He smiled from behind a weird, living swirl. “Don’t be afraid. There’s no danger. Look around you.”
Kate turned and saw the once-dark cemetery aglow with aether. Emerald winds caressed every stone, sliding around trees, whispering across the serene facets of carved angels, slipping over the mournful faces of children in marble.
“Oh my God,” Kate said. “What is this?”
“It’s magic. It’s aether.”
“But it’s everywhere. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Few have.”
She stepped away from him, turning, staring at the waves of mysticism whirling around them. “Have you?”
“This is how I see the world always.” His voice was soft and low.
“You see aether everywhere? At all times?”
“Yes. I believe I’m actually seeing into the world where aether exists before it’s summoned into our world by magical spells. Apparently the boundaries between the spheres are thin and permeable. And it tends to haunt areas of magical potential, such as this church. It’s so persistent that it’s similar to the way you feel the wind or hear a noise in the background. Eventually you accommodate yourself to it unless it changes tone or pitch, then you notice it again.” He looked around. “For example, I see it clearly now, more than normal. But that’s likely because I’m attuned to it, showing it to you.”
Kate looked at Simon as if for the first time. He stared at her, his gaze unwavering despite the wonder that was occurring around them. He lived in a different realm from others, from her. However, he looked normal. “I can’t see aether coming off of you. With your power, it should be pouring through you.”
“It doesn’t work that way. I can’t see it once it’s in our world and in use.”
Kate moved close and took Simon’s hands. She turned from the visible magic swirling around her and looked into his eyes. “If this heavenly sight is common to you, how do you even pretend to be a normal man?”
“I’m not normal, Kate. Neither are you.” Simon reached to cup her chin and leaned down to kiss her. Kate’s lips were soft and she pressed into his. He could feel the warmth of her breath in his mouth.
She opened her eyes and let out a long sigh when they parted.
Simon ran a strong finger along the line of her jaw. “Perhaps a more romantic spot might have been arranged for a first kiss.”
“No. This is lovely. I must no longer fear graveyards. I could feel that kiss down to my ankles.” Kate’s brow furrowed and she looked down at the hem of her gown that touched the earth. The material was rustling. She grasped the fabric and lifted it slightly.
A hand protruded from the dirt and its fingers flailed at her petticoat.
“Jesus God!” Kate stamped her heel onto the grey hand.
She stepped back, but Simon noticed the top of a head beginning to breach free of the ground near his foot. Together, he and Kate ran toward the church, trying to avoid the crop of hands and fingers sprouting. The ground grew soft beneath Simon’s shoes and he barely leapt aside as a sinkhole opened on a slowly widening morass full of struggling bone and hanging flesh and upturned, desperate eye sockets.
All around them gruesome marionettes rose awkwardly from the dirt before pausing to shake themselves and stare at their surroundings. One dead man stood and dusted off his tattered shroud, then immediately began to claw at the ground next to him, assisting a cadaverous woman to her own freedom. Some wandered in confusion, milling into corners of the walled cemetery. Others, rich with decay, moaned and flailed angrily.
A bony hand swiped at Simon’s head. He ducked with a whisper and proceeded to grasp the moldering thing by the collarbone. With a quick pull, he used his runic strength to tear the rib cage loose. The cadaver fell apart like a broken toy, but its pieces continued to struggle.
Kate pulled a pistol from under her coat and fired, shattering the skull of the nearest reaching corpse, but there was no time to reload the heavy weapon so she used the blunt end to slam against approaching shamblers.
Simon spun and used his walking stick to crush the skull of an undead man reaching for them. He then swung both cane and rib cage to batter at the wandering dead. His coattails flew as he cleaved bodies into bits of bone and flying gobbets of meat. But that activity attracted the attention of more shamblers in the churchyard. The growing mob circled closer. Simon tossed the shattered rib cage aside.
Kate grasped her small handbag and pulled a small blue vial and threw it into the grinding mob. It shattered harmlessly, causing two creatures to pause with a look of confusion.
