Page 36 of Deader than Dead

“It’s not there,” Crocodile said. “The fucker is taking us for a ride.”

As he stepped threateningly toward Bellamy, I took a deep breath, and then gathered up the energy I’d sent into the soil, urging the bodies within the immediate vicinity that lay buried deep in the soil to come with it. It proved harder than I’d anticipated, sweat breaking out on my brow. How long did I have before they took their attention off Bellamy and noticed I was up to something?

“I was sure it was here,” Bellamy said, his words sounding convincing even to me, and I knew it was a lie. “Perhaps I got confused. Some of these gravestones look quite similar.”

There. A faint wriggle within the soil.

The whispers started up from beyond the veil in that ancient language, all layered on top of each other, some of them talking to me, some of them arguing and debating with each other. Yet, somehow, I could hear and understand them all as clear as a bell. If they wanted to, they could bring a halt to this entire thing. So many? Are you sure? That will take a lot of power, necromancer. Can you handle it? If you can’t keep hold of them, you know what will happen. So many souls to release. Don’t let him have them, not that many. He’s asking nicely. He wouldn’t ask if he didn’t need them. He’ll give them back. You know he will. Has he ever lied to us before? What about the green-eyed man? He still walks. We can’t get his soul back. You know that wasn’t the necromancer’s fault. Give him what he’s asked for. If we do, what will he want next, an army?

Shut up! That voice was louder, cutting across the others, and I instinctively understood that this was someone more senior than the rest.

Please, I said, making sure that the words were only in my head and knowing he’d still be able to hear them. I need them.

Then you shall have them.

The wriggle became a thrashing, skeletal limbs that hadn’t moved for hundreds of years answering my call as I commanded them to rise to the surface.

“What’s he doing?” Crocodile demanded. No prizes for guessing who the “he” was.

I opened my eyes to find everyone had turned my way, O’Reilly’s brow furrowing in another rare show of emotion. Hand still buried deep in the soil, I smiled at her. “Piece of advice for you. Never invite a necromancer to a graveyard.”

A gun swung my way, but it quickly swung in another direction as the first skeletal arm breached the surface. Another skeletal arm followed it, this one close to O’Reilly’s feet. They all stepped back as one, equal parts confusion and horror etched across their faces, as my motley crew of reanimated long-dead skeletons left their graves to rejoin the world of the living once more.

O’Reilly was the first to break from the fugue state, two of the skeletons having grown close to freeing themselves from the grip of the soil. “Don’t just stand there. Shoot them.”

“But they’re already dead,” Gold Tooth said, clearly confused.

Crocodile seemed to have no such compunction about shooting the dead, raising his gun, and sending a round through the skull of the nearest skeleton as it rose to its full height. Despite the scatter of bone fragments, it kept coming, its arms outstretched, reaching for Crocodile as he backed away.

“Shoot him,” O’Reilly said, her gaze returning to me. “He’s controlling them.”

Fuck! I threw a skeleton between us as Gold Tooth’s pistol swung my way, the skeleton taking the bullet meant for me in its sternum.

Gold Tooth cried out as the skeleton shook off the bullet and pushed him to the ground, the two of them a mass of thrashing limbs as the skeleton endeavored to rip him to pieces.

A hot drip of something splashed my lip. I lifted a hand to my face, my fingers coming away stained with blood. That wasn’t good. Neither was the pronounced tremor in my fingertips, or the pressure building in my head. I’d only raised six skeletons so far, and Crocodile had rendered one of those harmless, realizing that the key to incapacitating them was pulling their arms and legs off. If they couldn’t move, they weren’t dangerous. Crocodile pulled the skeleton off Gold Tooth, the man suffering a few facial abrasions and a nasty bite to the neck, but otherwise remaining relatively unscathed as he struggled to his feet.

I needed more skeletons. Only, I didn’t have the capability of bringing them to the surface and keeping control of them. Thirty had been a pipe dream, when I couldn’t even manage ten. O’Reilly and her men would overpower the ones I’d raised, they’d shoot me, and Bellamy would be left alone. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen.

Chapter Nineteen

John

The green-eyed man, the voice whispered in my head. You need the green-eyed man. He’ll make you stronger. Yes, stronger, echoed the other voices. Quickly, quickly, they all said, before it’s too late.

Would he? Closing my eyes against the building pressure in my head, I reached out blindly with my free hand. To my surprise, fingers immediately closed around mine.

“I heard them,” Bellamy said. “I don’t know how, but I heard them.”

Power surged through me, like I was a car and he was my battery. One minute, the pressure in my head was there and the next, it was gone. Bringing the rest of the skeletons up was easy, all twenty-four of them. They erupted like seedlings breaking through the soil after a downpour of rain. One of O’Reilly’s men that I’d never gotten around to giving a name to went down first under a pile of at least five skeletons, two of them dragging him down into the earth, his cries growing gradually fainter until they stopped altogether.

Crocodile and Gold Tooth were next, the skeletons particularly vicious with Crocodile, as if they bore a grudge for his limb-ripping habits with their brethren. Screaming, they too were dragged down to leave only three men and O’Reilly. Two of the men made a break for it, but didn’t get far before being overpowered. The last one crawled in my direction, his eyes pleading. He got as far as his fingertips brushing the toe of my boot before a skeleton pulled him backwards, his expression changing to one of abject fear.

I looked away. Bellamy didn’t, but his hand tightened on mine, his grip almost painful. A flash of movement caught my eye on the opposite side of the graveyard. O’Reilly. She’d recognized the odds as being heavily stacked against her and run. I could send skeletons after her, but she was close enough to the gate that it risked a passer-by witnessing something they were unlikely to forget in a hurry. The only alternative to that was letting her get away, though.

“No,” Bellamy said, apparently reading my mind, his fingers tightening around mine once more. “Let her go.”

“But…”

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