Slowly, the four members of my crew turned and looked at me. Ethan actually looked upset. Pete horrified. And Wally had tears in her eyes. What the hell?
I shook my head. “What? Why are you all looking at me?”
Orin smiled, slow and sad. “You’re supposed to be missing,” he said with more than a tinge of sorrow to his voice. “What better way to have it happen than for you to go missing in the middle of the House of Night’s trial?”
I shook my head harder. “No, no, no. That makes no sense. The other kids that went missing, they were all asked.”
“And what would you say if you were asked?” Orin countered.
“No. She’d say no and we all know it. Anyone who’s spoken to her once would know it,” Wally answered for me. She wasn’t wrong.
Especially now that I knew what had happened to the kids who’d taken up the offer to skip ahead. Or sort of knew what had happened to them.
“Fine, so this is my fault? You want me to go first?” I took a few steps and Wally sighed.
“I want you to walk with me at the front, not Ethan. Your warning system is going to help us get through this. Our odds increase incrementally with you in our group, even if this is a set up.” She turned away from me and headed toward the locked gates. They swung open, welcoming us in.
“My warning system?” I stepped up next to her and slowly pulled my knife from my belt. A flicker from that very warning system cut down my spine like tiny little needle jabs. Not enough to hurt but enough to make sure I was aware of what was about to happen.
Wally plucked at a long stalk of grass as her eyes roved the space ahead of us. “I’ve been reading up on Shades. You have a built-in warning system, better than any of the other houses, as you are meant to survive attacks from many different quarters. You are meant to be aware of the world in a way the rest of us are not. Of course, not all Shades have it. About fifteen percent of Shades have a faulty warning system. Less than five percent have a heightened warning system, one that provides a wider range.”
I didn’t tell her she was wrong. That warning system, as she called it, had been saving my butt most of my life and since I’d arrived here, it had kicked into high gear.
She stepped to the right, her hand trailing over the tops of the gravestones closest to her, a sigh slipping from her lips. “The dead are so quiet, so simple. So much easier to talk to than the living.”
“How big is this magical graveyard?” I asked.
“Acres and acres,” she said. “Miles upon miles.”
Pete let out a groan. “I’m shifting. If we’re going to be running for long distances, I’d prefer to do it as a honey badger.”
I didn’t disagree with him—he was much more agile in his animal form, and far more aggressive, which wasn’t a bad thing in the least. The fact that he said nothing about his clothes told me just how worried he was. He just stripped, tossed his clothes to the side and shifted to his four-legged form.
I reached out and put a hand on Wally, slowing her. “Just take it easy. We don’t want to fight or run until we have to.”
“Agreed,” she whispered. “There is another necromancer here. He is starting to call the dead to life. I’ve only ever tried to handle two or three at a time. Zombies that is.”
“Crap,” Ethan whispered, his fear all but tangible. I glanced back at him. He and Orin were side by side, Pete waddling along between them and us, sniffing at the graves. Orin’s eyes glittered in the darkness, and for the first time I was worried about him.
Not that he wouldn’t make it.
But that he might have been setting us up. According to Rory, vampires were in on this, maybe even behind it. Mason’s roommate also thought a vampire was involved with his disappearance. Could Orin have been playing us all along? Vampires hated necromancers, so why had he defended Wally? Thoughts and questions rolled through me like tiny bolts of lightning.
A slow grin spread across Orin’s face, and my heart picked up, adrenaline lacing each beat.
What if the vampire Rory had warned me about wasn’t Jared, or some nameless blood sucker?
What if it was Orin?
Chapter 3
I didn’t have time to consider just how deep a game Orin was playing, if he was friend or foe, or whether he would stand by us now that we were here in his house. The graveyard we stood in trembled beneath our feet, the ground rumbling and rocking. A roll of earth rippled toward us like a wave in the ocean, and with it came a warning that was so thick it seemed to smother my lungs, freezing the air in them.
