I brought my knife down hard on the biter’s head, driving the blade all the way into the hilt, but it didn’t let go. It shook its head and its broken body began to shift into something else—
House of Claw. Get out of there, Wild! Pete’s voice came through loud and clear.
“Yeah, trying!” I yelled as I pulled the knife out and tried a different angle, jamming the blade into the zombie’s head sideways, through the jaw bone. The mouth went slack on the one side, and I yanked free, blood running down my arm, my fingers numb on that side.
I backed up and reached up with my good hand. I opened my mouth to ask for help when a zombie shuffling toward me stopped me in my tracks. Instead of trying to get away, I took a step forward.
“No.” I struggled to breathe around what I was seeing, the world dipping and curving like I’d held my breath for too long and was about to pass out.
My brother stepped through the crowd, his body not as rotted as the others, as if he’d only just been killed, as if he’d died protecting me as he’d promised to do if it was asked of him. The line of his jaw, the brush of his hair, the hands that had boosted me into the apple trees how many times? It was all so familiar, so unmistakably him.
This could not be happening. This had to be an illusion.
Didn’t it?
“Tommy.” I could barely say his name as he pushed his way through the crowd, and then he was rushing me, pushing me back against the mausoleum with so much force he knocked the wind out of me. I tried to grab at him, to see his face. I had to see his eyes. I couldn’t believe this was where he’d been kept. And now he was fighting me.
“Tommy!” I bellowed his name, pain wrapping around my heart as I fought him.
The necromancer had done this to Tommy, had set my own brother against me. I drove my fist into his side, felt the ribs crack, but it didn’t slow him. Not for a damn second.
His hand came up lightning fast, his fingers wrapping around my neck, squeezing.
I kicked as he lifted me, stronger than he’d ever been. Weirdly, I could only wonder if he’d been this strong as a living Shade, or if this was the strength of the undead. My brother was undead.
And he was going to kill me.
“Tommy.” I whispered his name, choked on tears. I didn’t want to die. But I couldn’t stop him. I couldn’t bring myself to destroy him.
I tried pulling his fingers off my neck, snapped one of them backward and he didn’t so much as blink. Staring into his face, his rheumy eyes, I knew then there was nothing left of my brother in this body. This was not the boy that I’d adored, the one I’d looked up to and wanted to be like. Not the brother who’d shown me how to wrangle cows, ride horses. Not the brother who’d taught me how to track and survive out in the woods.
It was only his body, not his spirit.
“I’m sorry.” I mouthed the words rather than spoke them as I lifted a foot and kicked him in the hip, throwing him off balance. We went to the ground and I rolled, driving my elbow into his, snapping the bone. His fingers still clung to me, but I pried them off, one broken finger at a time, gasping for breath.
Orin, Ethan, and Wally were shouting at me to get up, to hurry, but it all seemed so far away. Even the other undead seemed to be waiting to see how this played out between me and Tommy. No, not Tommy. This was not my brother, not anymore.
I spun as another body rushed through the horde. Green eyes, dark hair, and the scent of home. The other half of my childhood, this one alive and desperate. Desperate to watch my back, at all costs.
“Rory—” No words, there were no words, just his name, as Rory thrust himself into peril and rushed over to me. He dragged me back to the mausoleum. He bent and cupped his hands to give me a boost, same as I’d done for Wally and Ethan.
“What about—”
“Go. I’ll be fine!” he yelled over the din, fear heavy in his voice.
Like in the trees, I knew it wasn’t fear for himself, but fear for me. Fear he’d lose me as he’d lost my brother. Maybe fear that I’d end up like Tommy—
I choked back a sob and took the boost, balancing a hand on his muscular shoulder. I scrambled to hold onto the edge, Ethan helping me up the rest of the way.
I spun on my belly in time to see Rory disappear under a wave of the undead.
“Who was that?” Orin leaned over the edge.
“NO!” My scream echoed through my head. Through my heart. My middle had already been ripped open by seeing Tommy as one of them, by having to fight my own brother. To lose Rory too…that was beyond unfair.
A flash of his dark clothes was all I could see as he was rolled under the zombies, like an undercurrent in an ocean of the undead had taken hold of him and swept him away from me. I stood and bolted to the other side of the roof, looking for him, searching the masses with my eyes, frantic to see him one more time.
“RORY!” His name ripped out of me as I frantically searched for him.
Gone, he was gone. This time, I couldn’t even see a shred of fabric.
I was no fool. There would be no diving in after him, no saving him from these creatures. He wouldn’t want me to throw my own life away when we both knew he was done. That he couldn’t be saved.
He’d put his life on the line for me, just like he’d said he would.
I bent at the waist, my entire body shaking. Memories and images cascaded through my head—the first time we’d gone skinny dipping in the river as kids, the two of us grinning at each other as we hid from Tommy, that cheeky ass smile of his, the feeling of his strength pooling around me and protecting me the night he’d hidden me from the assassin.
I couldn’t stop the shaking, couldn’t stop the tears as they bubbled up. The others were all talking at once—I could hear them in the background discussing what to do, how to get out of here. How to escape.
And all I could think about was Rory.
