Page 55

Lucian

“It’s a corpse-walker,” Kerainne’s whisper was filled with disgust that I could only imagine.

“Fuck.” I borrowed from her vocabulary. “I thought it was some sort of glamour.”

“So did I, until the dispel glamour spell didn’t work.”

A thousand questions darted through my mind.

But they’d have to wait. The portal to Qua’ al-fán lay open, flickering with ugliness and emanating evil.

I pulled Kerainne’s glove from her hand, then linked my fingers with hers, pulling her toward it despite the rational part of me wanting to retreat from it.

“No!” Kerainne screamed. “Please don’t!”

“Trust me, Kerainne. I know what we’re supposed to do. My mother told me what our union can do. In a moment, you will too.”

She fell silent, and let me lead her to it.

“Oh,” she whispered, with weighty understanding.

Instinct guided me as I willed our magic to mingle like it did when we made love.

Then, together, we sent careful, specified pulsed of magic into the portal working at it like a chisel.

When we’d worked the shape, we pulled magic from the air around us, the very essence of this world.

With that essence, we built a solid door and closed it over the portal.

“We need to lock it!” Kerainne said.

Understanding filled me and we wove our magic together, then screwed it into the door.

I knew with full confidence that only a Leonine and Jagwolfe together would be able to open it.

And since the Leonine custom was to have their bodies burned, the Evil One’s necromancers couldn’t use corpse-walkers to open it.

The corpse-walker… I turned to see that it had crawled closer to Kerainne. I lifted her by the waist and dragged us back a few extra steps.

Unlike Xochitl, Nik, and probably Kerainne, I’d never had the decidedly unsettling experience of looking at one of my own corpses. And the fact that this one was moving, and only minutes ago trying to abduct my mate, just made the thing more gut-curdling.

“Let’s destroy that,” I managed to get out before gagging.

“No!” Kerainne shook her head. “It can talk . Maybe Del or Rayven or Zareth knows enough necromancy to be able to find out who’s been spying on us and how they managed to steal your body and animate it to the point where it was capable of enough thought to operate alone.”

A terrible thought came to me. “Are we sure it’s alone?”

“Fuck sandwiches. Hold on a sec.”

I couldn’t help chuckling at her colorful phrasing. “Fuck what?”

She shushed me with her mom voice and knelt by the corpse-walker’s head. Which had been my head three days ago. To my disgust, she put her hand in its hair and pulled out a few strands. Then she held the hairs in front of her and chanted a few words of magic.

I felt her power flow out in warm air currents.

After a few moments, she shook her head. “It came alone. Its necromancer must have been waiting on the other side of the portal. He or she probably fled when it felt our magic.”

“And now it can’t get through this way.” My shoulders relaxed with relief that we wouldn’t have to fight one of the Evil One’s soldiers tonight. Even though it would be better to have a live captive than this dead one.

“Exactly.” Kerainne stepped away from the grasping corpse and continued. “And creating a long-standing portal like that probably required the effort of several mages. It will be a while before they can make another one and attempt something like this again. Which gives us more time to prepare.”

I crouched and recovered my sword, putting it back in my bottomless pouch. “I guess I’ll have to carry the body while you get the head.”

I didn’t want to touch it. Especially since it still moved. It kept crawling toward Kerainne.

She frowned down at the body. “We’ll need to restrain it. Do you have any rope?”

I reached into my bottomless pouch and focused on my inventory. “No.”

“Ok. I have another idea.” She pulled a knife from her pocket, walked behind the corpse, grabbed the back of its filthy blue velvet jacket and started sawing at it.

“If I brought my bottomless pouch, I’d have my sewing scissors,” she grumbled, then gasped.

“That’s what you were wearing the last time you went to Luminista before this!

No wonder the thing’s clothes smelled so wrong. ”

The implications of her words struck me with a chord of dread. “That means they dug up my body in Raijin too.”

“Probably to use as a test model until they perfected their scheme.” Her eyes narrowed in anger as she finished sawing a wide strip of fabric from my old jacket. “Damn it, I should have been the one to bury your body that time too. I would have put it in the nightmare forest.”

“You weren’t at the point where you’d have been willing to do that for me.”

Her eyes dimmed with remorse. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you were right,” I said quickly, never wanting to make her feel bad.

“I’m only pointing out that this wasn’t your fault.

