by E. A. Copen
Instead, I stopped at a corner store and bought a bottle of Jack Daniels. It’d been a while since I crawled into a bottle to drink away guilt and misery, but I figured this was a special occasion. It was Mardi Gras, so why the hell not? Everyone else was drinking, and I’d nearly died. I made up every excuse I could think of and embraced them all. Anything was better than remembering the disappointed look on Hades’ face when I went through with it, or Persephone’s voice in my head over and over, telling him to trust me.
I didn’t even pull the bottle out of the bag to chug a quarter of it outside the shop. I’d found my way onto the street car again before it hit me. Once you start drinking, it’s hard to stop, especially when you’re a recovering alcoholic in a funk. I had half that bottle drained before I got off on the wrong stop and staggered up the street.
With every step closer to the house, I dreaded more what I’d have to do once I got there. It would almost be easier if she knew what I had done. Chances were good that she didn’t yet, though. Wasn’t like they’d put it on the news. This just in: Broke Moron with Magic Murders the One Decent God in the Multiverse. What the hell did she see in me anyway? Beth was right. All I ever did was hurt people, Emma included. It was my fault she’d quit the force. I’d ruined her life and she deserved better.
I stumbled through the gate on wobbly legs. The house was dark, but that was probably because Darius and all his guys were out partying. Emma wouldn’t have gone out. She was trying to lay low, pretend like I’d kidnapped her so she didn’t have to deal with her family. Guess we were both dodging the consequences of our decisions. I was just doing a piss poor job of it.
At the stairs going up to the porch, I misjudged the distance and fell. Rather than go through the trouble of getting up and going through the door, I decided I was better off just sitting in the yard getting shitfaced.
A roving group of drunks shambled down the sidewalk outside the mansion. I raised my bottle and called out a slurred toast to them that they didn’t return. One of them put their hands on the iron gate and pushed it open. Dammit, I hadn’t meant to call them over. Me and my big mouth. Now I was going to have to tell them to piss off. I was having a solo pity party.
Then a wave of nauseating magic hit me followed by the stink of rot and decay. The closest person staggered into the moonlight, revealing a gray face with drawn features. She peeled dry lips back from yellowing teeth. Her bloodshot eyes twitched wildly as she reached for me, foaming at the mouth.
Even in my drunken state, I recognized something wasn’t right about her and shot to my feet. Or tried to. I wasn’t coordinated enough to do that and hold onto my bottle at the same time. It was either let go of the bottle and run, or sit and finish my drinking, and I took entirely too long to decide I should run. The bottle dropped into the grass with a dull thud and I found my legs, though the world tilted. When had I gotten onto a boat in choppy water?
“Afraid I’m gonna have to ask you to leave, ma’am,” I slurred out. “This is private property.”
Her answer was a barely audible gurgle in the back of her throat. Tourists.
The door behind me crashed open. “Move!” Emma shouted.
I spun around in time to see the end of her gun flash. The frothy mouthed woman who’d been reaching for me jerked when the shot hit her in the shoulder, but didn’t stop coming for me. Huh. High pain tolerance, I guess.
Emma stormed down the stairs, grabbed me by the collar and dragged me back to the door. “Get your drunk ass inside before they eat you, Laz!”
I stumbled through the door and hit the floor, suddenly nauseated. Emma fired off a few shots and slammed the door before barring it. I stared at her. There was something I was supposed to tell her, but I was too drunk to remember.
She popped the magazine on her gun and slapped another full one from her pocket into it before dropping the gun back into her holster. I was still trying to get up when she grabbed me by the back of my collar and dragged me through the house. I remember being surprised by how soft the runner in the hall was as she dragged my cheek across it, then how cold the bathroom floor was. That was nothing compared to the icy water she splashed on my face from the faucet. It was cold enough that my lungs seized. Good thing, too, because the next thing she did was plug the sink and push my face down into the frigid water, holding me there until I flailed.