The way I’d talked to him. My last words to him had been spoken in anger, pushing him away. A wave of nausea rammed its way up my throat, and I threw up over the edge of the roof, right onto a zombie’s head. It blinked up at me with a bemused look.
Nice shot, Pete said from beside me. But what’s got you all riled up?
“Stop it, just stop it!” Wally yelled and I turned to see Ethan pushing her across the roof, toward the edge.
Ethan kept shoving her. “Do something to help. If you can’t be useful, then you can be the bait this time. You can draw them away.”
Orin just watched.
And the grief in my belly turned to an instant white-hot rage. I would not lose another friend to the army of undead.
I didn’t even recall moving across the space between us, I was just there on Ethan, driving him back, my hand wrapped around his throat the way Tommy’s had been wrapped around mine. I held him out over the edge of the roof, balancing him on the backs of his heels, his face red from the lack of oxygen. “You don’t touch her. You don’t hurt her. Got it?”
“Wild, it wasn’t that bad,” Wally said. “Honestly, this is too far, even for you. Don’t drop him. We need him. We need all of us to get through this.”
Ethan watched me with wide eyes, his entire body leaning out over the grasping, broken, and rotting hands that reached for him.
I swallowed hard and drew him back onto the roof. He fell to his knees and coughed, shaking his head and looking up at me. “What does it matter? You might as well have dropped me there? We aren’t going to make it out of this. None of us are.”
We all stared at him.
“What are you talking about?” Orin said. “You want to die now?”
Ethan shook his head. “Don’t you get it? This isn’t normal.” He swept his hand over the dizzying scene. “This isn’t a test for the Culling Trials. I was trained in all the variations on the challenges, going back generations. This was never mentioned. Never. No, this is meant to kill us. Wally was right about that much. Because even if it was meant for one of us”—he shot a glare at me—“the
y can’t have witnesses. That’s how this world works and you all know it. You can’t allow witnesses to a death that was an assassination.”
While I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that we would make it out of this too, I truly believed our lives hung in the balance.
I would grieve for Rory later, but right now I needed to figure this out. I had to find a way for us to escape this trial.
Wally’s hand slid down to my palm and she linked her fingers with my good hand. A burst of awareness flooded over me, and I slowly turned, hanging onto her as I looked down at the sea of dead.
Glowing lights lit up inside each and every one of the bodies, throbbing with a deep green pulse that I knew without understanding belonged to the necromancer controlling them. “Do you see that?” I whispered to her.
She tightened her hold on my hand. “The light? Yes, but I don’t know how to stop it.”
I nodded and dragged her to the edge of the roof for a better vantage point. The zombies didn’t look as rotted. The longer I stared at them, the more they looked…alive. “You see them as they were, not as they are.”
Wally blew out a slow breath. “You shouldn’t be able to see them like I do, Wild. There is only one—”
“If we can pinpoint where the light’s coming from, we can stop the necromancer.” I looked at her. Really looked. She was as terrified as I’d ever seen her, and I didn’t think it was just the fact that we were facing death. “Wally, why does this scare you?”
“The same reason Gregory was afraid during his trial, the same reason Pete was afraid in his,” Ethan said. “If she fails her own challenge, her memory will be wiped. She will be cast out of the only world that would have her and her skills.”
Her face paled. “He’s right. I’m terrified to blow this, not just for me but for all of us. The undead here, they are going to make a push to kill us. I can feel it growing. I don’t know why the necromancer is waiting, but he is.”
Out in the graveyard the light pulsed and danced, stronger to what I would guess was the north of us. A steady glow of green curled round a bigger clump of stationary zombies.
I watched that group for a beat, and not one of them took a step in our direction. I pointed. “There. That’s where the necromancer is.”
Wally nodded. “I know, but what good does it do? The odds of me being able to beat a necromancer of this calibre…well, they’re not good.”
“At a loss for stats. Finally,” Ethan grumbled.
I stared out at that green glow and the light that radiated from the individual who had done this to us. “We kill that necromancer, and the dead go back to their graves?”
“Yes, in theory. But we only really need to knock the necromancer out,” she said.
Orin had been quiet until that moment. “And just who is going to run the gauntlet and knock him out? If someone can get to him, they’ll still have to fight the zombies around him, no doubt some of the strongest undead.”
Slowly, they all turned to me.
I closed my eyes, taking stock of my body. My arm throbbed, aching deep to the bone where the zombie had chewed on me, and my fingers still tingled as though there had been some nerve damage. Other than that, my body wasn’t in bad shape. I wasn’t even exhausted. I just felt like my heart had been ripped out of my chest.
Just like when Tommy had died.
It took all my strength to push the grief down, to stuff it to the back of my heart where it wouldn’t interfere with what had to happen. My survival wasn’t the only thing on the line here. The others were depending on me too.
“Ethan, what kind of range do you have with that wand of yours?” When I opened my eyes, he was looking out over the milling mass. A few of the zombies were climbing on top of each other, trying to get to us. Eventually they would. They’d be just like those red army ants on the bird that should have flown away but couldn’t.
There would be no waiting this out. “I’m not sure if I can reach the necromancer,” he said.