We were in serious trouble.
“Jump!” I said as the wave in the ground got close, and we all leapt into the air. Well, with the exception of Pete, who was tossed up by the rolling earth, flipped like an oversized pancake. His paws scrabbled outward as he twisted, reaching in four separate directions, his teeth bared and his tail jutting straight up before he fell back down. I landed in a crouch, fist to the ground.
The ground gave beneath me, like it had turned into a pile of quicksand. I quickly rolled away, but there wasn’t far to go. All around us the ground sunk and dropped around the different markers. “The graves.”
“The dead are being wakened!” Wally stood in the center of our group, her head thrown back, her hands outstretched. “The necromancer…oh God, he’s so strong! How can he do this? This isn’t supposed to be possible!”
“You said two or three zombies at best, that’s what you can handle?” I spun in a slow circle, counting the graves coming to life. Five, six, seven… ten, twelve, fifteen.
I stopped counting when I realized every single grave was stirring.
Every. Single. One.
Hands, elbows, tops of heads and shoulders pulled themselves free of the now softened ground, clawing their way toward us. Most hands were partially decomposed, others were straight up skeletal with tattered rags hanging off them. Only a few were solid, still holding muscle and bone together with actual flesh—even if that flesh was more than a little decomposed. The smell that wafted up with the emerging bodies sent us all stumbling back, Ethan gagging, and Orin pulling a face. I tried to breathe just through my mouth, but I could taste the rotting flesh which was far worse than just smelling them.
Time to move. “Wally, tell me you can slow them down!” I grabbed her arm and dragged her through the middle of the graveyard, assuming the others would follow, picking up speed as I searched for the best path between the dead, grasping bodies. The three guys stuck close, Orin falling to the back as I tried to find us a way out that didn’t involve going over graves.
A hand shot out toward my ankle and I kicked it away, snapping it off at the wrist.
Fore! Pete’s voice reverberated through my head as his honey badger form chittered.
“Not playing golf, Pete!” I sidestepped a pair of hands that came at us, closer to knee height. “Keep your wand out, Ethan!” I hollered.
“Really, Sherlock? I thought I’d let them take us.” He snapped back then yelped and a burst of light shot up behind us. The darkness and fog faded for the space of two strides, and in that brief moment I could see, we were in far bigger trouble than I’d realized.
Acres of graveyard was an understatement. There was no end to it that I could see, no wall at the far side. And every grave was moving, every occupant climbing out.
We’d been running before. But now… “As fast as you can. Orin, take the lead!”
The vampire shot ahead of us, Wally falling way behind him, Pete at her side.
“Ethan. You and me at the back.”
We ran, dodging hands and snapping teeth, and my adrenaline ping-ponged inside me. Because I was severely out of my element. I didn’t know how to stop the dead.
“Wally, what do we do?” I shouted, and she slowed and looked over her shoulder.
“We have to fight.” Her eyes were wide, shell-shocked. “We have to fight our way out. Running will only make this go on and on. In that it is an illusion, like a hamster’s wheel
that keeps going and going. The only way to make it stop is to face them.”
A howl went up behind us, gurgling and wet. I dared to look back in time to see shapes bounding across the graves. Clumsy, limping, but bounding.
“Werewolves. Dead werewolves,” Ethan snarled.
“Real wolves are afraid of fire,” I said. “Can you do anything with that?”
“No problem.” He waved his wand with a quick flick of his wrist, and three fireballs popped out of his wand like a roman candle, growing in size as they flew toward their targets.
The first fireball hit the lead wolf square in the chest, knocking it to the ground, lighting it up like a Christmas tree.
“See? This is easy.” I could hear the smirk in Ethan’s voice.
But I kept my eyes on the burning wolf. It shook itself and slowly got back to its feet, its fur singed in patches and still burning in others. The undead beast bared broken teeth before charging toward us once more. Now we had a werewolf on fire coming at us.
