Dead Rising

by Debra Dunbar

  So Russell might turn the vampires upon themselves, cause them to commit mass suicide, or something else. No doubt it would take him some time to learn how to use the scepter. How long, was anyone’s guess. I’d need to research further, as I assumed Russell had been researching. The difference was that I had the advantage of an entire Templar library at my disposal, and I wasn’t up every night summoning the dead.

  No, I was up every night protecting vampires, then working during the day at the coffee shop. Russell was probably fresh as a daisy compared to me right now. I’d proven his summoned spirits could be conquered. I’d proven I could block his attempts to rip the souls from living vampires. I’d given him no choice but to turn his attention toward the scepter now. All my efforts to block the necromancer and corner him into a compromise may have led us into an even worse position.

  “I’ll need to do some research, then see if I can’t come to a peaceable solution to the issue between you both.”

  Leonora stood. “Research all you want, but this magic user will be dead by next sundown. And mark my words, even if I do not recover the scepter, I won’t yield my position as Mistress of this Balaj. If you want to live, stay out of our affairs. And stay away from Dario.”

  Chapter 29

  I’D HALF HOPED that Dario would drive me back to my apartment, but it was Sarge that dropped me off in the early morning hours.

  Leonora had warned me off, but I didn’t take threats lightly. Actually I pretty much ignored threats. I’d like to blame it on the Templar heritage, but in truth I was just really stubborn. I was going to see this whole thing out, although I was going to try my darnedest to stay out of their internal power struggles. As for staying away from Dario…I got the feeling he’d be staying away from me.

  Which was probably for the best, given my somewhat obsessive thoughts lately when it came to the vampire. I had fledgling friendships. I needed to start dating, to get out there with human men and take my mind off this unsuitable vampire one.

  But in the meantime, I had a scepter to recover and a necromancer to stop. Or possibly kill. I winced at the thought. I’d never killed anyone before, which was odd given the militaristic nature of our order. We used to kill, to protect the Temple, to guard the Pilgrims on the Path. Wasn’t this the same? If I considered the Vampires to be somewhat innocent Pilgrims, then Russell was a threat whose death was justified.

  Then why did I feel so sick about it? I envisioned my sword, tearing through flesh and bone and shuddered. He was a human being. Someone who had been wronged and who truly believed he was doing the right thing. He wasn’t a monster, even if his actions were murderous and his mission misguided.

  Wasn’t he my Pilgrim too? Just one on the wrong path?

  I picked up my phone and stared at it a moment, remembering my last conversation with my father. Something about Jacob and Esau. I needed to speak to someone, but I was reluctant to get another obscure biblical lesson in return. Mom was out of the question, so that left me with Roman or Athena. Or Essie.

  I dialed, thinking again how odd it was that my century-old great grandmother had a cell phone.

  “Hello? Aria, is that you?” she screamed into the phone.

  “Yes, Gran. It’s me. I need some advice.”

  Her laugh roared through the phone line and I couldn’t help but smile. “So you call me? Your old witch of a granny? I hope it’s about that gorgeous vampire boy, because you know what my advice is going to be.”

  Yeah. Bring him home for Essie to play with. Poor Dario. “No, it’s about a necromancer.” I told her the story as succinctly as I could, amazed that she remained silent and attentive through the whole tale.

  “Quite a pickle you’re in, my girl,” Essie said at the end. I was relieved that she had in fact been listening and not dozing off in the middle of my story as I’d feared. “If I were in your shoes, I’d lop off that Russell-man’s head and ride off into the sunset with the smoking-hot vampire.”

  I rolled my eyes. That was Essie. But once you got past her shocking statements, she usually had some good ideas. And they weren’t couched in biblical stories, or lectures about how I needed to take my Oath. “Thanks, Gran, but what would Tarquin do?”

  Essie snorted at the mention of her husband, the renowned Templar and my great-grandfather. “Tarquin would cut his head off, too. Then he’d decapitate all the vampires after he killed the necromancer. Much as I loved the man, he was known to use extreme violence as a solution to any problem.”

