Death Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (Shrouded Nation #37)

Chapter 1

SALIMA

The first thing I registered wasn’t the sound. It was the way my skin went tight, like my body had decided danger lurked before my brain caught up.

Then the screams hit.

They cut straight through the basement suite, through the hum of my laptop that I never bothered to shut off, through the half-dream I’d been having where nothing ever happened and nobody needed anything from me.

I shot upright in bed and immediately regretted it. My head throbbed like I’d been hit with a frying pan. Great. The tincture I’d taken to force myself to sleep must have worked a little too well.

Another cry. Closer this time.

I flung my legs over the side of the bed, bare feet finding the cold floor. My suite always ran cooler than the rest of the house. Mrs. Harriet insisted the heat “was perfectly fine,” which meant she kept it at a temperature suited for a woman who wore cardigans like armor.

A heavy thud sounded overhead, followed by muffled footsteps. Even Harriet was up.

That alone made my stomach drop.

I grabbed my phone off the nightstand. Zero notifications, which meant this wasn’t a normal supernatural flare the council had seen coming. When the magic board went off, my phone usually lit up with a warning before I could blink.

I shoved my arms into the bathrobe hanging on the hook by the door, the fabric twisting over the tattoos on my forearms. I didn’t stop to find shoes. I didn’t stop to think. I just moved.

The back door of the basement suite opened to the yard. Harriet’s rose bushes framed the narrow path as if they were trying to be polite about the fact that her yard was not meant for panicked exits. I pushed through anyway.

Cold air slapped me awake. The night wasn’t fully night anymore. That in-between hour when the sky looked bruised and the streetlights didn’t know if they should stay on.

And the street was chaos.

People poured down Beechward Crescent in a surge of bodies, some in pajamas, some in coats thrown over bare legs, some clutching dogs that barked as if their lungs were going to give out. A kid cried. A man shouted for someone named Lisa. A car horn blared, long and desperate.

The smell hit next. Smoke, maybe. Or something scorched. Underneath it, that coppery tang I associated with blood and bad decisions.

I stepped onto the sidewalk and immediately had to grab the fence post to keep from being knocked over.

“Move!” someone yelled, shoulder-checking past me.

Another person ran by with a grocery bag like it contained the last piece of sanity in town.

Nobody looked back.

Which meant whatever they were running from was behind them.

My chest tightened. The healer part of me wanted to grab the closest person and ask what happened. The other part of me, the part I kept buried under sarcasm and locked doors, already knew this wasn’t a gas leak or a fire.

This was fear.

I pivoted, scanning the crowd.

“Hey!” I shouted, but my voice got swallowed by the panic. “What’s going on?”

A woman stumbled toward me, eyes wide, face pale. She clutched her arm as if she’d hurt it.

“Don’t go that way,” she gasped.

“That way is my way,” I snapped, already stepping forward. “What did you see?”

Her gaze flicked past my shoulder, and her expression changed. Not fear anymore. Pure horror.

“Dead,” she whispered. “It’s dead, and it’s walking.”

Then she bolted, disappearing into the tide of bodies.

My pulse tripped. I took one step, then another, moving against the flow. It felt like trying to run upstream in a river, except the river was made of screaming neighbors and elbows.

Someone knocked into me hard enough that my robe slipped open at the collar. I didn’t care. I tucked my phone tighter in my hand and kept going, weaving through people, dodging a stroller someone had abandoned on the curb.

A siren wailed in the distance. Not close enough to help. Not fast enough to matter.

The farther I went, the less noise there was. The crowd thinned, as if panic had a boundary it didn’t want to cross.

Then I saw why.

A figure staggered in the middle of the street under the dying streetlamp. At first glance, it looked like a drunk, swaying, arms hanging loose. A man, maybe. Tall enough. Wearing a jacket that hung wrong.

Then it lifted its head.

And my breath caught.

The face was gray. Not sick gray. Not tired gray. Gray like candle wax. The skin around the mouth had split at one corner, and dark, sticky blood had dried down the chin in uneven stripes. One eye was half-collapsed, the lid sagging. The other stared straight ahead, milky and empty.

Its movements were jerky, like someone had tied strings to its joints and didn’t know how to work them.

A zombie.

I’d seen one before, but still, they brought a chill to my bones.

Stories never got the smell right.

Rot had weight. It filled the air. It crawled into your mouth and sat on your tongue like a dare.

The zombie turned, slow and wrong, toward a man crouched on the sidewalk with his hands over his head. The man’s shoulders shook. He was crying. He either hadn’t seen it yet, or he had, and his body had chosen denial as a coping strategy.

