“A fine mess, and I’m sorry. Look, please don’t tell Les, but I’m heading back to the holler where the Nothing came up from. It’s the only place I’ve got to start.”
I heard her say, “Got to start with what?” but I was already hanging up. I tossed the phone into the passenger seat and put both hands on the wheel, breathing, “C’mon, little buddy, let’s see what your punk-ass V-6 can do.”
The Impala, which had as much heart as could be expected from a late-model automatic transmission, jumped from forty to ninety in a respectably short distance, and for a few glorious minutes I didn’t think about anything except getting there fast. The car’s tires weren’t quite wide enough to stick to the mountain curves as well as I’d like, but he and I knew each other well enough by the time we got through the lower turns to take the higher ones at satisfying speed. I’d cut my teeth on these roads, learning to drive both safely and dangerously well, and some things you didn’t forget. Driving was the one skill at the police academy I’d come up aces in, and sometime soon after I got back to Seattle I was going to have to make a little drag-racing confession to Morrison, who would never, ever understand the impulse. Neither for the speed or for the thrill of the illegality of it, though at least I wasn’t a cop anymore, so I would at least save the department that embarrassment if I ever got caught.
Not that I ever got caught.
I overshot Sara’s holler-entering-site by a good distance, heading farther up the mountain to see if a pull-out gulley I remembered still existed. It did, as a big chunk of raw earth and dust where somebody had once cleared the land for tobacco. I killed the engine, got out, and slammed the car door closed. The noise echoed off the mountains and down into the gulley on the other side of the narrow road. For just a second it struck me as the only sound of civilization in all of creation, and the old soft beauty of the landscape impressed itself on me.
The sky was misty gold and pink, with just enough clouds hanging on the horizon to hold the color. The trees were still black with night, not yet giving up to daytime colors, and down in the gulley, steam rose off water that was warmer than the early-morning air. It couldn’t be more than half an hour past sunrise.
Which meant that realistically, I had to be way ahead of a bunch of animated dead bodies. There was no way they might have gotten up here faster than I had. Zombies were not known for their speed.
I fact-checked that against every zombie movie in history and decided to ignore movies. My personal experience indicated that zombies were, as tradition had them, slow. They also stank to high heaven, an experience that couldn’t be replicated in film, but which ought to give me some warning. Except these would be very fresh zombies, which might not stink so much.
I was not helping myself any, and neither was the awareness that I was not armed the way I’d been at Halloween. I had my sword and my magic, but I longed for Petite and the small arsenal I’d built into her trunk recently. It wasn’t much, just a sawed-off shotgun, some rock salt, three pairs of handcuffs and two wooden stakes, which I filed under “just in case” and assumed I would never actually have to use. Vampires did not exist. Dam {ot d two woodmit.
I’d taken a look around the pull-out while muttering all that to myself. There were fresh footprints, but not much in the way of tire tracks, which meant one of two things. Either this was not the other way into the holler, as I had hoped it would be, or the locals had been going to a tremendous amount of trouble to keep Sara from finding it. Unless there was also a major moonshine distillery up along the trail, I couldn’t imagine why they would go to so much bother, so I figured it wasn’t the way in. I sighed and decided to leave the Impala there, and walk back down to Sara’s roadside entrance to the holler. It would keep the car from getting banged up by traffic driving up the mountain the way I’d just done. I locked the doors and headed for the roadside.
Carrie Little Turtle, moving at lightning speed, came out of nowhere and tried to rip my face off.
The only thing that saved me was the sheerly instinctive flight reaction of falling over backward because something was in my face. I screamed loudly enough to be heard the next county over and kicked a booted foot into Carrie’s belly as she leapt at me. She weighed nothing, all that baling wire and sprung steel turning out to be personality more than physical strength. She went flying over my head and crashed to the earth somewhere beyond me. I dug my fingers in the clay, reminded myself that zombies were slow and came to my feet with a fistful of dirt in one hand and a blazing blue sword in the other.
The other six dead elders spread around me in a half circle, their hair bleached stone-white and their skin only a half shade darker. Their eyes were eaten with darkness, blood red where the color once had been. Their fingers were grotesquely long, nails discolored and sharp, and each of their forefingers looked as if it had been burned. Just like the marks on the vigil-keepers’ foreheads.
“Not zombies.” I actually said it aloud, surprising them at least as much as I surprised myself. “Definitely not zombies. Wights. I think I’ll call you wights. Is that all wight with you?”
Three of them snarled, possibly in response to the pun, and showed teeth that had decayed into yellow masses of dripping bile. I took that as a no, but before I could think of anything else stupidly witty to say, they came at me.
I envisioned the handful of clay as carrying the weight of the earth itself, and flung that weight at the nearest wight. It fell, pinned down and screaming under a shimmer of gunmetal-blue magic. I was starting to like that shade. It appeared to be the color my magic took on when it was really working in harmony, warrior and healer together again for the first time at last. The wight struggled, but healing power trumped death magic this time around, and I felt like having the bright morning sun on my side was a win.
The second wight avoided my rapier with a deftness I wouldn’t have attributed to the undead. I mean, I’d been sword fighting for almost a year now, and I’d skewered a thing or two in my time. Even with pinning one wight down magically, I could manage a lunge and thrust. But the second wight sucked its belly in and twitched to the side like it was invested with a rattlesnake spirit, too, lending it speed it had no native right to.
And that left the third one to jump on my head.
I went down under its weight, shouting and swearing. Its nails scrabbled at my shields, unable to break through, and for the umpteenth time in a week I cast a rueful thanks toward the werewolf whose attack had finally forced me to permanently activate those shields. I wasn’t exactly invulnerable, but I was a whole lot harder to hurt now, which made this kind of fight a little less scary.
Still, there were seven of them and one of me. Shields were great, but if they decided to work together, I could be drawn and quartered before I blinked. I forgot about pinning the one monster down and shoved my left hand upward, willing magic to take a physical, concussive form.
The wight on top of me blew upward like it had been caught in Old Faithful and went spinning off to crash against the mountain somewhere. The remaining four closed in all at once. I threw magic in quick blasts, catching them repeatedly and knocking them back, but they kept getting up and coming at me again. They sauntered around my swordplay like I was a kid with a stick. After a minute or three, Carrie and the other one I’d blown off joined the others, so I was surrounded and starting to feel like the hapless kung fu student in the movie, right before everything comes together and she suddenly kicks everybody’s ass.
Except instead of kicking ass, I was slowly wearing down. That was almost entirely new territory for me. I was accustomed to drawing ridiculously deeply on my own strength, without the need for a power circle. Moreover, I’d leveled up in the past couple weeks, gaining more access to greater power. There was no way a bunch of undead monsters should be able to wear me down so fast. But not only was I starting to stumble, it seemed like they were getting faster and stronger with every hit they took.