How to Wake an Undead City

by Edwards, Hailey

  Shoving that aside for later reflection, I turned to the first page and began reading.

  An audible click filled my head, and I wobbled beneath the tangible weight of…I don’t really know what. But when I picked up where I had left off, I couldn’t read enough.

  A fierce hunger burned in my gut, igniting a longing for an unnamed craving, but I couldn’t be sated. The more I read, the more I wanted to read. The quicker I read, the more the words blurred. I couldn’t have stuck a straw in the spine and slurped it up faster than I was devouring it with my eyes.

  More, more, more was all I could think as my brain began sizzling with information overload.

  The jolt of a cool hand on my nape snapped my head up, and I gulped like I had been drowning without realizing how far I had drifted.

  “Our time is up,” Linus told me. “We have to go.”

  Sinking back into my skin, I pulled my thoughts back in order. “How did I do?”

  “You cataloged the entire collection,” he marveled. “I finished my half, but it’s superfluous.”

  The instant he set down a book on his end, I had snatched it up and gulped down its information. I remembered that, the agony of waiting, the thirst for the next long drink at what had seemed like an endless fount of knowledge. But to hear it had run dry after all…

  Suddenly parched, my tongue darted out to wet my lips and found them cracked.

  “Did you retain it?” Bracing his hands on my shoulders, Linus stared into my face. “All of it?”

  “Yes.” I rubbed the heels of my palms over my face, but it did nothing to erase the lines of text burned into the backs of my eyelids. “I have the worst headache.”

  Boaz peered over Linus’s shoulder. “You’ve got what you need?”

  “Yeah.” I swayed when I attempted to step around Linus. “It feels like you stacked all those books on top of my head, and if I don’t balance them, they’ll fall.”

  “Let’s get her out of here.” Boaz crossed to the panel and entered the code. Throwing his weight into it, he swung open the massive door and led us back into the antechamber. “I need a second to lock this.”

  Sweat poured down my spine, and the room began to spin. The edges stretched and twisted until they resembled the cramped handwriting I had spent the past four hours reading, but I couldn’t make out the words. They were gibberish no matter how I squinted.

  “Hush,” Linus whispered in my ear. “You’re reciting from the books.”

  Mashing my lips together got us past Marx, but I was babbling again by the time we reached the first elevator. All we could do was hope a verbal purging wouldn’t erase my temporary memory bank.

  Linus held me and stroked my back, guided me and shielded me, as Boaz led us to the surface.

  “Hey, handsome.” The female guard sashayed over to Boaz and all but climbed up him as she wrapped her arms around his neck. “Miss me?”

  “Actually, no.” He clasped her wrists and peeled her off him. “I didn’t.” He strapped on a stern expression. “I already told you. I’m engaged. That means I’m off the market. I appreciate your help, but I’m not pulling down my pants—or yours—to pay for it.”

  What a fine time for him to sprout a conscience. Goddess preserve us.

  Fury turned the scorned woman incandescent. “You’ll regret this.”

  Uncertain if she meant to bash his head in with the radio she snapped off her belt or commit career suicide by admitting to her peers she had let Boaz in without authorization, I couldn’t take the chance.

  Using the twist tie I hadn’t returned to Linus, I pricked my finger again and wrote a sigil on her forehead that caused the harsh lines to soften and her lips to go slack.

  “This is front gate,” a man barked. “Visitation, do you copy?”

  Boaz took the radio from her limp fingers and held it to her mouth.

  “Ten-four,” she said dreamily. “Have a nice day.”

  Boaz caught her when her knees buckled and laid her out on the floor. “What was that?”

  “I don’t know.” I massaged my temples. “I reached for a solution, and that sigil presented itself.”

  “The information is fighting to get out.” Linus hooked an arm around my waist. “I feel it too, pushing at the edges of my brain. Just hold on a little longer, and try not to use what you’ve learned until we can examine the sigils outside of our heads.”

  “Sure thing.” I slumped against him. “Can I nap now?”