“What is that potion?” Simon asked.
Kate stared as the two undead things began to shuffle forward again. She glanced into her purse. “Damn it! That was my perfume.”
“I hope you have something stronger.”
“I have this.” She was already filling her hand with another vial. She twisted the cap and immediately the vessel began to glow. She threw it across in front of her and a flowing sheet of bluish flame washed over a swathe of the undead. Though the corpses continued to come on, the weird fire quickly consumed their flesh and they fell into simmering piles of ash. Others that struck out across the field of fire were consumed, as the flame would not die. Still, there were other cadavers that moved around the blaze to take their place.
“Greek fire!” Simon shouted. “Do you have more?”
“One,” she replied as bony fingers seized her flowing dress. She managed to tear a portion away. “I knew I should’ve ignored fashion and brought a sword.”
“Take this.” He pulled a short sword from his stick with a whisper of blue. A quick word sent an electric glow coursing along the blade. Simon extended the stick sword to her, handle first. “Do not touch the blade or you will die.”
“What will you use?” The moment she took the curved silver handle, the exhilarating surge of power registered in her face.
“I’ll manage.” He wrapped his arms around a large marble cross on top of a vault. With a grunt, he broke the huge ornament off and hefted it like a cricket batsman. As Kate worked the sword in a galvanic arc, slicing limbs and heads, Simon swung the heavy cross with thunderous effort. The wet sounds of impact filled the air.
Still there was no respite from the vacant faces with exposed teeth and sunken noses. Kate was swinging for her life, but the sword was losing speed and height. She didn’t have the stamina that Simon’s tattooed runes provided. If her arm faltered, she might fall under the ragged fingernails and clamping jaws of the dead.
“Kate,” he roared over the squelching blows from his heavy cross, “I need thirty seconds.”
“Of course,” she rasped with faltering breath. “I have it under control.” She drew her last vial of Greek fire, popped the cap, and sloshed it in a semicircle around them. Blue fire rose from the ground, consuming the wretched cadavers that approached without reason or fear. She turned to cover the other direction with the sparkling sword.
Simon lifted the cross over his head with both hands and hurled it with all his considerable power, mowing down the closest ranks of undead. He dropped to one knee and began to draw runes in the dirt with the end of his walking stick. This wasn’t the perfect way to write a spell, but it was their best hope.
“Stay still,” Kate warned Simon, and began a deft dance about him, the slight blade flashing as it crashed against the surrounding corpses, wreaking havoc more like a broadsword. She neatly worked her way around the focused Simon, leaving a ring of anatomical wreckage in a sheer ballet of viciousness.
He heard Kate moving around him and felt heat as the blade passed near his head. He tried not to see the mud-crusted feet pressing ever closer. He smiled grimly, ready to make the last stroke on his rune, when the filthy hem of Kate’s dress swept across his design and brushed it out of existence.
“Hurry please,” she huffed.
“Yes, thank you.” He set about redrawing the runes, keeping one arm out to block another gown disaster.
He didn’t look up. The tumult grew louder. There was nothing but the sound of colliding bodies and Kate’s desperate, hacking breath. He shoved it aside and continued to scribe in the dirt, focusing his concentration.
“Simon!” Her voice was a panicked shout. “Have you forgotten how to tell the bloody time?”
He traced one last line and hissed an ancient word. The rune glowed up into his face and an eldritch luster spread outward across the ground. He leapt to his feet. Kate’s right arm was trapped by desiccated limbs. Clawed fingers grasped her hair and she was being dragged off her feet. Simon seized the arm holding her and snapped it in half. He kicked out at another cadaver while pulling the sword from her hand. He spun and sliced the wrist tangled in her hair.
With a whispered word for additional muscle, he grabbed Kate around the waist and leapt for a marble vault. Filthy hands reached out as his foot struck the edge of a tomb and he dropped hard to his knees. Dead figures surrounded the raised platform, reaching and clawing for the living pair. Fingers fell short of Simon and Kate, the cadavers slipping lower as if the vault were lifting into the air.