  Great. “I don’t want to kill Russell. He’s not really a bad man, he just is misdirected. He’s on the wrong path.”

  “And there you have your answer, my girl.” Essie’s voice was softer, lower. It rang through me. “You’re not me, and you’re not Tarquin. And much to your mother’s dismay, you’re not the rest of your family either. You’re Aria, and you need to come up with a solution that lets you sleep at night. Put the man on the right path so he’s no longer a threat to your other Pilgrims.”

  “He won’t go. I’ve tried to talk to him. I’ve told him these vampires are blameless in the deaths of his family. He still sees them as monsters that he needs to get rid of.”

  “Sometimes words don’t work, Aria. Sometimes to change a man’s mind, you need to smack him upside the head—preferably with a hard, blunt object. When men have their emotions involved, they won’t see reason until you drive it through their thick skulls.”

  I’d had an idea nudging at the back of my mind for a while, but it was so risky and the price of failure so high that I didn’t want to consider it. But if it came to a choice between Risky Idea and Killing the Necromancer, Risky Idea won.

  “Thanks, Gran. I love you.”

  “I love you too, Aria.”

  I stared at my cell phone a moment after hanging up. I had a lot to do. In order to make this work, I had to remove all of Russell’s other options, to herd him down a path like a cow in a chute. And as suspicious as he was, I knew I was going to need help.

  After a quick nap I began researching the scepter and what I found wasn’t comforting. In addition to controlling vampire undead, it also held dominion over ghouls, zombies, ghosts and more. Grimoires that detailed the spells and ceremonies needed to activate the scepter were under tight magical security at the Temple, but that didn’t mean other documents weren’t out in the public. I read the brief overviews of the rituals and they weren’t simple by any means. If this thing was what I thought, it held great power—but it was only as powerful as the mage who held it.

  If it were just in my possession I’d have an affinity toward, an appeal to the dead. Those specters wouldn’t harm me and would be open to suggestions I made. Vampires would feel an urge to protect me and not want to harm me. Other than that, nada. With the correct spells, I could raise and command armies, and rule the world. With shitty partial spells…who knows? Russell might be using it to enhance his command of the undead he raised—which meant he’d be able to bring up thousands of spirits and direct them to kill. I’m not sure he had the mojo or the knowledge to be able to command and kill the vampires. Although I wasn’t sure.

  The guy in Richmond had the knowledge and power. It wasn’t a terrible stretch to imagine Russell might, too.

  I closed the books and packed up my supplies, swinging by three fast food restaurants on my way to the cemetery so I could decimate their supplies of salt packets. With my pockets loaded and my sword in hand, I once again walked through the big metal gates and across the neat rows of headstones toward the Robertson’s graves. They stood out, rectangles of dirt in a field of thick green. Little shoots of grass were beginning to sprout through burlap and straw covering the dirt.

  With the tip of my sword, I slashed a narrow line across the symbol on the grave markers. It glowed red then faded, leaving the stone unmarked. Any further magical marks would slide right off the granite.

  But that wasn’t enough. There were other ways to raise the dead. I needed to make sure that didn’t happe
n. One by one I circled the graves with salt, blessing the dead as I went. Then I kneeled at the foot of each grave, my sword hilt like a cross against my bent head.

  “Yeraz minch’yey shep’vori zangeri.”

  The salt sizzled like acid. The brown rectangles of disturbed dirt smoked, singing the sprouts of new grass. I felt a moment of guilt that I’d set the growth back a few months, that grass would be unlikely to cover these graves again until spring. But at least these souls would be at rest.

  These five graves were the most important of all. I’d just blocked Russell in a way that would hurt his heart. Yes, he could raise other victims of vampires to do his revenge or use other spirits with the aid of the scepter, but nothing would give him a sense of satisfaction, of closure like having his own family deliver justice.

