Chapter 22
“Holy shit,” Sophia breathes.
The ornate iron gates to the cemetery have been wrenched open, and the zombies inside are dragging themselves out of open caskets and patches of earth.
They slip and crawl over the hills and intertwining pathways doused in curling fog.
Sophia raises her bow, but I pull her behind a towering oak tree, out of sight of the creatures.
We watch as the zombies converge like ants on spilled syrup, their singular focus on the lacrosse pitch beyond the gates.
Snarling, yowling, groaning their senseless need for flesh.
They aren’t fast, but together, they’re strong.
A blood-chilling scream carries over from the field, and Sophia shudders beside me.
I can’t think about what’s happening back there.
The way students and teachers are battling monsters with faces they might have known, friends and colleagues they may have mourned.
If Elliot’s gotten to safety. If anyone’s been killed.
I have to have faith that older students and professors can defend themselves while we stop the spell.
“We need to find the origin object,” I whisper. “Like Professor Crowley was saying in class yesterday.”
But unlike the minor rituals hunters can perform, spells and hexes must be cast by witches. And I don’t see any living beings around here but us. No dark figures. No cauldrons bubbling or incense burning or animals sacrificed on a hearth.
Sophia’s eyes scan the hills and tombs of the cemetery.
The weeping willows and babbling fountains.
I can read her furrowed brow. We have no idea where to begin.
The object that anchors the spell could be anything.
It could take days to find, and we don’t have that kind of time.
Every minute, another zombie climbs from its resting place.
“The gates,” I whisper at the same time Sophia quietly says, “We could block the exit.”
We exchange a brief smile—great minds—and then bolt toward the entrance.
A snarling, hulking, long-since-dead hunter hurtles toward me and I slice both my daggers clean through his neck before he can make contact.
Groaning noises and shuffling feet threaten to overwhelm me, but I tell myself it’s like the blindfolded sparring session.
I only need to focus on one sense at a time. We just have to make it to the gates.
Sophia gets there first. The wrought iron’s been ripped from its hinges.
She shoves as hard as she can, but the parts don’t fit together like they did before, and they’re heavy even for her hunter strength.
After three agonized attempts, I come to the same conclusion she does—there’s no way to close them.
No way to stop the reanimated creatures from spilling out and into the school.
“We just have to take them out as they reanimate,” I breathe. But there are so many of them.
“Shit,” Sophia curses as she shoots a crisp arrow into a decaying man whose lips have been ripped clean off. Another claws toward her ankles. My heart is between my teeth as I lunge with my dagger, but another one yanks me back. Sophia screams. The scent of rotting flesh races up my nose—
In two flashes of bright light, the corpses spring off us like we’re electric to the touch.
I spin, breath sawing out of me, to find Dean Driscoll, hands raised, sweat and blood on his brow.
I’ve never seen magic like that before.
“Dean Driscoll.” Sophia gulps.
“You two need to get out of here.” The dean’s face steels, and he raises a hand. Another flash of white light sparks in the corner of my eye, and two more zombies drop. “Now.”
A mournful festering woman stumbles out from behind the massive oak and toward the dean before we can respond.
This time, she halts, caught in midair by the throat.
The dean’s eyes narrow to furious slits as the fight is squeezed out of her.
His power wrings her neck. She shrieks—a desolate, sickening sound.
The scars and tattoos on the dean’s muscled arms bulge as he holds his hands out in her direction until her rotting head pops clean off and rolls toward a squawking crow wreathed in fog.
I swallow hard, my stomach churning. “We’re trying to fix the gates. To lock the zombies in here.”
But the dean has closed his eyes, his hands raised toward the cemetery behind us.
The scent of strange herbs and biting spices fills my nostrils as Sophia and I slice through any undead who wander toward him, groaning and stumbling, looking for flesh.
The dean doesn’t wink an eye open. His body tenses, the wind shifts, and a foreboding chill snakes down my spine.
When the dean opens his eyes, grim and bright with fury, he says, “The object of origin’s down there.
” Sure enough, we follow his eyeline to see a crypt door flung wide open, muddy footprints trailing down the darkened steps.
In the mist-coated night and in all my panic, I didn’t even notice.
“I can destroy it, but not if you two are in danger. You both need to get to safety.”
