Dance By Midnight

by Phaedra Weldon

  That night Mike went out with his friend Darius. I begged off, saying I was still tired and needed sleep. But long after they were gone I searched the kitchen for the largest plastic bag I could find. One that sealed was perfect.

  I opened the glass doors, grabbed Mike's box of garden tools, and headed down into the yard. Behind the small fountain were a few large boulders. I picked the largest one and with a quick, "Elu," the word for raise up, the boulder levitated a few feet off the ground, high enough for me to dig a deep hole. I dropped the bagged envelope inside and recovered it with dirt.

  "Saplu." The boulder lowered to the ground. I spent a few more minutes making sure it looked as trim as it had before, then moved to the other boulder to make it look like the one I'd disturbed.

  I stood looking at the stone for a long time before I realized I wasn't alone.

  To my right sat a wolf. A magnificent white wolf. I took a step back and it whined. A soft, unhappy noise. So I swallowed my nervousness and took the step back and added another one closer. "Hey...are you a friend of Brendi's? I didn't mean to make you sad."

  She—I sensed at that moment it was a female wolf—tilted her head as she watched me. I wiped the dirt off my hand and offered it to her, hoping maybe she would let me touch her. I had no idea how she got into Mike's garden.

  The wolf stood on all fours and put her paws on my shoulders. I caught the glint of something in her mouth just before she dropped it into my hand. She sent back on all fours and then sat looking up at me.

  I stared at the necklace and locket of a gnarled tree, a flame, and a howling wolf. It was the same one I'd seen around the neck of the Faerie that warned us to leave in Maab's garden.

  When I looked at the wolf I knew it was her. She pushed my hand with her nose. I could just see details of the locket under the light of the porch. It opened—

  Emotion overwhelmed me as I looked down at the picture of me...and my mother.

  This time when I looked at the wolf she was no longer a wolf, but the woman in the Queen's garden looking at me face to face. I opened my mouth to say something, but she put a finger over my lips. I felt flesh instead of a wolf's paw.

  "I am so very....very proud of you."

  And then she was gone. My eyes burned as I called out to her. I almost tore the garden apart looking for her. I ran through the back gate to the sidewalk, turning to the left and then the right to find any sign of her.

  After a while I put the locket around my neck, cleaned the tools, replaced them, locked the door and took a long, hot shower.

  about the author

  Phaedra Weldon is a writer and mother of one. Born in Pensacola, Florida, Phaedra was raised in the lush, green southern tropic of Georgia. She grew up on southern ghost stories told while eating marshmallows around campfires, or on the back of pick-up trucks in the middle of cornfields on chilly October nights. She worked as a Graphic Artist for over twenty years in the publishing and sign industries until she became a full time writer in 2009. Phaedra currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband and daughter.

  This work and everything in it is the sole property of Phaedra Weldon. Any copying or reprinting will be prosecuted to the furthest extent of the law.

  Book Two of the

  Grimoire Chronicles:

  Minutes to Midnight

  Chapter One

  ZOMBIES!!!

  I think weird shit lives somewhere between the movies and Channel 10 on my TV. I never thought or even considered in the slightest that some of that shit on there was real. Take zombies, for instance. I mean, seriously? The walking dead? Vampires had more of a chance of fitting into the waking, sane world of the mortal, especially if you explained them as demon-possessed humans.

  Totally makes sense, right?

  But an animated, walking corpse that feeds off of brains? How is it supposed to eat the brains if it's dead and the stomach's not working? And if it's dead, that means the heart isn't working, which also means there's no blood pumping into the brain, and it's not getting oxygen because the lungs aren't working. So it's just not feasible for such a thing to exist.

  Right?

  "Dags! Stop daydreaming and whammy this thing!"

  Whammy? Really?

  My name's Darren McConnell, though most people just call me Dags. I can't remember where that nickname came from. Before all of this happened to me, I was just your average run-of-the-mill ghost-sensing human during those awkward, adolescent years when trying to fit in was harder than passing the eighth grade. Either way, I was small, weird, and a bit of a geek, so I spent an inordinate amount of time inside my own locker or the trashcan just outside the gym door.

