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Perhaps this is as good a place as any to introduce myself. I’m Camille D’Artigo, and I’m half-Fae, half human. With my two sisters, I came from Otherworld. We belong to the Otherworld Intelligence Agency—well, actually, now we run the Earthside division of the OIA. We were originally shunted over here ostensibly because our half-human heritage skews our powers at times, but I suspect there was another reason—a matter of revenge aimed directly at me. I’m the eldest, and I’m a witch and priestess of the Moon Mother.
I have three husbands—yes, three gorgeous, sexy hunks—and we’re as happy as four peas in a pod. Or we would be if it weren’t for the demonic war we’re facing. Smoky is half white dragon, half silver dragon; Trillian’s one of the dark and charming Fae known as Svartans; and Morio’s a youkai-kitsune.
Delilah, my middle sister, is a two-faced Were. She resembles our mother, who died when we were still very young. Delilah turns into a golden tabby when stressed, and at the call of the full moon. And she turns into a black panther when duty calls or she gets too angry. She’s a Death Maiden, serving under the Autumn Lord, and Shade is her fiancé.
And Menolly, a jian-tu-turned-vampire, is the youngest. Married to her werepuma wife, Nerissa, she’s also the official consort for Roman, the son of Blood Wyne, the Vampire Queen, as well as his heir. He re-sired her, and it’s created an odd blip in their relationship, but they’ll work it through. They have to.
When we were first sent over Earthside, we expected to be on an enforced sabbatical—a vacation in Siberia, if you will. What actually happened was that we found ourselves planted squarely on the front lines of a demonic war. And we also discovered that we love our mother’s home world as much as we love our father’s and our own home.
As I said—we’re caught in a demonic war. Shadow Wing, the current ruler in the Subterranean Realms, is doing his best to break through the portals that keep the demons from invading Earthside and Otherworld. He aims to ravage through the land and exert his control over all three realms. He’s also wacked—and has been called the Unraveller. If the Demon Lord succeeds, billions of people will die or be enslaved: Fae, human, and Crypto alike. Shadow Wing has managed to establish fronts in both OW and ES—overtly in Otherworld where war is brewing, and covertly here Earthside, where his operatives are working behind the scenes to open up the portals.
Here, Earthside, we’ve gathered a huge assortment of friends and extended family who now know about Shadow Wing. To the last, they’ve pledged to fight him. And back in Otherworld, we’re working with the elves, the unicorns, and some of the Fae.
We need to find the last two spirit seals—we’ve found seven so far, and lost two of them, so we have only five. The spirit seals, gems that once were joined together to form an ancient artifact, can—when reunited—rip open the portals and allow Shadow Wing full entrance into both of our worlds.
Now that he has two of them, Shadow Wing’s starting to make ripples in the fabric of space and time that keep the worlds separated. If he gains any more, the tide may turn in his favor, since his armies are united, and ours are still scrambling to figure out the best defense.
To be honest, we don’t know if we can stop him. But as long as we have the breath to fight, we’ll keep up the battle. Because if Shadow Wing wins, we all lose. And the thought of both of our beloved worlds going down in flames, well, that thought is more than we can bear.
“What the fuck just happened?” Delilah stared at the toppled gravestones before hurrying over to Chase’s side.
I joined her, just as confused as she was. “I think…something just sucked the spirits out of this cemetery. Kind of like a giant vacuum cleaner.”
“What would do that? And why?” She reached down to give Chase her hand, and I took his other side. We lifted him to his feet, and he draped his arms around our shoulders. “You okay? What’s wrong with your leg?”
“I caught my foot in a hole when I was running from a bone-walker. I don’t know if it’s broken, but it hurts like hell.” He sighed. “I’m not even going to pretend I can walk on my own. But can you find my men? Two officers were out here with me. I lost track of them when we split up. They went down a different path to check out a noise we heard, and I haven’t heard from them since.”
Morio motioned to Smoky. “You and the girls go look for his men. I’ll carry him back to the parking lot. Shade, come with me, in case we meet any stragglers.”
Shade nodded. Chase let out a “Huh?” as Morio, still in his demonic form, lifted the detective into his arms.
Morio shrugged. “Dude, it’s going to be quicker if I carry you.”
“Fine, but hurry. You’ve got some pretty funky B.O. going on in this form.” Chase gave me a wry what-can-you-do shrug. Over the past few months, he’d managed to rein in his ego and had fallen into his place in the group. He was a vital member, and now he knew we thought of him that way. So he’d started accepting his physical limitations even as his psychic powers burgeoned out.
Morio set off with Shade behind him. Smoky, Delilah, and I turned back to the graveyard. The night was growing darker, and the clouds now covered the moon. I was tired, both magically and physically. The sugar and adrenaline rushes had worn off, and I just wanted to drop into bed.
“Come on, let’s get this over with.” I hoped, really hoped, that Chase’s men had found a place to hide, or that somehow they’d made their way back to the parking lot, but the cynic in me wasn’t betting on it. Zombies and bone-walkers might be slow, but they never tired, and fear made for clumsiness.
We headed for the nearest sidewalk—probably fifty yards away—in silence. The scattered remnants of the bone-walkers still twitched, fingers inching along the ground, toes struggling to move on their own. I passed an arm bone that still had a hand attached to it, and the fingers were pulling it along the ground, grasping at blades of grass as it inched toward us. Smoky gazed at it silently for a moment, then walked over and stomped on it, crushing it beneath his foot. That took care of that. He looked back at us.
“Once we find Chase’s men, we should bury this flotsam. These were once living, breathing people. Their remains deserve respect, not this desecration.” He rejoined us.
“That they do.” I led the way off the grass onto the sidewalk. The path wound through another thicket of trees, this time birch and maple, out into another section of the cemetery. The gravestones here had been toppled, too.
Everything felt empty, eerily so. Though I knew most of the dead were still in the ground, the spirits were gone. Shortly after death, the majority of spirits went on to their next phase in life, or to be with their ancestors, but every graveyard held at least a handful who could not let go. I’d never encountered a completely clear and empty boneyard before, and the feeling unsettled me. It wasn’t normal.
“There’s nothing left. Whatever sucked up the spirits got them all. Who could do such a thing?” I shivered, drawing my jacket tighter around me.
“Ivana Krask?” Delilah grimaced.
I thought about it for a moment. Ivana Krask, the Maiden of Karask, was one of the Elder Fae—and a definite freak show. She kept a garden of spirits, where she would torment them. For the most part, she took only the angry and dangerous ones. But even though Ivana had a staff that could clear out the ghosts in a limited area, this sort of wholesale pillaging was beyond even her. At least I thought it was.
“We’ll ask her, but I don’t think she was responsible. Never hurts to check, though.” As I pushed aside a low-hanging branch overshadowing the sidewalk, I stopped cold. Up ahead, just off the path to the left, was a man, in uniform. Or what was left of a man. And over the body hunkered a pair of zombies, feeding. Great, first bone-walkers, a bloatworgle, goblins, and now walking meat-bags.
I grimaced as I noticed they’d ripped open his torso and were dipping into the organs. One of the zombies was feasting on intestines, and the slick tubes of viscera hung limply out of the creature’s mouth. The zombie had been a young woman, and the sight of her shoveling the offal through her bloodstained lips made me want to retch. I sucked it up—I’d seen a lot of sick things in my time and this was no worse than some of the others—and looked around for the other officer.
A ways up the path, we caught sight of the second body. Again, a zombie was hovering over it, gnawing on an arm. It glanced up at us, a wary gleam in its eye.
