“Ah imagine, boy, if you could have foretold our need of the artifact, you’d have a good job as a psychic. You’d likely not have those holes in your hand either.” Zola smiled.
Foster, only recently calmed from his fit of hysterics, burst into a hiccupping fury of laughter.
“Thanks for that.” I said as my lips quirked into a grin.
“Ah’m going to run out for coffee. Do you want anything?” Zola said as she smiled and winked at Foster.
I shook my head. “I need to get the shop ready for the glass company.”
“Ah’ll be back in a bit.”
I waved to Zola as she left. I started pulling all the valuables out of the cracked display case and split them up into the side cases.
“What are you moving all that for?” Foster said as I set some old Native American pipes and arrowheads beside a large conical piece of Magrasnetto. The rock made a deep scratch in the wood as I shifted it.
“The glass company is replacing Sam’s custom-made spider-webbed top on our display case.”
Foster nodded as I flipped one of the old obsidian arrowheads over in my hand. It was unique because of the Nordic-looking runes carved into it. Cara was sure the arrowhead was Paiute. They were a tribe from the Great Basin in northern California. The runes were carved about the same time the arrowhead was made. I smiled and tried to imagine how anyone out in the middle of nowhere would have any knowledge of runes. My money was on the Fae. I set the arrowhead down and picked up the Magrasnetto.
“Hey, Foster, you want to help me carve a wand out of this thing?” I hefted the stone a bit higher to emphasize the question.
Foster glanced at the rock, then met my gaze. “A wand, huh?”
“Yeah, why not? It’s a good way to store some juice if there aren’t dead things handy.”
Foster’s tiny eyebrows rose. “You always seem to have dead things handy, Damian.”
I opened my mouth, but couldn’t think of a good reply. I shrugged.
“Zola’s had you working ley line arts since you were a teenager. Plus, didn’t Mom already show you some non-dead tricks?”
“Yeah, your mom’s been showin’ me some tricks.” I waggled my eyebrows and Foster snorted a laugh. “Thing is, with this I can store some power in the Magrasnetto for emergency pummeling of nasties.”
“Nasties?” He raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “You should have been a poet.”
I nodded slowly. “Sam always said that.” I held a serious face long enough for Foster’s expression to grow horrified. Then I lost it.
He rolled his eyes, tapped the display case, and said, “Why don’t you just lace that badass cane with the Magrasnetto so you don’t look like a forty-year old Harry Potter fanboy run amok?”
I stopped laughing and stared slack-jawed at the tiny fairy with the mean words. “There is nothing wrong with being a forty-year old Harry Potter fan!” I said as I pointed a finger at him. “Besides, I’ve got a good ten years until then.”
Foster’s face split into a huge, wicked grin. “Fine, but a badass demon cane would be cooler than a stick.”
My eyes shifted to said badass demon cane. At four feet, it’s really more of a staff. The more I thought about it, the wood already had focusing runes carved in a ring around either end with a flourishing pattern of curved lines. About a third of the way from either end, the channels carved by the lines came together in a circle. If the staff were to ever be employed by a demon, the circles would hold runes of power with ley energy connecting them all. Now, only scorch marks and gouges graced the surfaces. I could inlay Magrasnetto and carve my own runes into it. Oh yeah, it would be cool. My lips curled up in a mirror of Foster’s grin.
“No time now,” I said.
He nodded. “When we get back you should really think about it.”
“Hmm,” said a voice from behind us. I looked toward the back room to find Aideen hovering over my shoulder. “That’s not a bad idea, Damian, but it’s going to take a lot of work that’s well beyond your skill.”
“If you want it to work that is,” Cara said as she joined us.
I glanced at the staff, the pile of rock, and then the fairies. “You probably have a point there.”
“Let’s talk about it when you get back,” Aideen said.
“Sounds good,” I said as Zola made her entrance.
“Ready?” she said.
Foster said yes as I nodded an affirmative.
