by Annie Bellet
“Zombies?” Junebug said as she got up off the couch. “Why are you wearing Levi’s shirt?”
“Chivalry ain’t dead,” Levi said as he crossed to her. “Besides, who would you rather see without a shirt? Right?”
“Modesty is very dead,” Harper added. “Dibs on second shower.”
“Wait, who gets first shower?” Levi asked as he wrapped an arm around his wife’s shoulder.
“Me,” I said. “Though there are two showers. I’m using mine. I’ll try to leave some hot water.”
“I am glad you are safe,” Alek said as he followed me into the bedroom. I stripped off Levi’s shirt and what remained of my clothing.
“My shoes held up,” I said as I tugged them off, pulling out the charred laces. “I’ll call and leave a message for the Archivist. See if he has any info yet on who shot you.”
The sooner that got settled the better, in my mind.
“That has been taken care of,” Alek said as I walked naked into the bathroom.
I stopped and turned slowly around.
“Taken care of?”
“The men who shot me are no longer an issue,” Alek said. He had a very sheepish smile on his face.
Alek… looking apologetic. I figured the devil was having an ice-carving competition right about now.
“I’m exhausted,” I said. “How about you explain to me in really small words what you mean by that?”
“They are dead.” Alek tried to give one of his Gallic shrugs but it ended in a wince, ruining the effect.
“Don’t fuck with me right now. Who killed them? Who even was ‘them’ that we’re speaking about?” I folded my arms over my breasts. It’s ridiculously hard to feel intimidating when you are naked.
“Shower, Jade,” he said. “I will explain after.”
“Nope, you’re coming in with me and you will explain during.”
Alek grinned, wincing again. Moving his head at all clearly still hurt him.
“I can agree to this,” he said as he followed me into the bathroom.
I turned on the water to scalding and stepped in as soon as it ran hot. I left the shower curtain open a bit so I could see Alek where he took up a spot leaning against the vanity.
“Start talking,” I said as the hot water rinsed away the smell of roadkill, fire, and necromancy.
He talked. I listened until I couldn’t help myself anymore.
“Wait, what do you mean, Nazis?”
“Wait,” Ezee said as we gathered around the table and the pizza that had arrived, courtesy of Junebug’s quick thinking, while we all cleaned up. “What do you mean, Nazis?”
“Former,” Alek said. He wasn’t eating. Instead he sipped a large cup of ginger ale, looking miserable. Swallowing, he’d explained, still hurt. Alek slowly told the story again, sketching out the details.
“Kinda surprised Jade didn’t kill you for going and doing that on your own.” Levi grabbed another slice of pepperoni and pineapple pizza.
“The Sheriff helped,” Alek said.
“The night is still young,” I said, glaring at Alek. I understood why he had done what he’d done but that didn’t mean I was thrilled about it.
Part of me could admit I was sad because I hadn’t been there to kill them myself. Part of me was secretly relieved it was done.
“It’s still day time. You going to call the Archivist?” Ezee asked.
I swallowed the bite of pizza I’d just taken and looked over to where we’d moved the heart in a jar to the kitchen counter. The jar sat there, innocuous and yet ominous. The smell of necromantic magic had all but faded from it.
If that was a sorcerer in there, could I really turn it over to the Archivist without knowing who it was or what they might have done to deserve this fate? I had no idea what the vampire would do with such a thing. Sell it to the highest bidder, perhaps. What if some sorcerer bought it with the purpose of eating it and gaining its unknown power? There was nothing healthy-feeling about the necromantic magic we had encountered down below the house out there. It was possible all the things we had encountered were protections put in place by the owner of this heart.
Too many things didn’t add up. The drag marks and the scrap of fabric we had found in the house. The varying ages of decay evident in the zombies. The newer ones dressed like soldiers versus the older ones in jeans and the like.
“I don’t know,” I said, realizing I’d been quiet a little too long. “I mean, I will call him. I might not hand that over though.”
“I wouldn’t,” Harper said at the same time as Ezee said, “I would.”
