by Lisa Daniels
“I don’t know,” she said, though a part of her wanted to blurt out, no chance. Not from the reports she’d been following. Not from the testimonies of those caught in the advance, and the footage they had managed to collect. Zaimov seemed to be controlling thousands of bodies at once, and she didn’t understand it. By all the rules she’d learned about the magic, it should have been impossible to control so many. He should have been drained of all his magic after a few moments of handling them. He shouldn’t be able to function.
Yet he did.
How?
A familiar brush from the Other Side caused her to gently slide from Mason’s hold to slip into her trance, to embrace the spirits in their muted realm. There were a few on the first layer, including the familiar essence of her mother, who seemed to have broken free of Zaimov’s grip once more.
“Mother, can we get you to fight with us?” Ellie wasted no time in saying so, wondering if she could somehow override the command. He should be spread out thinly. There should be spirits with a possibility of being stolen from him.
“No. You can’t. I will try not to fight,” she said, though she appeared slightly dubious as she said it. “But he has harnessed… us. Many of his have the independence of a revenant, but the devotion of a guardian angel. They protect him free of charge. He does not have to use his magic.”
Ellie let out a little gasp, and she wasn’t the only one to do so. Other necromancers on the same layer as her on the Other Side were also listening in, drawn by the strange guardian angel. Many of them had never seen one, but there were a few familiar with them, like Ellie and Morgana.
“He doesn’t use magic at all? And he’s being… protected?”
“Yes,” her mother replied simply. “We protect him, the ones who are gone… even if it is against our wills. He can take us away from our resting place. There is no counter for us, even if we fall back to it.”
Ellie paled at that. Their chances of success went from a slim possibility to nearly no chance at all. How the hell were they supposed to resist that? What could possibly stop someone who could abuse the power of spirits in that manner?
“Is there no way to stop him, Mother?”
The spirit looked sad. “There might be. But I do not know of it. I only know from what the other spirits have been saying, and from my own experiences. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Ellie said, though she took the time to embrace her mother. Two spirits embracing didn’t feel quite the same as a real-world hug, but it wasn’t exactly awful, either. Her mother should have been long gone, she should have been free from the trappings of the mortal world.
Another spirit entered the first layer, one flickering with darkness, with red and black motifs. Ellie suppressed the urge to shriek out a warning, as she recognized it in that same instant as Talia’s father, Rickard Grieves.
“Spirit,” he said gruffly to Ellie’s mother. “Can you show me the path you take back to your master?”
Ellie’s mother regarded him dubiously. “You are on these people’s sides?”
“I’m on your daughter’s side,” he said. “The revenant in me desires vengeance for what Zaimov has done to him. I am best equipped to answer his dream.”
There was a long, awkward pause between them, and Ellie’s mother flickered in and out, as if being pulled elsewhere. “I will show you,” she said. Rickard reached out to touch the guardian angel. And just like that, he and her mother vanished, puffed away in a blaze of blue and red light. Leaving Ellie to stare in absolute confusion, and then leaving her to confront a rather alarmed and frightened Talia and Rosen Grieves. Since it was their father, after all, who had vanished. And it wasn’t exactly every day that someone’s father decided to up and out themselves from the world and follow a guardian angel into goodness knows where.
“Where did my father go? Where did he go?” Talia’s spirit dove in beside Ellie, who could only shrug in response, repeating the words she had heard. Rosen drifted over to listen as well, along with Morgana Hargraves. None of them knew if Rickard Grieves would return. All they knew was that they needed to persist with their game plan nonetheless, and trust that they were doing the best that they could. Nothing else mattered. One by one, the necromancers in that room took over the cluster of spirits, until dozens of bodies were animated at once. It stretched the limits of their powers, and Ellie felt the strain of balancing several beings at once. Usually she had strained herself with two spirits maximum, but now she was juggling about twenty-five of them at once. Which also meant she couldn’t really give them all complicated instructions without wearing out her energy further.
