Walking Dead

inside of me without even the faintest external flare. I went after it in a slow luxurious fall, the rapier no longer enough to hold me up.

The last clear thing I saw was four blades rising to take my life, and the Wild Hunt, accompanied by Suzanne Quinley, Gary Muldoon, Billy Holliday and Captain Michael Morrison, pouring out of the sky to override Redding’s backyard like a bunch of kids playing at cowboys.

When I stepped between planes of existence, the one I was in tended to be all-consuming, whether it was my garden or the Dead Zone or a visit to the Upper and Lower Worlds that made up the trifecta of which the earth was the center. I had, once or twice, stepped out of my body and remained in the normal world, but my consciousness had gone with the spiritual version of myself, rather than the physical. I hadn’t ever learned to see in two versions of reality at once, maybe because it had never been necessary.

I learned real goddamn quick right then, because there was no way I was gonna miss this.

My garden was by far the clearer of the two realities I stood in. It was like the diner all over again, with my disembodied emotional self kneeling above a mangled idea of my body. I knew what I was doing this time, which was both good and awful: a girl shouldn’t have to patch up god-awful wounds like the ones I’d sustained once in a lifetime, much less two or three times. We were talking major bodywork, and to my huge relief, the magic wasn’t gone. It just apparently didn’t think blasting zombies was as important as surviving. It responded easily to my garden-self’s ministrations, and on a distant level I felt the screaming pain in my hand ease.

All of that was secondary in my interests to watching the home team kick the hell out of a zombie army.

Okay, it was a very small army, what with only four of them being left standing, but the Hunt itself wheeled away once it had deposited my friends across Redding’s back lawn. Even though I thought it’d be helpful to have a god on Morrison’s side, if Redding or that cauldron had drawn the Hunt in, I really couldn’t blame them for getting out of there as fast as they could. We puny mortals would only lose a lifetime, if we were thrown in the cauldron. A god and his Riders would lose eternity. Even if I wanted Cernunnos to help my friends, I could easily see how that price would be too high.

Besides, it wasn’t like I was in any condition to stop him.

Morrison had ridden with the god himself, both of them on the liquid-silver stallion and both of them wearing near-identical grins of fury. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what had convinced Morrison to ride with the Hunt, but he looked comfortable on the stallion right up until the moment he dived off its wide back. He hit the ground in a roll and came to his feet less than a yard from one of the zombies, his duty weapon at the fore. I saw six flashes of light from the gun’s muzzle, though I didn’t hear a thing, and the undead monster collapsed with a skull full of lead.

Gary’d ridden with the bearded king, and Billy with the archer. Suzy was with her uncle, the boy Rider, and all three of the mortal passengers flung themselves away from their inhuman hosts in the brief space of time it took Morrison to wipe out the warrior he’d faced. Gary smashed into another one with a flying tackle. This time I heard something: bone popping and cracking as his weight made a ruin of an already ancient body. He rolled to his feet as easily as Morrison had, breaking into a run, and skidded to a stop beside me.

Love and joy and all sorts of other gooshy things welled up in my chest. My God, I had good friends. I’d have never expected him to take time to check on me, not in the midst of chaotic battle. Tears blurred my already-poor vision and fell over the bridge of my nose to seep into the ground. I wanted to smile, but I was still too tired. That didn’t matter: the up-swell of emotion actually breathed new life into my power, and the garden version of myself sparked with relief and grim triumph. My breathing eased. I could still feel wrongness in my belly, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been.

Gary, my savior, my friend, my hero and my protector, yanked my still-glowing rapier from the earth, thundered back to the zombie he’d broken and began hacking it to pieces.

Every drop of romanticism and foolhardy joy went flat and wry within me. I mean, I had to hand it to him, that was a smart move, but it shot the shit out of my sails. A snicker bubbled up from somewhere inside me, which seemed like a positive sign, and I moved my head a little to get a better view of the rest of the fight. That I could was an even better sign.

Billy’d gone the same route Morrison had: he’d emptied a clip into one of the zombies, and stood over it with his gun at the ready, daring the thing to move again. It was normal, it was human, it was the expected response.

It made Suzanne Quinley look all the more extraordinary.

Suzanne flung her head back, hair white and crackling in light born of magic. Wildfire green seared from her raised fingertips, dancing over the yard like a plasma lamp. It touched Morrison, touched Gary and Billy and me, all of us at once, with a quick cold shock that discerned, deliberated and discarded us in an instant. We were living. We were meant to be.

It touched the undead warrior, and the silent monster opened its jaws in a noiseless scream. Green magic hissed into its thin blackened body, embodying it, enfleshing it. Color came back into its skin, hair sprouted, its eyes came alive. Its scream turned audible, a man’s voice torn from hell and spread across the night for examination.

Then it began to youthen, hair becoming fuller, its face losing the lines of age, its body growing stronger until it was in its prime. The scream continued, and so did its unaging: from man to teen, from teen to child, all the way back to a shriveled bit of nothing that winked out with a near-silent pop of sound.

An echo rolled over me, an echo of a life lived centuries ago and abruptly undone. Ripped wholly out of time, as if it had never been. The part of me given over to healing stopped, filled with horror, and I came together again, more or less whole in body and spirit, to stare at Suzanne and what she’d wrought.

That was wild magic. That was chaos magic, born from a child of immortal blood. She saw the future, but could unmake a man who’d become a monster so thoroughly that he’d never existed.

It was over in seconds.

Suzy collapsed, all the brilliant color of her magic fading away. I rolled to my hands and knees, determined to get to the girl’s side and make certain she was all right.

Morrison said, “Walker,” with unrestrained relief.

Archie Redding’s living, breathing, screaming wife erupted from the cauldron.

CHAPTER 28

Redding cried out with a disbelief echoed by every other living being in the yard. His daughters scrambled out of the cauldron behind their mother, screams torn from their throats, too. Newborn babies cried on entering the world, but this was something worse. The Sight whispered on, stronger now than it had been over the past few minutes, and I started to move before I really understood what I was seeing.

They were alive. They were honestly, truly, swear-to-God alive, full of vivid energy and surrounded by snapping auras. Their fractured bodies were healed. Better than healed: the Sight and my magic wound together and looked through them on a fundamental level. They bled new life, as though they were newborns, not a single flaw or strain in muscle or bone or skin.

They screamed because smoky-black monsters were trying to pull their freshly born souls from their bodies.

The monsters reminded me of the banshee, narrow things cloaked in death shrouds that did nothing to hide their emaciated form. Bony fingers clutched each of their heads, the Sight showing me how bruises were forming beneath the vicious grips. Each of the things—hell, for all I knew they were banshees, if not the specific hatchet-faced Blade I’d faced once before—each of the banshees brought its hooded face to its victim’s, offering a bleak kiss that ripped at their very essence. They made me think of gas masks working in reverse, sucking up to the mouth and nose and forcing poison in instead of filtering it out. And Archie Redding, who had spent half a dozen lifetimes trying to bring his family back from the dead, was held by two more of the