I held up a hand before they could start arguing. I knew the look on Harper’s face well when she was ready to defend her position and Ezee had drawn himself upright with his “professor” face on.
“Not a democracy,” I said. “This is my problem, I’ll handle it.”
“You going to pull that lone hero bullshit on us again?” Ezee said. It must have been difficult to look authoritative and disapproving while brandishing a slice of pizza, but Ezee managed better than most.
“No,” I said. I laid out the rough sketch of my thoughts, then added, “So until I know what that heart is, I can’t really give it over in good conscience.”
My friends were nodding. I felt the weight of Alek’s gaze but didn’t turn my head to see what his expression was. He had no right to judge me at the moment anyway.
“How will you find out?” Junebug asked.
I pinched the bridge of my nose between my fingers. “Not sure. Maybe see if the memories in my head know anything about it.”
“Samir never encountered anything like this?” Ezee asked.
“Dude, not cool. Too soon?” Levi said as I jerked upright, dropping my hand to my D20.
They had misread my gesture as PTSD or something. I felt relief as I realized that.
“It’s okay. I just don’t know what I’m going to do yet. I’m tired. Let me handle the vampire. Go home, get some sleep, okay?” I was bone weary. Tired of lies. Tired of fighting and mysteries and death.
Everyone ate quickly after that, nobody arguing anymore.
“How do you kill something already dead?” Alek asked, breaking the tense silence. “Just in case,” he added as I turned my head and raised an eyebrow at him.
“Cutting their heads off seemed to work,” Ezee said. “My vorpal blade went snicker-snack.”
“Most things die if you destroy the head,” I said.
“You wouldn’t,” Harper pointed out.
“What would happen if someone cut your head off?”
“Levi!” Junebug shot an appalled look at her husband and reached over to tug on the plug in his earlobe.
“No idea,” I said. “And no, I don’t want to experiment and find out. Ever.”
“But would you regenerate? Would your head grow a new body or would your body grow a new head?”
“Levi,” Alek growled.
“Shit, now I’m curious,” I said, setting down my half-eaten slice.
“Jade.” Alek glared at me.
“Not that we’ll find out. Ever. I promise.” I made an X over my heart, which immediately felt ironic, given my heart was the one semi-vulnerable organ in my body.
After everyone ate, I shooed them all out with promises to meet up tomorrow, and collapsed on the couch. My cell phone rang. Blocked number.
With a sigh I answered, trying to ignore the sudden pounding of my heart.
“Jade,” the Archivist said.
“Kinda early to be up, ain’t it?” I said by way of greeting.
“You are back,” he said.
It wasn’t a question. Did he have someone watching the building? If so, had they seen us come up the steps with the jar? I was wading into shark-infested waters, for sure.
That was the moment when I knew I wasn’t handing over the jar.
My heart in my throat, I licked my lips and said, “yes, barely. You failed to mention zombies, Noah.”
Sil
ence on the other end.
“Did you find anything else?” he said as though I hadn’t just said zombies out loud like a non-crazy person.
“Ritual circle of some kind,” I said. I felt it best to stick as close to the truth as possible. “But I was fighting for my life against zombies. Did I mention there were a fuck ton of zombies?”
“What happened to the house?”
“I torched the zombies. I’m fine, by the way, just some claw marks, nothing serious. The house got damaged when the stairs to the zombie infested catacombs below the place collapsed.”
Alek settled down onto the couch beside me and rubbed my thigh. I immediately felt calmer. I squinted at him, wondering if he was working some kind of weird shifter magic on me. Maybe it was just cat magic.
“But you found nothing?” The Archivist’s voice had a touch of impatience to it.
“Besides zombies? Nope,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound too flippant. I was glad we were doing this over the phone. I imagined lying to him in person would be ten times as difficult. “The good news is, the Sheriff took care of the shooters, so we don’t need your resources for that anymore.”
More silence followed that statement.
“Very well,” he said.
