Tangled Web Page 4

  Shit. Three pairs of red eyes stared back at us from the shadows, and when the darkness stirred behind them, I could make out another three sets farther back.

  I didn’t want to go into the alley after the ghostly dogs, but the idea of battling them in the middle of the street didn’t appeal to me, either. I felt in my pocket for salt and found a small bag, but hardly enough for a pack of hellhounds, or whatever they were. My mind raced, trying to think of what kind of demon-dog creatures might be loose in the city.

  The lead dog raised his head and howled, and then I knew. Not grims or hellhounds or the “black dog” of legend. These were hunting dogs. And we were the prey.

  The pack moved forward, but we had an advantage if we could keep them bottled up in the alley. They couldn’t chase us, and they couldn’t surround us. We might win this fight without too much effort.

  Then I heard more howls from the alley on the other side of the street. This was about to go wrong in a big way.

  Teag and I stood back to back, knowing that running would be the wrong move for dogs trained to chase their quarry. Didn’t matter whether they were banshee beagles or ghostly greyhounds, they could probably outrun us, and a trained hunting pack could harry and herd its target. Screw that.

  “Go for it,” I murmured to Teag.

  The dogs sprang forward, growling and snapping. They looked solid enough to do damage, with black bodies and hellish, red eyes. Lips drawn back into snarls and heads lowered made their body language completely clear. I didn’t know whether those teeth were solid or spectral, but I learned a long time ago that something doesn’t have to be “real” to be dangerous.

  I raised my athame and sent a blast of bright white energy streaming in a brilliant cone of power at the dogs attacking from the left. One of the dogs tried to duck to the side, and Bo leaped toward it, snapping his teeth. The blast from my athame forced the demon-dogs to retreat. I motioned for Bo to stay beside me because I didn’t want to accidentally hurt him while I was aiming for the hunting hounds from hell.

  Teag’s silver whip snapped, and the black dog it hit vanished. I didn’t have any silver, but I did have salt, and when the ghost hounds surged forward again, I hurled a handful of Morton’s best right into their midst. Their shapes wobbled and faded, like the image from a weak TV signal, and I doubled my effort, throwing more salt. Then while they looked staticky, I blasted them with the white light power.

  The dogs vanished, with a howl that made my skin crawl. Bo wagged his tail, bumped against my leg, and blinked out.

  I turned and saw Teag warily reeling in his silver whip; the spectral hounds were nowhere in sight. Without needing to discuss it, we both moved to lay down the rest of my salt in lines at the mouth of the two alleys. It might be gone by morning, but for now, it would deter the ghosts from coming back right away.

  “What the hell?” Teag said, as we finally began the walk back to the shop. Instead of the leisurely stroll we’d had on our way here, we kept a brisk pace, shy of a jog. The streets were still too empty for my comfort, although if demon dogs were prowling around, maybe that was for the best.

  We made it all the way back before a low growl sounded behind us. Where the dogs from the alley had been indistinct, hard to figure the breed, the huge shadow-cur that burst from the darkness stood as tall as an Irish wolfhound, and probably weighed as much as a full-grown man. Hunting dogs came in all sizes, including extra-large.

  The ghostly dog growled again, a low, dangerous rumble. I seized on a plan.

  “The warding,” I said. “Get to the doorway!”

  I ran, with Teag sprinting beside me. We hurled ourselves into the alcove where the door to Trifles and Folly is nestled a few feet deeper than the shop windows. The huge black dog lunged, stretching out to its full length, and bared its sharp teeth, going for the throat.

  Teag and I backed deep into the alcove, weapons ready if it came to another fight.

  Before the ghost dog came within a foot of the store’s windows, light flared almost too bright to look at, and a curtain of shimmering power sprang up between us and the specter. The hound was already airborne, with no way to change its trajectory. It hit the light barrier and vanished in a spray of sparks, like the world’s biggest fly in a magic bug zapper.

  “I guess Lucinda’s wardings are still good,” I said, a little breathlessly.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Teag replied, sounding as weirded-out as I felt.

