Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
If you think ghosts are scary, now is the time to exit the story. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
T hroughout history, different cultures had worshiped thousands of gods. Some were as fantastical and real as Santa Claus, while others not prominent in our modern day world still existed.
Donn, the Irish god of death, was one such being. Rumored to have once been a mortal who pissed off the Goddess ériu, she sent him to his watery grave at the bottom of the ocean and bound him to the house of Donn, where souls were collected. And so was born the god of death.
Nowadays the “one true God” idea dominated religion, but that didn’t mean the ancient gods had disappeared—they were effectively in retirement. They didn’t sully themselves with the squabbling of humanity these days. However, Donn being involved made sense, and it was bad news for us.
Celtic gods were brutal, powerful, and if memory serves, utterly nuts. Sitting alone in my office, I stared at the wall, trying to understand how Eloise would have gotten a direct line to a god. The book. Dammit. The Red Dragon.
She’d tracked down the powerful grimoire in order to perform spells to drag demons from Hell and siphon their power. She must have stumbled upon something powerful that allowed her to contact a god who would normally obliterate her. Gods weren’t known for their patience, which meant he must have wanted something. To come back? Ugh, I had more questions, not less. I hated gods. Wait, no, not you, God. Just the other ones. Your god buddies.
And now I was speaking to a wall like it was the burning bush.
There was a clatter upstairs as my family prepared for our delayed Christmas dinner redo. I was semi regretting it, but our lives couldn’t be full of death and despair without a little light. We’d go as nuts as Donn, and then we’d all be doomed.
My office door swung open, and Dangerous Dave swept in, a storm of dark leather and brooding expression. Was it too much to ask to go back to a time when the worst we faced was a weird shifter death?
“What’s up?” I asked. He wasn’t someone who came for small talk.
“We need you to examine a death at the pack.”
My shoulders dropped. Okay, weird wish to make come true, Grandfather.
I swung my feet off my desk and grabbed my bag, double-checking I had some sugar. How long had it been since I’d done a retro read? It was like dusting off my true magic, a familiar thing that needed nurturing, and I’d neglected it. Nothing a mysterious death couldn’t solve.
“I’m ready,” I said with a nod before striding up the stairs with the pack’s chief of security on my heels.
Aunt Liz hurried down the hallway. “Where are you going? Everyone will be here and the parsnips need peeling.”
I glanced over my shoulder. “My scalpel skills are needed elsewhere. I’m sure Maggie can handle a peeler.”
Aunt Liz huffed and parked her hands on her hips.
Dave spun around, grabbed my aunt, and kissed her senseless. It was so passionate, I was stuck between staring like a creeper and running for the hills. Before I could decide, he let my dazed aunt go and ushered me out of the house.
I sighed as we scrambled into the car and launched on to the road.
“It’s not what you think,” Dave grumbled.
“Are they dead?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you know why?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then it’s exactly what I think. So stop blustering and let’s go.”
“Fine, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The trees ruffled in the unseasonably warm winter breeze. The late afternoon sun was beginning its descent and rewarded us with a palette of pinks, peaches, and purples. In contrast, the scene before me was unnatural; a study in violence, colored in blacks, grays, and crimsons.
“I warned you,” Dave muttered from my left.
“How insistent were you?” Hudson snapped from my right.
I stared ahead, trying to understand. “How can you not understand why they’re dead?” I asked.
David squinted at the carnage. “Don’t confuse the why with how. How they died—clearly through limb and organ loss. Why? Well, that’s a mystery, given we can’t see anything missing.”
The only thing missing was my sanity. With a long-suffering sigh, I snapped on my gloves and strode into the middle of the field. “I didn’t even know you kept cattle,” I muttered.
Hudson pointed at a pile of bloody white feathers. “Hens.”
Dave jerked his head at one of the largest piles of remains. “Cows.” Then he pointed at a smaller mangled mess. “Goats and sheep.”
“I spotted a few rabbits in here as well,” Hudson added.
“Bunnies?” Seriously? Who or what would attack bunnies? I bent over to analyze the wounds. Large, messy, determined.
Twenty minutes later, I rose from my crouched position and peeled off my bloody gloves. “If I had to make an educated guess, I would say a human inflicted the wounds,” I told Dave and Hudson, who had stayed to watch me work.
“That’s not possible,” Dave said. “One human couldn’t achieve all this. There’s no trace of gunpowder, so they must have used blades.”
“No blade did this,” I told them. “The wounds aren’t clean enough. Hands and teeth made these.”
“For what purpose?” Hudson asked.
