Dragon Knight (The Collegium Book 3)

by Schwartz, Jenny

  Healing complete, Steve shifted back to human, reappearing fully clothed. “What have we missed?”

  “I don’t know,” Lewis said. It frustrated him. His instincts told him there was something, but perhaps it was magic, something he could no longer see clearly. However, he had more than instinct to go on. “The demon let us in too easily. Perhaps the bonds of its summoning were an agony it wanted to escape, but still…”

  “Only two mundane guards,” Fay said thoughtfully.

  The house loomed in front of them. Unlike the yellow stucco wall that surrounded the compound, the main house had the stark dramatic lines and quality of a billionaire’s retreat. It was sharp and new. Its front door stood open.

  “There’s no one else in there,” one of the guardians said. “We’ve already swept it once.”

  “Cursorily,” Kora said. She looked at Lewis. “Do we need a specialist crew? Oh dear God.”

  Gina whimpered. The animalistic sound simply crawled up her throat and out. It was born of fear and the utter wrongness of the creature lumbering out the front door that the demon had left handily open. The thing might have lumbered, but it was fast. It closed with the nearest guardian, a man in his late thirties, and even as the guardian kicked its legs from under it and the others slammed it with magic, the thing fastened its teeth to the guardian’s thigh and bit.

  Flesh and blood sprayed as magic shoved the thing back hard.

  Thing? It was human, or had been once.

  “There’s more,” Kora said tensely. A warning.

  The things were emerging from the house through the door, around the far left corner of the house, from windows.

  “They smell of rot,” Steve said.

  “Zombies.” The word came from half a dozen mages.

  Two guardians ran to scoop up their injured comrade. The bitten guardian snarled, snapped at them, and tried to bite them while on his hands and knees. The blood that should have pumped from the torn artery instead clotted black. His teeth snapped an inch from one guardian’s hand before a powerful, invisible force slammed him back against the house.

  “Heavier than human,” Fay reported tersely. “Or else, somewhat resistant to magic.”

  The guardians drew back, clustering with Gina, Lewis and the others.

  “Retreat.” Lewis crossed to where the chief demonologist had managed to haul herself up, swaying. He lifted her in a firefighter’s hold, ignoring her protest at the indignity. “Out the gate. I want to see if they have a boundary.”

  It was as if the zombies understood him. They charged. They were all kinds of people and all ages, still wearing the clothes they must have died in. Gang members and housekeeping staff, model-beautiful women and security guards. A drug lord’s household.

  The Collegium group scrambled back and through the gate, Kora swinging it closed. She waited near it, magic balled around her right fist. If the zombies made it through the gate or over the wall, she’d prepared a surprise for them.

  Gina never got to see Kora’s idea of a zombie surprise.

  The things halted, keening, on the inside of the gate. They were visible through the wrought iron bars of it. They sniffed the air hungrily; mindless things on a hunt.

  “Zombies are impossible.” Gilda glared at the horde from the shade of the palm tree Lewis had braced her against.

  No one bothered to argue the obvious.

  “It explains why the compound was eerily empty,” Fay said. “The demon turned its denizens into zombies. The question is how, and what exactly a zombie is. Is it a disease, something they can be healed of? Is it contagious?”

  “I saw one of the two guards we rendered unconscious. He should have still been down and out, but he was lumbering with a fresh bite on his arm.” The guardian who spoke looked ready to throw up.

  “Fast-acting, but contained for the moment,” Kora said.

  Behind the gate, the zombies stilled.

  “The demon must have had them hidden until its banishment. Shackled. A nice surprise for us.” Fay had her knife in her hand.

  “Are they alive?” Lewis demanded of a mage who’d been quiet till, now.

  Belatedly, Gina noted the discreet healer’s tattoo on the man’s inner right wrist.

  “They’re dead,” the healer said flatly. His outstretched hands, extended to sense energy from the compound, dropped. “There’s nothing living in there.”

  “Then worst case, we destroy the compound,” Kora stated.

