Page 73 of Resurrection

“Waking the dead,” Gabe said. He rolled the magic up, the buckets of it still dripping and sloshing through him like waves hitting a shore, and layered it over the ground. The spirits of these beings were gone. Unlike the vampires, they were completely empty. But humans didn’t have revenants to hold the monster inside. They moved on quickly, which left what remained as easy puppets. It wouldn’t be much, bones weren’t very frightening, but maybe enough to terrify the witches and buy them time?

Gabe shoved his will into the ground, spreading out the magic, using Seiran’s blood as a boost, and the ground began to move. Not from earth magic, but the crawling of dead things from their graves. It ached within Gabe, like a muscle too long clenched and gone unused. Had he suppressed it that long?

This power was not welcomed in the modern world. He recalled that clearly now. When was the last time he’d stretched those icy fingers to touch the bones of mortal existence? The rush of it ran through him in an energizing thrill as the remains began to pop from the ground, latching together with the last remains of mortal energy to become almost zombies, or mostly whole skeletons. Not possible in scientific terms as there was little tissue to hold them together. His magic didn’t care. They knit themselves together, digging their way out of the ground and rising up to surround them.

Page curled up in a ball behind Gabe, shivering and repeating, “Holy fuck.”

The last to rise was Steve. His body jerking upward as though pulled by strings rather than human muscle and bone, which he still had. A broken neck. Gabe could tell that now from the odd angle of his head. The soul long gone meant he’d been dead likely more than a few days.

Gabe looked at Page. He could have killed him, though Page was a smaller man than Steve had been. But stealth was a good equalizer. It would mean that they had both misread Page, though Gabe was rarely wrong about anyone. At least as long as his brain wasn’t clouded by magic or the revenant.

He recalled Tresler’s bond beginning to tie him up in magic built through small doses of his blood. The tainted bottled blood had taken years to build up a bond. It had been like slugs slowly growing through his system. And now that he remembered, he really wanted a hot shower. Or some type of dialysis of his blood to clear out any residue of that monster.

The dead continued to rise. Way too many for some random cabin in the woods. Dead only a few months old? A few years at most. The sheer number was insane. Not even a few dozen, but over a hundred at least. The further he let his power reach, the more bodies he found. Animals closest to the cabin, but as he pressed further, more and more humans, even a few witches. He could separate those by the way they swayed in his magic. Not as still as humans, as witches, even after death, could turn into feral, flesh eating things. He’d have to keep an eye on them. Another necromancer would have to pull them free from his grasp to really shift them, but he had no idea if there were necromancers in this coven or not.

“Why are there so many?” Page whispered and the ground continued to spit them out. They formed a barrier of skeletons, and rotting corpses, encircling them in all directions as the trees Seiran had woven into a magic ward, disintegrated.

“Someone has been murdering a lot.” The ground was charged with it. Blood, death, violence, perhaps torture, obvious as some of the dead were missing parts, limbs, the back of a skull, even half a ribcage in one nearby case Gabe could see. Holy fuck, was right.

Had they begun here? Murdered animals first to add to their power, then stepped up to humans and witches? Perhaps that hadn’t been enough so they’d begun experimenting on vampires? It was dizzying. The power wasted, the sheer number of corpses. Not the work of one barely legal witch, of that much Gabe knew.

He poured his strength into the growing surge of dead, shielding them even as they continued to rise and spread out further, as the tree barrier fell, baring them all to the violence that awaited them beyond it. Gabe couldn’t see the witches or the police, but he could hear them all now. The chanting, and the murmur of voices from the police. No warnings issued to stop or even a chance of being taken in alive.

And wasn’t that infuriating? There they stood, face to face with a legion of the dead who’d been slaughtered by what Gabe was certain was a fairly sizable coven, and their only goal was killing Page? Maybe Seiran and himself as well? By design, or pure stupidity?

The revenant rose to the surface of his conscious. Not taking over, but adding a red haze to his sight. It was a bit of a welcome feeling, that zinging power and absolutegive no fucksmentality the revenant provided. He had learned to balance this power centuries ago, teetering on the edge of the darkness taking over.

Until he’d been forced to swallow it and exist in a world that found him terrifying.

Maybe it was time to remind them why they’d been afraid. It seemed like they’d been fucking with Seiran for long enough. The possessive monster in his gut told Gabe that Seiran was his, and even the revenant recognized that. Good. He was done with all of this bullshit.

A raven landed on Steve’s shoulder, staring down at Gabe who was still crouched low, giving no one with a gun a target. The magic would have to get through his barrier of death, and death was an old friend of Gabe’s.

The raven leapt down, landing near Gabe and trotting over, changing as it went, into Sam. That was something Gabe didn’t remember.

“Don’t stare at my naked ass. There’s obviously some shit you didn’t tell us,” Sam said waving a hand at the dead amassed around them. “How bad is Ronnie hurt?”

“Bleeding, but healing.” His heartbeat was strong and Gabe felt every pulse of it through their bond. “The Goddess is shoved back for now.”

“Yeah, I guessed that from the level five hurricanes that popped up all over the globe and then suddenly vanished. Fucking witch bullshit.” He looked at Page. “Don’t suppose this is the baby witch causing this mess?”

“He’s a summoner,” Gabe said. “Better with souls than with the dead. Created the golem, but it sounds like the family was blackmailing him for blood to work spells with.”

Sam sighed. “More bullshit we didn’t know. The witches want you all dead.”

“I’m not afraid of witches,” Gabe said. He could call this army to move, and even begin to awake more if needed. The power stretched, unlimited, his bond to Seiran fueling him with energy from the rotating of the earth. “This is a lot of dead for some random family hunting cabin,” Gabe pointed out. “Seem a little suspicious? Do you see the lines of magic etched into the cabin?” Behind them the cabin could no longer be seen through the stretch of the dead.

“I saw it from above. Hate this witch bullshit,” Sam snarled. “A lot of fucking dead. But we only have a few options here. Either you go all lord of the darkness and command the zombie army to attack their ass, or we negotiate.”

“Is there anyone to negotiate with? Any sanity left among the Dominion?”

Sam’s gaze fell to Page. “We could give them the witch.”

“Not an option. If they want Page, they’ll want Seiran too. This whole thing feels like a set up. Or at the very least, an opportunity to smack him down.”

“It probably is. They’ve tried to oust Rou from the board every year for as long as he’s been on the board. A thousand written warnings, all bullshit. If it weren’t for him being a true scion to the earth, and his ties to the vampires and the fae? They might have already removed him.” Sam glanced back toward where Gabe could hear the witches and police gathered. It sounded like more activity. “Tanaka’s here.”

An instant bit of rage surfaced in Gabe, strong enough he had to work hard to keep himself from leaping over the group and eviscerating her.