They were robbed of the time to absorb that information as the latch on the gate finally sheared under the weight of a horde that had now swelled to forty. Their voices weren't groans and snarls and hisses like on TV, but threats and words and voiced desires that should have been unspeakable.
Inside the phone was ringing. In the distance, sirens blared.
All hell had broken loose.
Luckily for them, the dead did seem to move like they were constipated octogenarians. Constipated octogenarian evil cannibals controlled by necromancy and driven by the promise of Druid power and a second chance.
Or whatever.
"Oh man," Tierra fretted as she tightened her grip on her shovel, "we've warded this house up, down and sideways. I can't believe they can get through!"
"Must not work on someone who's already dead," Claire said, swiping at one of them with the wide side of her rake. It knocked down the teenager with the already missing arm, but in moments, he was struggling to his feet again.
"Well, shit." Tierra backed away from an approaching tiny Asian woman who screamed threats, or demands at her in Japanese. "Get back," she warned. "I don't want to hurt you."
The woman grabbed for Tierra's arm, her teeth opening to take a bite.
"Don't you dare!" Tierra wrenched her arm from the woman's grasp and jabbed the sharp head of the shovel into the woman's mouth.
Gnawing on the metal, the lady just held out her wrinkly arms and did her best to snatch at Tierra until the earth witch actually drove the shovel through her head, knocking the woman down and separating everything above her sinuses from the rest of her jaw.
"And stay down!" she yelled.
Problem was, like the decapitated hippie from the afternoon, they didn't stay down. It reminded Aerin of a Monty Python movie, except when she'd relieved a kid in a marine uniform of all his limbs, no blood had shot out of cheap pumps.
"Don't fight me," he'd cajoled. "I'll do more with your powers than you ever could. I know where the danger is. Give it up."
"Go back to your grave, uh, soldier," Aerin pointed. “That’s an order!” Maybe that would work.
He attacked her. And even when there was nothing left of him but a stump, his hands went all "Thing" from the Addams Family and finger-walked their way over to her, grasping at the hems of her slacks.
Reluctantly, Aerin had stomped the palms into the ground, staking them with her stilettos.
"Take that, you undead asshole." She paused, chewing on her lip and also a bit of shame. "Also... thank you for your service."
"This isn't working!" Claire called, swinging at a crowd of five zombies, barely holding them off.
One of them grabbed her hair, and Aerin lunged, fearing she was too far away to get to her sister in time.
"Speak for yourself!" Moira pranced over to Claire, the chainsaw running on full speed as she began to cut through the crowd like a knife through butter. "Yeeeeehaaaaw!" she hollered.
Though, as efficient as the chainsaw was at cutting through flesh like butter, it seemed to merely create two halves of a corpse, and that came with its own form of chaos.
A hand closed around Aerin's ankle, causing her to stumble. She looked down to see the long half of Pastor Bill latched to her, his creepy-ass eyes and half smile staring up at her from the ground.
"Fuck. This," she hissed, and dropped her ax.
The moment Pastor Bill went flying over the fence on a strong gust of wind to land in the street, Claire dropped her rake. "Hell isn't the only place you can burn, you undead bastard!" Fishing a lighter out of her pocket, she flicked it open and curled her hand around it, creating beneath an expanding ball of fire. "Here goes nothing," she muttered and tossed it at a group of three corpses lurching toward her.
They didn't explode so much as immolate.
"Did you guys see that?" she squealed. "That was my first fireball."
"What did I say about magic?" Tierra scolded, whacking a rather chompy teenaged kid right in the kisser. "Open another seal and we're dead meat!"
"That's only if four of us use magic at the same time," Claire pointed out.
"Yeah, don't use any of yours," Aerin said. "Hey, Claire, behind you!"
Claire whirled around, creating another fireball with her hands. Aerin lent it strength, feeding it with oxygen.
"Uh, ya'll?" Moira's worried voice sounded from behind them.
"Get it," Aerin hissed. "Bomb that fucker."
