Page 38 of Resurrection
Gabe had done something with those two that had calmed them enough to be taken to the hospital. They still had to be bound with vampire grade cuffs before transport and treatment. A half dozen vampires had escorted the ambulance to ensure the safety of the EMT and the hospital staff. But the vampires weren’t in any shape to answer questions. The torture they had survived brought a lot of uncomfortable realizations. Like the fact that being a vampire and almost impossible to kill, might not be a good thing.
“Broken,” Gabe said. “The tie to what makes them human, snapped.”
Max studied him, then turned to Seiran. “I’ve been told the culprit hasn’t been caught?”
Seiran felt his cheeks heat. It wasn’t really his place to be embarrassed. He hadn’t let the guy go. He still didn’t believe the missing kid, Steven Brody, had created the golem. The magic of the golem wasn’t maniacal or even haphazard. It seemed to have been created by someone who knew how to do it. Or sort of knew how to do it, and had the power to do so. The rest of this mess was anything but a skilled practitioner. It was more a child breaking toys while it played, messy, and erratic, but nonetheless horrifying.
Why have this killing field then? It reminded him of the discovery years ago on the grounds of his father’s old mansion in California. The house was now a halfway house and training ground for young male witches, which Jamie and Kelly monitored, and his cousin actually ran the house, but at one time it had been the hub for the Ascendance, a body of male witches practicing forbidden magic to gain more power. He had found bodies, dozens of them, buried to create a ring of dark magic. This wasn’t any sort of ring or structure that Seiran could tell.
“Does this look like Ascendance magic?” Seiran asked Max. Years ago, Max had been the head of the organization, but when Seiran had inherited his father’s legacy, he’d joined the Ascendance to the Dominion and ended the destructive cycle of dark magic they were using. Or that had been what Seiran thought had happened. Maybe this family had Ascendance members within it that hadn’t liked the change.
Max surveyed the field. “Yes, and no? Seems like a lot of wasted energy, of magic? For what? Have they been creating golems this whole time?”
“I don’t think so,” Seiran said. The life animation didn’t feel the same as the rest of the death. He had to admit he was using his tie to Gabe to get a better grasp of it. While the power tickled his senses as the Pillar of Earth, it didn’t feel likehismagic. Could he create a golem from new death? Maybe. He didn’t think it would be easy. Not with souls bound in it, as he’d never even heard of that happening before. But maybe a lot of intense spells and practice. Was that what this was?
“Not the same magic,” Gabe said absently. He kept close to Seiran, though seemed tense, with his arms crossed. Ever since he’d mentioned on the drive over that Seiran closing the ties between them was making him struggle, Seiran had tried to keep the link open. “This death is almost as if they were trying to do something.” He gazed at the golem. “Maybe even trying to make a golem and failed? Choosing vampires because they try to go unnoticed?”
The golem stared out into the killing field with empty eyes.
“Were you here?” Gabe asked. The words felt more like a command than a request, like a vampire sire might make of a fledgling. “Can you show us where you came from? The bodies from which your souls were freed?”
Seiran startled when the golem actually moved. In fact, the entire group of enforcement stopped moving when the golem began to trek across the area, weaving through bodies in different stages of being documented, then packed up and transported. Seiran could feel the tie from the golem to Gabe, and wondered how it was different than his own. It wasn’t the gentle thing of the blood bond he’d created before they left the house that day, but almost a net, or thinly stretched webbing that spanned the distance between them. As though Gabe could grab a hold of that web and yank it back in a titanium grip. Was that how it worked between vampires and their fledglings?
The golem finally stopped at one set of charred remains, recovered, but too far damaged to be recognized. The vampires had indicated it was dead, no reanimation available even though the head was still attached. Vampires couldn’t heal everything. Seiran swallowed back bile at the horror that they might survive damage like this corpse had suffered. How long had they lived through the torture?
The sheet thrown over it, and a lot of the other worst victims didn’t help fade the memory of seeing them come out of the ground. The fact that Seiran had asked for the earth’s help in revealing them all, so the team wouldn’t have to flounder and use dogs, had meant he’d been in the middle of all that death until the ground stopped rumbling.
Like the worst zombie movie ever realized, with skulls and limbs jutting out in places as the ground slowly spit them out. The dirt a bit reluctant to let them go.Fuel,it told Seiran in subtle pictures, reminding him, as though he could ever forget, that the ground ate through organic matter. Didn’t matter how they died or what they’d been before they died. Death was an equalizer in a lot of ways.
This badly damaged body was on the far edge of the field, near where the trees restarted. She had even been buried on top of other bodies. Like they’d run out of room. She. Because that’s what the golem changed into. The soul seeming to find a few seconds of purchase over the golem’s magic.
Forest’s appearance shifted, turning to the girl Seiran recognized from the files of the three missing vampires. Blonde hair, young, looking no more than a barely finished eighteen. Not much older than his kids, Seiran remembered thinking when he looked at her file. Though she could have been centuries old, since vampires didn’t age. Missing from a nest in Madison Wisconsin, not far from the Twin Cities, but still not a short ride. Had this tortured corpse been her? She looked back at them from the living features created by the golem’s visage and seemed surprised to see them all.
“I’m dead?” She asked, as she began to sob, even dropping to her knees and wrapping herself up into a ball. “It’s over. It’s finally over.” She cried while everyone looked on at the mounting horrors of the day. Whatever spell or geas that kept the souls from directing them before had been broken, at least when it came to the killing field. Jana Rosette’s body was here, burned, sliced up, limbs missing, and part of a killing field with far too many bodies.
* * *
Two of thethree vampires who had created the golem were in the field. Only two. Gabe had issued a command for the golem to show them all where the bodies were, and it had led them to the second, but then when it tried to walk beyond the field it stopped. Almost as if it were unable to pass a border or a ward or something. Seiran couldn’t find any such ward, nor did the earth around them indicate a marker that could create one.
Seiran’s group sat the golem down and recorded what it remembered of the last days of each vampire’s life. The torture too much for him to hear, he’d walked away to take in the evening air, and breathe something other than the stench of death, rot, and burned flesh. This was why he was Director now instead of an investigator. Eight years of field work, and hundreds of horrors, though none as bad as this. Was he getting old?
Gabe remained at his side, shielding his back while he watched the golem mimic some of what was done. The sounds alone, of begging, crying, screaming, and a shrill sound like an animal dying, wouldn’t go unheard even in Seiran’s nightmares.
He wondered if Gabe was angry, or thought he was weak because Seiran wasn’t watching. The show earlier in the day had brought back too many memories from his youth that he’d long thought buried. He’d have to restart therapy. Had thought for a while that he’d been free of all that mess. It seemed a different life. But wounds like that never really healed. They scabbed over and sometimes even became scar tissue, waiting for the right snag to rip them open again.
“You don’t have to stay with me,” Seiran whispered to Gabe. “Not even because I’m your Focus. Max can probably help your control.”
The vampires stayed close to the center of the group, observing, not to protect the witches, but likely to bear witness and ensure justice would be served in the end. Max had become the king of the recovery effort, directing everyone for efficiency that Seiran knew both the Dominion and the Police rarely showed. But these were his people, even if none of them had been his fledglings. And Max didscary super vampirereally well.
“I’d rather stay with you. Unless my presence bothers you,” Gabe said so softly Seiran barely caught it. “I have a vague memory…”
“Of?”
“Someone hurt you?”
“Lots of people hurt me,” Seiran said.
“Including me?”