  “Would that then break whatever ward the demon left to contain the zombies?” Steve asked. “I’m not in favor of acting without knowledge.”

  “Nor am I,” Kora snapped. “I said worst case scenario. We need to get in there and see how these things were created. There should be remnants of the magic the demon used. This big a magic must have required a spell.”

  “It’s horrible,” Gina shuddered. “Not only are they the living dead, but they’re the mindless source of death for others. It’s awful, but in a terrible way I’m glad they are dead. To be alive and know that you were doing this, reduced to this, would be hell.”

  “Like the children with bombs strapped to them,” Lewis said slowly. “That was the demon’s sick joke, a foreshadowing of this.”

  “Which is worse?” Gina murmured. One horror was mundane, the other magical. Both were nightmares.

  “If the zombies get out…” The healer wrenched his gaze away from the things at the gate and stared around the countryside. The compound was off the main road, at the end of a long driveway, but it was still near the coast. Locals and tourists, farmers. Innocent people. Victims.

  “I can go in,” Steve said. “I’m were, immune to magic.”

  Fay gripped his bare arm. “Not all magic.” They shared a long look; haunted on her side, determined on his.

  “Someone has to restrain the zombies,” Steve said. “You’re strong in magic and you said you felt resistance to your efforts. How much help will the other mages be?”

  “Good point.” Kora pushed magic at the zombies standing silently peering through the gate.

  One or two zombies went back a couple of steps. The others merely leaned back a moment before regaining their balance. However, the magical attack restarted their keening.

  The sharp, lamenting, yet hungry cry shivered across Gina’s nerves.

  But none of the zombies tried to get through the gate that was closed but unlocked. They were truly bound to the house.

  Cold dread filled Gina’s stomach, curdling to nausea. It wasn’t hope she felt, although a thought challenged her that perhaps she could help.

  No, no, no. Even as the chant of resistance echoed like a mantra in her mind, she cast her house witchery magic towards the house and compound. She didn’t try to use the magic, just let it slip into the walls and land, into the essence of the structure and surroundings that made it a place of habitation.

  Her magic had been coiled and ready for so long; pitched first to find and save Lewis, then to save the children in Mérida, and finally, to save Gina from the demon and its workings. Now that she let it act, and to choose its own familiar path through a residence, it acted swiftly and returned its knowledge to her.

  Gina stumbled away and vomited behind a tree.

  Lewis handed her a water bottle and stepped away while she rinsed her mouth. “We have no idea how long the zombies will be limited to the compound. The binding may fade with the demon’s passing or collapse at sunset.”

  “It won’t,” Gina said. She didn’t feel embarrassed that everyone had seen her retching. Matters were too serious. “The zombies are tied to the compound. They’re part of it. I’m not sure how, but my magic—I’m a house witch—recognizes the zombies not as people or one-time people, but as mobile extensions of the house. As such.” She took a steadying breath, reminding her stomach that it was already empty. “I can control the zombies.”

  “You?” Kora asked skeptically.

  Lewis gripped her shoulder. “Are you sure?” />
  Gina concentrated on the zombies by the gate. She needed to demonstrate her power over them, but at the same time, she wasn’t willing to waste her magic. She started the zombies sweeping the gravel. Since they lacked brooms, her house witchery magic dropped the zombies to their knees and had them sweep the gravel with their bare hands.

  A couple of the guardians swore.

  “I’ll hold the zombies,” Gina said. “You go find how the demon created them.”

  Chapter 14

  Leaving Gina to hold the twenty one zombies in frozen immobility just inside the gate was one of the hardest things Lewis had ever done.

  The weight of the responsibility she held showed in her expression. Everyone who entered the compound, now, relied on her to keep them safe.

  No one needed to be told to hurry.

  The house was expensive, luxurious and echoingly empty. Furniture filled it, but lifelessly. Surreal art hung on the walls and in clusters of weird statues.

  “Bullet holes,” Kora noted tersely. She had partnered with him when the group split into teams.