  I grew to about five-seven—missing the magical height of six feet by three inches. That's when I learned height didn't matter when it came to perception. Wouldn't have mattered if I'd grown to be six-seven because my face seemed to be a problem. I looked more like my mom than my dad, and my choice in hairstyle wasn't popular. I told a kid his dad had died and the kid didn't know it yet, so several of his classmates tied me to a tree and gave me a raw razor buzz cut. After that, I never told anyone else what I could see and vowed never to cut my hair again. So I sported a ponytail until recently. I don't know why I cut it all off.

  So by the time I got involved with a ceremonial cult at the age of twenty-four, I was well established as a long-haired hippy freak.

  Weird things happened with that cult. Weird things that lead me to having a witch shove a Grimoire into my soul to save my life.

  Yes. I have a book in my soul. And not just any book. A book of magic spells. Got that? Good. Because I need to duck now.

  The zombie swung the top half of a concrete tombstone at my head. I crouched down and ducked to avoid having my brains spattered all over a nearby set of ancient headstones. I was sure my blood would add a certain sense of ambience to the graveyard, but I liked having my brain matter in my skull.

  As I hoped, the force of spinning that hunk of rock around took the creature into a second rotation. I stood up as it moved the stone away from me. There wasn't going to be a lot of time between passes before the thing swung back around at me so trying to pull a spell from the Grimoire wasn't feasible. A sword against the zombie or the headstone—again, not gonna work.

  So…the third option I had was to attempt to whammy it as my best friend wished, with fire.

  I moved as far back out of the thing's range as possible. Bonaventure Cemetery was a tight bone yard, speckled with plot-to-plot family gatherings of headstones and mausoleums. Luckily we weren't in one of the larger plots where massive stone and marble monuments were built to the memory of some patriarch or matriarch of the family. That would have been way too close an area for me. I'm not a big man. I like open space for that fourth option.

  Running.

  I turned and faced my opponent as I shouted a single word. "Isatum!" It was Sumerian for fire, and boy did it make some fire.

  Initially I wasn't sure where the power came from. I assume the Grimoire worked as the catalyst and my own energy, chi, ka, whatever you want to call it, fueled the spell.

  Of course, I could be uber wrong.

  Fire engulfed the rotting corpse with a bit more force than I intended. Tiny pieces of flying concrete stung my face and bare forearms as the headstone exploded. Then silence.

  I had my eyes closed. Which of course was a habit I seriously needed to correct. But I didn't want to them to get hit with flying zombie guts.

  When I opened them, nothing moved in front of me. Bits and pieces of zombie embers floated in the sky like sick little fireflies. I heard a brushing noise just before something clamped down on my ankle like a vise. I looked down to see a bony hand gripping me for all it was worth. I screamed like a little girl and hopped around on my non-zombie-grasped foot while I tried knocking the hand and lower arm off of the other.

  A hand grabbed my upper arm. "Hold still."

  That was Mike Ross. My oldest friend. My best friend. One of his
Desert Eagles gleamed in the moonlight as he pointed it at my ankle.

  My eyes bugged. "Not the ankle, not the ankle!"

  He fired, and the ugly piece of zombie flew against a nearby headstone. Bits of flesh, bone, and goo splattered on the concrete. A closer look showed that most of the exploded zombie covered the nearby azaleas and trees. I don't know why I yelled. Mike never missed what he aimed at, and barely missed what he didn't.

  Mike looked around the cemetery, the weapon pointed skyward with a bit of wispy smoke curling up from the barrel for effect. Dude was ultra cool. Tall, well-muscled, and rugged. Women always saw him first.

  Well, he was a good foot taller than me, so everyone saw him first.

  His body was tense. Mike either sensed other zombies in the cemetery or he was looking out for us. Either way, I propped myself against one of the adjacent headstones and took a look at my ankle. Other than some seriously gross body fluids smeared over my boots, it felt okay.

  Instant, burning pain sliced through my calf on the other leg. I dropped the just-rescued leg and looked down to see a zombie sinking its teeth into my flesh through my jeans. Its remaining arm and hand grabbed at the ankle below it and pulled. I lost my seat on the headstone and slipped down onto my ass, the back of my head connecting painfully with the concrete.

  "Sonofa —there's another one!" Mike shouted.