I came up coughing, teeth chattering, desperate to suck in a full breath. “What the hell?”
She pointed out the door. “Those zombies out there? They’re not here to party, Laz. We need to take care of them before they wander off and start terrorizing crowds of tourists.”
Zombies? Something snapped in my brain like a rubber band. I grabbed my aching head, groaned and staggered back to sit on the side of the tub. Shit, she was right. Those weren’t just weird Mardi Gras drunks out on the front lawn. Those were full-on zombies and they were loose in New Orleans.
I had to do something. Unlike when we’d cornered them in the amusement park, we couldn’t just go around busting heads on the front lawn. If we were going to take these guys out, it had to be somewhere out of view where people on the street wouldn’t call the cops.
Someone pounded on the door then groaned. Well, at least they hadn’t wandered off yet.
“We might not have to kill them.” Speaking in complete sentences was still difficult.
“Explain,” Emma demanded.
I rubbed my throbbing temples. “Well, I am a necromancer. I made those zombies, right? Or evil me probably did. In theory, I should be able to take control away from him with the right spell.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just shoot them?”
I shook my head and instantly regretted it. The movement sent my head spiraling and my stomach lurching. I fell on my knees and vomited a good portion of the bottle I’d just chugged into the toilet. Normally, throwing up when you’re drunk makes you feel a little better. Not the case that time. I was still reeling.
Emma offered me a towel. I took it and mopped up the mess on my face. “We can use them.”
“Use them? For what?”
I rubbed my forehead. “Give me a minute. I’m trying to remember how to talk.”
The pounding at the door got more desperate. Somewhere in the house, glass shattered.
Emma rushed to shut the bathroom door. “I don’t think we have a minute, Laz.” She pulled out her gun and aimed it at the door, backing toward me. “Whatever you’re going to do, you’d better do it before they break through that door, because I’m going to shoot these assholes right between the eyes.”
I reached for my magic, then promptly bent over the toilet and threw up again.
Chapter Fifteen
Most people would be surprised by how easy it is to turn a human into a zombie. You can get most of the ingredients required for the spell at your local Asian grocery. Mash the ingredients, lay them out to dry into a fine powder, and then stab your victim. Once he’s good and dead, all it takes is an infusion of will, a little exposure to the powder, and you’ve got a reanimated human.
The magical cocktail only reanimated the brain, creating creatures of mindless obedience. Slaves to their creator. I didn’t care for them because I felt making zombies was disrespectful to the dead. I mean, I wouldn’t want my body up and walking around without me inside it once I was dead. I just assumed no one else would either. The dead can’t consent, and that means it’s abuse to force them to act.
Once the zombies were given a command, they couldn’t disobey, but they also couldn’t move very well on their own. That’s the thing about dead bodies. They get stiff. It takes constant supervision from a necromancer to keep them mobile. Since they were also incapable of basic decision making—such as whether to turn into the gate or keep walking—the creating necromancer also had to use a spell to stay connected to the mind of every zombie he made just to get them to go wherever he wanted. It was a royal pain in the ass.
It also meant that with a lot of magic
and under the right circumstances, a more powerful necromancer could wrestle control of a zombie away from a weaker one. In short, I might be able to take away Bizarro Laz’s favorite toy and force it to give up his hiding place. It wouldn’t be easy though. I’d need total concentration, which was hard to do with a throbbing headache and nausea spinning in my gut, not to mention zombies pounding on the bathroom door.
I closed my eyes and tried to push all of that away, focusing on the power inside me. Slowly, I let the walls around my psyche crumble so that I could reach for their dead minds. The mind of a dead person wasn’t comfortable to be in. For starters, it was cold and dead, incapable of rational thought. Empty but for the presence guiding it. I felt him, lurking there, tugging on the strings of magic that kept the creature upright and moving. I would have to push him out to take control, and that meant a battle of raw will.
