Page 37 of Resurrection

Old blood. Yeah, a lot had died here. But this wasn’t all. Gabe turned and focused on the feeling of rot, and the animation that often came with it. He left the group at the first shed, though there were a line of them, and headed into the woods. Seiran followed.

“Zombies?” Seiran asked quietly as they walked, Gabe mostly unseeing anything really around them as he was laser-focused on the smell.

“Do you smell it?” Gabe asked.

“Yes, but I didn’t know what exactly it was. Old death? We’ve found old bodies before and they just smell like earth. The rot scent fades pretty fast. You think these are fresher?” He sniffed the air, seeming to find the scent again, and frowned. “It’s like death, and rot, but with perfume? Not the sickly-sweet smell of rotting meat, but actual flowers?”

“Only zombies smell like that.”

“Not vampires?” Seiran asked.

“No. Vampires don’t rot. Even when we go to ground, we are absorbed back into it if we are down long enough. This is something else.”

“Zombies aren’t a thing,” Emmaline said, having left people behind to begin cataloging the sheds as she followed Gabe. “It’s a horror movie special effect.”

“It’s a thing,” Gabe assured her. He had a sudden memory of a handful of times in his past he had encountered zombies. Not movies. The real thing. And they felt very familiar. Fuck. “Death magic.”

“I am really beginning to think death magic is its own thing,” Seiran said.

“It is,” Gabe said. “As an earth witch you could unravel the ties that make a vampire, but you can’t create a vampire. Death magic is required for animation.”

“You’re remembering more?”

“Bits and pieces.”

The area they came across was a bit of a break in the trees, mostly bland and seeming to be little more than dirt. It wasn’t mounds or anything that looked like graves. In fact, the ground didn’t appear disturbed at all, but Gabe’s revenant was pulling hard at him, wanting out to fight whatever danger they stood in.

Gabe stopped in the center of the small clearing and let his power reach into the ground. Not magic like the witches, but a vampire’s strength. He could sense other vampires. Gone to ground here, perhaps? Why?

“There are vampires here,” Gabe said. He looked at Seiran. “Can you feel them in the earth?”

“Gone to ground?” Seiran appeared confused, but Gabe could feel when he opened himself up to what the earth was telling him. Gone to ground wasn’t right. Left more than a few days the vampire body would reform, eventually returning to their graves. Or wherever most of their grave dirt was.

This ground had been disturbed, and only the barest hints of blackness in the soil gave tell to what lay beneath. Touching them, the bits of darkness, was almost like stirring the revenants. Not possible. Seiran hissed after a moment and the ground began to bubble.

The witches stepped back all gasping at the sight as Seiran’s power forced the bodies of vampires to the surface. Not one, or even a dozen, but so many it was impossible to find ground without them. Some had tree roots grown through, and many were actually rotted, taken by true death. A few stared at them with wide, seeing eyes, while staked and bound, limbs missing, covered in lacerations and burns, like they’d been tortured and then somehow bound beneath the earth to keep them silent.

“Holy fuck,” Sam said as he appeared behind the group. “What the fuck is this?”

“Your missing vampires.” Seiran said.

And then some, thought Gabe at the body count. “Does this mean there are more golems?”

Chapter 13

Avampire serial killer was not the news Seiran had been hoping to end his evening with. The amount of law enforcement, Dominion investigators, and vampires that descended on the spot was astronomical. They would need something larger than the normal morgue office to house all the bodies. Seiran suspected they needed more space than the combined Twin Cities morgues could offer.

“What is the point of all this?” He wondered out loud as the group worked its way across the scene. Vampires in the modern day kept their heads down and out of trouble. The Vampire War, even as brief as it had been, only lasting a few months, had been enough to set the entire world against them. Only delicate negotiation had helped soothe some of the frayed trust. Negotiation and time. Was this some sort of revenge? Why so many vampires? And how? Vampires weren’t exactly easy to kill, or hold. “Does anyone know the family’s history? Is there a beef against vampires?”

“I’ll look into it,” one of the group Emmaline had brought in, said. Seiran was pretty sure she was on the investigative team, but hadn’t personally trained her as he had Emmaline.

Max appearing on the fringes of the group startled him, and the cops who were guarding the area, although they recognized him fast enough and let him through. It was never good when the big dog of vampires showed up.

“Hart,” Seiran greeted him.

“How many were saved?” He asked without preamble. “I have a warehouse open for the bodies. We can go through each, identify and notify next of kin and the members of their nests.”

“Two are still somewhat there,” Sam said. “Might be revenant, so we’re being careful.”