His ears twitched. Voices reached them from the stairwell. Someone was coming up from below. Ceridwen turned toward the stairs and raised her staff, but this time it was Danny who grabbed hold of her wrist.
'No,' he whispered. 'We're here to learn. To do that, we listen.'
She glared at him a moment, and then she nodded. Danny moved swiftly and silently to the nearest door. It was unlocked, and he led Ceridwen inside. He left the door open several inches and knelt to put his eye to the crack. The room was dark, and once more he gathered the shadows around himself, hoping Morrigan's followers wouldn't be as perceptive as Ceridwen, hoping the darkness would keep them from noticing him spying.
He knew Ceridwen was behind him. Even now she would be standing above him, trying to peer into the hall. Danny could feel her there, could feel the cold. And that was the two of them. Ice and shadows.
Together they waited, and they listened, in the cold and the dark.
The glass was shattered in the doors of the Museum of Fine Arts. The broad stone stairs in front of the building's grand facade were swarming with the dead. Corpses crawled over one another, trying to get to the doors. The red mist that enveloped the entire city churned and rolled in clouds that obscured the horror surrounding the museum for a few seconds before thinning once more. Flags beat the air, jutting from the brow of the building, and banners advertising their latest exhibitions covered part of its face.
There were walking dead who were crumbling with every step, who were clothed in tatters. Some of them had lost arms or hands, even lower jaws, and what skin remained was parchment stretched across their cheeks or sunken eye sockets. Muscle tore as they walked, but the magic that propelled them was merciless. Some of them were brittle and withered.
Eve moved through the dead with her long sword like the reaper with his scythe. Yet this was a bloodless harvest. Her blade hacked into them with the pop and dry cracking noise of snapping kindling. Her coat flowed around her like a toreador's cape, but she did not need any red flag to draw their attention. The restless dead had been sent to the museum for a reason, but presented with targets, with vibrant, alive creatures to kill, they deviated from their mission.
She felt the blood race through her, her mind descending into a primitive rage that often enveloped her in combat. Her mouth opened and she howled a cry of battle that echoed out across the empty street. Her heightened senses brought to her the scent of Clay nearby, but he and the specter, Dr. Graves, were lost in the mist and the sea of staggering dead.
Cold fingers clutched at her jacket and snagged in her hair. Eve spun, bringing the sword around with both hands upon its grip. This time, however, the blade met more resistance. Some of the walkers were freshly dead, their flesh and muscle more substantial, their bones harder. Two hands grabbed her head and a pale, fat man in a three piece suit dipped his jaws as though he might tear out her throat.
Eve gave a cruel, rasping laugh as she thrust her sword point through his mid-section. With her preternatural strength she hoisted the fat cadaver off the ground and dumped him on top of several others. A dead woman, her face painted in the garish makeup of morticians the world over, seemed to grin as she reached out and twisted her fingers in the fabric of Eve's blouse, tugging at the spaghetti straps as though intent on tearing it off. Eve hacked her hands from her wrists.
It was a perverse death dance, a black-tie event, every corpse dressed in its Sunday best. But Eve wasn't getting anywhere. The limousine was back at the curb and she had made some progress, but not enough. She was at the bottom of the museum steps and cutting through the dead was taking too long. There were just too many of them. The sword was too slow.
'Squire!' she roared into the sky, into the red mist.
Off to her right was a statue of a man on horseback. She heard the goblin replying even as she spotted him, emerging from the dark shadow beneath the statue.
'What can I do ya for, darlin'?' he called.
Eve sheathed her sword. A pair of dead walkers, one only days dead and one rattling with every step, tried to take advantage of the moment. She lashed out at the fresh one, grabbed it by the face and yanked it toward her. With her left hand she dug her talons into the flesh at the back of its neck, plunged her fingers in around bone and gristle, and tore out its spinal column. The other, the crumbling, brittle one, she shattered with a single kick of a designer boot.
'This is taking too long!' she called to the goblin. 'I need something that's going to clear a bigger path.'
Even through the mist she could see Squire grin. The goblin slipped back beneath the statue and disappeared in the darkness there. Squire could fight when necessary, but that was not his purpose among Conan Doyle's agents. He drove, yes, but only because he enjoyed it. Squire was the armorer, the weapons master. As long as there were shadows for him to pass through, Eve knew she would never be without a weapon when she needed one.
The dead continued to grab at her but now Eve was less concerned with fighting them. Destroying each one would take forever and was a waste of time. Getting through them, past them, that was the priority. She felt her rage begin to subside. Had these been living enemies, bodies humming with fresh blood, she would have found it much more difficult to sublimate her fury and her bloodlust.
But they were dead, hollow things.
Obstacles.
Eve tore through them, picking up one dead walker and tossing it at the others. With a single swipe of her hand she tore the head off of the corpse of a teenaged girl. Her gaze swept the crowding dead and she saw a skull- faced cadaver, a man who had been extremely tall. She pulled the arms from the withered corpse and drove it down in front of her. It fell across several others and they scrambled to get up, to get free, to get at Eve. Planting a boot solidly on the dead man's chest she launched herself over the heads of a dozen of the staggering zombies.
Eve landed in the midst of another horde and began to fight them as well. She was halfway up the stairs when she heard Squire call her name. She turned to see him slip from the darker shadows up against the wall of the museum.
'How about this?' Squire asked.
He raised a pump shotgun in one hand. Eve grinned and raised her own hand and Squire threw the weapon to her. She snatched it from the air.
'I could kiss you.'
'Don't flatter yourself, babe,' Squire replied, and then he was gone again, lost in shadows.
Eve turned the shotgun and aimed in the general direction of the museum's front door.
'All right, numbskulls. Now the fun starts.'
She pumped the shotgun and fired. The blast tore the torso out of a corpse right in front of her, ripping through two others behind it, and knocking down several others that were clustered with them in a tangle of clawing arms and twitching legs. Tiny bits of human gristle spattered her shirt, but at last she was beyond caring about her clothes. There were always more shops, always something pretty to wear. But she didn't get an evening like this very often.
Again she pumped and fired, racing forward, leaping up stairs. She found her footing where she could, crushing bones under her boots, darting in amongst the dead. The shotgun boomed in her hands and she neared the top of the stairs.
Then the shells were spent, the shotgun smoking. Eve dropped it to clatter on the stone steps and drew her sword once more. The museum doors had been torn open and they hung off kilter in their frames.
'In,' she snarled.
Clay could be anyone. He had met warriors in his long, long life who were terrifying in every aspect. Some of them were unnaturally strong, some large enough that ordinary men would have called them giants. Some were like gods to the simple people who worshipped them. But he could also be anything. A tiger. A grizzly. A snake. Even some things that had only existed in the imagination of the Creator, things that had never walked the Earth but that He had considered.
The dead were quicker than they looked, jerking and lunging and clawing. But Clay did not need swiftness or skill, did not need agility to deal with these mindless abominations. All he needed was power and an appetite for destruction, and he had both in quantity today.
Once outside the limousine, and away from the eyes of his comrades, he changed. There were times when