He eyes the dead who continue to break free from their graves and slink toward us. More and more and more of them—
“We’re not going anywhere,” Sophia says, reading my mind.
“Get the gates closed, then,” he says, voice baritone and resolute.
Not one to bicker when student lives are at stake.
He sidesteps the pool of congealing zombie blood on the ground before adding, “And do so without dying.” Then he conjures a jagged, gleaming hunting knife from thin air and carves his way through the dead standing in his way.
“You heard the man.” Sophia shoves at the gates again until her bangs are matted against her forehead with sweat. I try to help from the other side, but these hinges have clearly been broken by something far stronger than us. Magic, maybe. The same magic that spelled the cemetery.
My own breathing is too loud in my head.
The more we bang the gates, the more we draw the dead toward us.
Something grabs at my dress from behind, and I plunge my dagger back, but then another one is at my heels, and I can’t reach, and his fingers—those cold, dead fingers—are trying to tear into my flesh, and when I turn around to stab…
they’re both dead. Arrowheads in their skulls.
My eyes find Sophia, crossbow raised, dead zombies lying between us. “Told you I’d have your back.”
We watch as two more stumble over the fallen dead, trying to cross toward the field. But they can’t surmount the lumps of rotting flesh at their feet. Bones breaking, they collapse to the dirt.
I’m opening my mouth to thank her when an idea slams into me.
“They can’t climb,” I murmur. I survey the wooded cemetery. “There. We can knock that tree down. Block their path.”
Sophia looks up at the towering oak we’d hidden behind earlier. “With what army?”
But that’s exactly it. I gesture to the snarling dead around us. “This one.”
Digging my foot into the bark, I use my daggers like ice axes on a frosty mountain ascent to scale the tree.
Sophia uses her arrows to do the same, and we make quick work of the climb.
The view of Old Campus from the top of the oak would be hauntingly beautiful—all the swirling mist and gloomy, glowing windows—if there weren’t a bloodbath on the lacrosse pitch to our left.
“Ready?” I ask her.
“Are you kidding?” She grins. “This is going to be awesome.”
But adrenaline is coursing through my limbs so hard they’re shaking. “I’m glad you feel that way.”
Sophia screams as loudly as she possibly can. Despite every corner of my being telling me Do not do this, I follow suit. Our screams rival those coming from the pitch. Crows flee from trees around the cemetery, screeching in the air.
The dead below come slowly at first. Recalibrating their direction. Moving toward the sound. But the more we scream, the quicker they get the message. Like any herd, they have a pack mentality, and once a few come, so do the rest.
Only then do they attempt to scale the tree to get to us. Swarming, grunting, throwing their rotting bodies at the trunk. Arms and legs break off as a pileup begins to form at the base.
“It’s working,” she breathes. “Look.”
There’s no way down from the tree now. They have us surrounded. The roots begin to snap one by one. Hunter senses firing on all cylinders, I can feel them breaking as the tips of my fingers clutch the peeling bark. The tree leans and sways.
“Relax,” Sophia says. She must notice my white knuckles gripped around a branch, because she adds, “It’s like a roller coaster.”
“Now, that’s your horror franchise,” I mutter, trying to brace myself for the fall. “Zombie Roller Coaster Six.”
“The fourth one was better,” she jokes. I don’t think she’s even afraid.
“You’re out of your mind, aren’t you?”
The herd gives one last shove and the trunk rips from the earth with a crackling pop.
Shit, shit, shit—
The ground flies up to meet us. The mob of undead moans and whines at a low, rumbling decibel.
I hold on to the tree with my entire body’s strength and then, a second before impact, let go to avoid being crushed underneath its weight.
I go flying, rolling over trampled grass and mud.
A jagged tombstone catches my hip and pain ripples through me.
For a moment, it’s all I can do to lie still. The wind’s been knocked out of me, the air stopped in the depths of my lungs.
Panic seizes me. I can’t breathe—
But then the inhale dislodges and I suck in air by the lungful.
When I look up, I see Sophia’s landed in a barrel roll on the ground. A rabbit flies from the bushes to avoid being crushed, and the oak tree comes crashing down onto rocks and mud and headstones. Debris splatters both of us. But when we stand…