Chapter Nineteen
A few hours later, the small town of Pilot Knob passed our windows in flickers of light and shadow. Cars littered the streets at sparse intervals, parked in and around the pooled streetlight. None of them moved during our short drive across town to find the old church. I glanced up at the ancient white building as the last rays of the evening sun crept over its surface and I shivered as we parked.
“That’s a creepy old place,” I said.
Zola snorted. “Not nearly as creepy as the town we just drove through.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Were you paying attention?” Foster said. “We didn’t pass a single car on the streets. There was barely even a light on in any of the houses.”
“Every yard was overgrown,” Zola said. “Something’s wrong here. Let’s get inside and look around.”
The church and one-time hospital was small and white, with three wide steps leading to a red double door at the front. I could see the top of the stone foundation just below the thin white siding. The windows were all narrow and taller than the doors. Two windows graced the front of the building to either side of the entrance, with three more on the side closest to us. The roof came to a plain peak except for the belfry jutting up near the front edge, crowned with a modest cross.
The church had a presence unlike anything I’d ever felt. I focused my Sight, but found nothing out of place. A few weak ley lines dipped and weaved across the street and lent a dim luminescence to the shadows. I shivered.
“You feel it?” Zola said.
I nodded. “I don’t see anything. What is it?”
“Pain, horror, the certainty of one’s own death.” Zola stared at the doors and sighed. “It is like the fort, but worse. This place was a field hospital when Ah last laid eyes on it. Full of the dying.”
Foster flew to the doors and placed his hands on each. He backed away from the doors as fast as he’d touched them. “There is evil in this house.”
“Great,” I said.
Zola’s smile was weak. “The evil you sense may be what we’re looking for.”
“Oh, in that case I retract my sarcasm.” I threw my hands up in the air and said, “I meant to say fucking great.”
Foster let out a quiet laugh and Zola’s lips quirked up just a little further.
I took the short three steps to the front door and tried the handle. The right door swung open in silence. Dust and dying sunlight were all that greeted us.
“So, is this a little unusual for a Sunday evening?” I said.
Zola pushed past me, the whisper of her cloak the only sound. Her cane was extended and her gaze moved from side to side as we ventured deeper into the house of worship. The floor was a rough-cut natural wood, sealed and polished, but I’d be willing to bet it had acquired much of its character well before it was treated.
I cursed as a black blur in my peripheral vision moved and my heart leapt. My hand landed on the butt of the pepperbox as my head wrenched around to an old table and chairs.
“What was that?” I stared at the empty chairs set a few feet beyond the pews, flexing fingers around my gun.
“What?” Foster said.
“I saw something in the chairs. It was like, I don’t know, like silhouettes of people.” I paused. “They disappeared as soon as I looked directly at the table.”
“Guardians,” Zola said as she took a few steps and pulled out one of the chairs.
“Like Aeros?” I said, surprised.
She shook her head. “No, they come w
hen something threatens things most important to them. Old ghosts.” Zola bent down and wiped away a patch of dust. A dark brown and black stain was visible on the floorboards beside the chair legs.
“Is that blood?” I asked.
Foster nodded. “It’s old too. I bet that’s what Glenn was talking about.”
“Should we dig it up?”
Zola laughed and pointed a few feet to the side. “There’s a hatch to the crawlspace.”
I blinked and said, “Oh.”
We pulled the hatch up. I was surprised that the hinges were well oiled and quiet. Someone had taken great care of the old church, but they were nowhere to be found.
“I can’t see shit,” I said, squinting into the black square in the floor. I slid my backpack off, dug out a flashlight, and handed it to Zola. She pointed it into the hole. When nothing came screaming out to attack us, I stuck my head in.
“Nothing but dirt,” I said an instant before I started spitting and rubbing my face.
“What was that?” Foster said.
“Cobwebs.” I scraped them off on the edge of the hole.
“Ah wouldn’t complain about cobwebs.”
I glanced up at Zola and cracked a smile. “Sure, but you don’t have to crawl into the scary hole in the floor.”