I did not have time for denial.

I took a step forward, then another.

The zombie lurched.

The man looked up.

He screamed.

The sound sliced through everything else. It wasn’t just fear. It was the primal understanding that you were about to become something you couldn’t come back from.

I lifted my hand without thinking, fingers spreading. Light flared in my palm, pale and concentrated. Not the kind of magic that killed. The kind that shoved.

“Back off,” I hissed.

Power snapped out of me like a whip, invisible force slamming into the corpse’s chest. It staggered, but it didn’t fall. Its head rolled to the side, neck cracking, and it righted itself with a wet pop.

Okay. That was new.

I swallowed hard and forced myself to focus.

I expected to feel a signature, some kind of residual spellwork. Necromancy left traces. Like smoke in the air, like cold fingerprints on the bones of the world.

Instead, I felt… nothing.

Not nothing as in safe. Nothing as in blank. Like someone had scrubbed the scene clean and left the horror behind.

My skin prickled. The hairs on my arms rose. My magic pressed against my ribs as if it wanted to run away.

I took another step, angling to keep myself between the zombie and the man.

“Get up,” I snapped at him. “Run. Now.”

He stared at me, shock freezing his features.

I grabbed his sleeve and yanked. That did it. He stumbled upright and bolted down the sidewalk.

The zombie followed.

Of course it did.

It dragged one foot, the shoe half off, leather flapping with every step. Its jacket had a name tag pinned to it, like it worked somewhere. I couldn’t read the letters. The tag was smeared with blood.

A fresh wound split the skin at its temple. Something had hit it. Maybe a bat. Maybe a brick. The wound should have made it stop. It didn’t even slow.

I raised my hand again, then hesitated.

If I threw more power at it, I risked drawing attention. I risked the wrong kind of attention.

Because there was a second sensation now, faint but real. A thread, like the tug of a fishing line. It ran from the zombie into the dark, stretched taut and hungry.

It wasn’t attached to the body.

It was attached to the idea of the body.

Someone was pulling it.

Necromancy.

My stomach rolled. It wasn’t my spell. It wasn’t my signature. But it was my nightmare, walking in the street as if it owned the place.

The zombie lunged again, faster than it should have been able to move.

I acted on instinct.

I stepped into its path and slammed my palm against its sternum.

Cold. So cold I felt it in my teeth.

For a split second, my senses sharpened. The street, the air, the heartbeat of the town. I saw the necromantic thread clearly then, dark and slick, like oil on water.

Then the cold surged, trying to climb up my arm.

I jerked back as if it had burned me, and the zombie stumbled, arms windmilling, almost falling. Almost. It caught itself and snapped its jaw, teeth clicking.

“Not today,” I muttered.

My phone vibrated in my hand.

The screen flashed a name I didn’t want to see right now.

Lucinda.

Of course.

I answered because ignoring the high priestess never ended well, and because if the council was calling, this was already bigger than one undead idiot on my street.

“What?” I demanded, voice harsh.

“Where are you?” Lucinda’s tone was clipped, as if I’d personally inconvenienced her morning.

“I’m outside,” I snapped. “People are running. There’s a—”

“A zombie,” she cut in, as if she’d already moved past the shock and into irritation. “Yes. We know. Get to the council chambers. Now.”

I glanced at the corpse in front of me as it swayed, head tilted, listening to nothing.

“You want me to leave this here?”

“You want to argue?” Lucinda’s voice rose. “Move, Salima. This is council business.”

Council business. The words tasted bitter.

I’d been council business in Salem. That hadn’t gone well for me or for anyone who stood too close.

“I’m on my way,” I said, because fighting on the phone while a zombie tried to chew my face off felt like a bad use of time.

“Good,” she snapped. “And Salima? If you know anything, you tell us first.”

The line went dead.

I stared at the phone for half a second, then shoved it back into my grip like it could keep me grounded.

The zombie lurched again.

I didn’t have a weapon. I didn’t have supplies. I had a bathrobe and a headache and the world’s worst timing.

So I did the only sane thing.

I ran.

Not away from the zombie. Past it. I sprinted up the sidewalk, darted around a parked car, and threw a final shove of magic over my shoulder. It knocked the corpse sideways, giving me a few precious seconds.

I flew back toward my house, feet slapping pavement, robe belt flapping like a ridiculous flag.

As I crossed the yard, I heard Harriet’s voice from upstairs.

“Salima?” she called with worry. “What’s going on out there?”

“Stay inside!” I shouted back. “Lock your doors!”