  We nosed out of the alcove warily, then edged beyond the warding and hurried to our cars with the promise to figure things out in the morning. But as I drove home and the shakes hit me, I had the awful feeling that the storm Mrs. Teller predicted was about to break loose.

  Chapter Three

  Magnolia Cemetery would be a perfect final resting place, if it weren’t for all the damn zombies.

  “Where did they come from?” Teag muttered as we looked out across the moonlit grounds at the staggering, shuffling undead lurching beneath the ancient live oak hung heavy with Spanish moss.

  “Offhand, I’d say their graves,” Chuck Pettis remarked with a sidelong look and a grin. No one would mistake Chuck for anything except ex-military, with his sturdy build, thick neck, bald head, and no-nonsense attitude. He’s an Army vet, mid-fifties, retired. His Black Ops unit de-fanged alien and dark magic threats. Now he teams up with us on occasion to fight the good fight against supernatural bad guys, or as he thinks of them, “ectoplasmic terrorists.”

  Teag rolled his eyes. “I meant, what made them rise?”

  Before Chuck could suggest an answer we all might regret, I jumped into the conversation. “Maybe it’s tied into the other weirdness. You said it yourself: we don’t get coincidences in our business.”

  I could hear Chuck ticking from here. Don’t get me wrong: Chuck is a valuable ally, and he’s done us some real solids. He has more than a few tricks—and explosives—up his sleeves for dealing with the preternaturally perturbed. But he’s also a little battle scarred—with good reason—and he believes that if his massive collection of clocks ever wind down and stop, he’ll die. So Chuck’s jackets are all lined with working wristwatches—just the clock part—and you can hear them when he’s standing close. If the watches make him feel better, I’m fine with that.

  “Since I don’t think St. Peter’s blown his horn to call the dead to heaven, then I figure some son of a bitch is playing around with magic,” Chuck replied. “And that’s usually trouble.”

  We had a heap of trouble shuffling across the lawn. If they’d been smart enough to avoid the headstones, they probably would have been on us by now. But all across the cemetery, I could see zombies stuck behind granite markers like those toys that keep on walking when they hit the wall.

  This would have been like shooting fish in a barrel if we were going to go all Walking Dead on their asses. But that would leave a major tourist attraction littered with the rotting corpses of historically-significant dead people, and the fallout from that wouldn’t be pretty.

  “Archibald is on his way,” Sorren said, coming up behind us so quietly I didn’t hear him. Of course I didn’t—vampires excel at stealth.

  “Can he make them go back into their graves?” I asked, nervously watching one of the zombies bang into a headstone, back up a step, and run into it again, over and over. “Because making them all fall down isn’t a whole lot better than shooting them, and there are too many for us to rebury by the time the groundskeepers get here in the morning.”

  “He’s a necromancer,” Sorren replied with a shrug. “I leave the details up to him on this sort of thing.”

  Sorren is slender, with high cheekbones and gray eyes the color of the sea before a storm. With his trendy haircut and ripped jeans, he looks like a graduate student, but he’s centuries older. I took comfort from the fact that he wasn’t freaking out about having dozens of shamblers roaming the cemetery. Then again, we’d seen a lot worse.

  “Why did some of them rise, and not others?” I as
ked, then hoped I hadn’t tempted fate. There are thousands of burials at Magnolia Cemetery, dating to before the Civil War. A few dozen zombies we might be able to put down without too much of a fuss, but a cast of thousands would be terrifying.

  “I think the right question is—why have any of them risen?”

  I turned to see a tall, broad-shouldered man striding across the lawn toward us. With his British accent and his mutton-chop sideburns, Archibald Donnelly looks like he should be wearing a pith helmet. Since he’s the immortal overseer of a time-traveling private club for adventurers-gone-missing, maybe his fashion sense really is left over from the days of the British Empire. All that matters to me is that he does some damn fine magic.

  “It’s going to be all over the news if corpses with their heads blown off are strewn around the cemetery,” Sorren pointed out.

  “Can’t have that,” Donnelly agreed. He put his hands on his hips and surveyed the scene as if he were overseeing a work site. “Do we know who they are?”

