Chapter 16

CHAPTER

SIXTEEN

Zane didn’t get back to the hotel until after I was asleep, and I woke up with the stick still peeking out of my chest.

My phone alarm roused me early, the sun just starting to creep over the horizon. Zane was already dressed and ready since he didn’t need to sleep, and had started a new book between late last night and the morning. I appreciated that the vampire knew me well enough at this point not to speak to me until I had a few cups of coffee, but Barnaby had disregarded that rule.

The spry, newly energized incubus had clearly been up for an hour or two before me, and had the car packed and ready to go while I was still struggling to put on pants.

“The quicker we get on the road, the better timing we’ll make,” he was saying, buzzing around the car, loading up our duffels. “I also have some route suggestions to help speed us along, and have picked out a few rest stops we can visit along the way. Oh, and as far as food is concerned?—”

“Make him stop,” I pleaded to Zane, sleep still sticking to my bones. “Or I will kill him.”

“I’ll drive this morning.” Zane shut the trunk and motioned for us to get into the car. “You can sleep a little longer.”

“He’s not going to let me sleep. He’s a monster.” I rubbed my eyes as Barnaby leaned over the center console and started insisting on choosing what to listen to.

“I’ve never seen him this excited about anything. Did he get some espresso this morning?” Zane eyed Barns through the window.

“No, I gave him a crystal yesterday and it was really strong—” I hit the brakes a little too late on the sentence, my mind too groggy to be sharp.

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

There was a stretch of silence that nearly killed me, both of us watching Barnaby poking at the rental car stereo like he was about to launch the damn thing into space.

Zane spun the keys on his finger and caught them with his palm. “So this is your fault.”

“Hey. You wanted to bring him, not me.”

“Who was the one that let him get into the car to begin with?” he fired back.

“That was Preston and Seyyid’s fault, not mine. They distracted me.” I rounded the car when he did, glaring at him from over the silver top. “You could have pulled him out and made him stay. He would have listened to you.”

“Maybe. But I’m also the one not pumping him full of sex energy.”

“Phrasing.” I climbed into the car and put my palm over Barnaby’s forehead and forced him backwards into the back seat. “I need way more coffee for this trip.”

“I took the liberty of updating the route on the GPS. Now we’ll get there faster and there’s scheduled stops.” Barnaby produced a foldout, comically large map he must have grabbed from the motel lobby, and opened the thing up like it was the main sail to a ship.

“He updated the route,” I told Zane in mocked excitement. “Isn’t this fun? Are you having fun?”

“Goddess,” he breathed, regret dripping off him as he started the car.

We decided to follow Barnaby’s new route, mainly because he was very insistent and annoying about it. To his credit, the rest stops he picked did have some good food for those of us who needed sustenance, and Zane was able to pick up a new paperback along the way. It absolutely did not save us time, even if Barnaby claimed it shaved off an hour, and we arrived at the Silent Steps historical cemetery at dusk.

Maybe using the word “historical” is painting the wrong picture, that of a well-kept, museum-quality landmark with a groundskeeper who gives tours with maybe a fun gift shop where kids could find tombstone keychains with their names on it.

There was no gift shop, no kitschy keychains, no lovable old groundskeeper with oodles of ghost stories to tell while they dragged you around the old, but well-maintained, graves.

The Silent Steps had been abandoned for a very long time. Left to rot. Forgotten.

Creeping vines had wrapped themselves so tightly across the double iron doors that the metal was warped and bent. Any locks that had been in place were rusted and long gone, the vines providing more security than the locks ever had. It took us a while to hack through the thick brush enough to swing the gates open, shadows coming to play by the time we eased our car inside.

The cemetery was a yawning mouth of crooked, stone teeth set on elevated rows, weeds bleeding from the gums. Proud mausoleums sank into the earth like rotten molars, some now only piles of rubble being consumed by the wild. We parked not too far from the main entrance, simply because there was no way the sedan was going to make it any further.

“Any idea where the mausoleum we need is in this dump?” I grabbed my duffel in the trunk and started unpacking my supplies, which consisted of my gun, ammo, and knives coated in some vampire repellent, just in case. It was kinda funny seeing Zane wrinkle his nose when I dumped the cocktail onto it.

“Northwestern quadrant,” Barnaby answered, shining his flashlight onto the giant black book he had stashed in his backpack. He aimed the beam of light into the dark cemetery. “That way.”