All around them the churchyard glowed with eerie smoke and the ground had turned near liquid. The flailing cadavers were sinking unwillingly back into the earth. Even the Greek fire was swallowed by the dark, cold ground.
The vault shifted to the side like a sinking ship. Kneeling quickly, Simon grabbed an edge to keep from slipping overboard into the quicksand of waiting undead. Kate did the same, her eyes wide in concern, but she said not a word.
Then the pitching stopped with a final burst of eldritch light as the ground hardened again. A few corpses around them still clawed up through the dirt, but found it less pliable than before. They were trapped. For now.
Kate leaned into him, taking solace in their survival. “For future reference, I now despise cemeteries.” There were trails of blood on her face and neck but she wasn’t badly injured.
Simon grinned and tenderly kissed her scratched forehead. He reached toward Kate as if to caress her, but instead fumbled with her hair, pulling painful tangles. He came away with a moving hand.
She grimaced in disgust.
“You had something in your hair,” he quipped, tossing the living appendage away. He stretched out his legs and looked over the wriggling churchyard. “Now with a bit of time I should be able to fashion a spell to suppress these poor wretches and keep them in the earth.”
“Good.” Kate regarded him. “I’ll have a first kiss story that will surely dominate the garden club.”
Simon laughed as the bells began to chime in the frigid night air.
Chapter 10
It was early morning and Malcolm tried not to think about Hartley Hall and the creature sleeping there. He had been days thinking of it while searching for any sign of lycanthropes remaining in London. He tried not to think of the blank look on Imogen’s face as he had turned from the slumbering little form with the pistol in his hand. Even though she had looked no more involved than staring at a tiresome painting, there was accusation in her strange eyes. Charlotte wasn’t a little girl; it was a monster, Malcolm thought with a flare of anger. They would never understand that until it rose up and killed them. Malcolm had no intention of being one of them.
Amateurs.
Although he had to grudgingly admit Simon had done amazing things, led their frail little group against Gretta Aldfather and Dr. White, two of the most fearsome creatures that ever stormed from the darkness. Malcolm had started to believe that the man had promise even though he was a magician. But now the Scotsman started to think that Simon was typical of magicians after all, prone to absorb concepts of their own greatness the way they absorbed aether. The man was walking the path to destruction because he had begun to believe in his own power.
Well and good, Malcolm thought, except that Simon was taking Kate and Penny with him. Those two might stay with the scribe until it was too late. But it wasn’t Malcolm’s mission in life to exercise power over anyone else. Every man and woman was a free agent. He would no more tell anyone what to do than he would accept someone’s telling him.
Malcolm found himself taking a cold, dark route that sent him past the St. Giles soup kitchen. It was nestled between a dilapidated storefront and an empty, crumbling building. He wasn’t exactly sure why he went there. He fingered the thick woolen scarf around his neck. It felt ordinary, but his throat had been a hairsbreadth from being cut but for this scarf. He wanted to treat the woman who had made it to a fine meal. She had offered him warmth and a kind word in a city that teemed with opportunists and charlatans. For that alone he was willing to pay his respects and thank her.
There was a dim light in the window. The door was unlocked, as he suspected it would be, so he entered the empty open space filled with simple, long tables and benches.
Malcolm’s knuckles rapped as he closed the front door behind him. “Hello.”
There was a loud clanking as if someone was banging pots and pans about in the kitchen. He made his way to the back and opened the other door. A rank smell wafted out that near brought the Scotsman to gagging. It was as if the week’s garbage had been left to spoil in the bins.
Malcolm spied a figure beside the iron stove straight across from him. She had a wooden ladle in one hand and a pot in the other. This wasn’t the woman he sought however. This person was taller and heavier, and dressed in a ragged and filthy coat. He coughed as the overwhelming smell of rancid meat filled his throat again.