"Guys." Out of the corner of her eye, Aerin saw Tierra wave her arms, but Claire didn't see. She hurled her gigantic fireball at the zombie and the thing melted, leaving only bones.
"Yes!" Aerin celebrated, high-fiving her sister.
"Stop with the fire!" Tierra yelled.
"Why? It's working."
"No!" Aerin and Claire turned to see Moira pointing at the three flaming zombies stumbling around the yard. One had just bumped into the shed, setting the hundred-year-old wood structure on fire. "No, it ain't."
Chapter Eleven
“I can do something about this.” It took a second for Moira to reluctantly peel her fingers from the chainsaw. Closing her eyes, she flung her arms out, muttering an incantation under her breath. The sky over them darkened just as an armless zombie fireball set all the lavender and sage bushes ablaze, releasing a rather pleasant scent into the night.
Aerin swiped at three swarming crones and, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a zombie policeman in his dress blues reach for the chugging Stonewall Jackson. “Moira, the chainsaw!” she yelled.
Startled, Moira was still able to kick the undead 5-0 out of the way in time to retrieve her precious weapon, but not in time to focus where her summoned clouds would dump their contents.
Claire screamed as the freezing deluge drenched her, smothering her latest fireball and making a mess of her leather. Only one of five burning bushes were extinguished, and not even a drop touched the shed.
“What the shit, Moira?” Claire called shaking water off her hands.
Moira didn’t answer until she’d carved through the cop and spat on his remains. “Excuse me, burning britches, but the only thing scarier’n a zombie is a zombie with a chain saw.”
“Give the General Lee to me,” Tierra ordered, staking someone to the ground with her shovel and advancing on Moira. “Then summon another cloud before the fire jumps to the house!”
“It’s Stonewall Jackson, you Yankee tree hugger!” Moira said, pulling the chainsaw out of reach like a recalcitrant child with a toy. “And he’s mine!”
Aerin grabbed the chainsaw’s handle from behind and relieved it from Moira’s grip using the element of surprise. “The South can rise again some other time, for now we need some rain.”
Moira threw a promise of retribution over her shoulder, but repeated her earlier spell, conjuring concentrated storm clouds.
Claire squished and squeaked up to Aerin, her wet leather making all kinds of unnatural noises. “You know how to use that thing?”
“Um… keep the spinning chain-y thing away from limbs I want to remain attached.”
Claire grimaced. “Hand it over, I’ve always had an affinity for dangerous machines.”
Glad to be rid of it, Aerin carefully passed it to Claire, who revved the engine and turned to protect Moira’s back while she put out the fire that was quickly turning into a blaze.
Problem was, now the flaming zombies had separated, and one was headed for Tierra who was trying to pull her shovel out of a struggling zombie’s hands, all the while dodging someone else’s dentured chompers.
“Some help over here, Moira!” Tierra screamed as the smoldering zombie stumbled closer.
“I’m trying,” Moira gritted out. “Do ya’ll know how hard it is to aim a raincloud?”
“Here,” Aerin jogged around a collection of zombies dressed like a quilting circle and threw her hands toward the cloud. The wind positioned it over Tierra for the precious seconds needed to put out the fire.
One flaming zombie
down, two to go.
Once Tierra’s flowing silk, chiffon and lace dress was sopping wet, it clung to her like a second skin, and she stood in the middle of the grotesque chaos, shivering and teeth chattering, surrounded by more than six undead doing their utmost to make her their midnight snack. She looked panicky, and wriggled her fingers like her magic itched to escape.
Claire was doing okay with whatshisface, the chainsaw, and Moira had figured out how to empty a few of the grave escapees of their remaining liquid, effectively turning them into zombie-jerky. With no fluids to lubricate their movements, they quivered like dry husks of corn and blew over in a stiff breeze.
A stiff breeze Aerin was happy to supply.
But more of the hungry fuckers filtered through the fence. Two, it seemed, for every one they incapacitated. They were losing this fight, and if they didn’t figure something out very quickly, they would lose everything.