  Someone had shot repeatedly at something. The bullet holes tracked higher and higher in a rising arc. “The demon manifested and someone shot at it.” Lewis turned slowly in a circle, giving the room his complete attention. “What would you say this room is?”

  They’d gone up the main staircase and were on the second floor with a view out to the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

  “Music room.” Kora gestured briefly at a keyboard in a corner. A guitar lay abandoned on an angular sofa. “Probably hidden speakers for music.”

  “Would you summon a demon in this room?”

  Kora never played the what-if game. “No marks on the floor. A demon summoning brands the demon’s circle of summoning into its site of emergence, which ought to be a circle of containment.”

  Lewis ignored the lecture suited to a first year guardian trainee. “Look up.”

  The spell was on the ceiling, an intricate pattern of arcane symbols and Latin words. Whether the demon had been summoned in the music room or whatever room was below it, the demon had chosen this room in which to enact its zombie-creation spell. He snapped a photo of the ceiling on the phone Gina had lent him.

  Kora knelt beneath the spell, shoulders hunched but her attention determinedly on the floor. She scrutinized the white marble surface. “Scratch marks and…I can’t see any blood, but I expect that if we used luminal, its presence would show.”

  Human blood—human sacrifice—to power the spell.

  “It’s like a twist on a demon summoning spell, if I’m remembering the medieval Nordic version correctly.” He wasn’t an expert, but the photo was on its way to Gilda’s phone where the chief demonologist waited near Gina, safely outside the compound. Gilda had resisted being kept out of the investigation, but she wobbled when she walked. The demon had hit her hard.

  Fortunately, Lewis had another demon expert on site. “Fay!”

  Fay and Steve double-timed it up the stairs.

  “Damn,” Steve swore, following Kora’s gaze and staring up at the ceiling.

  Lewis’s borrowed phone chimed. “Gilda? Okay.” He disconnected, looking at his audience of three. “You heard.”

  “Gina’s reaching the end of her magic. We have to move,” Steve confirmed. He walked to the staircase and hung over the edge. “Everyone out, now!” he shouted.

  “Go!” Fay seconded.

  Her urgency wasn’t just from Gilda’s phone call warning that the zombies would be loose, shortly.

  “What?” Lewis demanded.

  “I know this spell,” Fay said. “And I know its weak point.” She had her knife in her hand. “Go!”

  “You better be on my heels,” Steve said. He ran down the stairs in an awesome act of respect and faith in his fiancée’s powers.

  Lewis saw Fay slash her arm as he, too, turned and ran, with Kora racing ahead of him.

  Even as he leaped three stairs at a time down the wide staircase, he heard a roar of fire behind him. He braced, just in time, as Steve turned and tried to run back.

  For a second the two men grappled. Lewis had the advantage of higher ground, but Steve was desperate. For an instant, Lewis thought of translocating them—and then, Fay was there.

  “Idiot.” She grabbed her fiancé’s hand, and the three of them ran out of the house, out beyond the zombies still frozen in place, and through the gate.

  “Thank God.” Gina sat down, ungraceful and abrupt, on the dirt.

  Behind Lewis, bound to the compound, the zombies keened.

  “They’ll burn,” the healer muttered. It was all too easy to consider the animated corpses as alive.

  Inside the compound, the house was burning up faster than normal fire could achieve. Flames burst from the roof.

  The zombies collapsed.

  There was a shuddering not-quite-sigh of relief from everyone.

  Lewis couldn’t see the golden threads of magic that the others saw and he didn’t bother reaching for silver sight. He could feel that the demon’s taint had been exorcised; its zombie-creation spell forever destroyed. “It’s okay,” he whispered to Gina.

  “Fay’s arm needs treatment,” Steve said.

  “Let me see.” The healer jerked from his trance, attention torn from the compound where, through the wrought iron gates, it was possible to see fire burning strongly where no fire should burn. It was incinerating the zombified bodies, burning all traces of the demon’s presence.

  “Fay, how did you do it?” Gilda asked. The chief demonologist still held her phone in one hand, hard enough that the screen ought to crack.

