Some secrets you take to the grave

Chapter Three

I already was.

The burial niches lining the walls gave up their dead. Not the old dead, the ones who’d been resting quiet in those recesses for a hundred years—these came up out of the dark spaces behind them, out of gaps in the stone I hadn’t clocked as anything but shadow. Four of them. Five. Gray hide stretched tight over elongated bone, black shark eyes catching the purple glare and throwing it back flat and hungry. They didn’t hesitate the way the pack down the hill had hesitated. They came straight in, low and fast, aimed at the brightest, warmest thing in the room.

Julian.

“Elvis!”

“On it!”

He didn’t argue, didn’t crack wise, just dropped out of the air like a stone and drove himself straight through the chest of the lead ghoul before it cleared six feet. The thing shrieked, a sound like sheet metal tearing, and its whole body seized mid-leap. Ectoplasm does something to dead muscle that I’ve never fully understood and don’t especially want to—flash-freezes it, locks the joints solid, turns a killing machine into a lawn ornament for about four seconds. The ghoul hit the flagstones and skidded, rigid as a fence post, and didn’t get back up right away.

Four seconds was a start.

I drew the Colt.

I don’t carry it loaded with anything you could buy at a gun show. Every round in that cylinder had cost me three hours the afternoon before, hunched over my kitchen table with a jeweler’s loupe and a steady hand, etching banishment sigils into copper jacketing thinner than a fingernail, packing the hollow points with rock salt and shavings off a silver dollar I’d melted down for the purpose. Overkill for a possum problem. About right for a room full of scavengers with somewhere better to be than staying dead.

I put the first round into the ghoul closest to the circle.

The gun went off like a thunderclap in a stone box, loud enough to hurt, and the round did exactly what I’d built it to do. White light bloomed out of the entry wound, brief and blinding, and the ghoul didn’t fall so much as come apart—dry ash and dessicated meat scattering across the flagstones where a body had been half a second before.

“Julian, get down!” I fired again, taking the jaw clean off a ghoul vaulting over a stone sarcophagus. It went down screaming through a mouth that wasn’t there anymore.

Behind me, the one Elvis had frozen shuddered, joints cracking as the ectoplasmic cold started to wear off it. Four seconds had bought me exactly as much as advertised, and not a heartbeat more.

“I can hold it!” Julian’s voice cracked into something closer to a shriek. He’d thrown both hands back at the failing circle, trying to shove his own raw, undisciplined will into cracks that were already too wide to patch. The purple light guttered, flared, guttered again.

“You can’t! Let it go!”

He didn’t. Or couldn’t. Same result either way.

The crack that followed was louder than the gunshot. The chalk ring shattered like a dropped mirror, every line of it going dark at once, and the backlash caught Julian square in the chest and threw him eight feet into the stone altar behind him. He hit it hard enough that I heard the air go out of him from across the room, and the grimoire skittered off the ledge and slid across the floor, pages fluttering in a wind that wasn’t coming from anywhere.

The ghouls felt the ring go down the same second I did. Every black eye in the room swung toward the kid crumpled at the base of the altar.

“Not on my watch.”

I stopped thinking about the gun and started thinking about my arm. Heat, pulled up from somewhere low in my chest and shoved down through my shoulder, my elbow, my fist, until the air around my knuckles shimmered like blacktop in August. I put myself between Julian and the nearest ghoul and met its lunge with a left hook wrapped in enough kinetic force to total a car. Bone crunched. The thing left the ground sideways and slammed into the iron doors hard enough to dent them, and it didn’t get up.

Two more came at my flanks. I dropped to a knee, slapped my palm flat against the stone, and shoved a wave of pure force out along the floor in every direction. Azure light rippled across the flagstones like water. It wasn’t fire, wasn’t a blade, but to lesser undead a dispersal hex feels like walking face-first into a furnace, and both of them scrambled backward, claws sparking uselessly against stone, shrieking.

“Get up.” I hauled Julian off the ground by his collar. Blood ran from a split over his eyebrow, soaking into the collar of his hoodie, and his pupils had gone wide and glassy. “Move to the door. Keep the iron at your back, you understand me?”

“The book—” He twisted against my grip, one hand reaching back toward the ledge where the grimoire had come to rest. Even half-concussed, even with the room falling apart around him, the kid wanted the book more than he wanted to survive the next thirty seconds.

“Forget the damn book.”

“You don’t understand,” he said, and I felt something in his voice crack clean in half, grief showing through the shock like a bone through skin. “I heard her. I finally heard her and I let it go, I let it—”

“We all want them back, kid.” I shoved him toward the stairs, hard, no time left to be gentle about it. “Every single one of us who’s ever lost somebody wants exactly what you wanted tonight. Magic’s not a cure for that. It’s a magnifying glass. It just makes the hole bigger and lets more things crawl out of it.”

Something hit the floorboards hard enough to rattle the sarcophagi.

I turned around into the worst thing I’d seen all night.