  I’d taken that from him. He’d be even more pissed. Which would mean more spirits, a doubling up of efforts on his part. I was squeezing him into a corner and I wasn’t sure how this was going to end. A cornered fox needs an out. I just needed to make sure the out I gave him lead in the direction I wanted him to go.

  Pulling the sheets of paper out of my pocket I looked at the fifty-five other names. I could salt graves all day and not finish by nightfall, and with the scepter it wouldn’t really matter. I’d need to bless and salt every damned grave in the city. And ones outside the city. This was insane. I couldn’t spend all my time trying to stay one step ahead of Russell, especially when the vampires planned to kill him tonight.

  I’d laid his family to rest. It was time to skip the others and go straight to the finish. My meeting with Janice wasn’t until noon, so I went by the Robertson family house. It was a long shot that Russell would still be storing his memorabilia there after our last discussion, but I thought I’d try anyway. If I could grab the focus items, somehow manage to luck out and find the scepter, I’d be ecstatic.

  The old house looked the same, but I could tell something was very different from the last time I’d been here. Sure enough, the magical wards were down on the stairway, but there was one in place in the master bedroom—a trap. It was crude and loud. If I had been blind enough to trip it, it would have hurt me but not killed me. And I would have had to have been truly blind not to notice the pattern painted on the floor or the airsoft pellets poised to explode out of a bag when tripped.

  Russell was warning me off, and it gave me some hopes as to his salvation that he didn’t want to kill me either.

  I disabled the trap, and searched the room, just in case he’d left some sort of clue behind about where he’d moved his base of operations to. Another former family home? Where he was currently living or working? I had a few more hours to check between my meeting with Janice and my late shift tonight.

  Trying to be as stealthy as I could with a sword strapped to my back, I headed back to the pizza shop, asking about Russell’s schedule. He’d quit, and the manager was reluctant to give out any personal information on the necromancer. Luckily for me, his coworkers weren’t so circumspect.

  “Here.” The waitress handed me a slip of paper with two addresses written on it. “He also worked at the Citgo part-time and may still be there. This is the address he gave for his tax papers.”

  I smiled up at her, reading her name tag. Tania was about my mother’s age, with a maternal figure and a liberal amount of gray in her black hair. Lines creased her cheeks when she smiled.

  “If I see him, I’ll let him know you’ve got news about his family. I hope it’s good news.” The creases remained as her smile turned into a worried frown. “He was always talking about them, how they died when he was young. I hope what you have to tell him will let him live the rest of his life in peace, cause he sure hasn’t had much of that to date.”

  I hoped so, too. The Citgo was close enough to hit up before my meeting with Janice, but the other house would have to wait. This time when I drove there, I left my sword in the car. Russell could see past the look-away spell, even if the other humans couldn’t, and I didn’t want him thinking this was an attack. It wasn’t. It was a sneaky, herd the necromancer where you want him, meeting.

  Russell stiffened when he saw me, his hand going to a talisman around his neck. I raised my hands, showing him that I was free of both physical and magical weapons. “I just want to talk,” I told him.

  “I have nothing to say to you.” His eyes narrowed. “You protected them. They’re monsters. How could you do that?”

  “They’re no more monsters than you or I. I told you, the ones who did this to your family are dead. By continuing your attacks, you’re proving yourself to be no better than they were. How can you think that killing an entire Balaj makes you any different than the vampires who massacred your family in their home?”

  “They prey on people. They kill people.”

  “We kill for food, too.” I had a sudden vision of a cattle uprising—cows storming the city and killing every human in their path. Even the vegetarians.

  “Animals don’t have the same emotional capacity that we do. You know what they did to me, how can you even think of defending them?”

  This was going nowhere. Time to bash Russell over the head. “You will either cease your attacks on the vampires, or I will be forced to kill you. Your choice.”

  He sneered. “You? A Templar? You’re going to kill another human to protect a bunch of bloodsuckers who prey on humanity without remorse?”

  “They are Pilgrims on the Path. You are interfering with their progress. Therefore, their plea for help is more righteous than yours.”