  Fay leaned against Steve and extended her arm to the healer. “Ironically, it was a variation on a spell I was studying last week in a Gothic grimoire in Copenhagen. A spell that riffed off a demon summoning incantation to try and enslave humans. There is no evidence that the spell ever worked, but I know it needed human sacrifice and the spell caster’s blood. In this version, the demon must have used its own blood—or the equivalent—and that’s what the fire is burning. I had to take ownership of the spell.” She shuddered violently and Steve wrapped both arms around her. “Then I could destroy it. Fortunately, the spell had an affinity to humans and I think that’s why my blood could replace the demon’s, particularly with the demon banished. Thank you,” she added to the healer, as he finished sealing the wound on her arm.

  “We’re going,” Steve said.

  “The fire will attract attention,” Kora agreed. She nodded at Shawn and two other guardians. “We’ll stay and walk through the site later.”

  The rest of them got into the two cars. Shawn had left the keys in the ignition, for whoever might have needed a swift getaway. Lewis started up that car, the engine turning over roughly, and headed back to Mérida with Gina silent in the passenger seat beside him, and the healer and two more in the back seat. They left the car three streets away from the portal and made their way to it, meeting Fay and Steve and their carload there.

  Fay’s stepfather, Jim, welcomed them with relief.

  The portal’s actual owner had returned, and appeared far less happy to see them.

  Lewis gave his thanks and the evidently unwelcome news that other Collegium members might need to use the portal over the next couple of days.

  The Mexican porter shrugged and spat a comment in condemnation of the demon’s presence so close to his home. The matter was settled.

  Not quite.

  Gina had been silent all the way back to safety. Now, she halted at the edge of the portal. Fay and Steve had already gone through, taking Paul O’Halloran’s hand to return to New York. “I want to go home. Home to Cape Cod.”

  “Emmaline’s portal?” Jim asked.

  “Yes.”

  The older man studied her face and evident exhaustion. His gaze flicked to Lewis, holding her, and back to Gina. “I’ll take you to her.”

  “Thank you,” Gina said.

  Lewis nodded his own
thanks, but he felt cold.

  Gina hesitated a moment. Then she touched his chest lightly, over his heart, and turned away. The portal vanished her and Jim.

  “She saved us as surely as Fay did,” Gilda said. “But there’s a price for that.”

  And Lewis thought he might be the one to pay it. Alone, he took Paul O’Halloran’s hand and stepped through to New York.

  Gina stepped out into the cellar of Emmaline’s home and into Riaz’s strong, relieved hug.

  Emmaline took care of courtesies, thanking Jim, who gave a very Australian, “no problemo” response, and stepped back into the in-between.

  “What’s happening?” Riaz demanded.

  But Emmaline had seen Gina’s face . She tugged her gently from Riaz and into a cherishing hug. “Riaz, what have I told you about a porter’s role?”

  “A client’s business is a client’s business,” he recited in a sing-song resigned tone. “But Gina’s family.”

  Emmaline smoothed Gina’s hair away from her face with a papery-soft hand. “All the more reason to respect her privacy. Would you like a ride home, dear?”

  Gina thought of the peaceful walk through familiar countryside, so different to the tropical landscape around Mérida. It would be soul-healing. But even better would be to be truly home, in her jewel of a house, showering away the day and crying where no one could see. “A ride would be great.”

  “I’ll drive you,” Riaz volunteered. “And I won’t ask any questions.”

  Gina’s laugh cracked. She swallowed. “Thank you.”

  Riaz was as good as his word. In fact, he was silent till they drove down her driveway. “Emmaline never trusted the Collegium. I used to think she was just paranoid, a bit of a conspiracy freak, but there’s been nothing but trouble since you got involved with Lewis.”

  “The Collegium does more good than you know. Than I hope you ever learn,” Gina added with a shudder as she thought of the demon and zombies. “And the ironic thing is, Lewis didn’t find me. I found him. I invited all this change into my life.” She got out of the car. “Thanks for the lift, Riaz.”