Chapter 11 #2
A charge sizzled through the air, Charlee’s unbound hair frizzing with electricity. The moon shifted behind a cloud. Shadows lengthened across the misty grass, reaching for Gabriel. The air thickened, sour on Miles’s tongue, coating his mouth as his protective charms grew warm.
“You guys feel that?” Emily whispered, her voice uncertain.
“Yeah,” Charlee answered. “I don’t like it.”
But there was no darkness spreading over Gabriel’s skin, no sign that he was being taken over. In the distance, an owl hooted. The surrounding trees were still.
“Did it feel like it worked?” Miles asked Gabriel.
“How would I know?” He stared down at the page, eyebrows furrowed. “I did all the steps correctly, and I—”
A noise broke through the night, a loud crack that rattled Miles’s teeth. Several yards away, one of the headstones shook, dirt churning and frothing at its base before it toppled over. More started to tremble, the smell of fresh earth and decay filling the air.
Charlee clutched Miles’s sleeve. “What’s going on?”
Where the first headstone had fallen, a mangled hand punched through the soil, fingers clawing at the surrounding grass.
Miles watched in horror as wiry arms followed, then a concave head.
Long hair twisted in grimy tangles, gray-tinged skin hanging in strips from the face to reveal the rotting meat beneath.
Another emerged from the ground beside it—dried flesh split over flashes of milky bone that glowed in the moonlight—and scrabbled at the dirt.
The dead were crawling out of their graves.
Panicked white noise droned in Miles’s ears. He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.
“We’re all seeing this, right?” Emily asked weakly.
“Yep.” Charlee’s fingers tightened in the denim of Miles’s jacket. “What the hell do we do?”
Miles choked on a painful wheeze. “Those are zombies, Charlee. Zombies. Oh my God, I knew we shouldn’t have used this stupid book, I knew it.”
Charlee whirled to Gabriel. “What went wrong, and how do we fix it?”
He dove back into the book, flipping the pages frantically. “I don’t know. The ritual was meant for Jocelyn, we named her specifically, so it should have—” He cut off.
“What?” Miles forced himself to look away from the graves, away from the undead painstakingly pulling themselves free of the soil like butterflies wriggling out of a cocoon. Rotting, bloodthirsty, undead butterflies. “What is it?”
“The spell is to summon living or dead, spirit or flesh. If it wasn’t able to reach Jocelyn, the magic still has to go somewhere.” His gaze flitted to the zombies. “This must be the flesh.”
“That doesn’t make any sense!” Miles was too far gone to be embarrassed by the hysterical note in his voice. “We didn’t summon zombies.”
“We’re in a cemetery. The closest flesh it could find would be corpses.”
“Stop acting like this is okay! There are literally zombies coming out of the ground right now. We’re five seconds away from having our brains eaten.”
“I’m simply saying, I understand why the magic chose—”
“Uh, it’s coming at us,” Emily interjected in a panicked squeak.
The first zombie had completely broken free of the earth and was slowly lumbering towards them. Thick black ooze dribbled from its hamburger-meat lips.
“It’s coming at me,” Gabriel corrected. “I’m the one who summoned it.”
“Do we run?”
“We can’t run away and let zombies loose on the town,” Charlee hissed. “We need to do something.”
Miles flushed. She was right, of course she was, but zombies. Everyone had told him it was an irrational fear, that they didn’t exist, but here he was, smack dab in the middle of his worst nightmare come to life. He could barely think, let alone formulate a plan.
Charlee snatched up her shovel from the grass and sprinted forward, swinging it like a baseball bat.
The flat blade smashed into the side of the zombie’s head with a sickening crunch, knocking it to the ground.
A moment later, it moved to push itself up with unsteady limbs, but Charlee stomped it back down.
Miles had never loved his cousin more.
“You two figure out how to fix this,” she barked at Miles and Gabriel. “Emily, grab a weapon and help me keep them back.”
More corpses shambled forward, birthed from the darkness and swirling fog. They weren’t particularly fast, more than one stumbling over their own feet and bumping into tombstones, but it was unnerving how focused they were on Gabriel.
Emily whirled helplessly, hands flapping. “What am I supposed to use?”
Two rows of headstones back, there was a flag jammed into the ground beside a grave.
It wasn’t very long, standing only slightly taller than the tombstone, but that didn’t stop Emily from ripping it free and charging at the nearest zombie with it like a jousting pole.
Miles could only watch, jaw dropping, as she skewered it with a wild shriek.
It pierced through but didn’t knock the zombie over, Emily and it both staring down at the protruding stick in confusion.