“I don’t know if those zombies have another way out,” I said. I didn’t like the thought of them out there, even if they were miles from anywhere.
“I will handle the house,” Noah said.
“And the warlock?” I didn’t say necromancer, but I was tempted.
“I took care of that.”
“Good. We’re done then. Even.” I resisted the urge to cross my fingers like I was ten again.
“Perhaps,” the Archivist said. Then he hung up on me.
“I don’t know if I fooled him,” I said after I made sure the phone call was over by mashing the power button until my phone turned off entirely.
“We shall see,” Alek said, wrapping an arm around my shoulders.
“I feel like I could sleep for a week,” I murmured. I was done with necromancers and vampires for the night. Tomorrow I’d go poke Brie and Ciaran and see if they knew anything.
My bed was calling and it sounded damn good. I looked over at the jar. I had no idea what to do with it. I got up and went over to the fridge. There was room in there.
“You are putting that in here?” Alek said from right behind me as I slid the jar onto the middle shelf.
“It’s kind of hidden this way,” I said. I tucked a container of wilting spinach and a chunk of parmesan cheese in front of it. I doubted being refrigerated would hurt it if it were a sorcerer’s heart. “Come on, let’s get some more sleep.”
I grilled him more on his fight against the wolves before I let him sleep. He’d done exactly what I would have done in his position, so it was hard to stay mad at him about putting himself in danger when he was injured. I was exhausted but it took a while to drift off. I didn’t want to see Samir in my dreams. Not after a day of so much death. I finally slept and Samir was waiting, warnings on his lips.
It was almost a relief to awaken as my wards went off like a three-alarm fire in my head.
Alek was up as soon as I slid off the bed. The clock said it was just after one in the morning. I grabbed the Alpha and Omega from the nightstand and buckled the sheath around my hips. I’d gone to sleep in nothing but a teeshirt so I pulled on a pair of sweat pants as I listened for a sign of what had made my wards go nuts.
The magical warning system was still ringing in my head and I shut it down. I wasn’t good enough at wards to make them super specific, so now that I was awake, there was little point to being distracted by the hum in my brain.
“Something moving outside,” Alek murmured, his voice a graveled growl in the near-darkness. He’d crept to the window and nudged the blinds aside.
I heard glass break below us. Damnit. Whoever was down there was inside my shop now.
“I just finished building,” I muttered.
We slipped out of the bedroom toward the front door. There was a deck off the guest room that had a door out to it as well, in case we required a second exit. I peered out the window overlooking the back parking lot.
An elongated shadow moved beneath one of the floodlights in the lot. It looked vaguely human but with greyish skin pulled tight over too-long bones. Glowing red eyes stared straight up at me and its wide mouth opened, revealing a double row of sharp teeth. A demon of some sort, perhaps. Or a ghoul. My mind fixated on that. More necromancy bullshit.
I heard a crash from the shop beneath us. My guess was one of those things was inside the shop, upstairs in the computer room. Right beneath the kitchen where we were standing. The whole apartment shook as something slammed into the floor from below.
“We can’t fight these things properly here,” I said to Alek, backing away from the window. I yanked open the fridge and pulled the jar out, dumping spinach onto the floor. I’d clean it up later, if we got a later.
“They will follow?” Alek asked as he gathered a gun from the cabinet in the living room.
“Hope so. I’ll head to the park by the church,” I said, thinking quickly about where I could get to open ground and not endanger anyone when I opened a can of sorceress whup-ass on these things.
Clutching the jar under my arm, I threw open the front door. Magic sang in my blood as I sprang into the air, shoving myself along the ground twenty feet below in a gliding leap. Flying was scary, I preferred a gliding run. It was faster, more controlled, and I got to feel like a character out of Naruto or in a Wuxia film. I touched down briefly in the parking lot, the pavement rough under my feet.
“Come and get some,” I said to the ghoulish creature as I leapt forward, racing away from it in another swift gliding leap.
I heard more than saw it follow and narrowly missed being mauled by another of the ghouls as it shot from the darkness toward my side. My glide was too fast for it as I pushed more and more magic against the ground, building speed as I shot down the road toward the park. They were taking the bait.