Brilliant.
We backed up until we bumped into Wally, Pete at our feet. “Orin?”
“You told him to run. He ran,” Wally said. I turned around to face her.
So much for staying together.
“Best case scenario, what are our odds?”
She closed her eyes for a brief second, squeezing them shut, and then looked at me once more. “The odds are not in our favor. We can fight, but they will keep coming until we are overrun. Thousand to one. Maybe worse.”
“You’re the necromancer,” Ethan snarled. “Shouldn’t you be doing something other than giving us cruddy odds?”
For the first time in these trials, he was right. This was Wally’s world and we needed her to pull it together. “We’ll protect you while you figure this out.” I put my back to her. “We’ll stand our ground.”
“That’s suicide!”
I grabbed Ethan by the arm and gave him a shake. “And Wally’s right. Running will get us nowhere. Orin is out there by himself figuring that out right now. We stand together, we fall alone.”
“Or he’s made it to the exit.” Ethan turned and squared himself. “Damn vampire. They can’t be trusted.” We faced the wolves together, the pack of three moving faster than the other undead. As they drew closer, my jaw dropped. I couldn’t help it. They looked to be not fully wolf, but not fully human either. Like the wolfman out of the old horror movies we’d watch on Saturday nights. Only they were hunched forward, not running on two legs but four.
“Are they only partially shifted?”
Ethan nodded. “Stuck between shapes in death.”
There was no more time for words as the weirdly shaped animals launched at us, snarling and snapping. They were not acting like normal wolves, or even the shifter wolves we’d faced in the previous trial.
These just came straight at us with no effort at stealth or subterfuge. All three of them came for Ethan, ignoring me.
Mistake number one on their part.
He went down under the weight of them with a shout. I grabbed the one closest to me by the scruff of its neck and heaved with everything I had in me. The skin stretched and pulled, tearing as I yanked the dead wolf off Ethan, flinging it to one side and taking down two more zombies with its thick body.
A burst of light cut through the air, sending one of the wolves straight up into the air in pieces that scattered like a burst piñata at the worst kind of party. Ethan rolled from the third, and I went in with my knife, driving it down and into the thing’s neck.
The wolf tried to turn his head, and I yanked the handle hard to the side, tearing the blade through the bone and rotting tissue, popping its head off like a daisy.
The dead wolf wobbled, fell to its all-too-human knees, and rolled over as its head tumbled away from its body.
Ethan and I backed up.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Don’t mention it.” I swung my blade to the right, catching a zombie that had risen partially from a grave. “We need to get our backs against something. Stuck in the center like this, we have no chance at all.”
“There’s a mausoleum in the center of the graveyard,” Orin said. “We can climb on top of it.”
Ethan and I whipped around at the same time.
“You came back?”
I couldn’t help the question. Orin tipped his head, looking like nothing more than an oversized black bird, right down to the flat black eyes.
“We’re a team. We’ve established that. Frankly, I’m surprised at your surprise.”
“You’re a vampire,” Ethan said, “Don’t be surprised that we’re surprised that you didn’t just leave us here.”
“That’s the pot calling the kettle black,” Orin threw back.
“Not the time, boys!” I said as I pushed another zombie back, shoving it with my boot. My foot sunk into its chest, trapped for a second by the partially shattered ribcage. I snarled and shook my foot harder until it was free, although covered in slimy substances I didn’t want to identify.
I grabbed Wally by the arm and we bolted for the mausoleum. Part of me still worried Orin would turn on us, that he was potentially leading us into a trap, but I didn’t see any other choice.
Orin led the way, cutting through the zombies with his elongated creepy claw fingers. The zombies fell under his hands better than any other weapon we’d used so far. A quick glance down at Pete showed that while his fur was covered in zombie guts, he’d suffered no bites.
“No bites?” I asked the others as we jogged along, Wally in the center of us. She was strangely silent, and I knew why without asking.
