“Come,” he ordered. He didn’t just speak. He pushed the command out to the zombies with the arcane energy he harnessed.
The zombies stopped what they were doing and turned toward him. The moonlight and starlight showed the gaping holes of their eye sockets and broken-toothed mouths. In that moment, they reminded Warren of a television special about prairie dogs he’d seen. The zombies had that same frozen attentiveness.
A moment later, they approached him. Several came out of the trees and the tall reeds that almost masked their presence. Snow flurries eddied about them as they stirred the white powder from the brush.
Marching zombies in wide open spaces was a lot like herding cats, Warren couldn’t help thinking.
“You should have waited to summon an army,” the quiet, melodious voice inside his head told him. “As I suggested.”
Warren didn’t argue. His exception to her plans had been obvious the moment he’d ordered the corpses from their graves back in London. He wasn’t as completely within her power as he’d been in Merihim’s. He didn’t flaunt that lack, though.
Her name was Lilith. She claimed to be Adam’s second wife. Mythologies mentioned her, and many of them claimed that she was the mother of demons, of vampires, and the dark things that hunted in the night.
Warren didn’t know all of her story. He’d inadvertently found her in an arcane book Merihim had ordered him to steal. The demon had forgotten about it, and Lilith took the credit for that. She was powerful, she’d told Warren, but she wasn’t ready to take on Merihim. Not yet.
The thought of fighting Merihim when the demon had easily twice bested him left Warren sickened and hammered by anxiety attacks. But even though he didn’t do everything exactly the way Lilith wanted, he knew he didn’t want to step completely away from her. He needed her protection.
When the last of the zombies joined the group standing at the base of the promontory, Warren pointed at three of them.
“Lead,” he commanded.
The three zombies fell out of the pack and marched toward Romney Marsh again. One of them promptly disappeared into the deep salt bogs that plagued the countryside. A moment later the zombie crawled back out of the muck. Not all of them reappeared from the bottomless bogs.
Warren waited a moment and followed, stepping in the footprints left by the zombies that didn’t sink. The snow continued to fall and swirl around them.
Naomi fell into step beside him. Warren felt her presence and her mood weigh heavily on him. After all this time, it was easy to read the woman.
“You haven’t told me what we’re out here looking for,” Naomi said.
“No.”
Naomi loosed a sigh of disgust that turned gray in the cold wind. “We’re out in the middle of nowhere. It’s not like I can tell anyone.”
Warren looked at her and thought again that bringing her was a problem.
“She’s going to be trouble,” Lilith said. In an eddy of snowflakes, she was suddenly there walking beside Warren. She was taller than Naomi, almost as tall as Warren. Her milk-white complexion caused her to blend into the snow, and it almost made her black eyes and long black hair stand out. She wore a long, flowing dress with deep cleavage and wide sleeves. The cutting wind bothered neither her clothing nor her hair.
Naomi couldn’t see her because she wasn’t there. Not in physical form, at least. She manifested so that Warren saw her, but no one else. Warren still wasn’t sure if that resulted from the book or the silver hand.
“Warren,” Naomi said. “Did you hear me?”
“You shouldn’t have brought her,” Lilith went on.
“I heard you,” Warren said, and the answer sufficed for both women. Neither was happy with his response.
“If you’re not going to trust me, why did you bring me?”
“I brought you because I felt I needed you.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know.”
“This is bloody asinine.”
Lilith smiled, and moonlight and shadows stippled the cruel expression. “I told you that she would be trouble. Better to leave her now. Or kill her.”
The thought had crossed Warren’s mind. Violent solutions to problems tended to be normal for him these days. Before the Hellgate’s opening and the arrival of the demons, that had never been the case. He’d run from every fight he’d ever faced. As a result, nearly everyone he’d trusted had taken advantage of him.
“This is not asinine,” Warren said. But he felt it was because Lilith hadn’t told him what they’d come this far for, either. She’d only told him that he needed to come. “There’s something out here.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I feel it.” Warren lifted his metal hand. “In here.”
Naomi started to say something, then she glanced at the hand and closed her mouth. He’d already proved much more adept at the arcane forces the demons wielded than her. Now that he had a new hand, his power had taken on new turns that he hadn’t had access to before.
“All right,” she said finally. She pulled her long coat more firmly around her. “But I hope we find it soon.”
Another of the zombies dropped into one of the unseen bog holes barely covered by ice. The sharp crack sounded just before the zombie plunged into the black water. This one didn’t come back.
Only a little farther on, gray smoke plumed against the dark, star-filled sky. The feeling that pulled Warren lay in that direction as well.
Lilith walked beside him again. “You’ll want to hurry,” she stated calmly. “You’re being followed.”
THREE
Simon Cross hated what he was about to do. The whole performance was unfair. His victim—and he saw no other term that fit—didn’t have a chance. The