  Without hesitation, Linus scooped me up in a bridal carry. “Of course.”

  Given my history with the prison, the guards didn’t ask too many questions about why Linus had to carry me out. The chuckler, having recovered his bravado, made a snide comment about me being too weak to make it in Atramentous, like I hadn’t already done my time. I squeezed Linus’s arm, but I could tell it cost him to do nothing.

  Just when I thought we were in the clear, a high-pitched shriek raised the hairs down my arms.

  Sirens.

  Ten times louder and harsher than the severe weather sirens in town, these screamed warning. Danger. Escape.

  “That’s the emergency siren.” The chuckler glanced around before zeroing in on us. “You’ll have to come with me.”

  Panic unfurled wings in my chest and took flight, and I wriggled against Linus until he hushed me.

  “Sorry, man.” Boaz knocked him out cold with a single uppercut. “But you had that coming.”

  Another guard swung his gaze to Linus then backed away slowly before breaking into a run.

  “You won’t make it.” The remaining guard, just as wary of Linus, raised his hands. “No one does.”

  Boaz took the guard’s weapons then ordered him back to visitation.

  “How do we get out?” Linus asked Boaz when we were alone again.

  “People don’t get out of Atramentous.” He worked his jaw. “I thought we had time.”

  “We’re not in Atramentous.” Linus maintained his cool. “We’re in a yard surrounded by a fence.”

  “You’re splitting hairs, Lawson, and you know it.”

  “Grier, you’re going to have to wake up now.” Linus bit the cap off his pen then swiped a sigil across my forehead. “How do you feel?”

  The fog swirling through my head began to lift, and clarity seeped in. “Like I should have whammied that guard harder.”

  “Your brain is working overtime. The sigil boosted its capacity, but it’s depending on your body to fuel it. Holding on to all the information you crammed into it is exhausting.” Linus lowered me down until I bore my own weight. “The sigil I used on you won’t last long against the strain, but it should keep your head clear until we get out of here.”

  Nodding that I understood, I searched his pinched expression. “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m hypothesizing on your condition based on mine.” A tiny smile flirted with his mouth. “We’re both going to crash, and hard. Soon.”

  “Then we better get out of here fast.” I picked the scab on my palm until fresh blood welled. Using my finger, I drew fresh impervious sigils on Boaz, Linus, and then myself. “We’re walking out of here.”

  Any larger, and Boaz’s eyes would swallow him whole. “We can’t just—”

  “I’m not going back.” I’m not proud of how my voice broke. “I am not going back.” Linus massaged my nape. “We go through. Together. All of us. We’re walking out of here.”

  “We go through,” he agreed. “Together.”

  A switch flipped, and a calm, cool, and collected soldier stood in Boaz’s place. “We go through.”

  All the fear and concern twisting him up vanished. I wondered at that, and then I got it.

  Boaz had cut the last tie between us. He was forcing himself to stop looking at me as his sister’s best friend, as the girl who had crushed on him for years, as the woman whose heart he had broken, and see me for who and what I had become. Really see me, all of me.

  Thanks to his injury, he had m
issed out on the miracle of his healing. But he would be wide awake for this. There would be no going back, no pretty little lies he could tell himself. For better or for worse, the whole truth of my potential would be laid bare to him.

  I was no longer helpless Old Grier. I was New Grier, and she was fierce.

  As much as I once craved validation from him, I almost regretted the loss of the last shred of innocence between us. He would never look at me the same way again, and there was a sadness in shedding the last vestiges of our childhood.

  The guard took aim, at me. He must have thought I was the weakest link, or he hoped Linus’s and Boaz’s chivalrous streak ran deep enough that it would stop them in their tracks.

  “I’ll handle this.” I dipped into the knowledge filling my head to bursting and isolated the perfect sigil.

  “No.” Boaz stepped in front of me. “I got you into this mess. Let me get you out of it.” He rolled his shoulders. “I want the fault for this to land squarely where it belongs—on me.”