Finally giving in, Tierra called roots and vines up from the ground beneath her, snaking them around the ankles and legs of her attackers and pinning them down.
Aerin stared at Tierra’s stomach, only a tiny tiny bit bigger than it had been before. Not yet a baby bump, but if one had an eye for detail, they would tell that the lower belly was fuller, and her hips were beginning to widen.
And suddenly, Aerin was afraid.
Until an idea knocked her upside the head with such abruptness she flinched. It felt as though it had been flying through the nether and shot through her thoughts like a dart.
“Claire, don’t use your magic,” Aerin ordered.
“Why?” Claire quieted the chainsaw long enough to ask.
“Because I’m about to use mine.” Dashing through the yard toward the house, Aerin called to Dr. Lecter, her vampire bat familiar. “Bring me the Grimoire!” She slipped a few times on slimy parts she’d rather not identify in her bare feet, fighting her revulsion.
Dr. Lecter appeared just as she reached the bottom of the porch steps, the heavy tome clutched in his wee claws. He flapped over to Aerin and deposited it into her reaching grasp.
“Thanks.” The book felt warm in her hands. The blue rune-tattooed skin of its cover the temperature of a live body. It pulsed with power, power she craved. No, not craved. That she needed to save her sisters. Yeah… “Okay Grim,” she addressed the book. “We’re dying here… show me a spell that is effective against the undead.”
Grim opened beneath her prompting, his pages flipping from front all the way to deep into the back of the book. Thunder clapped a warning out over the sound from the direction of the standing stones the moment Grim’s final page settled into place.
“Is that the back of the book?” Teirra asked in a shaking voice, lifting her hands and clutching her fists as more and more vines and plants were called to her aid to immobilize the undead.
“I thought Grim’s wards didn’t work against these guys.” Claire handed the chainsaw back to Moira, now that the fires had all been put out.
“This one will.” Aerin grinned down at the page, dark swirls adorning its corners and the painting of a skull and a candle interrupting the dark, sinister letters. “All right, you zombie ass wads, prepare to become my bitches.”
Chapter Twelve
Lightning forked through the sky, and the rumbling answer of thunder crawled after it, a cold, loud wind shrieking in from the east.
“We’re not…read… back …Grim!” Tierra was saying something, but it was lost in the sounds of the approaching storm and the calls of trapped zombies and the power swirling, and the heart beating in Aerin’s ears.
“I’m going to need some fire and a skull,” Aerin called.
“Allow me” Claire jogged over with loud leather creaks. Once she reached Aerin, she swept an arm to the struggling horde. “I think we have more than enough skulls here.
“No!” Tierra lunged through her cadre of trapped undead, ducking and weaving their reach like a human pinball. “Those spells are necromancy,” she yelled. “That’s not what we do.”
“That’s not what you do,” Aerin called back. “But nothing else is working. It’s time to fight fire with fire.” She slid a glance to Claire. “Er, death with death. Undeath? You know what I mean.”
“I gotcha.” Claire flicked her lighter. “I’m ready when you are.”
Aerin began the incantation.
“Without a soul or body of earth.”
Tierra was almost to them, and Moira wasn’t too far behind her, working backward and swiping at the zombies with her trusty Stonewall Jackson.
“Don’t,” Tierra cried.“Those spells are dark. We don’t know what they can do!”
“It says right there,” Claire argued. “Incantation to control the undead.”
“We want them kilt, not controlled,” Moira called over the ripping of the chainsaw as another one melted before her, his limbs scuttling on their own toward Tierra.
“I didn’t see one of those!” Aerin yelled, then started over.
“Without a soul or body of earth. What once had life, but death has delivered…”
With discomfiting synchronicity, the head of each zombie, almost a hundred in all crowded in and around their yard, all swiveled around to gaze at Aerin.
“Those returned through unholy birth, out of the grave and ashes slithered…”
“Do you feel that?” Moira asked a chill visibly shaking her shoulders.
“Yes,” Tierra nodded. “It’s heavy… like a weight of something in the air, like it’s trying to smother us.”
