Walking Dead

family restored.”

I kept my mouth shut that time, partly because I suspected what I had to say wouldn’t be helpful: killing somebody else’s kid to bring back your own seemed like a good idea? and partly because my heartbeat had slowed and the calming, serene confidence that I could bend space just enough to grab my sword was starting to come over me. Snarking at Redding seemed like a bad exchange for possibly saving my own neck.

He gave me another startlingly beatific smile. “And it was right. I’ve waited a hundred and sixty-seven years for this night, and you’ve come to help me assure it will be successful. Even if I only have enough time to resurrect you tonight, in another year I can awaken my children and their mother.”

I had the unpleasant idea that my zombie would be his companion for the intervening year, and it turned out that vampires weren’t actually at the top of my Very Bad Undead list. Me as one of the walking dead beat vampires hands down. Inspired by panic, I forgot about trying to be Zen and cool and one with the universe. I’d been trying to save my own life a few hours ago when I’d yanked it through the ether. There’d been no calm involved. Right now, I was all for terror-induced teleportation. One sword coming up, or one dead Joanne going down.

And time ran out. Redding drew his hood farther over his head, making himself a black mark against the night, and took a long slim knife from beneath his robe. A sudden vivid image of Sonata hanging in the air, ghostly blood draining from long cuts on her body, sprang to mind. I wasn’t spread-eagle, and he’d probably cut my throat to make sure I was dead before midnight, but I had no doubt I’d be made victim to the same five-cut ritual Matilda and the others had died in. That was a hell of a way to go.

My fingers, cold as they were, had enough feeling in them to close around the rapier’s haft. I put bursting into tears of relief on my list of things to do about an hour from now, and did my absolute best to whip myself in a circle and cut Redding’s totally insane head off. I was pretty sure I’d seen a movie trailer with a martial-arts expert trussed up like I was. He’d managed to kick the bad guys’ asses. It could be done.

Not, however, by me. I swung around in a lazy circle without anything like enough momentum to do damage. The rapier stuck out from behind my back at a ridiculous angle, enough to make Redding step back in surprise, but I didn’t think I was going to surprise him to death. I swished around again, trying to shift the sword enough to saw through the ropes around my wrists. This was, by any reasonable expectation, impossible. I’d spent a lot of time with the impossible over the last year, though, so I wasn’t quite ready to give up hope. In the worst scenario, I could arch into the ties and attack the rope holding my feet. A living body entering the cauldron was supposed to be what destroyed it. It wasn’t top on my list of choices, but if I couldn’t get free in the next few minutes, there were worse ways to go out.

Sadly, I had not anticipated the silent platoon of undead taking the sudden appearance of my sword as a threat.

Matilda Whitehead had never gotten her bony hands on me. I didn’t know how grateful I was for that until half a dozen cadavers surged forward, grasping for me. The other four swept into place around Redding, making a…prophylactic or phalanx or something like that, of protection. In the good news department, he wasn’t actually all that happy to be protected, since his window of opportunity for murdering me was rapidly coming to a close. Sharp, skinless phalanges digging into my skin fell under less good news. I screamed like a little girl again, and had the bare wittering presence of mind to slam my shields outward, making them into as defensive a weapon as I could.

Three of the warriors staggered back. Another one burst into blue flame, which astonished everyone, including me, enough to stop and gape for a couple of seconds. I recovered before they did, though the two I hadn’t knocked away still had their claws in me. I twisted and bucked, actively trying now, to slice the rope around my ankles so I could fall into the cauldron. Better a willing sacrifice to end a run of evil than being chewed apart by undead soldiers. On my third or fourth flail, the rapier caught in the rope with a soft hiss that signaled parting threads. I said “Shit” as the rope frayed and I fell.

The dead men caught me.

Cold surged through my body as though life itself tried to flee from their unfeeling hands. My shields flared, and the one part of my mind that wasn’t gibbering with fear shut them down. I was balanced precariously on rickety arms whose ropy black muscle held me out of the cauldron. The last thing I wanted to do was make those arms burst into flames.

They didn’t speak, the dead, but they moved together. Three tiny sways, and then a good heave-ho sent me tumbling away from the cauldron and toward Redding’s swimming pool. I hit the concrete edge with my face and tasted blood, but given that I’d been expecting to taste untimely doom, blood was pretty nice.

Behind me, the distinctive note of metal leaving leather hissed. I clenched every muscle in my body and tried to flip myself over, pissed off at the idea of being stabbed in the back at this late date. I almost made it, too, but a booted foot caught me in the back of my ribs and kept me on my stomach. A wordless yell broke from my throat, and for all that it was muffled by the gag, it at least felt like the kind of thing a fighter should go out on. It was angry, full of defiance, ready to face whatever the fates had in store.

It was also a completely inappropriate response to the ropes binding me being slashed apart by someone else’s blade.

My hands flopped to the ground and my feet smashed downward, thunking into the lawn that bordered the swimming pool’s patio. I’d pushed blood back into my system, but actual non-magically-assisted blood flow let me know just how inadequate my efforts had been. Good enough to let me grab the rapier, but not nearly good enough to keep pins and needles that felt like pitons and spikes from driving into my extremities. I lay there for a few seconds just gasping with pain, unable to even care that my back was exposed to a bunch of presumably murderous corpses.

Once that thought worked itself through my over-oxygenated brain, I rolled over on my back and lifted my rapier in a feeble defense. The five warriors who’d taken me down stood in a loose circle, and Redding was caught in the midst of his phalanx, shouting furiously. Apparently they didn’t consider him their general, because they stayed where they were, watching their mates, who were watching me. Waiting for me to do something. After a while I realized what it was.

They wanted a fair fight.

I yanked the gag out of my mouth, spat bile and jumped to my feet. My feet protested this treatment with a shriek of agony, and I had a brief dazzling image of Petite’s brake pads going. Replacing brakes took a while, time I didn’t have, so I slammed the idea of a little extra brake lube through my system and the dancing anguish faded. I didn’t really need new brakes. I just needed to not fall down while I took on undead warriors in man-to-man combat.

All five of the semi-circle of fighters moved forward at once, as one. I guessed they didn’t want a totally fair fight. On the other hand, I’d torched one of them already, so maybe me against nine wasn’t such bad odds. Especially since I only had to stay alive about six more minutes and the witching hour would be ended.

Teeth bared in a grin, rapier aglow with life magic, I fell into a fencing stance and for the second time that day, lifted a hand to say bring it on.

Archie Redding threw his sacrificial knife and caught me in the belly.

CHAPTER 27

I had learned something during the break-neck three days in January when my shamanic talents had awakened from their slumber. Well, I’d learned quite a few things, but the relevant one right now was this:

Getting a knife in the gut really hurts. I’d done it twice then, both times in fights with Cernunnos. It turned out having a mortal, or semi-mortal, human being wielding the blade didn’t make it hurt one little tiny bit less at all. My vision went black, because going white seemed like too much effort. It was already dark out, after all. Pain didn’t have to go very far to turn everything to swimming, blinding darkness. It wasn’t quite a mortal injury sort of darkness—I’d had those, and this was different—but it was very calm and very reassuring and very easy. Easier than I thought it should be, which I blamed on the presence of the cauldron. It took everything I had to draw in a breath, and even doing that brought a host of regrets.