  He threw up his hands, obviously just as frustrated with my stance as I was with his. “You won’t kill me. I’ve been studying since I was ten. I’ve dedicated my life to the magical arts, where you’ve spent yours drinking martinis by the pool and studying Latin.”

  I winced, because his words struck close to the mark. All the military training and the practice with weapons had all been somewhat academic. It was like rich guys who took fencing to spar with other rich guys, and never saw combat. At twenty-six, enlisted soldiers had already experienced war up close and personal, where I was still sparring and slicing up practice dummies.

  And honestly, who fought with Bastard Swords anymore? Or rode a charger in full plate with a lance at the ready? Yeah, I knew how to use modern weaponry, but my lifetime of practice had been geared toward a fighting style long out of date. We were relics. We were rich, entitled, aloof snobs drinking martinis by the pool, confident that no one would attack the Temple, that we no longer had Pilgrims on the Path to guard.

  It was an obscene life, and I was embarrassed by it. Which was the reason I was here in Baltimore, working a minimum wage job. It was why I was a Templar but not a Knight. It was why I’d refused to take my Oath—an Oath that was a mockery of the holy mission we’d once been charged to uphold and defend with our lives.

  But Russell was wrong if he thought I was without skills. And he was dead wrong if he thought I wouldn’t put away my reluctance to kill another being and end his life. He might be a Pilgrim, but he most definitely was on the path to hell.

  “I will continue to guard them every night, while you waste your precious resources attacking the impenetrable defense my faith provides. And I will ensure that those I return to the grave are only awakened by the trumpet of Judgement Day.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “There are a lot of dead in this city—more dead than you can possibly counter in your lifetime. And as for the vampires, you can’t protect them all. They eventually have to go out to feed, to be away from you, and I’ll have them. I’ve got focus items from nearly half of them, and I’ll keep at it until they die. One by one I’ll rip the souls from their rotted corpses.”

  “And your backup plan? You told your thief to steal the scepter. You knew exactly what the vampires had in their possession.”

  He smirked. “Just taking it is revenge enough. They’ll turn on each other soon enough. If not, I’ll make them kill each other.”

  I sens
ed his bluff. He was skilled, but not that skilled. “The best you can do with that scepter is make them fight over the television remote.

  “I think I can do more than that. It’s a three pronged attack. I’m not going to give up until they’re all dead, every last one of them.

  This had to stop. Now.

  “You won’t live long enough to manage a prolonged attack. I found you today. I’m sure the vampires have people who are tracking your every move. They plan on killing you at sundown, and if they don’t I will. Give this up or you’ll be seeing the inside of a coffin by the time the sun rises.”

  Doubt flickered in his eyes. I leaned forward to press my advantage home. “I found the tracker you put on my car, Russell. You’re not the only one with skills. I’m more than a Templar, and if you think I can’t find you or that I’ll hesitate to end your life, you’re mistaken.”

  “You wouldn’t.” There was a tremble underneath the strength of his voice that betrayed his fear. “Kill me and the police will have you on death row. I’m not the only one who notices the sword you carry around.”

  I smiled, watching him take a step backward. “I wouldn’t kill you Templar-style. No, when you least expect it, a car will fly around a corner and flatten you. Or a freak windstorm will blow a tree on your head. Maybe a chicken bone will stick in your throat, or an unknown food allergy will take you out.” I leaned closer. “Who knows? Ebola. Avian flu. Anthrax. Small pox. Maybe I’ll send a demon after you.”

  “You’re a Templar,” he stuttered, his face ashen.

  “I’m not a Knight,” I replied smoothly. “I haven’t taken my Oath, and I dealt with a very nasty demon last week that would love nothing more than to tear a human apart and take his soul. End your attacks and leave this city right now, or you’ll die.”

  I turned around to leave, hoping my bluff worked. Yes, I would kill him if I had to, but I was hoping that wouldn’t be necessary. And if it was, I certainly wasn’t going to mess with that demon who’d shown up in Vine’s place ever again.