I joined her, just as confused as she was. “I think…something just sucked the spirits out of this cemetery. Kind of like a giant vacuum cleaner.”
“What would do that? And why?” She reached down to give Chase her hand, and I took his other side. We lifted him to his feet, and he draped his arms around our shoulders. “You okay? What’s wrong with your leg?”
“I caught my foot in a hole when I was running from a bone-walker. I don’t know if it’s broken, but it hurts like hell.” He sighed. “I’m not even going to pretend I can walk on my own. But can you find my men? Two officers were out here with me. I lost track of them when we split up. They went down a different path to check out a noise we heard, and I haven’t heard from them since.”
Morio motioned to Smoky. “You and the girls go look for his men. I’ll carry him back to the parking lot. Shade, come with me, in case we meet any stragglers.”
Shade nodded. Chase let out a “Huh?” as Morio, still in his demonic form, lifted the detective into his arms.
Morio shrugged. “Dude, it’s going to be quicker if I carry you.”
“Fine, but hurry. You’ve got some pretty funky B.O. going on in this form.” Chase gave me a wry what-can-you-do shrug. Over the past few months, he’d managed to rein in his ego and had fallen into his place in the group. He was a vital member, and now he knew we thought of him that way. So he’d started accepting his physical limitations even as his psychic powers burgeoned out.
Morio set off with Shade behind him. Smoky, Delilah, and I turned back to the graveyard. The night was growing darker, and the clouds now covered the moon. I was tired, both magically and physically. The sugar and adrenaline rushes had worn off, and I just wanted to drop into bed.
“Come on, let’s get this over with.” I hoped, really hoped, that Chase’s men had found a place to hide, or that somehow they’d made their way back to the parking lot, but the cynic in me wasn’t betting on it. Zombies and bone-walkers might be slow, but they never tired, and fear made for clumsiness.
We headed for the nearest sidewalk—probably fifty yards away—in silence. The scattered remnants of the bone-walkers still twitched, fingers inching along the ground, toes struggling to move on their own. I passed an arm bone that still had a hand attached to it, and the fingers were pulling it along the ground, grasping at blades of grass as it inched toward us. Smoky gazed at it silently for a moment, then walked over and stomped on it, crushing it beneath his foot. That took care of that. He looked back at us.
“Once we find Chase’s men, we should bury this flotsam. These were once living, breathing people. Their remains deserve respect, not this desecration.” He rejoined us.
“That they do.” I led the way off the grass onto the sidewalk. The path wound through another thicket of trees, this time birch and maple, out into another section of the cemetery. The gravestones here had been toppled, too.
Everything felt empty, eerily so. Though I knew most of the dead were still in the ground, the spirits were gone. Shortly after death, the majority of spirits went on to their next phase in life, or to be with their ancestors, but every graveyard held at least a handful who could not let go. I’d never encountered a completely clear and empty boneyard before, and the feeling unsettled me. It wasn’t normal.
“There’s nothing left. Whatever sucked up the spirits got them all. Who could do such a thing?” I shivered, drawing my jacket tighter around me.
“Ivana Krask?” Delilah grimaced.
I thought about it for a moment. Ivana Krask, the Maiden of Karask, was one of the Elder Fae—and a definite freak show. She kept a garden of spirits, where she would torment them. For the most part, she took only the angry and dangerous ones. But even though Ivana had a staff that could clear out the ghosts in a limited area, this sort of wholesale pillaging was beyond even her. At least I thought it was.
“We’ll ask her, but I don’t think she was responsible. Never hurts to check, though.” As I pushed aside a low-hanging branch overshadowing the sidewalk, I stopped cold. Up ahead, just off the path to the left, was a man, in uniform. Or what was left of a man. And over the body hunkered a pair of zombies, feeding. Great, first bone-walkers, a bloatworgle, goblins, and now walking meat-bags.
I grimaced as I noticed they’d ripped open his torso and were dipping into the organs. One of the zombies was feasting on intestines, and the slick tubes of viscera hung limply out of the creature’s mouth. The zombie had been a young woman, and the sight of her shoveling the offal through her bloodstained lips made me want to retch. I sucked it up—I’d seen a lot of sick things in my time and this was no worse than some of the others—and looked around for the other officer.