Foster and Zola both muffled a chuckle.
“Alright, I’m going down,” I said against my better judgment. I spun around on my ass and put my feet down first. One more glance over my shoulder, watching for shadows, and I dropped to the dirt a few feet below. “Foster, keep watch at the front in case some of the church folk come back. I don’t want to completely freak them out with strangers snooping around in their crawlspace.”
“Ah’ll hold the light,” Zola said.
I nodded and crouched down, slipping my entire body into the crawlspace. I managed to stick my face right into an even thicker cobweb as I pushed forward. After some sputtering, cursing, and wiping my face off repeatedly, I looked around. “Can you hand me the flashlight for a second Zola?” The acoustics of the tiny space muffled my voice.
She handed me the light and I pointed the beam to each corner of the crawlspace. Nothing. Not a damn thing. I placed a hand in the dirt and pulled myself off to one side. I crawled a few feet deeper and my knee knocked on something hollow. A second later my brain informed me dirt shouldn’t make a hollow knocking sound. I banged my knee a few times in the same place.
A dark shadow moved through the beam of light as it swam deeper into the crawlspace. It vanished as soon as I looked at it. I clenched my teeth, shivered, and pointed the flashlight at the ground. My fist pounded the dirt methodically as I backed up slowly. The first few spots were a heavy thud. Just what you’d expect. The fourth spot I hit echoed with the same hollow sound my knee had made.
“Zola, I think I got something!”
“Really?”
“Yeah, why do you sound surprised?” I said as I scraped a couple inches of dirt off an old board. “I’m passing the flashlight back to you. Can you point it at that clean space I just made?”
“Foster,” Zola said. “Go with Damian.”
She waved the beam around for a moment, then settled on the bare spot. Foster followed the light down and landed nearby.
“Don’t get yourself eaten by a spider,” I said.
“Shut up.”
“Just saying,” I said with a grin. “It’d be a tough one to explain to Aideen.”
Zola coughed to cover a laugh. I wiped the board down with several flicks of my wrist. Dust and dirt filled my nose in the narrow crawlspace. I uncovered another board beside the first and another, and yet another. There was enough space between the second and third board to squeeze my fingers in. I tried really hard not to think about what might be waiting to bite them off. I grimaced and bent my fingertips around the gap. One hard yank and the board splintered around the nails at either end.
It looked like a tattered uniform was beneath the boards. A moment later I realized it was a body, long, long dead. I snapped another board up and could see the skeletal remains wrapped in a dark uniform.
“It’s a body, Zola. Looks like a Union soldier.”
I heard her sigh. “Check around it.”
Another board disintegrated with a hard pull. I stuck my head in inches from the corpse in the dim light. I shook my head.
Foster hopped down onto the chest of the old soldier. “There’s nothing here.”
“Move the body.”
I met Foster’s eyes and we both frowned before he jumped back out of the grave. “I’ll wait upstairs,” he said.
“Me too,” I grumbled before I cursed and pulled another board out of the way. It gave me enough room to get my hands under the body and feel more boards. I sighed and said, “Sorry,” as I rolled the body to the side. At the same time I wondered what kind of interesting bacteria was getting in my ferret wounds.
I found it beneath the corpse and the rotted boards. The black cover of the book had an inverted Ankh with an extra line three quarters of the way down the stem. It reminded me of a cross with a thin ankh hanging from it. Yellow and brown papers were sticking out from the edges of the book. I picked it up and something screamed at my senses as my fingers grasped the dry leather. A shockwave, much like one from a small explosion, ripped through the tiny crawlspace.
“What was that?” Zola said as her voice rose in pitch.
“You felt it too?”
“Something happened,” Foster said.
“Great.” I glanced at the book in my hand. Scrawled below the ankh in faded gilt Latin was the phrase ‘from those who have come before.’ My Latin was shaky at best, but it was a phrase Zola had drilled into my head. It was a mantra for most necromancers, the acquisition of knowledge and the passage of that knowledge from master to student. It was repeated generation after generation, and a generation of necromancers could last a damn long time.