The figure shifted at the sound. A dead, rotting face, half-consumed in writhing maggots and with its jaw hanging askew, turned toward Malcolm. He took an involuntary step back and yanked out his Lancaster pistols, pointing them at the woman.
He hesitated, waiting for the walking corpse to make the first move, but it merely stood there, clutching the wooden spoon in a hand comprised of bone and sagging flesh. Malcolm flashed back on Old Mrs. MacIntyre, who had terrorized him as a young lad from her reclusive sod shack near Loch Lomond.
Suddenly, there was a sound behind him and he spun around, one pistol still on the dead woman and the other pointing at a new arrival. The young woman he was searching for entered, dressed in her familiar plain grey dress and white bonnet. The eyes behind the small glasses perched on her nose widened at the dark Scotsman. Then she caught a glimpse of the horrific creature by the stove and she screamed. The bundles in her arms tumbled to the floor.
The dead woman reacted wildly to the shriek, rushing Malcolm with its arms held high, grunting loudly. He pulled the trigger. The ball struck the corpse in the center of the chest and tore a huge hole in it, but then the thing was on him. Its strength was surprising and a flailing limb slapped the pistol, sending it clattering across the stone floor.
Fingers seized his throat, cutting off his air with a powerful grip that dug deep despite the folds of thick wool. Malcolm grabbed the arm and putrid flesh dissolved in his hand until he held only cold bone. He blocked a wild swing from its other arm but he was unable to bring the second pistol to bear. It was all he could do to hold the thing at bay as the corpse jammed him into a corner.
Malcolm head-butted the undead woman. He heard a dull crack as its skull caved in with the shallow impression of his forehead. It staggered back. He planted a foot in its chest and kicked it farther away, with the sound of more bones snapping.
Gulping air into his desperate lungs, Malcolm brought his remaining Lancaster up and fired numerous booming shots in quick succession, the quad barrel spinning with a violent hiss of steam. Each ball slammed into the dead thing, forcing it back across the kitchen. When the gun clicked empty Malcolm drew a long savage dagger.
Then it saw the young woman rush in and dart toward a row of hanging knives and mallets. Before she could reach the tools, the cadaver seized the woman by the hair and pert high collar. The woman twisted to face her rancid attacker. She was pulled close against the coating of ooze leaking f
rom a variety of jagged openings. As the horrid creature struggled with the woman, it turned its crumbling back to Malcolm.
He charged, grabbing the corpse around the neck to drag it away from the terrified woman, but it was like trying to move a rail of iron coated in grease. Bits of rotting clothes and desiccated flesh came away in his hands. He saw the young woman rearing back and pressing her small hands against the monster’s emaciated chest.
A buzzing noise intensified in the room. Malcolm’s skin started to tingle with electricity, his hair rising on his scalp and arms. He wasn’t sure what was happening. He shook his head as a bluish aura enveloped the corpse. His first instinct was to get away, but he couldn’t abandon the petite, bonneted woman. Then he saw multiple spidery arcs of electricity crawling over her slim hands.
It was the last thing Malcolm saw as the stunning crash of Thor’s hammer falling to Earth reverberated in the room. He found himself airborne and smashed against a wall before the world went dark.
Malcolm came around to someone shaking him urgently. Everything hurt and his head was spinning. His eyes barely focused on the worried face of the young woman hovering over him.
“Oh, thank the Lord, you’re alive,” she exclaimed, clutching his rough hand.
He shoved himself up dizzy onto his elbow. “What the hell was that?”
The woman flinched. “I … I don’t know.”
“Are you hurt?” Malcolm asked groggily.
She looked amazed. “That, sir, seems a rather ridiculous statement when you are the one who was unconscious.”
He laughed and rubbed his eyes. “Just being polite.” He sat up straighter and felt none the worse for wear except for a sore back and the nagging heat of mild burns. He grinned wryly at her. “We have never been properly introduced. I’m Malcolm MacFarlane.”
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