Aerin could feel it, all right. It enveloped her like a cloak, settling around her like a robe of nobility. Power surged through her, tendrils of it snaking from her mouth and calling to the twitching undead on the lawn.
“I think its working. Look, they’ve stopped trying to bite us.” Claire pointed with her free hand.
“Heed me now, thou slaves of the past. Unchain your flesh from the grasp of Death…”
“He’s not going to like that,” Tierra warned, reaching out for the book, though still a few paces away.
Aerin didn’t care. She felt hard, like her skin would crack and her bones would splinter, so much power surged through her. It threatened to tear her apart, but in a decadent way. Like a sneeze, or an orgasm. A moment of pure sensation that rearranged molecules and expelled chemicals and threats, and breath.
Air.
This was right… it may not be good, but it was right.
“I can feel it too,” Claire touched her shoulder. “It’s intoxicating.”
“It’s dark!” Tierra cried. “Stop!”
“No.” With a swipe of Claire’s hand, a wall of fire leapt between them, separating Aerin and Claire from Moira and Tierra. The heat singed the air like a scream, and smelled of sulphur and terror, and pain.
“Claire?” Tierra wrenched her hand away just in time to stop it from being burned. “How could you?” her eyes shimmered with hurt. “We don’t use magic against each other.
“Come to me, if your numbers be vast. And heed the commands upon my breath...”Aerin paused, readying to say the final words, wishing that her sisters could understand… that they could feel this. Power. Control. Knowledge and darkness.
But shadows could be good, couldn’t they? The moon Goddess lit the nighttime, not the day. Death was a catalyst for rebirth, and hell balanced out heaven. This was Arma-fucking-geddon, and Aerin de Moray was never one to stand by and let things happen. She made things happen, and now she had an army of the undead to help them all. “By the earth, the air, the fire and sea…”
The last words caused her a bit of hesitation, but it was too late to stop now…
“By the power of darkness, which I call unto me!”
The undead knelt. The ones who were only bound by their ankles dropped to their knees. The others who had no limbs, merely bowed their heads.
“What have you done?” Tierra asked.
“Oh don’t get your panties in a wad,” Aerin snipped. “Look at them n
ow, they’re harmless.” They glanced over to the horde, still as stone and bowing as though at some macabre royal court.
“You can’t stop us,” Claire said in a strange, monotone voice.
Aerin looked over at her. “What? Stop who?”
“I see the future in the flames… and whatever path we two chose, the world will come with us. You can’t choose for us. You can’t stop us. If you join us, decide it is time to end it all, to rule it all, no one will be able to stand against us. Not the Lord of the Damned, not the Horsemen, and not the denizens and deities of the otherworld.”
Claire’s eyes were burning now, shadows crawling through the veins on her face like writhing black worms.
“What nonsense you talking, girl?” Moira demanded.
“Look what you did to her!” Tierra scolded. “You made her all evil!”
“That wasn’t me!” Aerin shook her head in denial, but she snapped the Grimoire shut.
That seemed to slap Claire out of it and she blinked, her eyes and skin returning to normal and the wall of flames abating to nothing but a singed line across the grass. She rubbed her eyes for a second and then fluttered her lashes. “What?”
“Give me that!” Tierra snatched Grim out of Aerin’s hands. “I’m so mad I could just… just… bury you!”
“You did that to Death, already,” Aerin came back at her. “Time to get another trick. Besides, look at them. They’re not trying to kill us anymore. I just did a good thing.”
“Whatever you did,” Moira rubbed at chill bumps on her bare arms. “It ain’t in the realm of good.”
“Yeah, but it was in the realm of effective, and you’re welcome.” She turned to Claire. “You feeling okay?”
“I feel great,” Claire shrugged. “Though I don’t know what happened just now.”
“Progress,” Aerin wrapped her arm around Claire’s shoulder. “That was some powerful fire you just wielded tonight.
“Right?” Claire’s eyes gleamed with pride.
Which Witch is Wicked? (The Witches of Port Townsend Book 2) Page 15