Behind me Cassandra was on her knees, the abaya she wore puddling around her feet like an oil slick. Was she praying? Well, she’d been an oracle once. If she had any pull left, now would be a great time to call in her favors.
Beside her Bergman clutched big tufts of his lank brown hair with both hands, his sparse beard seeming to tremble as he yelled, “Give me a weapon, goddammit! A rock! A screwdriver! Anything!” Suddenly the Spec Ops guys were beside us, holding off the reavers when they weren’t actually taking them out. “Fall back!” I heard the commander say, his voice so familiar in my ears I had to force myself not to turn and look. A massive black dude knelt in front of me and started firing, so I took advantage of the break to hand Bergman my knife and reload. Slowly, fighting all the way, we backed into the farmhouse. At some point I realized the two men who’d been out in front of the rest were being helped along by their buddies. A couple more had taken damage as well. They’d all been raked across the arms and chests by the reavers’ harpoonlike claws, but the body armor they wore under their light-colored thobes seemed to have averted total disaster. As the medic attended them, the rest of us took our posts at the windows and the open door. The reavers bombarded the house with no regard to the lead we poured into their bodies. But they dropped pretty fast when I repeated my call. “Target the third eye!” I yelled. The sergeant hunkered next to me, chortling as he dropped yet another one. “I love my job!” he said. He couldn’t have been much older than me, a mid-twenties adrenaline junkie whose Asian ancestors had granted him an exotic beauty set off perfectly by his square-jawed American side. “Me too, pal,” I said as I took my turn at the window. There were only a couple left. I decided to leave them for the others. I’d only brought a limited amount of ammo and I was a long way from home. I began refilling my clip as my neighbor introduced himself. “Don Hardin,” he said, holding out his hand, “but you can call me Jet.” I shook it, doubting I’d experience a wimpy grip in his ten- person unit. “Nice to meet you,” I said. “I’m Jaz Parks.” You know how they say silence is golden? Not always. At the moment I’d have colored it orange. The hue of those construction lights you see on the highway, warning you to hit the breaks before you clip the poor schmuck who’s holding the stop sign. The last shot rang out. The final reaver fell just as I said my name and the farmhouse fell quiet. I looked around. The single stone room wasn’t lit. The troops wore their night-vision goggles. Vayl could see in the dark. The rest of us had Bergman’s contact lenses. I suddenly realized how completely we depend on being able to see the expressions on people’s faces in order to interpret everything from feelings to appropriate conversational gambits. “Somebody cover the windows. Give us a light, Cam,” ordered the commander in the gruff voice I was sure I’d recognized before. All of us made the necessary adjustments so we wouldn’t be blinded as a tall, broad-shouldered woman closed the door and hung blankets over the window openings, and one of the guys across the room pulled the hood off a surprisingly bright lantern. I blinked as the commander stepped forward, looming over me like Albert used to right before banishing me to the yard, usually for talking when I should’ve been shutting up. Once there, I was required to run laps until further notice. Generally he had to reseed a three-foot path all the way around our property line every time we moved, since I usually figured whatever I’d pulled was worth the punishment, my brother felt the same, and our sister, Evie, ran with us to keep us company.
Dave had grown since then, and I’d never seen him so fit. But I didn’t think he’d appreciate me oohing and aahing over his amazing abs in front of his unit. My suspicions were confirmed when he asked in a demanding and somewhat annoyed tone, “What’re you doing here?”
That’s the CIA for you. Don’t even tell your partners who’s coming until they get there. I was tempted to strike a dramatic pose, hands on hips, hair floating on a well-timed breeze as I declared, “We have come to vanquish the Wizard!” But there would be no awed intakes of breath if I took that approach. According to our pentagon briefers, these guys had been chasing the bastard for a year. But he’d been killing long before that.
The Wizard had caused more U.S. and allied soldier casualties in the past decade than entire countries during official armed conflicts. He’d murdered thousands of innocents during terrorist attacks — his own people and ours. He made few distinctions. Anyone who denied his god, Angra Mainyu, as the Big Kahuna, made himself a target. And the Wizard, well, he didn’t exactly call Angra Mainyu Daddy, but he’d begun to drop hints. Frankly, it did seem as if he had some divine assistance at times. He’d slipped so many traps locals said he ate shadows and drank starlight. He also made the dead walk. Which meant our training for this mission had included a crash course in necromancy that had left me with a bad case of the gag-a-maggots. Cassandra, of all people, had been our instructor. Pete had set us up in an empty meeting room around a scratched table with a fake wooden top on which she’d gently set the Enkyklios. The size of a makeup case, it held hundreds of years’ worth of histories and lore gathered by Seers from across the world. Though I’d seen it work several times before, I still marveled at the unseen power that moved its parts, which resembled rainbow-colored glass balls. The kind hip women put at the bottom of vases. Don’t ask me why. I’ve never been hip.
Bergman had still been buried in his lab, so only Cole, Vayl, and I had watched as Cassandra whispered,
“Enkyklios occsallio vera proma,” triggering the marbles to change, rearrange, and reveal their zombie-making secrets.
Out of a grouping of orbs shaped like a bell came a hologram so clear I was tempted to reach out and touch the weeping woman wearing a faded flower-print housedress. She strode down a narrow dirt path, her sensible shoes raising small clouds of dust with every step. Her wheat-colored hair had begun to escape from the bun she’d arranged at the nape of her neck. Tendrils of it brushed across her shoulders, pointing down to the dead girl she carried in her arms. She headed toward a thatch-roofed cottage, the garden of which was so wild and dark it looked like it belonged in a painting by van Gogh. When she got to the door she kicked it twice. “Lemme in, Madame Otis!” she cried in a harsh cockney accent. “I need your help! I’ll pay, I will!”
After she’d kicked a couple more times the door flew open. “What —” A narrow-eyed, stringy-haired woman took in the scene before her and crossed her arms. “Go home and bury that girl,” she said flatly.
“She’s my only child,” the mother replied, desperation making her voice crack. “I know you can bring her back.” The woman spat into the tangle of weeds and hollyhocks next to the doorway. “I won’t.” We exchanged interested looks around the table. Not “I can’t,” but “I won’t.” Madame Otis was a necromancer. “I need her!” wailed the mother. “I can’t live without her! You can’t imagine the pain!”
“What’s your name, woman?” demanded Madame Otis.
“Hilda Barnaby and this here is Mira,” she added, nodding to the burden in her arms.
“Don’t imagine you’re the first woman to fall to her knees under the crush of a child’s loss,” snarled Madame Otis. “What you’re asking me will bring you horrors beyond imagination. Wrap up that child, shoulder your grief, and move on. Because, believe me, you cannot be rejoined to her on this earth without conjuring yet more pain and an eternity of regret.”
The women stared each other down. Almost at the same moment Hilda got that aha! look on her face; we realized Madame Otis had experienced a much similar loss and a parallel reaction. With one exception. She’d become a necromancer so she could raise her own dead. The nightmare of that experience still played across her face, though instinct told us it stood many decades in her past.
The picture faded as Hilda’s voice came in unrelenting monotone through the misty gray fog that replaced the images. “I convinced Madame Otis to raise Mira in the end. All it took was everything I had. And it seemed so little to give. Even though Madame Otis explained to me that Mira would not be the same, I couldn’t bring myself to care. My little girl would walk and talk once more. I would be able to hug her. Cook for her. Watch her walk down the aisle.” Bitter laugh. “I couldn’t have been more wrong.”