“Damn it,” he heard her swear, before she yanked it free. The flag twisted and bunched around the pole, wet with rotten guts and more of that slick black liquid. Instead of stabbing again, she started whacking, beating the zombie to the ground with a determined grimace.
Behind her, a near-skeletal head went flying as Charlee’s shovel drove it off a set of shoulders.
Holy shit.
He and Gabriel shared a look of awed disbelief before turning back to the grimoire.
“We need to stop them,” Miles muttered. “Maybe a… mass banishing spell?”
“To banish what? They don’t have spirits.”
Miles frowned, cautiously lifting his mental shield and reaching out to the nearest zombie. Gabriel was right— there was no spark of life, no soul, only the dark taint of the grimoire’s magic stuffing their limbs with power.
How did you kill something that wasn’t even really alive?
“Wait, do you have the knife?”
Gabriel whipped out the kitchen knife from earlier and offered it to him.
“Not that knife—the overpowered kill-anything one!”
Gabriel frowned. “Why would I have that?”
“In case something exactly like this happens!” The same reason Miles had been lugging around that disgusting heart. It wasn’t like they’d get a heads up before needing it. “Okay, I’m done coming up with plans, it’s your turn.”
Emily and Charlee were doing their best, but the zombies were closing in around them, lumbering back to their feet faster than they could knock them down.
Gabriel set down the grimoire. “The magic animating them feels similar to the guardian in the tunnels. I might be able to take hold and release it.”
“But the darkness went into you.” That was exactly what they were trying to avoid. Miles wasn’t sure he’d be able to save Gabriel again. The last time had been one big rush of desperation and instinct. “We can’t risk it.”
“There’s no time to dig through the grimoire for another spell. If we don’t stop them now, they’ll hurt someone.”
He was right. Miles hated it. “Fine, but come into my head first so I can protect you.”
“I can’t do both. Hold your mind open for me, and I’ll step inside if I need to.”
Miles liked the idea that he was a place of safety. That Gabriel could stand with one foot over the threshold of his mind, half in the light, half in the dark.
“I will,” he swore.
Gabriel’s fingers dipped beneath the sleeve of Miles’s jacket to encircle his wrist. A moment later, that now-familiar tap announced his presence.
Charlee bashed her shovel into the torso of a particularly decrepit corpse, then jumped back with a noise of disgust as it snapped at the waist, top half toppling to the grass in a cloud of dust. Its legs kept going, staggering around.
“When I pull the magic, close yourself off if you feel it starting to transfer to you.”
“Yeah, sure.” As if Miles would abandon him.
Gabriel sucked in a jagged inhale. A crackle in the air made Miles’s hair stand on end as Gabriel went rigid, his nails biting crescent moons into Miles’s flesh.
All the zombies, even the ones half-freed from their graves, froze mid-shamble.
Emily panted, slumped against an angel statue with her flagpole, unbelievably, still intact. Beside her, Charlee stood guard, shovel raised and ready.
A quiver raced down Gabriel’s body, tendons straining in his hands and corded on his neck. He was crushing Miles’s wrist to the point of pain, so Miles twisted in his grip until their palms met, weaving their fingers together.
In eerie unison, the zombies’ faces tilted up, kissed by the pearly moonlight.
A beat passed. Then, that black fluid streamed from their mouths, hovering in the air like threads of liquid night plucked from between the stars.
It twisted, mirroring the tendrils of fog below before surging towards Gabriel.
Miles flinched, about to tackle him to the ground, but the streams collided with each other a few feet away, forming one glistening ball, darker than the shadows of the cemetery surrounding them, with a mesmerizing oil-slick shine.
The zombies toppled over, unmoving.
“You got them all,” Miles told Gabriel. “You can release it now.”
Gabriel’s free hand lifted, curling into a fist before the orb. It bobbed closer, pulsating.
In the tunnel, the creature had dissipated immediately.
“It’s not listening,” Gabriel breathed, his eyes glazed. Unfocused. “It wants… inside.”
No. No, no, no.
“Let it go. Step back and let it go.”
“I can’t. We conjured it. We owe it.” Gabriel sounded far away, like the darkness was already dragging him under, taking him far enough away that Miles couldn’t reach him. “It’s hungry and needs to feed.”
Miles tried to expand the bubble of his mind to envelop Gabriel, but slammed against an immovable wall.
Backtracking, he lunged for the gentle weight of Gabriel’s presence instead, for any part of him he could yank back to safety.
With a sickening lurch, he fell straight through the open doorway between them into Gabriel’s mind.
Gabriel’s emotions hit him full force.