Page 84 of Resurrection
“I think it’s just somewhere we can’t see right away? And I’m not examining golem buttholes for it.” He punched another golem, sending it skittering backward for a few feet, but it bounced right back like a fucking yo-yo.
“Huh,” Seiran rolled his earth power through it, searching for the center tie, ornameas it might have been crafted in the spell. He even pushed out a pulse with his omniscient sight, looking for ripples of magic. And there it was, a mark on this one near the back of its arm.
Seiran touched the mark and unraveled the tie, severing the blood bond. The golem shattered, falling into a heap of sticks and clay.
“Really, Ronnie? Just poof? I thought you wanted to tear some shit up.” Sam leapt at another golem, not punching but wrapping himself around it to hold it down. “Find the mark then, show-off. Unravel this fucker before I gotta call up more zombies. This is not a power I find appealing.”
“No?” Sei asked, wondering, but he raced to Sam’s side, searching for that pulse and finding it on a leg this time. Another unraveled. “Why not just use fire?”
“’Cause we already have burned vampires, and I’m the only one fireproof in the room.” Sam brushed the clay off and stared at the mess Bryar was making. “Good choice for child bearing, Rou. He’s just another nutjob.”
Bryar was surrounded by golem parts, all mixed up and trying to reform, but he kept hacking them into smaller pieces, laughing maniacally like a villain the entire time.
“He’s having a good time,” Sei offered. “You don’t like my parties?” Sei focused on another golem, a writhing leg of foot wide roots ensnaring the creature. “Why are the vampires also zombies?”
“Well, the vampire zombies were an accident,” Sam said. “Some of the vampires helping out were on fire. Then the golems poured in and I just thoughtriseand whoops…”
Sam’s power was a little wonky on the best of days, even though he did work regularly on training.
“They popped out of the body bags.” Sam threw his hands in the air imitating a familiar kid’s movie Sei knew he’d watched a dozen times with their kids. “Like daisies.”
Sei snorted, and dissolved another golem.
The vampire zombies tore at the golems. Like the horror movies of zombies attacking to tear people up, these zombies did exactly that, a red glow illuminating from their eyes, those that had eyes at least.
The golems were fighting back much the same way, tearing limbs and trying to rip each other apart. It was a bit gruesome, but at least it kept the undead vampires and the handful of witch and human investigators safe. Seiran realized his mother, and a smattering of his investigators were holed up in a corner trying to offer triage to those injured while still having a couple of people guarding against attack.
When one of the golems reached for Tanaka, he feared he’d not get there in time, but the ground in front of her erupted with a giant wall of tangled vines. Not his magic, but hers. He smiled to himself, snagged the golem in a weave of living vines, found the mark and unraveled it.
“How are you finding the mark?” Sam demanded.
“Odin’s Eye. The mark glows.”
“Hmm,” Sam sounded disgruntled, but they had spent some time mastering the spell. Sam had wanted to be able to find Luca and Con if necessary, and Seiran suspected he could find Max that way too. “Do we need any of these whole for questioning?”
“No.” Seiran said. “They are soulless. I already bounced back the fire spell. We’ll have plenty of burned witches to track, if they survived that inferno.”
“Good.” Sam stretched out his hand and Sei felt the hammer of power. The room shifted to a weird black and white wash for a half second, revealing the marks on all the golems, and staining them with glowing color so even as the light went back to normal, the mark still shined.
“Now who’s the show-off?” Seiran grumbled. Sam’s power was more like a sledgehammer than a butter knife. But Sei used it to his advantage, bouncing around the room and unraveling any golem he could reach. It was easier now that he knew what it was. The touch of earth to the mark could send them back to the Goddess, a bit like asking the earth to dissolve the blood used to tie them to this world. Sam was at his back keeping them off him, and even holding some down, until Sei could unravel them.
There had to be a couple dozen golems. All from the killing fields they found? Was that the pull Gabe had felt? Someone trying to control an army of golems? None of them had souls like Forest did. All just toys of some greater magic that Sei would now recognize if he ever met it again. The signature of it strong enough to burn into his memory. Another thing he could track.
Sei landed in Bryar’s mess of body parts last, sweeping a wave of magic outward. The reforming golems shattered, clay blasting into pieces, with a messy spray of poop brown. Bryar looked disappointed when none of them got back up.
“Sorry,” Sei offered, breathing hard, and dripping with chunks of clay. It looked like they stood in the center of a blood bath, though it was clay rather than blood. Bodies and bones everywhere. The zombies stopped, all turning eerie gazes Sam’s way.
“Whoa… creepy,” Sam said.
“Put them to rest,” Sei said.
Sam blinked at him. “How do I do that?”
And Gabe was in the ground. Was there anyone else to ask? “Didn’t you say you dealt with zombies before?”
“Just to set them on fire.”
And that didn’t seem like the best option since the nests these vampires belonged to wanted them back. “Sammie…”