I handed the book up through the floor to Zola. I heard her gasp as I laid the boards down again and rolled the corpse gently back into place. It fell apart a little, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t mind. I climbed back out of the hole to find Foster perched on Zola’s shoulder. Her hands were trembling and her eyes were wide. She already had a sheet unfolded and laid across the front of the book.
Her voice was only a whisper. “The forbidden … Philip, you fucking idiot.”
“What is it?” I said.
In answer, she held the sheet up. It was a diagram of a dagger. A pentagram circled the interior of the pommel, with runes noted in each section, and more runes in a ring within the second circle encasing the pentagram. It was a diagram of the dagger sheathed on my belt.
“That dagger,” Foster said as he pointed at my waist, “is a key of the dead.” He blew out a puff of air and flew over to the closest pew. He sat down and hung his legs over the front edge. “Those aren’t even supposed to exist anymore. Gwynn ap Nudd had them destroyed ages ago.”
“The Fae king?” I said. “Why did he want them destroyed?”
Zola folded the paper and stuffed it back in the book. “He is also the Lord of the Dead, Damian. No one should hold a key of the dead other than him. A key can be used as a focus, for necromancy and much blacker arts. Ah would say we should destroy the key, but Ah doubt we could so much as scratch it. We’ll have to return it to Gwynn ap Nudd.”
“Yeah, that sounds peachy.”
Foster snorted. “You still haven’t told him?”
“Told me what?” I was pretty sure I wasn’t getting an answer when Zola moved her gaze down to the leather tome.
“There is this, as well,” Zola said as she opened the back cover of the book and slid a sheet of gray metal out. It was roughly the same height as the book, but narrower. She turned it in the dim light and I could see dozens of runes, lines, and knots etched into rows and columns on the surface. “I don’t know what it is.”
“Do you, Foster?” I said.
He shook his head. “I’ve seen
sheets like it before, used to make fairy bottles, but this … it doesn’t feel right. I’ve never seen runes set in knots like that before, either.”
I glanced at the sheet again as Zola slid it into the book. To say the knots were intricate would be an enormous understatement. I’d want to take a closer look at it when we weren’t in the creepy old church. “Alright, let’s get out of here,” I muttered.
We turned to leave the church, the odd presence still nagging at my senses. Between that and the glimpses of shadows, I was on edge.
“Something is wrong here,” I said. “Like we’re being watched.”
Zola turned slowly, studying each window. I followed her gaze, but saw nothing.
“What is it?” I said.
“Something’s here,” she said. “Ah don’t think we’re welcome here.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Foster whispered as he landed on my shoulder.
I nodded and walked quickly to the front door. My fast steps sent small creaks into the eerie silence. Zola was right behind us. The instant the book crossed the threshold of the church, everything went to hell.
Chapter Twenty
“My God, Philip, what did you do?” Zola’s eyes shone with moisture as she stood watch over hell.
The earth heaved. A deep rumble shook the church and the ground beneath us, thickening the air with a roar. Concrete and soil cracked and opened into churning chasms, swallowing trees and felling power lines. Skeletal limbs and rotting flesh burst through the surface in showers of dirt and debris as the land birthed the first zombie horde the world had seen in centuries.
“Get to the car!” I screamed, even as the front wheels sank into the soil. A huge slab of concrete vanished into the earth a moment later, the road now impassable. I leapt over an emerging zombie as it reached for me. Vicky’s front bumper was beneath street level. I managed to brace myself on the car to keep from falling over as the earth moved again. I opened the back door far enough to grab the backpack. “Fuck, we gotta get the hell out of here.” Another chasm opened and I took a running leap to get back to Foster and Zola. I hit hard, sliding on my knees toward another zombie, its face destroyed and dripping fluids. Zola’s cane smashed the zombie’s head an instant later.
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