“Your charm picking up anything?” Zane asked as we locked up the car. “Any sign of lingering magic?”

“Nothing so far.” I gave the little magic detector a pat in my pocket. “I think we should have brought some machetes to slice through this bush. I wasn’t expecting it to be this overgrown.”

“How could anyone let any site get to this state?” our historian incubus lamented. “Sure, it’s a resting place for necromancers and death cult fanatics, but it’s still a piece of history. Truly tragic.”

“I think some things are best lost to time,” I told him as we embarked into the dark. “This place could be swallowed by nature and be better for it.”

“Just to have someone a thousand years later come dig something up they shouldn’t,” Barnaby retorted. “Better to educate than to abandon.”

“He’s got a point,” Zane defended Barnaby, because of course he did. “Pretty sure this is the kind of crap that starts curses.”

“We’re not starting any curses this trip.” I crunched down on some dead branches as we walked. “Just some light grave robbing.”

“I’m going to let you two defile graves, I’m just here to translate.” Barnaby swung his light around, looking for any hidden dangers. “How confident are you that you can reanimate this very old corpse? Are you sure you can get us any answers?”

“Bodies that have been dead a long time are tricky,” Zane explained before I could give my own estimation of my skills. “As the physical form deteriorates, the soul sinks deeper into the void. Necromancers train for decades to master such a skill.”

“What happens if we open the coffin and it’s just bones and dust?” Barnaby aimed the light at Zane. “Would that mean we came out here for nothing?”

“Have some faith, Barns.” I shielded my eyes after the beam was redirected to me. “I’ve successfully resurrected two whole bodies now.”

“If the body is bones, we’re out of luck. There’s no way he could reach that far into the void. My hope is that this person was wealthy enough at the time to have been buried with decent embalming.” The vampire sighed up at the moon, his breath foggy against the cold. “Then we might have a chance.”

“This body is hundreds of years old, Zane,” Barnaby argued. “If anything is left, it’ll be a brittle mummy by now.”

“You’re thinking bodies preserved by regular means,” Zane countered. “Not a necromancer’s magic.”

“I guess they’d want their gatekeeper to be able to talk.” I ducked under a low-hanging branch, dusting some spider webs off my hair. “Makes sense they’d keep him pickled.”

Barnaby shivered. “Ghastly.”

“You don’t want to leave behind a pretty corpse, Barns?” I grinned as he visibly cringed.

“Gods, no. Back to the earth with me. Cycle of life and all that cheery nonsense.”

“No cremation? Get scattered at one of your favorite historical sites with all the naked statues?”

“The thought of my body being nothing but ash is awful.” Barnaby remembered who he was walking with and winced at Zane. “Sorry. I forgot.”

“It’s alright,” the vampire dismissed the discomfort. “All vampires are destined to be dust. Our bodies become erased, souls plunged into the depths of the void to rejoin the Goddess’s embrace, never to return.”

I knew all too well what happened to a vampire after they’re destroyed. Even Thralls, the most powerful vampires, were just embers and ash after a well-placed blade or bullet shattered their tether to the living world. Hell, my favorite sword was crafted with the ashes of a notorious undead foe folded into the blade.

It felt a little different now that I knew a Thrall I didn’t hate.

I almost felt bad.

I had no plans on turning Zane into melty soup that burned into dust. I was starting to kinda like him being around.

He kept Barnaby company. And he was useful sometimes.

Plus, you know. He had his moments of being bearable with comfort, and between us, he did look fine as hell in a suit.

Naturally, those thoughts were left in my brain as we walked, the full moon above casting enough light to keep the cemetery from plunging into total darkness. The silver light made the crumbling tombstones shine in a haunting beauty as the wind whispered through the gnarled limbs of the old trees. The steps were silent as we weaved through them, the dead peaceful as two and a half living creatures stomped through their resting grounds.

Atop one of the steps deep in the graveyard, our mausoleum stood waiting. Thick vines with spade-shaped leaves grew like veins over the side of the pale stone building, the pointed roof framed by four pillars painted with moss. Stone walkways leading up to each step had been overtaken by weeds, but still had enough structure to allow us to use them.

All of the other graves throughout the cemetery had neighbors, the dense population nearly overlapping each other in proximity.

But not this one.

This mausoleum stood alone on the top step, solitary in its eerie majesty.

