Aside from a few dents on the right-side doors, the SUV was fine. They piled back in and headed toward the center of town, tooling slowly down the road, all of them on the alert. Greyson gave her his gun, grabbing another one from Maleficarum. It rested in his hand like a cobra about to strike. Nick had a gun too, in addition to, of all things, a sword. She might have laughed at the sight—it wasn’t often you saw a man swinging a blade in modern small-town America—if he hadn’t handled it with such deadly confidence.
Malleus, Maleficarum, and Spud, of course, looked like they were about to storm Fort Knox. Megan would have prayed they wouldn’t be pulled over, but even if Greyson couldn’t have handled any police officer who came near the car, she doubted it would be an issue tonight. Something told her the police in Grant Falls would be otherwise occupied.
They rolled past the hotel, silent and dark, and continued on. Through the haze of falling snow Megan saw Christmas lights twinkling still on some of the buildings and in the windows of the shops farther down the road, in town. The clock read 11:00. Surely the stores would be closed, the lights off?
Movement off to the right caught her eye. Emerging from the little forest was a woman, her filthy shirt in tatters. Through the strips of grayish fabric they could see her bra soaked with blood and her bare, ghostly pale skin streaked with it, making her look like a bizarre zebra. Even in the darkness her eyes seemed terribly white, wide with terror or the blank screen of dementia. Something else was wrong too, but Megan couldn’t seem to place it and it didn’t matter.
“Pull over,” she started to say, but Greyson interrupted her.
“No.”
“What? Look at her, she must be freezing, she’s—”
“Where’s the cemetery?”
“What? Malleus, I said pull over!”
“Mr. Dante?” Malleus glanced back. His features, cast in pale green light from the dash, looked somehow leaner, as if his frown was pulling them tight.
“Meg, where’s the cemetery?”
Megan glared at him and reached for the handle of the door. They were going slowly enough, and once she opened it Malleus would stop. She knew he would. “I can’t believe you’re going to let that woman just die like that, I—”
“She’s already dead.”
“Sure, if you let her…oh.” Megan subsided. That’s what was wrong. Snow was piling on the woman’s shoulders and forming an old-fashioned nurse’s cap on her head. “Oh.”
Somewhere in the back of her mind she’d had this idea—this fantasy—that they’d roll into Grant Falls, pop into the abandoned hospital, take whatever relic of the Accuser still lived there—which in the fantasy was a lock of hair or something similarly inoffensive—thus defeating Ktana Leyak and getting back her demons. Then they’d stop for a piece of pie or something before driving back toward the city singing “Adeste Fidelis.”
Nowhere in her fantasy did demon-powered zombies appear. Not once.
So much for fantasies.
Then again, the idea of riding around in an SUV with a bunch of demons singing Christmas carols was rather silly itself, wasn’t it? So why should she be surprised that this obviously wasn’t going to be the uncomplicated little jaunt she’d hoped for?
“Do you think there will be more of them?” she asked in a small voice. The energy to speak loudly eluded her.
“I think it’s a pretty safe bet, yes.”
“There are two cemeteries in town,” she said. “At least there were when I lived here. There’s, um, Holy Innocents, which is that way”—she waved her hand to her left—“and Harbor Lawn, where they buried my—oh God.”
The men exchanged glances. “We may not have to see many,” Greyson said. “We might manage to get in and out of here before they have a chance to reach us.”
Megan just nodded. If she opened her mouth she would start screaming, and if she started screaming she didn’t think she would be able to stop.
“Zombies aren’t going to be a problem,” Nick said finally. “They won’t even be able to get close to us, thanks to Grey. It’s the people who worry me.”
Megan glanced out the window, desperate to look anywhere but at the faces of the men watching her, then wished she hadn’t. Behind the picture window of Kelly’s Tap bodies lurched and leaped in a brawl of epic proportions. A man flew through the glass, landing on the white-dusted asphalt outside in an ungraceful heap. Blood steamed in the freezing air as the chaos inside the bar became audible, shouts and screams ending finally in gunfire.
The men tensed. Greyson and Nick lifted their weapons, waiting, but they were already passing the bar, leaving the wreckage of it behind them.
More evidence that something was very wrong in Grant Falls awaited them as they rolled past, the low hum of the SUV’s engine bouncing off the blank storefronts. A bloody handprint embellished the holiday display in the window of Tommy’s Toys. More blood smeared across the wall, ending on the pavement as if the bleeder had fallen, but no body lay there.
Megan pulled the blanket more tightly around her. “The hospital is to the right, closer to the center of town.”
They floated down the street, the only warm and moving things in an alien landscape. The blanket didn’t help. Even Greyson’s warm hand on her leg didn’t help. The wrongness, the plain and simple sense that all was not well, soaked into her bones. Even with her shields up she could feel the despair, the misery, the rage.
Especially the rage. She realized that tired as she was her body was still humming, adrenaline making her heart pound and her feet jiggle. Her lips felt raw from where she’d bitten them and stung when a tear rolled down her cheek and touched the shredded skin.
She might be able to draw strength from it. If the Yezer—her Yezer—were causing all of this, it was entirely possible she could, that if she lowered her shields and tried to pull them back she could take all that power and use it.
But doing that would also alert Ktana Leyak to their presence, if she wasn’t already aware of it, and that was a bad idea. Yes, Megan would have to fight her sometime, but she would much rather that sometime not be now. Not now and not here.
“Make a left,” she said softly. Her voice would crack if she tried to speak much more forcefully.
Malleus did, then stopped abruptly. Four cars blocked the road, their windshields gaping holes with jagged edges of glass protruding like broken teeth. Their dashboards already looked frosted with snow. In the dim light from the pale sky she saw bloody footprints leading away, but there was no other sign of people.
“There another way ’round, m’lady?”
“Um…yeah. Go back, we’ll head toward the park. We can circle around it and come up from the other direction.”
Malleus nodded and executed a three-point turn as neatly as a driving instructor, while Megan stared out the window at the wreckage.
They made it as far as the edge of the park. Megan was increasingly aware of her skin prickling, of silent watchers from the buildings they passed. Zombies or demons or simply people, twitching their curtains to the side in their apartments above stores, wondering who was out and about on a night this cold, this close to Christmas, in a town that usually bedded down by ten.
Malleus slammed on the brakes. If his reflexes hadn’t been quite so fast the truck would have plunged headfirst into the gaping hole where the road had once been. The snow fell so thick and fast it was almost impossible to see.
Megan waited in the car with Nick and Greyson while the brothers got out to inspect it. They returned moments later, shaking their heads.
“’S all ice, outside it,” Maleficarum said. “That little hill, there, we can’t drive up it or nuffin’.”
The park itself sat on a rise, not steep but steep enough when frozen. To the left of them sat a row of parked cars, the lead one half-buried in the sinkhole, its rear wheels off the pavement. The SUV could not get through the line, and it could not go up the hill.