This was really her test, and so far she’d done nothing but give us crappy odds. She seemed to have frozen.
Orin made getting to the mausoleum seem easy. I should have been happy, but the very fact that it seemed easy felt wrong.
“Slow down.” I said. “Something’s off.”
“If we slow down, we aren’t going to make it,” Ethan pointed his wand up into the air and shot a burst of light that spread out around us, showing me just what we were facing. Easily a thousand zombies moved in on us. I could see them under the fan of light. Goblins, gargoyles, shifters, and men and women who held splintered wands in their gnarled and rotting hands.
Except...I didn’t see any vampires.
Or any obvious Shades.
“Once we’re up on the building, what then?” I asked. “We’ll be surrounded and there will be no way out.”
“We have no choice,” Ethan yelled. “We can’t outrun them!”
A zombie goblin launched itself at Ethan as if to help make his point. Pete shot forward, taking the shambling undead out by the legs, but it wasn’t down for good. It rolled over and pushed itself toward us again.
Like a swarm of ants. I’d seen red army ants devour a downed bird. You’d think the bird could escape, but after a thousand tiny bites, it gave up.
And the ants had their prize.
I wanted to vomit. This was not an enemy that could be killed or outrun.
But I also knew that pinning ourselves down without an out could—no, would—get us killed.
Because there was no doubt in my mind that Wally was right. This was no normal trial. It was meant to do one thing and one thing only.
Eliminate me.
Chapter 4
“We have no choice but to go to the mausoleum. Maybe I can blast them from there,” Ethan repeated. The graveyard was full of moving parts, along with the constant groaning and shuffling of the undead as they came for us en masse. I looked to Wally.
“Wally, talk to us. Talk to me.”
“We need high ground,” she said, her eyes closed. “Then maybe…maybe I could do something.”
Ethan shook his head and muttered “useless” under his breath.
“Then we go.” We started out again, this time without hesitation.
Orin reached the building first, climbed up and then waited, watching with his flat black eyes as we dr
ew close.
The mausoleum was a perfect square building with a few ornate edges, a flat roof, and no visible ladder to the top. I hurried forward, driving Wally and Pete ahead of me.
I bent and grabbed Pete around the middle and threw him up onto the building.
Damn it, I hate it when you do that! his voice echoed in my head.
I grinned. “You just wish you had wings.”
“Give me a boost!” Ethan shouted.
“I am right beside you, idiot.” I crouched beside him, cupping my hands, and then hoisted him up.
“Come on, Wally, you’re next.” I turned to see her standing behind me, her eyes despondent, arms wrapped around herself as if she wished she could shrink right where she stood.
“You should just leave me here,” she said. “He’s right, I’m useless to the group. I know stats, I know numbers, but I’ve never been trained as a necromancer. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to help our group. I can feel the dead, but I don’t know how to stop them. I can’t…. I can’t, Wild. I’m not good like the rest of you.” Her eyes flooded with tears.
“Look—” I waved a hand at the oncoming horde. “We don’t have time for you to doubt yourself. We need you to be the necromancer of this group. We need you to be a badass raiser of the dead.” I crouched beside her, and she reluctantly put her foot in the cup of my fingers.
I stood, boosting her high into the air. She scrambled over the edge, and I turned to see the zombies coming for me.
A semi-circle of the undead reached for me as a unit, smiles on their rotting faces. Those smiles sent chills of warning through me, and not the “hey, zombies are coming to eat you” kind of warning. This was more like “hey, whoever is running these zombies is coming for you,” which was infinitely worse in my opinion. Like the necromancer controlling them could see through their eyes and knew his prey was right in front of him.
I lashed out, shoving them back, breaking off bits and pieces as fast as I could. Strike, lunge, rinse, repeat. A bite landed on my forearm, and I howled as the zombie’s teeth dug into me, tearing flesh. The teeth were jagged, and they clamped on with a ferocity that would give any wolf a run for its money.
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