Trees sped toward me and I had to roll to one side as I nearly clipped a picnic table, reaching the park with far more speed than I’d planned. There were a scattering of lights hung in the trees around that cast eerie shadows but were enough to see by. I dropped the jar into the grass beneath me and drew the Alpha and Omega.
The dagger turned to a sword, the runes and letters on the blade glowing with blue fire. I swung as the first ghoul came at me. It was lithe and fast, and strong as fuck. The ghoul dodged out of the way of the blade and a long-clawed hand swiped at my thigh. The claws met mostly sweatpant, but the tips gouged into my flesh. I stumbled back and the ghoul went for the jar.
Blue fire arced out from my sword as I threw magic into it without a clear thought beyond “No.” The ghoul screamed and retreated into the shadows leaving only acrid smoke behind.
I regained my footing and stood over the jar. Where the hell was Alek? These things were too fast for me. I had hoped to end them quickly with the power of the sword, but they weren’t mindless zombies running straight into my blade. These creatures had thoughts in their heads and a sense of self-preservation.
The ghoul had come right in for the jar, however. They had a goal that I could potentially exploit.
Deliberately, keeping the moving shadows in my vision as the two ghouls circled me, I backed away from the jar. I pushed magic into a shield around the jar, careful to keep my mental vision of the shield as clear and invisible as possible. I wanted to tempt them into closer range, not hand over the jar by accident.
“Come and get it,” I said aloud. I split my magic, holding the shield tight with my left fist as I sent power down into the ground, visualizing the magic tunneling under the grass in a heavy rope.
A heavy, flammable rope.
I’d been right about them being focused but not entirely intelligent. Both ghouls took the bait, charging toward the jar from either side of me. I waited until they were clos
e enough I could smell the rotting magic miasma streaming off their grey, shiny skin.
Then I lit the rope of magic with another focused thought and yanked upward with my right hand, swinging my arm like I held a lasso instead of a sword. A wreath of flame tore loose from the soil, chunks of grass catching fire as the loop closed on the ghouls.
They screamed as magic fire wrapped around them like a noose. I charged forward, slashing at the nearest one. It tried to dodge but was too slow. The Alpha and Omega sliced a shallow cut across its cavernous ribs.
A cut was all that was needed. The blade’s magic burned into the ghoul. It fell back screaming like a dying rabbit on the grass as blue fire burned away its flesh.
Not the effect I’d thought the sword would have, but there was no time to ponder its different reactions to different creatures. The second ghoul had shaken free of the flames and was scrabbling desperately at my shield bubble, trying to get to the jar. It had enough sense of self-preservation to turn on me as I lunged for it. I slammed my left fist upward and across my body, bringing the shield like a physical thing up off the ground and into its side, knocking the ghoul off balance. The Alpha and Omega sliced into its chest like a hot knife through butter, the blue flames so intense now I had to immediately back off as the ghoul fell.
That’s when the third ghoul slammed into me from behind, throwing me a dozen feet over the ground. The sword flew from my hand as I tried to tuck and roll. This ghoul didn’t waste time going for the jar but followed me as I struggled to my feet and brought fire to bear in both hands.
It was bigger than the other two, with the same elongated limbs, shiny grey skin stretched over a gaunt skeleton, and a truly disgusting double row of teeth. The ghoul hissed at me.
“You need Listerine, buddy,” I said through gritted teeth as I regained control of my magic and threw fire at it.
The ghoul charged straight through my fire as though it didn’t care about being burned and smashed into me again. Those hideous teeth closed on my left arm as I tried to twist and defend myself. I felt bone crunch.
The ghoul was ripped free of my body by a white blur. I fell backward onto my ass, trying to summon more fire through the blinding pain. Tiger-Alek slammed the ghoul into the ground and raked it with his powerful back legs. Pieces of grey flesh flew, black ichor spattering me, cold as ice hitting my skin.