I placed my bloody gloves into a plastic bag and sealed it before dropping it into my work case. “I don’t know. My gift is normally reserved for the human variety. I don’t get reads off of animals, so this is a long shot.”
“What are you go?—”
I knelt and placed my bare hand on the largest victim, a tawny cow whose entrails littered the ground. My vision went black. Not so long after all.
Except I wasn’t in a cow’s mind.
The fever swept up my spine, and I rolled to my side. When would this end? The pain, the exhaustion, the clinging to life. Just let me go. I was ready. Where was God? I needed salvation in the arms of the Lord. Maybe then I could be at peace as I followed my beloved into the afterlife.
Bloodshot eyes stared back at me from my reflection in the full-length mirror positioned against the wall. My once golden hair that glistened in the sunlight hung limp over my reddened face. Bloodied cracks lined my perpetual pink plump lips, and my breath rattled in my chest, the oxygen fighting my lungs for dominance of the infection which would claim my body. Lotte, my beautiful daughter, sat on a stool in the corner, weeping silent tears as she read from my favorite book. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t focus on her words as my lungs seized one final time. Black dots decorated the edges of my vision, and I begged them to suffocate this pain. They answered my call, and the pain-filled world bled into the past.
I jerked awake, finding myself in the arms of a terrifying yet beautiful angel. His features were so stunning, it hurt to look at him. He smiled down at me.
“Time for you to wake, Sera. You have a new purpose.”
No. I was happy, at rest. I had done my time in the world, fought my battle with the devil and won the contest for my eternal soul.
I shook my head. “No, leave me here. I want to stay.”
“I have chosen you for my army.” His voice was a smooth symphony, coaxing yet demanding.
“What army?” I asked.
“You will see.”
The ever-present warmth bled from my limbs the farther we retreated from the light. I wanted to claw my way back. My heart wouldn’t cope with being away. Tears sprang into my eyes, and I struggled against him.
He clutched me tighter. Then boom, I was beneath the ground. The dirt pressed in around me, the sodden earth filling my nose with a combination of life and death. I could feel the worms moving against my skin. I was buried . No, no, no. Panic clutched my chest, and I fought the bonds of nature.
A clawed hand wrapped around my stomach and yanked me from the suffocating space before forcing my soul into a shadow. No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t a shadow; it was a vessel, one which would consume me. I fought, clawed, scratched, screamed, and begged to escape its clutches. It won, and a dark hunger enveloped me, one that burned my stomach until all I could think about was how to feed it. Blood, destruction, death. I scented their life force on the air and felt their heartbeats in my chest. Thump, thump, thump. Pain rattled my ribs. I needed to stop their hearts. Tendrils of my power wrapped around those vulnerable beating organs.
“Cora,” a masculine voice snapped.
I needed to destroy. Create suffering and chaos. My soul longed for it, and it was the only way the painful banging in my chest would cease. Power flooded my veins, and agony arched my spine. Flesh tore, and I gasped as my eyes flicked open to meet the hazel gaze of my mate.
He kneeled in front of me, his hands cupping my face.
“You back with us?” Indigo asked with thinly veiled amusement.
“Yes.”
“Good, because there’s only room in here for one bloodthirsty soul-sucking being, and I called dibs.” She sunk back into my mind, and the wings on my back sagged under the weight. I’d never carried them without her power before. Damn, they were heavy.
“You need to release us,” Dave growled.
Release them? What was he talking about?
Hudson’s thumb stroked my cheek. “Our hearts, Cora. Release our hearts.”
My eyes flew wide. Oh. Oh shit. I dropped the invisible grasp I had on them, and they both blew out a relieved breath. My body slumped forward, and I smiled at my mate.
“Sorry about that,” I whispered. “I need a little sugar.” That retro read had done a number on me.
Dave thrust a juice box with the straw already in at me. I took it with a grateful smile and swallowed the entire thing in thirty seconds. He swapped it out for another one.
Three juice boxes later, and I had fought off the rising tide of unconsciousness. That was progress.
“What happened?” Hudson asked. I recounted the vision, the memory, the feelings. Everything.
“So you got a read off the animal she killed?” Dave asked as he folded his arms. “That’s new.”
I scowled at him as Hudson helped me to my feet. The world tilted for a moment before righting itself.
“Why kill them in the first place?” Hudson asked. “Seems a little much for one woman.”
Except she wasn’t a woman. She’d been dead a long time. She was undead. Unnatural. She was an entity guided by a powerful presence, one strong enough to rip her soul from Heaven and shove it back onto the Earth.
“I think,” I started, before drawing in a steadying breath. “I think we are dealing with zombies.”