None of us could have known. The corpse-walkers we’ve seen before were all mindless puppets that had to be steered by the mages who raised them.

While remaining in range.” I reached down and pet the fluffy black and white cat who apparently hadn’t left Kerainne’s side since my trip to Luminista.

“Which is why you were right to stop me from destroying this one.”

“I know,” she declared cheerfully. “Can you tie its arms behind its back?” She fluttered her eyelashes at me. “You have all the muscles.”

Only she could bring light to such a dark time. I moved behind her and pinned the corpse’s back with my knee as I wrenched its arms back and tied the wrists together the best I could with the strip of velvet.

Kerainne sawed off another strip of fabric and blindfolded the head before lifting it by the hair.

At first, I tried hauling the body over my shoulder, grateful that since I’d died by exsanguination this time, no blood leaked on me. But it wriggled and squirmed too much. Then we discovered that if we let it walk, it would follow Kerainne.

The cat—who she’d named Phantom—walked between her and the corpse, growling and hissing at it every few yards.

“How did you find me in time?” Kerainne asked me.

“It was the strangest thing.” I shook my head, still trying to comprehend what had happened.

“I was still in Luminista, packed and saying my goodbyes to everyone, and though I’d already been in a hurry to return to you, I felt you crying out to me and knew you were in danger.

So I gathered my stuff and returned. I almost headed to the castle when I felt you in the woods.

Then I heard Phantom yowling. He must have smelled me.

He came running and then led me back to you. I like this cat.”

“He tried to tell me that wasn’t you.” Shame infused her voice. “I’d assumed it was because you didn’t smell like Aisthanesthai anymore. But I quickly caught on that something was wrong. That’s when I did the dispel glamour spell. I never guessed that it was a corpse-walker!”

“I didn’t either,” I reminded her. “But seeing something that looked like me dragging you to a portal to Qua’ al-fán… That was hard. Chopping its head off was easy.”

“I can’t believed I hugged that thing.” Kerainne shivered. “Though I did tell it to come back to the castle so we could wash those clothes. That smell, it wasn’t just the slight sweetness that was death, there was another odor…that must be Qua’ al-fán.”

And we’d be going there soon. I forced the thought away and focused on the immediate issue. “After we turn this thing over to Zareth, do you think he’ll be able to find a necromancer not on the Evil One’s side?”

“If he can’t, one of us will.” Her confident tone soothed me. “Not everyone who practices death magic is evil.”

When we reached the castle gates, the guards stared slack-jawed at the shambling, headless corpse and the blindfolded head Kerainne carried.

One of them recovered his speech and addressed his compatriots before letting us through. “Fates, the blood whore was telling the truth!”

“Just whom are you referring to in such a disrespectful manner?” Kerainne said in that voice that compelled one to straighten their posture and behave.

The guard’s face reddened as he bowed to Kerainne. “Forgive my coarseness, Queen Mother. One of the bl—er I mean, donors from the blood houses came here about an hour ago demanding to see the King. She said that death magic was nearby.”

“She’s one of them faelin folk,” another guard added. “They have strong magic, which I was trying to tell Orwen here. But he didn’t listen until the Keeper of the Prophecy came and demanded us to let her in.”

Orwen’s shoulders hunched further until his red face looked in danger of being swallowed by the rest of his bulky form. “Did you do the death magic, Queen Mother?”

For some reason, he avoided looking at me.

“No. Another necromancer raised this corpse and sent it after me,” Kerainne said cooly. “Now will you let us in so we may speak with the King and the blood donor?”

When we entered the great hall where Zareth and Xochitl sat on their thrones with all our friends and our new soldiers lined up, Kerainne gasped at the sight of a faelin woman standing between Delgarias and Shen Li.

“The seventh Bride!” she whispered to me, neatly dodging the headless corpse.

It took me a moment to realize what she was talking about. Then I remembered a line of the Prophecy that often fell under discussion among Del and his vampires. “Seven Nightwalkers with Seven Brides…”

“How do you know?” I whispered back.

She rose up again on her toes and her breath tickled my lower jaw because she couldn’t reach my ear. “Because Del said he’d found her in a blood house.”

“Why is a faelin working in a blood house?” I accidentally spoke too loudly. “They abhor blood magic.”

Delgarias chuckled. “We learned the answer today. Maeve?”