“Try,” I said.
He took a few steps and stood on the edge of the roof, held his wand up and then flicked his hand forward.
Hope he doesn’t drop his wand, Pete muttered.
Another time I would have laughed. Another time I would have poked fun at Ethan too. But Wally was right—we needed him, we needed all of us.
A flare of light shot out from Ethan’s wand, lighting up the sky with a tail like a comet. It fell about three quarters of the way to the necromancer.
Laughter boomed all around us, the zombies laughing with their master. Pete snarled, and Orin gave a low growl.
I just nodded. “So we know how far you can help us.”
“Us?” Ethan raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to leave me here by myself?”
I shook my head as I ripped a strip of my shirt off and wrapped it around my arm, pulling the ends with my teeth to tie it off. “No. Pete will stay with you. I’ll take Orin and Wally with me, seeing as this is their house and they have the best chance of surviving.”
Wally stood a little straighter. Orin rolled his eyes. “Vampires are far superior to any necromancer.”
“Right, fine.” I was going into battle mode. We had little chance of winning this game, but I intended to give us a chance. “Ethan, can you blast a space clear on this side so we can jump over?”
“Why not ask Wally to do it? Or can’t she control even one zombie?”
His words seemed to spark something in her. She stepped forward, and I saw in her a tiny spark, a flare of pink light deep in her center.
“I’ll clear the way, Wild.” She looked down on the zombies at our feet, and I watched with fascination as she reached a hand out over them. The pink light in her bubbled up and trickled down her arm to drip off her fingers. Like rain drops.
“We need a thunderstorm, not a sprinkler,” I said.
Her eyes whipped up to mine. “I can’t. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
You should get Orin to throw you guys down there, see how you like being chucked around, Pete said.
I glanced down at him and he stared up at me with a wide honey badger grin.
He wasn’t wrong. There was an opening about twenty feet out from the mausoleum edge.
“I’m going to regret this,” I muttered. “Orin, can you throw me and Wally out there?”
Orin grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”
He took hold of me by my forearms and spun. Like he was going to throw a hammer in the Olympics. My bitten arm did not like his grip, but there was nothing for it, I had to go through with this.
Sweet baby Jesus, this was a bad idea.
I swallowed hard with the first rotation, and then he let me go and I was flying through the air, seeing the dead flash below me, their arms raised like I was at a rave and about to crowd surf. It wasn’t so bad, not really.
That’s the last thought that rolled through me right before I smashed into a grave stone.
Head first.
Chapter 5
My first thought as I came to was that I didn’t have a dog, so how could a dog be pulling on my leg and my hand at the same time?
My second thought was that the dog would need to have two mouths.
My third was much clearer as I remembered my flight via Orin’s throw over the zombies’ heads as they reached for me right before I hit the gravestone. “You did that on purpose, Orin!” I managed to open my eyes just as Wally and Orin landed beside me, her cradled in the curve of one of his arms.
I was dragged backward, a low growl reaching my ears. Maybe it was a dog. The pounding in my head told me just how hard I’d hit that rock.
Gravestone. We were in a graveyard with zombies and a necromancer set on killing us.
“Kill our best chance at survival? I think not,” Orin said. “You are more solid than I realized. I couldn’t throw you as far as I thought. And I carried Wally so as not to break her.”
I lifted my head to see a hunched-over zombie with my foot and
boot in its mouth, its clawed fingers digging into the leather sole. I jerked my knee toward me, yanking the zombie closer, then got my foot free and booted the undead thing in the head. It fell onto its back and let out a low groan that sounded suspiciously like “Shiiiiiiiiiiit.”
Orin slashed at the zombie attached to my right hand. Its head rolled off, but the hands still reached for us.
I pushed to my feet, Wally helping to steady me. The second she touched my skin, the zombies lit up like fireflies. A steady pulse of green was all around us, the source drawing closer.
“Go, go! He’s making his move!” I yelled at Orin.
He ran ahead of us, and Wally and I followed, her right hand in my left.
A sharp warning spun me to the left as a zombie launched straight at Wally, teeth first, eyes missing from its skull, long stringy hair in patches, then more solid, the skin healing as I saw the person as they were before they died.
Even though I saw it differently hanging onto Wally, the thick stench of rotting flesh tickled the back of my throat. Keeping Wally behind me, I gritted my teeth and pinched my lips against the stench, then swung my blade. The knife cut directly across the zombie’s neck, through the soft flesh and partially decomposed bone with an ease that surprised me. The head rolled from the shoulders and plopped to the ground, teeth and jaws still snapping.
The arms of the zombie reached for me and I shoved it back, knocking it to the ground.
I pushed another zombie back. We couldn’t slow down, not if we were going to make it to the necromancer. Not if we were going to take even a portion of the chance Wally’s sight gave us.
The air around us tingled, the smell of ozone cutting it just before a flash of lightning touched down to our right, sending the zombies back a good forty feet. I glanced back over my shoulder to see Ethan waving that boom stick of his around, lightning snapping down with each wave.
Shadowspell Academy: The Culling Trials, Omnibus Page 34