Back in the real world, Mason watched her with a worried air, and the other non-necromancers in the room, all police and bodyguards, watched as a new army of the undead rose.
It struck Ellie in that moment how desperate they’d become, to actually rely on this. She also hated to think what kind of havoc it might play with the media, how people would picture the necromancers in all this. It could be they saved the city, but still got an awful lot of people killed. In which case, the people saved wouldn’t exactly be all that grateful about it.
“This is insane,” Morgana exclaimed beside her, walking with the other necromancers as they shepherded their charges in the general direction of the assault. “We’re actually allowed to use this army and make it roam through the street. Out of all the things I ever expected with my powers and from what people would permit, this wasn’t it.”
“I’m not happy with this,” Rosen added, her face grim. It seemed like she was grim far too much—some of those frown lines were beginning to mar her face. “I feel like we’re provoking the devil after us.”
Ellie sort of understood what she meant. It wasn’t every day things like this happened. She supposed she should be grateful necromancers were quite scarce in the general world population, since even one could cause a lot of trouble.
“I’ll protect you,” Mason whispered into her ear, and she turned to give him a small smile, though she couldn’t dedicate all of her attention to him. After all, she did have two dozen bodies tugging at her energy, and she wanted to make sure a stray one didn’t wander off or collapse. The streets of Lasthearth were a ghost town, with so many people evacuated, though there were still those who stubbornly refused to move. Those who wanted to stay in their homes, and others who took the opportunity to break into other people’s homes and emptied shops to steal goods of their own. The roads and sidewalks were wide, allowing them to drive the herd of undead in front of them with ease. There were some abandoned cars, at least two with the tires removed and the windows busted, and more than a few broken shop windows. Ellie noted some frightened residents peering through their windows, and heard the distant slams of doors.
They marched onward, and she felt a prickling at her skull. One that indicated the nearby presence of hundreds and hundreds of souls, on top of the ones that were being guided. She couldn’t exactly slip to the Other Side while walking, but highly suspected… and yes.
There they were. The enemy. Emerging from the depths of hell itself, it seemed. A fast-moving army converging from the opposite side of the town, bearing down on them with flickering blue and red auras. An unusual combination. Hundreds of them. Their own summoned force felt inadequate, though Ellie knew the idea was that their own necromancers would try to filch the spirits from the enemy. It took everything within Ellie not to yell out in shock and run away from the dangerous, all-consuming tidal wave of darkness, and to stand her ground.
The bodies clashed in an awful, vicious attack, tearing and ripping at each other, though it seemed clear to Ellie, after a brief examination of their troops, that Zaimov’s ones were more skilled, more passionate. Fighting like the guardian angel Morgana Hargraves once had, and like Ellie’s own mother. They had the deadly skill and precision of guardian angels.
How had he done it?
In the chaos, as some of the enemy spirits seemed to peel off and join their sid
e, fighting against the endless advance, Ellie felt something nudge her shoulder. She turned, still distracted, to see Mason in his dragon form. The green dragon bowed toward her, front limbs folded in a dignified way, and Ellie stared at him, confused, until she realized what he wanted her to do.
Ride him into the skies. She didn’t know whether or not this was a brilliant or awful plan. She felt a little short on the brilliant plans sector herself. She much preferred the idea of winding back time and spending those happy moments with Mason again, getting to address the blossoming feelings between them better rather than waiting for the hammer to fall on them. Waiting for something to tear them apart before they had really begun.
Life could be funny like that. Taking a deep breath, wondering what the hell she was doing, she clambered up onto Mason’s back. She secured a grip on him with her thighs and with her hands lodged into a loose pattern of scales around his neck, which allowed her to reach into the material and not hurt Mason (she’d checked many, many times with him, convinced he was lying).