“If that doesn’t scream ‘creepy necromancer grave,’ I don’t know what does.”

“I’m starting to get second thoughts about this,” Barnaby whined. “My gut is telling me this is a terrible idea, and it’s usually right.”

“We’re in it now, Barns.” I noticed him hesitate as we climbed the weed coated pathway. “We’ll keep you safe. Between myself and Zane, nothing is going to touch you.”

“I’m not too proud to say that I’m very scared of this place,” Barnaby admitted, like maybe we didn’t notice this entire time. “The pull of historic adventure is very alluring until you’re staring down a grave.”

“Here.” I unfastened one of the sheathed daggers from my belt and passed it to him. “I don’t see any signs of vampire activity out here, but if it makes you feel better, you can carry my dagger. It’s coated with a vampire repellent, so if you take it out of the sheath, it’ll make grunts back off.”

“What will you do if a swarm shows up?” He took it carefully, clipping it to his belt.

“Kill them like I always do.” I tossed him a wink. “Don’t worry about me. Stick close to Zane if something goes sideways.”

“You make it sound so easy.” Barnaby’s sardonic tone was present, but it was drowned out by the bubbling concern coating his words.

I led the way up the steps, the cool night breeze teasing the sensitive skin at the tips of my ears and nose. The winter had killed most of the plants other than the most resilient ones; the scent of frozen dirt and dead branches just a whisper on the wind. A cloud passed over the moon as we made our ascension to the crypt, shadows sliding over the ivory monument as a last warning of what was to come.

The door to the ancient tomb had been set back in place by the excavators, but it hadn’t been fully resealed. Iron bars had been set in front of the stone seal, but they had fallen aside from the overwhelming presence of the vines and harsh weathering. The thick stone slab had a crack through the center from when it had been pried open, nearly crumbling in half.

Zane and I hefted the stone door aside, pushing away the fallen gate so we could each squeeze through the narrow passageway. Barnaby swept over the walls with his flashlight, the inside of the mausoleum roomy enough for us to stand comfortably. Dirt and dry leaves coated the floor, scattering around the massive marble structure that protected its coffin from the elements. The mural we had been studying was sprawled across one side, an ancient poem on the other, with a statue of the Goddess standing watch over her dead acolyte.

In the darkness of the crypt, it almost felt like she was smiling at us.

Welcoming us home with a cheeky little grin.

Her arm wasn’t outstretched like it usually was, commanding her undead to march on her behalf. Instead, her right hand touched her chest where the blade of her holy scythe lay across it, her left arm that was missing beyond the elbow, open almost like an embrace.

Barnaby shivered, his light vibrating with him.

“I’ve never seen her look so…motherly.”

“The dead are her children.” Zane moved to the statue and touched the bottom of her robe gently, keeping his fingers there for just a heartbeat. “This is a sacred place.”

“How does one pay respects to the Goddess of Death?” Barnaby, ever the polite historian, asked from a distance. “Maybe we can get on her good side before desecrating one of her children’s graves.”

“She’s not that sort of deity.” Zane moved away from his Goddess. “Death is unbiased and unbothered by mortal things.”

“That’s good news.” I rubbed my hands together. “Then she won’t mind if we take a quick peek at this dead dude and see if we can grab some answers. Zane, grab this marble lid with me. Let’s see if we can shove it aside.”

Barnaby stood aside while we did the heavy lifting, putting our backs into displacing the thick slab of decorated rock from the tomb. The grinding sound of marble scraping against itself was rough, the solid thump of the lid cracking from its impact with the floor made everyone in the room flinch.

Dust rose up from the belly of the grave, the black casket inside grayed with dirt and debris. Any smell of rot or death was long gone, only the powdery hint of old bones and decaying fabric remained. The wood used to make the ritual resting place was a native tree that had been farmed into extinction, and it held its obsidian color beautifully.

“What if it’s just bones in there?” Barnaby whispered from beside me. “What will we do?”

“It won’t be,” I said with a confidence I had no business wielding. “This has to be the gatekeeper. Nothing else makes sense.”

“Or it could be a trap.” I felt Barnaby position himself behind me, deciding I’d be useful as a human shield. “Something to smite the people dabbling with forces beyond their understanding.”

“None of the archeologists got smote, remember?”

“None of them were necromancers,” Barnaby quipped, still hiding.

“I’m not about to turn around and go back now.” I looked at Zane. “You ready?”

