My summons and I stood in front of a tomb that, for all intents and purposes, seemed sealed.
I directed The Chariot forward, and in five seconds flat the Form had managed to get the door open, and the stone thudded heavily to the ground when she did, cracking and sounding like thunder in the cemetery.
Inside the tomb was a small, open room.
I hesitated, not wanting to go into the dim, nearly black space. Who would? This went against all of the things horror movies had ever taught me.
The outside of it was impressive, and looked to be one of the older structures here. Angels were carved into the sides of the structure, and columns reached upward to hold up a peaked roof.
Light filtered in, though it wasn’t bright enough to make the tomb any less foreboding.
I stepped in anyway, and realized that I should’ve questioned why it was empty and why I’d gone first.
Something rushed me, though it was impossible to tell what.
Screeching in fear, I hastily and clumsily directed the Devil to my side, where she lashed out with a whip to catch the-person?
At my urging she dragged the thing into the moonlight, and what I saw made my stomach flip.
I had been attacked by a corpse.
Even now the half-decayed thing fought to get free of my card, and quickly I had her behead the thing. She did so, but the creature still writhed.
So she took off its arms, then its legs.
And still the pieces tried to come for me.
“Fuck,” I said, my voice echoing off the stone. A necromancer had put these here to guard the spell, I reasoned. Undying, mindless corpses that would attack anyone that thought to enter without permission.
I did not want to step any further into the tomb.
But across the small space sat an altar, and I would be damned if there wasn’t some kind of map on it.
“Fuck,” I stated again. I needed to do this fast.
Pushing my will into the Forms of my cards, I sent The Devil forward, The Chariot spinning and making as much movement as she could behind me.
The decoys worked; spelled corpses lunged from the walls at both of them, groans echoing throughout the tomb.
Terrified, I dashed forward, stopping at the edge of the altar to look down at the spell as my heart thudded in my chest and my hands shook.
My Arcana Forms fought behind me, but I only gave them enough of my focus to keep them going.
Yet again the thought of summoning The Moon entered my mind.
Yet again, I pushed it away.
With everything happening around me, it was hard to pull my thoughts together to take in what I was seeing and figure it out.
The map. A bowl full of burning herbs. Four crystals in the cardinal directions.
I reached out, only to recoil with a hiss when the crystals flared and magic shocked my fingers.
“Okay, I knew it wouldn’t be that easy,” I grumbled, eyes tracing the painted circle that enclosed the Lafourche Bayou outside of the city.
My hand went to my bag and I pulled out some of the black powder from before, throwing that at the circle to see if it would nullify the magic there.
The little barrier flared and incinerated the dust.
I’d need a lot more magic to end this spell. Not that it surprised me really.
Glancing behind me for the first time, I saw that my Arcana fought the zombies dauntlessly. They’d ripped apart bodies, but pieces still came after them.
A detached arm hung from The Chariot’s throat, while the Devil had a man’s severed torso gripping her around the waist.
With a yank, I pulled both Forms to me, then turned and reached out towards the map.
They did the same, in their own ways. The Chariot’s clawed, feathered hand went out quick as a viper, finding the sparking barrier and pushing.
The Devil’s whip snaked forward and did the same.
Calling up all the magic I muster, I tried very hard to ignore the corpses grabbing at my ankles and reached for the crystal nearest me.
I didn’t try to move it. Instead I flooded it with magic, biting my lip as shocks fought to pry my fingers off of the jagged mineral.
But I didn’t let up. It was bearable with my Arcana Forms taking the brunt of the magic, and with another burst of magic sent into the crystal, I felt something pop.
Everything was quiet for half a second, before all four crystals shattered explosively.
I closed my eyes, glad for my glasses, and shielded my face with my hands. I was too late to stop all the shards of magicked crystal, and felt the hard edges bite into my skin.
Finally, when I lowered my hands and blinked away the blood that trickled from a particularly deep cut in my eyebrow, I found that the burning herbs had disintegrated, the crystals were gone, and the map itself had burned.
Unfortunately, the rain of shattered magic had also caused my Arcana Forms to disappear, which left me alone in the dark, with the blessedly unmoving corpses on the ground behind me.
I’d done it. I’d broken the spell on the bayou so that Cian and the others were no longer trapped and, hopefully, the vampires could no longer regenerate.
Now I wanted to get out of here, before Cian could come tell me how I’d somehow fucked this up too.
Chapter 31
My plans derailed the moment I stepped out of the tomb. The sounds of fighting were still evident in other places, so I figured Yuna and Aveline were still at it. I worried for them, even though I could feel the tug of Aveline’s magic at my core and knew she was alive. I didn’t regret splitting up from them, but I needed to know how they