One swoop of his wings lurched them into the air. With a ripple of his body, and a few more heavy wing beats, they were launched. The air bit into Ellie’s face as Mason flapped above the heaving mass of fighting undead, and from her increasing bird’s-eye perspective, she soon saw, much more obviously, how the Lasthearth defenders were being pushed back by the aggressive tide of enemies.
He wants me to search for Zaimov, she thought, the notion electrifying her brain. She gripped Mason harder and leaned forward as he began to do languid movements, with an aim of taking in all the enemy positions, and helping Ellie to look for patterns. Something to indicate a chain of command, a certain flow from an origin point. The most likely place was to check the back of the army, but Mason’s flight over what appeared to be the final, straggling dregs yielded nothing, leaving Ellie the horrible fear that Zaimov was nowhere near the army at all. What if he’d somehow mastered being able to control such things from a distance as well?
They had no chance, then. He was already defying all the conventions of necromancy as it was. If he commanded the army from a distance, then they might as well give up here and now.
I have to assume he’s nearby, she thought furiously, eyes searching, scanning, trying to pick up on relevant information. It should still be difficult to control from a distance. Maybe he’s not with the main group, but that doesn’t mean he’s not nearby. Maybe trying to make himself less conspicuous. Acting as a civilian, a police member, a refugee. He could be anything. Which made her pale further at the thought of stopping every odd human she found.
She was about to give up again in despair after her initial, frantic burst of determination, before something caught her eye. One of these things is not like the others. Words from a famous book, stuck in her head, rattling itself loose. One of the swarm of undead looked different. More red than blue. Most of them had an even mixture of red and blue. Some were blue-gold, like her mother. But only one was red and black without the hint of lighter spiritual toning. The red-colored body, a revenant, presumably, was in the last third of the army, but tucked in just enough to be missed.
“There!” she said, pointing, though Mason couldn’t see. “There’s a red aura in that pack. Near the blue shop, on the sidewalk, last section of the group.”
Mason absorbed her instructions and fluttered toward where she indicated, bringing them closer to the revenant. When he spotted the revenant, he dove down, fire gushing out of his mouth, spraying the foe in hot flames. Blue and gold light crackled in front of them, and it soon became clear that his attempts to take down the revenant was causing guardian angels to expend their lives in protecting the revenant.
Protecting a revenant from harm. They crackled and disappeared, some of them sending beams of light toward Mason, who swerved around some of them with difficulty.
“That’s got to be him!” Ellie yelled. “No way that isn’t! He’s being protected!” By his entire army. Who will die for him. Then come back. Oh lord. Her heart sank. No wonder the military forces that had engaged with this were unable to do anything. Indeed, now she saw a small strike team wearing army fatigues and aiming guns, bearing down on the rear of the undead horde. They fired into the crowd, but their shots were worse than useless. This strike force had insisted on working with the police and necromancers all the same. The undead just shrugged off bullets. They had a slightly harder time shrugging off the grenades then thrown into their midst. One explosion sent parts flying everywhere, chunking a great hole in the middle of one area. However, within seconds, those chunks flew back and reformed into their bodies once more.
Since as long as they had energy being pumped into them, they would continue to reform. About the only thing the strike force succeeded in doing was luring some of the undead away from their crush against the friendly forces. Better than nothing.
Mason continued to puff and spew great gouts of flame on his foe, but it didn’t look like the sacrificing guardian angels were thinning the army at all. Were they returning to control under Zaimov’s services? Assuming this was Zaimov, though Ellie had a pretty good inkling it was.
So he had given in and experimented on himself after all. He had taken the darkness of a revenant within, and most likely it found a home in his corrupted soul.
Mason, perhaps tiring from his attack, stopped the flames, instead backing away with lethargic flaps.
“This is stupid,” Ellie said, gritting her teeth as she felt her energy being hacked at, thanks to forces attacking the summons that she controlled. It didn’t hurt exactly, but it wasn’t a pleasant feeling either, to feel the constant draining of her power. If it vanished, she’d likely fall unconscious, and spin off Mason. “How the hell are we supposed to counter this?” What am I missing?