I pushed against the familiar presence. He pushed back. My head throbbed, brain reeling with the effort of staying focused. If I lost it, I could very well wind up exactly like I’d been at Six Flags a couple of nights before. Losing the battle of wills would not only push me out but give Bizarro Laz unrestricted access to my mind because my shields were down. He could launch a psychic attack and there’d be nothing I could do about it. Of course, I could do the same to him if I won, except I wouldn’t. Attacking him directly would mean letting go of the zombie.
Wood splintered. They were coming through the door.
“Lazarus, do something!”
I kept my eyes closed and focused on the pain. If I couldn’t work through it, I’d use it as fuel. Pain meant I was alive, and I could use that fact to draw a line between the undead mind and my own. “Trying.”
Magic slithered around in my head, probing for a weakness, pushing while I shoved it back. Water and sweat dripped down my neck to pool between my shoulder blades. The mental and magical tug of war was exhausting, but I had to win, or we’d be dead.
He made one hard push. Gotcha. I focused all my will into moving him backward, kicking him out, taking over, and little by little his power slid away. With a snap of black magic, Bizarro Laz ceded control of one of the six zombies at the door to me. “Got it.”
“Do something!” Emma’s gun shifted left to right in her hand.
The zombies had torn a hole in the door and were reaching through with bloody hands. I could hear them groaning on the other side of the door, fighting to tear the hole wider, but Emma couldn’t get a clean headshot.
I pushed myself up from the edge of the tub, flexing my fingers. “Stop!”
One set of hands reaching through the hole in the door went rigid. At least I knew which one I had control of now. Through the magic, I could tell it was male, middle-aged, and undead, but that was about it. Once, he’d had a full life, family, a job. Bizarro Laz had taken all that away and turned him into a slave. I hated him for it, almost as much as I hated myself for using the creature in the same way.
Slowly, I unfurled a fist. “I command you to protect us.”
The hands retreated through the hole. With an inhuman growl, the zombie attacked one of the other five trying to get in. More hands disappeared from the hole in the door as my zombie pulled his away. The growls on the other side of the door got louder, punctuated by the sound of chomping teeth and disgusting, wet sounds.
I couldn’t see what he was doing, but then I didn’t need to. I supposed I could’ve looked through the zombie’s eyes using the magic that now bound it to me, but the connection was making my stomach uneasy and I didn’t want to push it. The command would be enough.
With my hand outstretched, I pushed past Emma, placing myself between her and the zombies, just in case the one I’d taken control of couldn’t do the job. The hands had all disappeared, but I could still hear them fighting outside.
“What’s happening?” Emma’s voice was barely a whisper.
I quieted her with a gesture. “Wait.”
We stood in silence, just listening to my zombie tear the others apart. It was one of the tensest moments of my life. Images of ripping flesh and maimed bodies flashed through my mind. Bones snapped and throats gurgled. Unlike in the movies, real zombies don’t hunger for brains, and they weren’t super-fast or super strong. They just did as they were told. Humans are a lot stronger than most people realize. We could rip each other limb from limb if we wanted to. We just don’t because our humanity keeps us in check. Zombies don’t have that. They were monsters, perhaps the most monstrous monsters of all because once they’d been us.
I felt a tug at the edge of my psyche, a warning, and then a lightning flash of pain. Rather than hold on as I’d done at the amusement park, I let the zombie go. The haze of magic suddenly lifted and left me exhausted. I staggered until I fell against the wall. Every inch of me ached and the throbbing in my head surged to an unbearable level.
Even worse, more undead had shambled into the house. Too many to count. How the hell was he controlling that many at once? It’d taken almost everything I had just to grab onto one.
More hands shot through the hole in the door. Gray, undead fingers pulled at the edges of the hole widening it.
I backed away. “Emma, how may bullets do you have?”
She swallowed. “Not enough.”
My feet caught on something rolling over the floor. I looked down. It was the pipe from the elementary school. Not an ideal weapon, but it was better than nothing, and it wouldn’t splinter like a bat. I picked it up. We might not have had a chance of taking out every zombie wandering into the hallway, but I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to try and take as many as I could with me.