A ways up the path, we caught sight of the second body. Again, a zombie was hovering over it, gnawing on an arm. It glanced up at us, a wary gleam in its eye.
Unlike ghouls, who had some sense of sentience and who also fed on energy as well as flesh, zombies and bone-walkers were mere automatons and did not think or reason. All of them ran on magic until they were stopped or until the spell ran out. And all three types of the undead continued on until torn to pieces, and once that happened, they were helpless until the magic fueling the cells leached out or was cut off by the spellcaster.
Smoky silently went into action. He bore down like a battering ram, slamming the zombies off the first body. With one swift blow, he broke the neck of the dead girl, the bloody feast splattering out of her mouth. She came at him, her head drooping to one side. The other zombie went into attack mode, too, intent on defending his meal.
Delilah and I took on the one squatting over the other cop. We had a head start, and it ignored us until we were near enough to be a threat. Then, using the arm as a weapon, the zombie stumbled forward. I pulled out my blade and circled around back of it while Delilah engaged it face-on. With a shout, she spun, one booted foot catching it on the chin.
The zombie’s head whipped to the side, the sound of bones cracking. Taking advantage of Delilah’s attack, I plunged the dagger into it, shoving forward with all my weight. The zombie went down with me on top of it.
“Hurry, while I’m on its back, carve it up!” I tried a choke hold while Delilah got to work. Apparently, I was better at clutching than fighting, because I managed to hold the zombie steady while Delilah started sawing through the arm joint with her dagger.
Surprised, I noticed there was no blood splatter. Whoever this had been, he’d been embalmed. The question of how zombies ate—or if they even digested their food—ran through my mind, and I made a mental note to follow up. Disgusting, yes, but maybe the answer would help us in the future.
Delilah glanced at me as I perched on the back of the zombie. “This was an older body—it was falling apart when the necromancer raised it. In fact, I think the only thing holding it together is the magic.”
She whipped through the arm, then cut the hand and fingers from the limb, then tackled the other side. It was kind of like cutting up a side of beef. Except we weren’t about to fry up steaks for dinner.
Smoky joined us. “I dispatched the other two,” he said, watching as we finished detaching the arms and legs. “Here, I can make quick work of the rest of it. Get back.”
“Gladly.” I gingerly got up off its back, feeling grubby and hoping there were no parasites clinging to me from the corpse. In a blur of motion, Smoky ripped the thing to shreds.
Meanwhile, Delilah and I returned to the bodies of the fallen officers. “Tom and Markus. Both were fairly new.” She hung her head. “I didn’t know them all that well, but they seemed nice. I think Markus has a family.”
I leaned closer. It was hard to tell what race they’d been, after the zombies had gotten through with them. “Fae? FBH? Elf?”
“Tom was an FBH. Markus was an elf.” She pressed her lips together as Smoky returned. The bodies were a mess and it would be hard to get them out of there without making things worse.
“Should we call in a forensics team?”
Delilah shrugged. “Chase has to follow certain procedures but we know what killed these men. We do need the FH-CSI coroner so they can gather…everything that’s left.”
I gazed at the dead men. So much damage. But then, again, even in the FBH community, there were a lot of murders that made just as little sense. I shook my head. “Tomorrow, we pay a visit to Ivana, though I doubt this is her doing. The Elder Fae have no keep with zombies. They aren’t buddy-buddy with any of the undead, really, except for a few like the Black Annis, and Kelpie-Woman.”
Not wanting to leave the bodies alone, I put through a call to Yugi, Chase’s right-hand man at headquarters. “Yugi, get a recovery team out here. We’ve got two dead officers. We know what killed them—zombies. Don’t know who is responsible yet, but we’ll find out. Chase is hurt; he sprained his ankle pretty bad, it looks like, but he’ll be okay otherwise. Don’t think we need forensics, unless you bring out a magical team. We put the zombies back in the grave.”
“Right. Where are you?”