It came in over the wreckage of its own pack, easily twice the size of the others, hide gone the mottled gray-black of meat left too long in standing water. This one hadn’t been living on possums and stray cats. This one had been feeding on something with real substance for a good long while, and it had the bulk to prove it. It fixed both black eyes on me, unhinged a jaw that shouldn’t have been able to unhinge that far, and let out a roar that sprayed rot-smelling saliva halfway across the room.

I checked the cylinder without looking away from it. Three rounds.

“Okay, ugly. Let’s dance.”

It didn’t wait for an invitation. It came off a mausoleum wall at a dead sprint, closing twenty feet in under a second, and my precog screamed a half-beat too late to do me any real good. I got the gun up. A clawed hand the size of a dinner plate slapped it sideways, and the Colt barked into the ceiling instead of the ghoul, raining down a fine dust of two-hundred-year-old plaster.

Then it was on me, and we were both on the floor.

Its weight settled over my chest like a car dropped from a crane. It stank of swamp water and pennies left too long in a wet pocket, and its jaws snapped an inch from my throat, close enough that I felt the heat coming off its breath. I got my forearm wedged under its chin, straining to keep the teeth back, and its claws raked down through my duster like the leather wasn’t even there, opening my shoulders up in four parallel lines of fire.

I tried to buck it off and got nowhere. It had a hundred pounds on me easy, all of it corded muscle under loose gray hide, and every ounce was bearing straight down on my chest. My vision started to gray at the edges from the strain of just keeping its jaws off my windpipe.

“Get off him!”

Elvis dove through its skull. Ectoplasmic cold doesn’t do anything to something that big, not really—but it startles it, buys a flinch, and a flinch was all I needed.

I gathered everything left in the room worth gathering. The dying static off Julian’s broken circle. The friction of two bodies grinding against stone. My own blood running hot down my collarbone. I shoved all of it down into my right palm, pressed it flat against the alpha’s ribcage, and didn’t bother with anything elegant.

“Burn.”

White heat poured out of my hand and into its chest cavity. It screamed—actually screamed, high and human-sounding in a way none of the others had, a sound I was going to be hearing in my sleep for a while—and thrashed hard enough that its grip loosened just enough for me to plant both boots against its stomach and shove.

It sailed backward into the altar, smoking, and hit the stone hard enough to crack it. One twitch. A low, wet hiss. Then it folded in on itself and came apart into ash, same as the rest, leaving nothing behind but a scorch mark and a smell I’d be scrubbing out of my jacket for a month.

The two remaining ghouls didn’t stick around to see how that went for their friend. They broke for the ventilation grates set high in the vaulted ceiling, scrabbling and shoving each other in their hurry to be somewhere else, and disappeared into the dark like water going down a drain.

Silence rushed back into the room so fast it felt like pressure change.

I stayed on one knee for a second, breathing hard, blood running warm down my arm and dripping off my fingers onto the flagstones. My duster was ruined. Again. Somewhere behind me, Julian was crying, the ugly, hiccuping kind of crying a person does when the adrenaline runs out and the truth of what almost happened finally catches up.

“Well.” Elvis drifted down beside the scorch mark, hands tucked into his jumpsuit pockets, inspecting the damage with the air of a man reviewing a restaurant he didn’t like. “That got the heart rate up. Figuratively.”

“Little bit.”

I pushed myself up, wincing as the cuts across my shoulders pulled tight, and turned to look at the kid slumped against the iron doors, hugging his knees, shaking like a man standing in cold rain. The manic desperation that had been running him all night had burned itself out completely, and what was left underneath it looked about twelve years old.

I walked over, picked the grimoire up off the floor where it had skidded, and snapped the iron clasp shut before the thing could get any ideas about staying open.

“On your feet,” I said, and held out a hand. “We need to be gone before the local wardens feel that anomaly and come looking for whoever caused it.”

Julian looked up at me, tears cutting clean lines through the dirt and soot on his face, and didn’t move for a second.

“Am I under arrest?”

I looked at him for a long moment. Behind me, Elvis had gone quiet in that particular way that meant he was paying close attention to how I answered.

“Get up first,” I said. “We’ll talk about it outside.”

Julian took my hand. I pulled him up, steadied him when his knees buckled, and got an arm under his shoulder to keep him moving toward the stairs. Behind us, the last of the green light guttered out of the broken circle and left the crypt in nothing but shadow and the smell of ash. Somewhere above ground, dogs that hadn’t been missing an hour ago were probably still barking at whatever the local wardens’ anomaly readers had just picked up, and I had maybe ten minutes to get us both off this hill before somebody official showed up asking questions I didn’t especially want to answer standing over a scorch mark and two piles of dead ghoul.

“For what it’s worth,” Elvis said, drifting along beside us up the stairs, “I don’t think that went entirely terribly.”

“Your standards are low, Elvis.”

“My standards,” he said, “are exactly as low as they need to be for this job.”

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