“Lazarus, if we don’t make it—”
I lifted the pipe, ready to swing it at the first zombie through the door. “We will. We have to. Remy is counting on us.”
“But if we don’t...” Emma’s voice trembled. She squeezed her eyes shut. “God dammit, Laz. I love you.”
I twisted to look at her over my shoulder. This was an important moment, wasn’t it? Those three little words were supposed to be a turning point in a relationship, though I didn’t pretend to understand how. It felt significant, but I didn’t know what to say back. My brain was on fire, both from the start of the hangover and the effort of holding the zombie earlier, and there were undead literally knocking on our door. We might’ve had only seconds left to live. And yet...
“I didn’t get to say it before, when I thought you weren’t coming back.”
“Emma, I...” There was so much left to say. So much that didn’t involve magic, or zombies, or monsters. Normal things that normal people said to each other in moments like that, but the words were out of reach for me.
Before I could find the right words, someone screamed in the hallway. It wasn’t a zombie noise, either. Zombies mostly just gurgled and snarled. The sounds of a struggle renewed in the hallway, drawing the zombies away. Whoever had just crashed into the house shouted a word in a language I didn’t know. The tiny hairs on my arms and on the back of my neck stood on end as magic sliced through the air, magic that felt both familiar and strange at the same time. It was almost like the magic I had when I’d been the Summer Knight, except instead of being angry and fiery, this was cold and sharp.
Emma and I exchanged a glance before I gripped the doorknob and threw open the door, pipe in hand, ready to take on whatever new monster Bizarro Laz had thrown at us. The monster in the hall wore gleaming silver, form-fitting armor. Two huge silver swords flashed in a circle, taking zombie heads two or three at a time. Undead blood splashed up, staining platinum curls and slid off her armor. The bodies of the slain lay behind her like footprints leading to the door.
She stabbed her sword through the neck of the last of the zombies. It gurgled and reached for her. With a smirk, she took its head and kicked the twitching body away before turning to me. She eyed me, then pushed some of her hair out of her face. “Looks like I came just in time.” She spoke with a heavy accent that might’ve been Swedish? Iceland
ic? Hell if I knew the difference.
I tightened my grip on the pipe. “I don’t know who you are, or what you want, but you should know I haven’t had a very good day and I’m fully prepared to take it out on you.”
“Really?” Her eyebrow quirked and she nodded to Emma behind me before shouldering one of her swords. “And what’s your girlfriend got to say about that, Horseman?”
So, she knew who I was. Armed as she was, it would’ve been easy for her to cut me and Emma down. Instead, she stayed just out of reach with that knowing smirk on her face.
Emma cocked her gun. “I say you’ve got exactly thirty seconds to convince me not to shoot you.”
She eyed Emma with a bored look and then turned her attention back to me. “My name is Noelle Islana, knight of the Winter Court of Faerie, and you shouldn’t shoot me because I’m your best chance at getting your children back.”
Chapter Sixteen
If I knew anything about the fae, it was not to trust them, especially when they were offering their help. Of all the fae in existence, I trusted fae knights the least, partly because I knew they were beholden to their court. I had fought alongside the Shadow Knight—who’d turned out to be Khaleda’s brother—and while he was a badass in his own right, he tended to disappear at inopportune times. His help mostly consisted of getting me into more trouble every time he showed up. In the end, I’d killed him by killing his queen. His life was linked to hers. Not that it was a bad thing. He wanted to go, or at least it seemed like he did. His last act had been to thank me for killing him.
I’d also been a knight to the Summer Court, even if it was only briefly. It didn’t turn out too well for me, especially since I didn’t want to play Titania’s power games. To be a knight meant to be linked to the fae queen and do her bidding. Since most of the queens were crazy and powerful, you can guess at the things they made their knights do for them. Nothing good, that was for sure.