The Thrall gave me a nod. “Open it.”

“Here goes nothing.” I flexed my hands and gave myself a little mental pep talk before reaching into the tomb and lifting the lid of the old casket. The box opened without a fight: the nails that had once sealed it shut simply slipped free from being previously ripped loose.

Staring up at us from death was the messenger of the Goddess’s key, frozen in eternal slumber with his hands resting across his chest. The clothes he had been buried in dented in across his torso and shoulders, dark from age, relics of centuries past. Leathery skin stretched across bony hands that were still in decent shape, the fingernails long and pale. He hadn’t decayed nearly as badly as most corpses would have after centuries, which proved we had been right about some necromancy magic being used here.

There was only one small problem.

The head was missing.

In its place was an empty, black satin pillow coated in dust, leaving behind nothing but a mocking sting of bitter disappointment.

“Fuck.” I scowled at the mocking, headless thing. “That’s inconvenient.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Zane mused out loud.

“Why in the blazes would they take the head?” Barnaby demanded.

“They weren’t going to make it easy.” I leaned on the stone tomb, glaring at the corpse to give me the answer to the puzzle. “Something as important as the Goddess’s key probably doesn’t go to just anyone.”

“So they make it impossible?” Barnaby exhaled, rubbing at his temple. “That seems extremely pointless. Why even tell us about it then?”

“It also would have been handy if it was mentioned in the book before we hiked all the way out here.” I rubbed at my eyes, my frustration drying them out. “You think the fucker knows sign language?”

“We must have missed something.” Barnaby was flipping through pages, resting the book on the edge of the tomb so he could aim his flashlight at the text. Zane paced slowly through the small crypt, checking the walls for anything hidden we may have missed.

I continued to glare at the body, knowing in my bones that the key was this mystery, headless man. The faded, withered clothing draped over the frail body were simple yet elegant, lace collar and sleeves curled at the edges from the battle with time. A dark vest wrapped the torso within, corroded buttons dotting up the sides. A black stone sat in a brooch pinned to the lapel of a velvet coat, clutched between bony fingers made of tarnished silver.

I had never popped open a centuries-old grave before, so I had no idea what to expect when it came to what was normally buried with people back in the ye old times. These days, most humans and demons alike just got tossed into giant ovens to be converted to ash, unless they followed strict doctrine that demanded other methods. The old practice of pickling people and tossing them in lead boxes had been phased out years ago, because it took up too much real estate and bodies were constantly being dug up and robbed.

Peering at the treasure pinned to this headless jerk’s lapel, I understood why.

Since the corpse wasn’t proving helpful, and he was very dead and no longer needing an expensive antique brooch, I decided that was going to be the tax for being useless.

It was the first and last time I was going to take something from a headless corpse.

The moment my fingers came within an inch of the smooth, onyx stone, a bolt of magic arced from the surface and bit the tip of my finger. It was as brief and fleeting as seeing a static shock pop free after rubbing your socks on the carpet, but a hell of a lot louder. A thin string of green had lept up like a snake bite, electrifying the stone into a dazzling display of colors.

Iridescent flecks of emerald, violet and crimson danced across its surface like a storm of fire and magic.

My magic detector came to life in a flurry, a pattern similar to the warning of death magic, but nothing like I had felt before.

“What did you do?” Barnaby peered over, eyes wide. “It’s…glowing.”

“I don’t know.” I rubbed my fingertips together, the tingle of the shock still present. “I reached down to touch it, and it threw off a spark.”

“It responded to you,” Zane said, moving to my side. “To your magic.”

The dance of colors tossed out light from within, churning with a power I didn’t understand.

“Do you think this has something to do with why the head is missing?” Barnaby asked. “Or something to do with a mural, maybe?”

“I think there’s only one way to find out.” I shook out my hands and shoved my apprehension aside. “If I blow up or something, tell Kevin I love him.”

Barnaby closed the book and moved to the entrance of the mausoleum, ready to escape if I did, in fact, start to sizzle like a bomb. Zane stayed at my side, ready to face whatever the outcome was, explosive or otherwise.

I gathered my breath and reached out again, much slower this time, to see how the black opal took my second attempt to touch it. The air around the brooch was icy, like I was trailing the tips of my fingers over the surface of a thawing lake. Flares of greens pulsed before melting into swirls of deep purples, fire dancing between them as I moved in closer.