  I shook my head. “We’ve been focused on containing them. Didn’t want to get too close, and we figured we could find the graves they dug open after we put them back down.”

  Chuck and Teag had moved to counter some of the zombies that ambled toward where we stood. Teag had a long wooden staff, and when he prodded a shambler in the chest, the creature stumbled backward, then headed randomly in another direction. Chuck had a rifle with a night scope and used it to poke a zombie in the shoulder to send him back the way he came.

  “All right, let’s send them packing,” Donnelly said. “I’d gotten to the best part of the book I was reading, and I’m keen to pick up where I left off.” The idea of sending dozens of undead walkers to their graves didn’t seem to perturb him, as if it were a common occurrence. Then again, maybe for him it was.

  Donnelly raised his hands in blessing, drew in a deep breath, and spoke words of power. I don’t know what he said; I tried to listen, but the words seemed too slippery to hear. All across the cemetery, the zombies stilled, raising their heads like dogs listening for a whistle.

  Two of the creatures stood about twenty feet from us, and I watched them stop their shuffling and then begin to tremble. I backed up a step, fearing that we’d be caught in a spray of rotting guts if Donnelly accidentally overshot his goal and blew them up. After a few seconds, the zombies began to shuffle again.

  Donnelly stared at them, astonished. “That shouldn’t be possible,” he murmured. He raised his hands again, shifted his stance, and spoke words of power that sounded different, with a stern tone not to be disobeyed.

  Once again, the zombies stopped, but this time they turned, orienting on the source of the command.

  “I don’t like this,” I said, and the look on Sorren’s face told me he agreed. I had a long knife and my athame, with Bo’s ghost at my side. Sorren was old school; he had a sword in each hand. Chuck had a rifle, a handgun, and enough ammo that his pockets bulged. I knew that in addition to his staff, Teag had a short sword, and dagger, and probably that silver whip as well. But usually, all we needed was Donnelly’s necromancy, and the zombies would give themselves a dirt nap.

  If the creatures were hearing a dog whistle, it sounded “charge” instead of “retreat,” Every shambler in the cemetery started toward us, giving a new meaning to “dead run.”

  “Shit,” Donnelly growled, staring at his hands as if they had betrayed him. “I didn’t expect that to happen.”

  “What now?” I asked.

  Donnelly raised a bushy white eyebrow. “Now, we fight.”

  Before I could ponder how a bunch of shuffling corpses managed to defy an immortal necromancer, the game was on.

  Chuck climbed a nearby mausoleum, taking up a sniper position on the roof. Teag and I stood guard beneath him, to make sure none of the shamblers tried to climb. Donnelly pulled out an honest-to-God cavalry saber and waded into battle, and he and Sorren slashed their way through the zombies, who lacked the brains or instructions to try to get away.

  The crack of Chuck’s rifle rang out across the garden landscape, a steady staccato beat as Chuck aimed and fired, over and over again. Teag and I had our hands full down below. Half a dozen zombies at a time closed in on us, but I couldn’t tell whether they meant to attack or just started walking this direction and didn’t think to stop.

  I raised my athame and loosed a cone of cold white force, catching the nearest shuffler in the chest and throwing him back into a granite obelisk. I must have overdone it, because his rotted corpse split open on impact like an overripe watermelon, splattering the area with formaldehyde-scented gore.

  Teag spun his staff, slamming into the skull of a zombie that came in range, and then looked on, appalled, as the head tore loose and flew through the air like a two-base hit at Wrigley Field. Two of the zombies came at me, and Bo sprang at the closer one, knocking it flat with his full weight. He grabbed the corpse’s shirt front with his teeth and shook the body back and forth. It came apart, arms, legs, and head falling away, like a rag doll with its stitching cut.

  I didn’t have time to throw up, though my stomach rebelled at the smell. My blast of cold force missed the next zombie who lurched to one side as he tripped at the fateful instant, so I buried my knife hilt deep in his chest as he straightened, then pulled the blade back out and lopped off his head before he could get his balance.