The friendly necromancers were doing a great job, in all honesty. Turning some of the guardians to fight for them instead. Perhaps Zaimov couldn’t secure their loyalties in quite the way he intended. Maybe she could use this. Maybe there was a way to salvage this situation. Though if she wanted to join in the capturing of the spirits, she didn’t exactly plan to do it from above.
“Mason, land me somewhere! I’m going to try to—” She paused. Two spirits had just launched themselves from around the west-side junction, separate from the armies clashing in the middle of one of Lasthearth’s most prominent avenues. One blue-gold, the other a deep, burning red, of a similar stature to what Ellie assumed was Zaimov’s. “Change of plan. Go to where those two people are!” She issued a hasty set of instructions, and Mason flapped over there, his wings and body shadowing the deaths of the military forces who were unable to cope with an unkillable enemy.
My mother, Ellie thought with a jolt in her stomach. Yes, she would recognize that aura anywhere. Which meant the other one was Rickard Grieves, surely. Where had they been? She watched nervously as the two spirits sank into the back of the enemy, and passed through like they were hot knives through butter. They… what was happening?
She wasn’t the only one baffled. Mason hovered in the air, clearly as confused as she felt. The fighting didn’t stop, and Ellie’s energy reserves were falling frighteningly low, but something happened to the undead around where Rickard Grieves had penetrated. They halted, as if running into a brick wall, acting nothing like the others around them. More and more seemed to catch this freezing, and Rickard seemed to be heading straight for the other deep red slash in the army. Heading toward Zaimov.
They’re the same, Ellie realized suddenly. Zaimov and Rickard. They’re doing the same thing. They’ve contracted with a spirit, somehow, and it’s given them this power… the power to control? Perhaps people didn’t know of this, because there were few revenants in the world that would bargain with a living person, in the wake of their single-minded vengeance and thirst for destruction. Mason drew them closer, though he still kept a careful distance, and there was tension in his body that made Ellie suspect he was one second away from zipping through the air and making t
heir escape instead, just to protect her. She really hoped he didn’t. The others needed help. They needed Ellie’s magic. She winced, feeling her energy go dangerously low, noticing that a swarm of her own summons were all that remained ahead of the precinct's side. One breakthrough from the enemy, and Talia would die. All the people she’d gotten to know, gone.
Ellie let out a demonic yell as her energy dipped to dangerous levels—she needed Mason to land, before it was too late.
“I’m going to run out, Mason!” She tried to say something else, but the words in her mouth became garbled, and her brain suddenly felt as if it had been hit by a sledgehammer. Exhaustion consumed her body, and blackness rushed to greet her.
Chapter Twelve – Mason
He felt Ellie slip from his back, and in a panic, veered sharply toward the ground. She lifted off his back, but he managed to spin around and seize her in his limbs, forcing him to make a rough, painful landing, snapping one of his wing joints in the process. He bellowed in pain, but still cradled her as gently as a babe. Not on his watch. Never on his watch. Although now they were in direct danger from the heaving hordes on the ground, and he couldn’t fly with just one wing. Reluctantly, he shifted back into his human form, grimacing as the broken wing joint translated to a broken wrist, but he hefted her up all the same, attempting to carry her unconscious form to safety.
Thankfully, all the undead seemed to be distracted by other things, as they ignored Mason, and he was able to creep back to their side of the map.
You’re okay, he thought desperately, clutching Ellie’s body tight. I won’t let you die. I’ve got you. You’ll be safe with me. Though the thought that she might have died sent cold shivers throughout his body. She was precious to him. Perhaps more than she’d ever know. That moment they had shared together was nothing compared to the abyssal depths of his feelings—ones that he’d refused to address for a long time. He had so many good excuses. So many ways to reject her—and yet now he couldn’t even contemplate doing such a thing. Though it did add a considerable amount of emotional stress to know that he might end up being the one responsible for losing her.