  The light trot he started off in kicked up to a punishing jog after the first bullets pinged off his ward without inflicting any damage. He reached the first man and disarmed him. Using the butt of the rifle, Boaz knocked the guard out cold then made the rounds to the others who were too stunned to stop firing and run. He disabled them, but he didn’t kill them. Maybe that would win us points when this went to trial.

  Goddess.

  A trial.

  I didn’t have to try hard to imagine sentinels cinching their hands around my upper arms then hauling me out of Woolworth House while I kicked and screamed for Maud.

  Yanking myself out of that emotional tailspin was hard, maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I got my head back on straight. Thanks to Amelie, I had money tucked away where no one would find it. I had resources, though I hesitated to use them. The pack had hidden Taz, they would do the same for me, but it would bring down a lot of heat on their heads. And that didn’t take into account Linus or his duties or the repercussions for shirking them if this all went south.

  But what alternative did we have? Lacroix had Savannah by the short hairs. We needed help, or the city was going to fall, and the rest of the country would hear when she hit her knees. The existence of supernaturals would be out in the open, and hysteria would sweep across the world. True witch hunts would begin, and I would get my chance to see if torches and pitchforks were as passé as Linus believed.

  Boaz waved us on, and we ran through the checkpoint to the other side.

  “Ever consider marketing this?” Boaz indicated the sigil. “The Elite would pay an arm and a leg for one.”

  “This magic, my magic, isn’t for public consumption.” The vague dream of becoming a practitioner, an innovator, like Maud, had died somewhere between Volkov kidnapping me and Odette’s betrayal. I had no idea what I wanted to do, aside from embrace Linus’s dream for me of running my own ghost tour company, but it wasn’t designing weapons for the Society to use against its enemies, and it wasn’t adding to the number of vampires walking the earth. “I outed myself, and I can’t change that, but I won’t sell, trade, or license this sigil or any others.”

  After careful consideration, he said, “Okay.”

  I could tell he didn’t get why I wouldn’t want to share this knowledge, but it was enough that he respected my decision.

  “That can’t be good,” Boaz breathed. “Your friend shifted.”

  Sure enough, Hood paced the length of the last gate between us and freedom on all fours.

  “I hope he didn’t eat the guard,” I panted. “That’s not going to look great for any of us.”

  By the time we reached the gate, Hood had resumed his human shape. He swiped a keycard he must have lifted off the guard I hoped he hadn’t picked out of his teeth, and let us through.

  We didn’t waste time with questions, just sprinted for the van. And almost tripped over the prone guard, who was crumpled on the asphalt with blood matting his hair. I leapt over him, not my finest moment, and dove for the backseat.

  Once Hood cranked the engine and peeled out of the drive, he singled me out. “I didn’t kill him.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve killed enough people to know.” The patronizing tone didn’t help with my nerves. “After the alarm was raised, he tried ordering me out of the van. I declined. He insisted. I was forced to convince him to see my point of view.”

  “I hope he doesn’t suffocate,” I muttered.

  “I turned his head to one side,” Hood said smugly then sobered. “Did you get it?”

  “Yep.” I tapped the side of my head. “Now to see what it is I got.”

  Linus hauled Eileen, who I should have packed, out of his bag. “I brought her along, just in case.”

  The grimoire blinked up at me, her many eyes scanning the darkened interior in every direction, and she flipped open on my lap.

  “See?” I pointed to her blank pages. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Here.” He passed me a modified pen with a fresh ink cartridge. “Purge.”

  My hand didn’t wait for the order before it started moving across the page. “What about you?”

  “I came prepared.” The heavy tome he lifted glittered when we passed beneath a streetlight, its scales the size of my thumbnail and shaped like acorns, if acorns ended in razor tips. “We can compare notes when we’re done, determine how accurate the information is we gathered. If we produce two identical duplicates of an original, we can verify not only that your mind expansion design works, but that the information we gathered is correct.”

  I bumped his knee with mine. “Not so superfluous after all, huh?”

