
Gauhter lifted his hand and made a swatting motion in the air. Magic crackled. Not a spell initiating, but magic breaking.
“He just collapsed a circle,” I yelled, turning in the direction from which the discharge of magic had originated. Briar and Falin followed my lead.
All the lights were in the part of the basement where Gauhter and Saunders were working. The rest was lost in shadow, including the area where I’d felt a circle collapse. A part of the basement where I could feel the dead waiting.
As the containing circle broke, the smell of decomposition intensified a dozenfold, spreading like a choking miasma through the underground area. Bile rose in my throat, but I didn’t dare flinch or turn away. I couldn’t see what was coming, but I could feel it.
Briar clearly had the opposite issue.
“Fucking zombies,” she yelled, lifting her crossbow and releasing two shots back to back. “Why can’t I ever encounter a necromancer without fucking zombies.”
Two bodies exploded into flames as her shots hit. The light from the fire provided enough illumination that I could finally see what I’d only felt before. I almost wished it hadn’t.
The dead heading for us weren’t corpses with their time stopped like the ones piloted by the ghosts, or even well preserved like the soul-eating child outside. These were rotting corpses, mad with hunger. They ran toward us, scrambling over each other. Some dragged themselves, their legs too decayed to carry them. All stared at us with cloudy or missing eyes, emanating hunger because we had something they wanted. Our living souls.
Briar lit up two more. They kept moving several steps, even once already on fire. They didn’t burn as well as ghouls—too juicy. But after a couple of steps, the incendiary rounds did their job, and the zombies fell.
Falin fired repeatedly, but body shots did nothing, and it took too many head shots to stop one. He emptied his magazine and only dropped three of the corpses. With a curse in the musiclike language of the fae, he holstered the gun and drew two daggers as long as my forearm. I had my dagger in my hand as well, but I wasn’t keen on getting close enough to use it. I backed away as the zombies charged nearer. Briar incinerated another, but they just kept coming.
“Any truth to the fact that a zombie bite makes you a zombie?” Falin asked, as he made a wide slash with the dagger, decapitating the zombie closest to him.
“Myth.” Briar kicked a zombie, knocking it back so she had time to reload her crossbow. “But flesh-eating bacteria tends to breed in their mouths.”
Falin slashed out with the dagger, and another zombie fell, viscera flying. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Zombies burst into flame or fell headless, but more took their place. They pressed in closer, too close for Briar to keep incinerating them without catching fire herself. She pulled a short sword from her back and kicked at the dead bodies, trying to open enough space that she could swing it. Falin was facing similar issues. Two slipped around Briar, headed for me. I considered the dagger in my hand. It was eager to be used, but even it knew it wasn’t up for this fight.
I threw open my shields. The zombies paused. I felt the moment they all turned, sensing me as something new. Different. Roy once told me that when I straddled the chasm between the living and the dead I lit up like a sun in the land of the dead. These zombies had never seen a sun before.