Page 81 of Resurrection

He put his phone beside Seiran’s and tugged the blanket over them both. Maybe they both could rest a while? They could begin to tackle the problems of the world tomorrow.

He did fall asleep, though the dreams were a bit of an unsettled mess from the past. He vividly dreamt about the fog of hunger and rage that had taken control before he’d went to ground. The feel of Tresler trying to control him, Gabe’s revenant fighting back the only way he knew how, through blood and terror. The backbone of a vampire, really. It was a darker side he had tried not to show Seiran all those years ago. Would Seiran have run if he’d known? Maybe. He would have been smart to run away rather than be locked into their bond. Vampires were volatile at best.

Gabe also dreamt of the corpses. Steve who seemed to sit in a chair, still as stone, staring straight ahead at the golem. In the same room? Gabe didn’t try to make his mind follow any of them. It gravitated toward the dead because they were his. And he could see the troubled mess of the golem through the eyes of the dead.

Page’s attempt to free them from torture, bound them to another kind of torture. Had they found the body for the last unclaimed soul inside it? Gabe studied the lines of the ties for a while, knowing he could unravel the whole thing, but releasing just one would be impossible. All or none. Gabe followed the ties a dozen times, trying to find a way. If they didn’t find that body in the second killing field, did that mean there were even more dead? How long had the witches been slaughtering without consequence?

Gabe sighed and let his attention wander from the golem. It wasn’t a problem he could solve right this minute.

They were still loading everyone into another giant room in that warehouse Max had set up. The space the vampires had been in, while being cataloged and defined, but not feeling fully dead. There was a partition put up between the groups. But the vampire side was dark. The bodies sealed in body bags, all tagged and marked. Max’s crew must have been hard at work.

Gabe wondered briefly how he had enough people to work through the backlog of corpses. It wasn’t something any Joe Schmoe could do. Searching for trace evidence, fingerprinting, getting dental impressions, all while dealing with violently tortured and maimed dead. That wasn’t for the faint of heart. Yet the efficiency in which vampire investigators moved, led Gabe to believe this wasn’t their first rodeo cataloging crimes like this.

He’d have to ask Max about it. Max… Titus… Gabe’s memory floated briefly to their time as humans before the change. The short attempt after their change had been disastrous. Neither man who they had been as humans. Max had never given up the idea of world domination, while Gabe had lost complete interest in it. It was why Gabe and Seiran fit so well together. Both had insane amounts of power, but neither really cared for that ultimate level of control. In fact, to Gabe, it was a burden. As if he needed to deal with an entire world of problems. Perhaps that was an issue now as well. If he hadn’t taken a step back, and the world still feared him, would Seiran be safer?

Gabe let out a long sigh, relaxing deeper into sleep. He actually dreamed for a while. Floating in weird bits of colored memory from the walk through the veil, which had tried to pull the revenant out of him, to strange wanderings through dark forests and moonless nights. Seiran’s dreams, Gabe realized. The calm of the earth resettling. Gabe soothed the rising waves of rolling power with ease. It was like creating a steady blip on a heart monitor. Spikes too large caused trouble, and too small meant death. Seiran slept deeper as Gabe set a rhythm to the magic.

His long years had given him lots of practice. The dead had always been a mess of rising and falling surges. Plagues and wars adding to the ever-rippling flow of his power. It was how he’d lived as long as he had, able to manipulate the waves to his benefit.

He wandered through a handful more of dreams tied to his past before finding himself drawn back to the dead. Like something had again pulled on him, a startling half awareness that had him reaching for the corpses with worry.

It was curious that everything felt so still, almost in suspended animation. Though some of the skeletons fell, as if the magic holding them together would suddenly vanish and they did indeed shatter. The vampires were prepared, as each set of bones stood above a body bag. They fell and landed in a bag, which was labeled and ready for them to be moved. Gabe’s power not eternal in this case, even though the Focus bond had extended it.

Not many of the old dead remained standing. The few fresh enough to have any living memory left were seated like Steve was, but still as only death could make them. Sam oversaw the group, which was almost all vampires. A handful of Seiran’s MI investigators lingered. Gabe recognized Emmaline, who sat with Tanaka as the two went over paperwork.

Over all, everything was quiet. Too quiet.

Where had that tug come from?

Gabe waited, lingering on the edge of sleep, awareness on the dead, as though waiting for it to pull again. Did someone in these families have death magic? He knew with enough spells and maybe a pact or two with demons, any witch could animate a corpse. Getting it to truly obey was another thing altogether. That took blood and regular sacrifices. Even Page, with his magic so fresh and untrained, would not have been able to hold the dead long. The golem had begun to unravel because blood died. Even in the human body, blood cells died and were used to refeed the body or they were shed. Spells weren’t all that different, needing regular renewal.

Gabe kept his awareness half locked to the dead, linked firmly to Steve. Murdered by his own mother, Steve’s soul was gone, but within him lingered a dark edge that could be called. Gabe finessed the feeling, trying to recall all the details. It had been so long. The murdered always had a touch of the darkness within them. It could be fed to become almost revenant like, though in humans, and apparently witches, it was weak enough that he would really have to feed them power to get them to move.

Steve was fresh enough that sitting within the mind as it began to decay, empty of all living force, the darkness seemed to rise like the crawl of mold over a water-filled room. Not a pleasant feeling, but Gabe vowed he would ensure Steve went to ground soon. The earth would reclaim him as it should, giving the body true death.

Gabe waited there a long time. Half listening to conversations around him, but not paying attention to any. It was a garble of noise. Loud enough that he almost missed the second tug. Not on the dead, but on the golem.

Forest had been as still as Steve in the chair, not breathing or moving at all, and then he was shifting in his seat, like he was uncomfortable. But that wasn’t something golems could be. Gabe studied the magic tying it together. Page’s work was a mess. With training, Gabe suspected Page could be an incredible power. Would the Dominion let him live that long?

Forest turned his gaze to Steve. Like the golem could see Gabe resting in the strength of the dead, watching and waiting. But that shouldn’t be possible.

The intensity of the gaze heated, and Gabe thought he actually felt warm for a minute. Uncomfortably warm. A spell lighting up like a match flare, brief and hot, and insanely fast. Gabe was still trying to figure out what happened as flames flickered around his senses.

Sam was the first to react, turning, alarmed, reaching out.

It was then that Gabe realized Steve was on fire, and through him, the spell directing back at Gabe, setting him on fire as well.

Gabe screamed, and jerked away, leaving the distant spread of bodies, and leaping from the bed even as the flames burned into his flesh, and began to dig into his soul. He tried to break the bond with Steve, setting the dead free, which would drop them all, but he couldn’t break the cord. Not with fire shooting through it to incinerate him.

He floundered, his skin burning up, clothes acting like kindling, intensifying the fire. Panic and pain clouding his senses. The bed was on fire. The room was beginning to burn. Gabe reached out helplessly as he feared that he’d bring death to them all, the warded house burning down with them all trapped inside. That was not the kind of death he was meant to be.

Chapter 27

Seiran woke from a dream startled by Gabe’s discomfort, a threshold of worry and awareness that Sei couldn’t exactly define. But he lingered on the edge of sleep, trying to process if he should actually wake up, or it was something passing.

Then the fire started.

It was heat first, Gabe turning hot around him, and then the flames erupting. Gabe leapt up, and Seiran rolled off the other side as flames lit the bed, and Gabe on fire.