I felt the dancing ants trail up my fingers, cold tendrils of death magic slithering up my arm. The moment I saw the corpse’s fingers twitch, Zane’s hand slipped onto my shoulder.

I felt his grip hesitate before he whispered, “You feel different.”

“There’s magic pulsing from the brooch,” I told him, my focus on the body twitching in the casket. “I imagine I feel very weird right now.”

“It’s not the brooch.” Zane’s eyes bored into mine when I looked his way. “Something’s changed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know, hunter. But you feel…” he trailed off, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t look mesmerized or baffled in those few seconds. I confused Zane daily by just being myself, but I had never seen him look like this.

It almost felt like he was afraid of me.

Feeling the magic arc from the brooch again tore me away from trying to unpack Zane’s expression, the stone’s colors churning like the eye of a storm. Dancing green bolts of necromantic magic popped and flickered, connecting to my fingers in thick lines of power. The tendrils of death magic gripped my arm like a vise, and I set my jaw as the pressure began to build. I curled the magic around my fingers, feeling the lightning like strings being threaded through me. Zane’s grip tightened on my shoulder, and I gave the black magic strings a hard tug.

The opal shattered into thick pieces, a viscous ichor oozing from the center. The tendrils of magic around my arm remained as the dark liquid trailed down the corpse’s neck, dripping over the stump where the head used to be.

And it started to bubble.

“What’s happening?” Barnaby called from halfway out the crypt.

“Stay back, Barns,” I called over my shoulder. “Some freaky necromancy shit is happening.”

“The magic feels ancient, hunter,” Zane warned, his tone as grave as the one we were standing in. “Ancient and dangerous.”

“Yeah, black mystery ooze from inside of a rock sure as fuck would be both of those things, especially on a headless corpse in a necromancy tomb .” I held my position, focused on keeping the black magic tendrils around my arm calm.

The bubbling mass of danger goop began to coagulate around the neck, coating itself over where the vertebrae stuck out from the old flesh. The fingers of the body twitched and curled, shoulders jerking each time more of its neck was covered. The icy tendrils squeezed for power as a shape began to form, the ooze from inside the black crystal working its magic.

Before our very eyes, we watched an old, leathery head take form out of the black sap, connecting it to the body like it had been there all along. Bone sprouted from the neck like a flower, growing a jaw and eye sockets before dry muscle formed over it like over salted jerky. Skin stretched over its features and clung too tight around the cheekbones, the mouth a set of thin, curled lips over long teeth. White hair that behaved like brittle straw grew out the top of the head in thin wisps, and the puckered eyes of the corpse opened to show glowing orbs of haunting amethyst.

It looked at me, a knobby tongue moving just behind its newly formed mouth, and it spoke. The voice was a death rattle backwards, a language I didn’t know that bounced off my chest like a hammer strike.

I felt Zane’s hand on my shoulder squeeze, pulling me backward just a hair.

“W-what did he say?” I asked, my eyes locked on the horror before me.

“Uh.” Barnaby had to take a shaky breath, his voice somewhere behind me. “I’m not sure on the exact question, but it has something to do with your relation to the Goddess, I think.”

I swallowed the fear that threatened, and I curled my fingers into a fist. The tendrils tightened, crawling further up my arm as the dead creature's eyes flared.

“Tell it that I seek the key,” I told Barnaby, my grip around the magic slippery. “Ask it to lead us to wherever it is.”

“I’m not sure how to…” Barnaby trailed off as the corpse started to move, one of its bony hands lifting from its resting place.

It didn’t move like the other reanimated bodies I had tugged back to life before, its motions fluid and terrifyingly similar to that of a living being. The dead thing moved like it had just woken up from a nap, not like it had been rotting for a few centuries.

The magic between myself and the creature stirred, the tendrils dancing, the glow of its eyes bright in the darkness of its tomb. Cold, leathery fingers encircled my wrist with a calm gentleness that I imagined a grandparent would have for a child. It was not angry, nor was it vicious in any way.

It was happy to see me.

I felt its relief like a warm blanket around my shoulders. We were family, this corpse and I, connected by something I couldn’t possibly understand. I think Zane felt it too, because he sighed like all of his stress melted away, his hand leaving my shoulder.

That’s when the bottom of the casket fell out from under the body, swallowed up by an impossible darkness that seemed to stretch forever.

And it took me with it.