  Heads bent over our grimoires, we spent the drive to the airport and the flight home absorbed by transcribing all we had read. We took a break in the SUV on the way to Savannah, wary that our misfortune might have spilled out into the neighboring towns, but the Society had done an admirable job of locking down the surrounding area.

  The barricade was laughable. There weren’t enough sentinels left, even with aid coming in from other cities, to prevent any real trouble. Still, their presence was a comfort, and I was grateful for every woman and man who risked their lives in the wake of such tragedy to protect the city.

  Boaz elected to stay with the sentinels. He wanted to argue his case with the new interim commander before Atramentous sent a team to retrieve us. Linus was thinking along the same lines, attempting to contact his mother and give his report before she heard the news elsewhere.

  That left me to sit and reflect over Eileen, who I barely remembered filling with pages and pages of knowledge it would take a lifetime to fully absorb and learn to apply. Information I once felt ought to be put into the hands of all goddess-touched necromancers, until the scope of my power, and the potential for its abuse, made me grateful the Marchands had hoarded their knowledge.

  “We’re here.”

  I opened my eyes, not sure when I closed them. I hadn’t had much of a nap, but it had refreshed me better than the sigil Linus used on me earlier. That, or the plan blooming in my mind’s eye had erased my exhaustion. “I have an idea of how we can take down Lacroix.”

  Linus awarded me his full attention. “Purging jogged something loose?”

  “Lacroix’s amulet contains a lock of Mom’s hair. She wasn’t goddess-touched, but she must have carried the gene.” I scratched my hairline, wishing I could reach my brain, where I itched even worse. “Hair is good for a century, depending on the strength of the practitioner, but its power fades over time. For him to be so cocky, so certain it will protect him from my magic, he must have a fresh sample. While it’s possible he sourced it elsewhere, I don’t see why he would bother when he had Mom under his roof for a time.”

  “A servant could have taken a sample from her hairbrush, or Odette might have collected it later.”

  I read the question in his eyes and answered, “He can’t use my own hair against me.”

/>   Surprise creased his forehead. “This is new information?”

  “Yes.” Though I might have figured it out if I had thought about it. “Trusting my hair, blood, or anything else, means trusting my magic to always work against me when it doesn’t always behave the way it should when applied to me.”

  “A goddess-touched artifact, made by another goddess-touched necromancer, can negate your power.” He organized my rambling with his usual eloquence. “Your magic acts and reacts in unpredictable ways when you use it on yourself. He would be gambling with his life at every encounter, and he’s too canny for that.”

  “A talisman containing the same essence as his medallion would nullify his protections.” I winced as my nails drew blood and forced my hand into my lap. “There’s only one source we can be certain is undiluted and hers.”

  Her heart.

  As much as I wanted to do this on my own, I wasn’t certain I could open the box that had haunted a shelf in Maud’s office since Mom died. Maud kept it just high enough I couldn’t reach it when I was a kid, and by the time I was tall enough to take it down, I couldn’t bear to look at it, let alone touch it. And if I couldn’t hold the box, how could I collect a sliver of its contents?

  Linus gathered my twitching hands in his lap, and his were rock steady. “Let me do this for you.”

  “Okay,” I said weakly, hating that I didn’t put up a fight, that I was too grateful when he let me off the hook.

  But that’s how relationships worked. You leaned on each other when you couldn’t stand on your own.

  “Atramentous will dispatch sentinels to bring us in soon if they haven’t already.” I linked our fingers and walked with him up the front porch steps. “Lacroix struck first and hard. We need to make sure he doesn’t get a chance to show us what else he’s got up his sleeves.”

  Ten

  Purging hadn’t fixed the massive headache throbbing in my temples, but it had eased off some. There must be more to dump out of my brain, but I’m not sure where I would put it. Eileen was… Huh. Actually, Eileen was holding every drop of information I had poured onto her pages so far. Either she had an infinite number of them, or I had discovered another quirk brought on by combining goddess-touched blood and sigils with a fae skin-bound book. Though, I suppose it was called magic for a reason.