  Chuck must have packed enough ammo to stop a small army because he kept shooting. With all our combined efforts, after several long minutes, few of the zombies remained on their feet. Thank God Magnolia Cemetery lies outside of town in an area that’s surrounded by industrial sites, or we’d have brought every SWAT team in the Lowcountry down on us by now. Even so, I knew our luck wouldn’t last forever, that someone must have heard and called the cops. I hoped we were long gone before anyone arrived and started asking questions.

  Finally, no more shots rang out. Donnelly and Sorren moved across one side of the huge cemetery, looking for stragglers, while Teag and I worked our way past row after row of headstones, peering carefully around war memorial statues and fancy Victorian angels in case any of the shamblers had gotten themselves stuck somewhere.

  Along the way, we spotted the graves where the zombies had dug themselves out; hard to miss with the spray of fresh dirt and an open hole. I snapped photos of the headstone by each open grave with my phone camera, thinking maybe we could make sense of the whole thing later.

  “I don’t get it,” Teag said, scanning the next row of gravestones. “Some of the zombies are soldiers, most aren’t, some are really old, but some of those headstones look fairly new. Who woke them? Why those corpses in particular? And what were they supposed to do?”

  I shook my head, busy taking pictures before we had to dodge the cops. When the ground gave way beneath my foot, I nearly fell into a half-dug grave, just as its occupant burst from the dirt, late for the party.

  “Holy shit!” I yelled, scrambling back and trying not to lose my phone. I really didn’t want to leave evidence at the scene of a crime, since someone would eventually be blamed for desecrating graves and abusing corpses.

  The zombie reached for me, and I kicked hard. My boot connected with the creature’s chin, snapping the bone and sending the skull flying into the gravestone with a wet thud. The body flopped on, not quite ready to give up, until Teag sank a knife through its back.

  “Watch your step,” he warned, giving me a hand up. I’d been splattered with gobbets of dead flesh, and the graveyard smelled like a high school biology lab on dissection day. In the distance, sirens wailed, heading our way.

  “That’s our cue to vamoose,” Teag said, and we sprinted back toward where the others waited. Chuck had climbed down from his perch, and I wondered what the cops would make of long-dead corpses sprawled throughout the cemetery with fresh bullet holes in their heads. I wondered…but I didn’t want to stick around to find out.

  “Take the back way out,” Donnelly instructed. “I’ll lag behind
and see what I can do to slow down the police to give you a head start.” He always seemed unflappable, but after the way his magic failed to stop the zombies, Donnelly looked perplexed and bewildered.

  “Come on,” Sorren said, leading the way to where we’d parked the cars. “We can sort this out later. Right now, we could all use a hot shower and a stiff drink.”

  Teag came to my house to get cleaned up, because while Anthony knows the truth about what we do, he’s still a lawyer and having Teag show up looking like he’d been grave robbing when the aftermath was going to be all over the news would be a really bad idea. We tried to leave Anthony as much plausible deniability as we could, and sometimes that meant our own version of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  Nights like this are why I keep plastic sheeting in the back of my RAV4, so we don’t get blood—or worse—on the upholstery. We rode with the windows down, even though the night air was chilly, because we couldn’t stand the stench. I kept to the speed limit exactly, since we couldn’t afford to be pulled over, not looking and smelling like this.

  When we finally reached my house, I’d never been so glad for the distraction spell Lucinda had placed on the parking spot right next to the door to my piazza. It makes other people completely forget about the empty space, leaving it open for me. A godsend, since I didn’t want to traipse down the street looking like an extra from Night of the Living Dead.

  My house is a white clapboard “single house,” a uniquely Charleston style that situates the side of the house facing the street, with a door that leads onto the front porch. The porch and the real front door face a walled yard or garden. Back in the old days, that allowed people the privacy to take off their coats or lift the hem of their floor-length dresses without scandalizing the neighbors. Now, with Lucinda’s wardings, the sidewalk door is the first line of defense, and no one but trusted friends could enter without being invited across the threshold. Of course, Teag, Sorren, Chuck, and Donnelly were among those on the short list with permission to come inside.