he felt awkward about his nature, about the malleability of his body. He wanted them to see him as Clay, to have an identity in their minds, and experience had shown them that anyone who saw his flesh run like mercury and his bones reshape often enough could lose track of who he was.
He hated that, for there were times when the only way he could know himself was to see how he was reflected in the eyes of others. That was the fundamental truth of what he was.
He was Clay.
Now his hot breath snorted from his nostrils and he felt his muscles ripple in his chest. Black fur stood up on the back of his neck and he felt the crimson mist caressing the tip of each hair. He was a five hundred pound mountain gorilla, a silverback. Clay marched forward, trampling the walking dead beneath him, feeling their bones crushed to dust under his feet. Seconds passed as he cleared the area around him of zombies. His massive hands closed on the heads of the corpses. Some of their skulls shattered in his grip. Others he tore away from their shoulders.
'Having fun, big boy?' a voice asked.
With a grunt, the massive gorilla turned and stared as a slit appeared in the undulating darkness beside him. Like some grotesque birth, Squire slipped through the womb of shadows and stood before him, holding out a huge Turkish battle axe, a weapon almost as large as the goblin himself.
'Fun,' Clay replied.
He snatched the axe from Squire in one enormous gorilla hand. The goblin took two steps backward into darkness and was gone, even as the walking corpses tried to grab at him. Clay swung it with such power that he cleaved the heads from two of the dead and in the same blow cut a freshly dead man completely in half, the divided portions of his corpse striking the paved sidewalk with moist weight.
He threw back his head, free hand pounding his chest, and let out a gorilla roar that echoed back from the enveloping mist. The dead surrounded him and Clay began to trample them again. The axe swung out, clearing a path, and with his free hand he slapped others down to the ground. He reached the stairs, huge feet cracking the stone beneath him. The dead fell before him. His progress was slow, but inexorable.
Then, with another snort of hot air, the mountain gorilla paused. There were times when Clay transformed that he lost himself in his new shape. It took him a second to clear his mind, to make sense of what he was seeing.
Just ahead, the ghost of Leonard Graves walked toward him down the stairs. The dead sensed the phantom of the dead adventurer. They could feel Graves's presence. But they could not touch him. Their fingers, sometimes little more than bones, snatched at the spectral form of Dr. Graves, tried to tear his flesh, to grab hold of his clothes. But there was nothing there. It maddened them, and some of the mindless dead seemed somewhat less mindless now, their faces etched with a vicious frustration.
'Clay,' Dr. Graves said calmly as the decaying corpse of a woman in military uniform reached through his ghostly flesh and grabbed hold of another of the dead.
With a shudder and a grunt, Clay twitched and transformed back into the human form he most often wore. There was something in Graves's tone and bearing that made him feel foolish. And now that he no longer wore the body of an animal, he thought he knew what it was.
'There are too many to fight,' Clay said.
He swung his axe, not to cut but to batter, and knocked away three of the dead who were clutching at him.
Graves could not be touched, but his expression revealed his frustration. Abruptly he tore his gaze from Clay and reached out to the two zombies nearest him. His hands, pure ectoplasm, reached inside the rotting corpses, disappearing within. Their spirits had been forcibly pulled from the afterlife, restored to dead flesh, to rotting brains and madness. Now, with a single tug, Dr. Graves ripped those souls back out of their bodies.
The ghosts screamed in torment, eyes wide with unspeakable agony. But in the moment before they shimmered and dissipated like smoke on the breeze, they gazed at Dr. Graves with profound gratitude.
'You're wasting time out here.' Graves told him.
Clay frowned. 'Eve?'
'Already inside,' said the specter.
'Shit,' Clay said, kicking a zombie in the chest as he started toward the stairs to the museum. 'It's just second nature. Something like this happens… you know once they're done here these deadheads are going to look for more populated areas. That's what they do, zombies. They kill. I've never understood if they're hungry or just angry, but that's what they do. It doesn't feel right, leaving them walking around.'
Graves floated beside Clay, ignoring the carnage as the shapeshifter tore and hacked through more of the dead. 'There are already too many of them for us to stop them. It would take hours. Maybe days. We don't have that kind of time. It's not why we're here. And if we do the job — '
'There may be another way to stop them,' Clay finished.
Even as his lips formed the last of these words, they were not lips anymore. He opened his beak and cawed loudly, and he spread his falcon wings wide and thrust himself up into the air.
Dr. Graves kept pace. The ghost flew beside him. Clay stretched out his wings and glided in through the front doors of the museum. The huge foyer echoed with the shuffling footsteps of the dead. There were shattered corpses on the floor, unmoving, and it was easy to follow the path that Eve had taken. She had blazed the trail for them.
Up through the main hall Clay flew, the ghost of Dr. Graves keeping pace with him. They turned and passed through arched passages and soon they were moving through the collection of the Art of Ancient Africa. An exhibition of Egyptian burial jars, sarcophagi, bracelets and necklaces, and many other objects was ahead. Though the museum held some of the most beautiful and most celebrated paintings in the world, it was these wings that had always fascinated Clay. Paintings were only that. Art, yes, and some of it breathtaking. But the objects that people held in their hands and lived with thousands of years ago
… those were memories.
The European collection was ahead. Signs announced an exhibit called Life in the Middle Ages. The skull would be there, kept behind glass so that spectators could view the oddity that was the Eye of Eogain, the silver false orb with ancient words scrawled in the metal.
An artifact. Nothing more than that, or so the curators thought.
Clay reveled in the form of the falcon, in the interplay of air and wings, in the feeling of flight. He zipped lower across a vast hall, through another arch, and then dipped his right wing to turn again.
Around that corner, none of the dead were still walking.
Eve marched toward him across a floor strewn with fallen cadavers and the still-twitching parts of the resurrected. She had cleared herself a path, but now she was retracing her steps.
'This doesn't bode well,' Dr. Graves whispered, his words reaching Clay as though the ghost had whispered in his ear.
Clay beat his wings, stretched out his talons, and even as he alighted upon the tiled floor he transformed once more. Any reticence he had to do so in front of his comrades was gone, sacrificed to the needs of the moment. Bones creaked and shifted and his flesh undulated and pulsed as it expanded. It happened with such speed that Eve took a step back and brandished her sword toward him.
'Watch where you point that thing,' Clay said.
Eve rolled her eyes and lowered the blade. Her gaze lingered on Clay a moment, even as Dr. Graves' ectoplasmic form coalesced alongside them.
'What happened, Eve?' Graves asked. 'You couldn't find it?'
She snarled, baring her fangs at the specter. 'I found where it's supposed to be, Casper. They got there first. These fuckers are brainless. Morrigan's got to be controlling one of them directly enough to make it her puppet. One of the dead took Eogain's skull, and the Eye along with it.'
'Damn it!' Clay snapped. 'We've got to get it back! We've got to find the one that took it!'
At this, Dr. Graves raised an eyebrow. Eve stared at him in disbelief.
'Look around, Clay,' the vampire said, gesturing toward either end of the hall, where the dead had begun to gather again, staggering toward them. There were dozens, just in this hall alone. There must have been hundreds in the museum and in the streets around it. 'How are you going to figure out which one took the Eye?'
'Split up,' Clay said, already moving away from them. 'You find the one that moves with purpose, the one