“Wyvers Point Cemetery. We’re in…” I glanced around, but there was no telltale sign of what part of the graveyard we were in. Then I caught sight of a faded sign that read Belmont Lane. “We’re on Belmont Lane, one of the paths that runs through the cemetery.”
“Hold on…calling up a schematic right now.” Yugi paused. He was Swedish by birth, a naturalized citizen, and he was an empath. We’d never seen a good demonstration of his abilities, but he’d been with Chase since the formation of the Faerie-Human Crime Scene Investigation unit, since the portals first opened. Now, he was second in charge of the FH-CSI.
“Got it. Okay, sending a team out right now. Can you wait till we get there?”
“Will do. Delilah and I will be in the parking lot.” I hung up, then glanced over at Smoky. “Love, can you wait with the bodies? I can’t stand the thought of anything else coming along to destroy them.”
“Of course, my sweet.” He leaned down, his ankle-length silver hair lifting to coil around me. Smoky could do wondrous and sensuous things with his hair in the bedroom. He was six four, pale as cream, and young as dragons went, though he had seen centuries come and go.
He pressed his lips to my forehead, then nodded to Delilah and me. “Be careful on your way back to the parking lot.”
We followed the sidewalk, not veering off into the grass or the undergrowth just in case we’d missed any of the goblins or the zombies. The goblins…wait a minute.
“Goblins. Delilah, the goblins wouldn’t be in league with Ivana. Do you think Gulakah, the Lord of Ghosts, is utilizing them now? Maybe Telazhar is sending them over from Otherworld via one of the portals. He would have access to them now, and sending us groups of the buggers is a great way to wreak havoc.”
Telazhar, an ancient necromancer from Otherworld, had long ago been banished to the Sub-Realms. He’d led the Scorching Wars, laying waste to a vast region of land now known as the Southern Wastes. Rogue magic rode the sand dunes there, waiting for unwary travelers. And there, sorcerers and necromancers gathered, biding their time and practicing their dark arts.
While Shadow Wing couldn’t use the portals yet to send demons through from the Sub-Realms, Telazhar could easily use the portals to send goblins through to Earthside.
“Ten to one you’re right. Which means we need to find out which portal he’s using and close it down. If we can. Or at least post guards on it.” She brushed her hand across her eyes as we jogged along the trail. “Sometimes I wish the freaking war would just build to a head so we could get it over with.”
“Unfortunately, if that happened now, we’d lose. We still aren’t organized enough, and the gods only know what kind of force we need in order to go up against Shadow Wing’s armies. Hell, we have enough trouble dealing with just one demon general, let alone a brigade of demons.” I shook my head. “I’m as tired as you are, but don’t invite hell to rain down on us yet. We aren’t ready. So. Not. Ready. Remember: Shadow Wing is the Big Bad Wolf. And we’re holding Red’s basket of goodies, as far as he’s concerned.”
We reached the parking lot to find Chase on a bench, his leg propped up. Morio and Shade were keeping watch.
Chase looked up expectantly. I hung my head, not wanting to tell him the bad news. Delilah must have sensed my reluctance because she sat down beside him and gave him a sad smile.
He read her expression loud and clear. “They didn’t make it, did they?”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. No. We called Yugi, and he’s got a recovery team on the way here. Zombies. We killed them.”
Not that it made anything better, really. It would be one thing if we’d caught whoever it was doing the reanimating, but the zombies were simply weapons. They weren’t the masterminds.
Chase let out a long sigh. “I just took both of them onto the force. Promised them plenty of adventure and action. I guess they got more than they could handle. I should never have sent them out here. Not knowing what we’re facing.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Chase. They were both experienced, weren’t they? They had several years on the job, right?”
I didn’t want him to feel guilty. We’d suffered collateral damage before, and the bodies were stacking up. But regardless of how careful we were, there were going to be casualties. We just had to do our best to mitigate how high the body count went.
He gave me a long look. “Tom was a twelve-year veteran on the force. And Markus, he served five years in Queen Asteria’s guard. I guess…they went in prepared. We just weren’t expecting to find zombies.”