  Ya think? Mike's discovery did not give me comfort because he wasn't aiming at the one biting me. And it also meant he was distracted with his back to me as the zombie started dragging me away from him.

  Stars circled my head as I shook it in an attempt to refocus on what was happening to me. A zombie had its teeth in my calf, a hand on my ankle, and was dragging me with it at a pretty damn good clip away from where we'd been. I tried to see how it was doing this, given that it had its mouth around my muscle and flesh. It was moving backward—which meant the zombie was moving backwards while dragging me along on my back. How was that possible?

  "Dags!"

  Mike's voice was somewhere over my head, meaning he finally noticed I wasn't with him anymore. He was coming up behind me as I traveled. I tried grabbing at anything I could as I passed it. A different headstone, a bush, a piece of statuary. Unfortunately, the same things I tried to grab hold of also worked as instruments of blindsiding. After the third stone knocked painfully into my right elbow, I gritted my teeth and kept my hands inside the ride. This gave me a more than disgusting look at the muncher on my leg. I realized immediately—from what I could see between crashing into obstacles—that this zombie was less decayed with more meat on his frame. What I initially believed was a one-armed zombie was actually a two-armed zombie. As it tried to grab my other leg, I started stomping at its head in mid-cruise.

  "Dags—you need to smite it!"

  Smite it? Good God, who gave that man a dictionary?

  One problem I'd come across when using the fire spell I'd received from the Grimoire was that it drained my energy. One or two big blasts and I was ready for a nap. Anything more than that I was out cold. I had maybe one good blast left in the arsenal and I intended on keeping it handy.

  So smiting was out. But chopping was a good secondary. On command, a huge sword formed in my outstretched right hand. I instantly put my other hand on the hilt—it wasn't a light-weight sword—and started hacking at the thing's head. I had to be careful for two reasons: one I didn't want to hack my own leg—it already had a bite in it that was stinging to high hell—and two, I didn't want the sword knocked out of my hands by passing obstacles.

  Luckily I wasn't clobbered by either as I successfully lopped off the thing's arms. Somewhere in there we stopped moving, and I continued rolling to my right. I didn't lose hold of the sword, but I did connect pretty hard with the side of a mausoleum. Those things are made of marble.

  Ouchmotherfucker.

  No stars this time, just the fringe of an inky blackness closing in from all sides. I could feel what was left of the bastard chewing on my muscle.

  That is not a sound I recommend anyone ever have burned onto the hard drive of their brain. One of being chewed…on…

  I managed to lift the sword and saw the head moving up and down just past my chest. I hacked at it again, but nothing was working. My position was too awkward. It was time for that second smiting. The sword vanished and I held out my hand. "Isatum!"

  Fire flared from my palm and incinerated the zombie where it was. Within seconds it was gone. This was nothing like the floating embers from my fire before—this was vaporization Sci-Fi style. It was also an exhausting exercise and I lay on my back, panting, my eyelids heavy.

  The pain of the bite didn't disappear with the blast. I lay somewhere behind a huge marble structure with a bleeding zombie bite on my leg. My head hurt and I wanted to throw up. I wasn't even sure if Mike knew where I was or had seen where I'd been dragged.

  This was really bad.

  "Mi-Mike," I called out, but I wasn't sure if I used my outside voice or not. My ears felt stuffed with cotton. I recognized the signs of shock—and I was heading down that road. The bite was going to be bad enough—I mean, it was a ZOMBIE bite, for crying out loud. Mike was going to have to kill me now. If we pile on the fact I used magic spells twice and summoned the Guardian Sword…

  I was heading toward the great Land of La-La and not expecting to wake up.

  Something brushed against my neck, but I wasn't able to move. My eyes were closed, and a weight settled on top of me. "Mike…" I whispered. "It bit me…gonna have to kill me…"

  Soft laughter stayed my dive into oblivion for a few seconds as I felt knuckles brush against my cheek, and then a cool hand covered my eyes. "No…not tonight, Guardian. That's not something I can allow." The voice was female and the accent nice and sexy, but not something I recognized.

  The hand on my cheek moved my head to the left and I felt lips brush my neck. "Sshh…just relax, Guardian. It's not your time to die. I haven't even started with you yet."

  I felt a sharp pain where she kissed me, and then nothing.

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