I practically tumbled down the slope to the water, sliding through the mist and cold of the Grey as fast as I could, hoping to avoid the horrors clustering around Quinton long enough to get behind them. A few turned, but most concentrated on him.
As I neared the shore, the gleaming threads connecting the undead to their energy source were bright blue in the ghost world. I grabbed the first one I came to and ran along the water’s edge, gathering up as many of the tendrils of colored light as I could. Each one burned with cold that cut into my hands. With each one added, the burn worsened and the racket in my ears grew beyond the ringing caused by the shotgun blasts and into a buzzing howl that rang, not in my ears but in my bones and skull, and riffed through my blood like heroin. Each thread weighed me down, gathering in my arms like fiery lilies from a ghostly bride’s bouquet.
It felt as if the power ran through my arms and into my spine. When I snatched up the last visible line, I had to drop to my knees, but I remembered the way Jin had stood with his toes in the water when he raised the car and I put one foot into the lake.
It was like standing on a live wire. Power flowed up through my limbs, but it didn’t go into the threads I was holding; it just roared through me and throbbed into my head as if my skull were exploding. I yanked on the gathered threads, twisting them hard together, hard enough to break, and then shoved with all my will, one hard, concussive thrust of the power that flowed in me against the taut rope of energy that ran into my arms.
Magic boomed against the surface of the lake so loudly I could feel it in my chest as if someone had slammed an electric pole into a whole orchestra’s worth of bass timpani. Sparks erupted from the lake and it exploded into light that flashed like a mirror in the sun. The rolling sheet of white illumination shot up the hill to Quinton, throwing the shambling dead down like sticks before a hurricane. I could see Quinton drop to the ground and cover his head as it hit.
And it rolled away, leaving the lake black and still, the shore littered with putrefying dead, animal and human. There were no more small blue lamps in purple fog—the lights had gone out.
I crouched, shuddering, on the shore for a few seconds, catching my breath as the broken threads of power faded from my grip and my eyes readjusted to the night.
Rain dripped and pattered lightly on the ground, leaving nothing but ordinary puddles. Even the wild pools of magic that had oozed on the surface like oil were gone, burned away in the outrageous pulse of energy.
Quinton picked himself up and stumbled down the makeshift stair to the water, to me, picking his way as best he could through the swiftly decaying mess that had been an army of animated corpses.
I half expected the ringing deafness in my ears to have magically gone with the flash of energy, but when Quinton tried to say something to me, it sounded as if he were underwater, or as if I were. He gave up and put his arms around me to haul me to my feet, but as soon as he tried to move me, my muscles and joints gave up and dumped me onto the shoreline and into the water.
The icy water of Lake Sutherland made me gasp and thrash, but my movements were feeble. I’d put too much into that last push and I was too weak to help myself. I was also soaked, bloodied, and partially bare from having most of my shirt and sweater ripped away by the claws of undead beasts.
Quinton was only a little better off, but he was able to pull me out of the lake and help me onto the deck of Leung’s house. He put my coat over me and bent down, pressing his lips to my ear to tell me he’d be right back. Then he went away.
I looked over my shivering shoulder at the lake, wondering if there was anyone around to have heard the gun battle. The lake was a dark mirror, streaked here and there with light from the moon as it tore a slit in the clouds for a moment before being sewn back into its shroud of rain. Far across and down to my right, I could see a gold rectangle of electric light from an open door, weirdly magnified by the water as the light fell on it. Then the light narrowed and vanished.
In a moment, the storm door to the deck opened up and Quinton dragged me inside, locking the heavy door behind us.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Quinton, adept at getting what he needed while staying off the grid, had turned the water on, but it wasn’t warm. There was a generator off the kitchen, but it required gasoline and we didn’t have any handy short of a wet slog back out to the Rover. The propane tank for the stove and refrigerator was equally empty. The undead had ripped my clothes, so I was half-naked and I’d lost the packet of yellow silk. I was so cold from exposure, exertion, and the icy water of the lake that I couldn’t stop shivering. But I had mud, blood, and bits of dead things smeared all over me and it was too disgusting to leave there, so we ended up washing under the icy tap. Quinton had pulled the old couch up as close to the stove as he could and we snuggled naked together in the blankets to warm up. Quinton curled himself around me and his body seemed to burn my deeply chilled skin. It would have been much more erotic if I hadn’t been shaking so hard.
My hearing was still full of low buzzing that made everything sound distant and crackly, like an old radio with a bad antenna, but it was improving slowly. I filled him in on what I’d been pursuing since I had arrived at Blood Lake and what had come hunting us.
“Why haven’t the cops shown up about the shooting?” I stuttered between chattering teeth.
“Maybe no one heard it,” Quinton suggested. “You said there aren’t many people up here this time of year.”
“No, but there are a few.”
“And most of them probably don’t want the local sheriffs to come around and interrupt whatever magical nastiness they’re up to.”
I frowned over that and wondered who’d been at the door that had cast golden light onto the lake.
“How did they know we were here?” Quinton asked.
“Who?”
“The zombies. You haven’t stayed here before and you said Newman only gave you the key Monday. You didn’t use the place last night or the night before, so how did Costigan know to send the corpse brigade over here to attack you?”
“That’s a good question. I’ll have to ask the Newmans that tomorrow. I was given the impression they didn’t talk—at least not civilly—to Costigan, who seems to be in charge of the zombies around here. I need to talk to him, too. I haven’t done anything to attract his ire, that I know of—we’ve never even met.”
“Yeah, but you did tell the ley weaver that Costigan couldn’t be trusted, and that might have gotten back to him. And I don’t suppose Willow and her pet demon are the most honorable spell-flingers in the area, either.”
“More than you might imagine.” I paused, thinking, and feeling a little less like a human Popsicle. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You said you had to make a deal with the FBI to get their help. What did they want you to do?”
“Oh . . . I can’t really discuss it.”
“Will they be coming back for more? Are you stuck on their hook?”
“No. Part of the reason I cut my hair—well, it’s a little complicated, but I wanted them to think I’m not a good risk. The FBI doesn’t use the same kind of people as other agencies. They’re really cops at heart and they have less tolerance for rogues and lunatics than, say . . . the CIA does. It doesn’t mean my dad won’t come after me, but I think I’m done with the Feebs.”
“Your dad—he wouldn’t turn you in to the NSA, would he?”
Quinton snorted. “No. It wouldn’t suit his agenda. I’m an embarrassment that could ruin his career at this point. He’s just as glad to have me stay missing.”
“Do you despise him?”
“Not really. I just know I can only trust him to do what’s best for his career at any given moment. No person is ever going to come ahead of his job. I think that’s what made my mother leave him. She said it was the general stuff—the secrets, the tension, the absences—but I always had the impression there was a specific incident that broke them apart. Mom wasn’t an angel, either. She had affairs and she ran her life as if the rest of us weren’t important most of the time. Not that she made bad, selfish decisions all the time; she just didn’t feel the need to discuss them first. She looked after my sister and me all r—”