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Nerissa leaned over to sniff one of the buckets of chicken. She clapped her hands and licked her lips. “Chicken! So,” she added, looking up at me, “was it rough out there tonight?”
“Well, it wasn’t a picnic. It was easier than this morning, but it was still a mess. Bone-walkers everywhere, yanked out of their graves. My only hope is that the cemetery was so old that whatever raised them wasn’t able to find any spirits around the graveyard to suck up through their astral straw. And now, I’m wondering if the ghosts who were…well…ghostnapped…weren’t used in the ritual to gate the eggs over here.”
Shade returned from the bathroom off the utility room. He sat at the table and motioned for Delilah to sit next to him. “It is possible—the amount of psychic energy it took to bring those eggs over here had to be tremendous. While Gulakah’s perfectly capable of gating them over from the Netherworld, it might make it easier on him if he uses the extra energy from harvesting ghosts.”
Trillian was standing at the counter, filling a pitcher with lemonade. He motioned for me to join him, and when I did, he handed me a small pouch. I opened it and a silver medallion fell into my hand.
A round coin, the size of a quarter with a hole in it for feeding a cord through, it looked similar to the one I’d worn so many years back, but there were subtle differences. It was heavier, and stronger. I held it in one palm and closed my other hand over it, trying to read the energy signature, but—even though I was a seasoned witch—it was hard for me to detect the magic within the charm. And that was a very good thing. It meant it would be harder for others to sense that it was magical as well.
I held it up to the light. “You say this will last until I’m attacked?”
“Yes, it’s stronger than the ones we had back when we were chasing Roche. This will last longer.”
Menolly swiveled around from where she was carrying the pies over to the table. “You were chasing Roche? Are you saying you belonged to the OIA?”
Trillian stared at her for a moment, and then he looked at me. “Ask your sister.”
“I guess the time’s come to tell them,” I said.
“Tell us what?” Menolly looked confused.
At first, we’d kept it quiet that Trillian had saved my ass. Lathe, my boss, was looking for any reason to get rid of me because I refused to give him a blowjob or sleep with him. He’d done everything he could to make my life miserable. I’d met Trillian, fallen hard for him, and he’d joined forces with me to bring in Roche, a serial killer I was hunting.
I’d wanted to tell my sisters, but Trillian told me to keep it a secret. He wanted them to like him for who he was, not because he’d helped save my career. I’d felt odd about it, but agreed, and shortly after, with Menolly getting turned into a vampire, the issue faded into the background and we never had gotten around to telling them what really happened.
I turned around. “Okay, you remember the case I was on? The one that scared the fuck out of me because Roche was a demented serial killer and Lathe wouldn’t assign anybody to help me?”
They nodded. Smoky and Morio were staring at me now, too.
“That’s when I met Trillian. And he…the truth is that without Trillian, Roche would have killed me—that is, if I could have tracked him down in the first place. Trillian not only helped me catch him, but he saved my life doing so. And then, he refused to let me tell anybody because he didn’t want Lathe to use it against me.”>“Then I guess we head in. Delilah, you have Frank on speed dial?”
She nodded. “All I need is five seconds. The minute he gets my text with the address, he’ll start the phone tree—and everybody on the other end is waiting for the call.”
There was no more procrastinating. “Let’s get a move on, then.” And with that, I took the lead and, with Smoky by my side, headed down the middle sidewalk, hoping like hell this was going to be easier than this morning.
The egg was no more than five minutes’ walk away, around a curve in the sidewalk behind a clump of overgrown rowan trees—also known as mountain ash in the area. The branches were covered with ghostly white berries that would turn red in a few months, and bright orange by late summer. For now, though, they were just ghosts of color against the rain-soaked sky.
Tombstones littered the field, and I do mean littered. They were scattered haphazardly, as if they’d been tumbled every which way. Some were rubble, long ago fallen into heaps of broken rock; others looked weatherworn and were covered with moss.
Mounds of earth showed that the inhabitants of the graves had dug their way up, through rotting caskets and dirt, to the surface. The grass was knee high, making it difficult to see if there were any twigs or rocks in our way.
The egg stood in the center of the boneyard, looking very much the same as the one this morning, though a lot smaller, with a group of bone-walkers clustered around it. That alone told me the age of the graveyard—the flesh had long ago rotted away, leaving only the skeletons of whoever had been buried here.
One at a time, they walked forward, vanishing into the egg, sucked in and sucked dry. A sickening thud hit my stomach.
“We have no way of knowing what’s going to happen when we crack open that egg.” I stared at it, almost afraid to try. But if we didn’t stop it now, the carnage would be worse later. At least I didn’t see any of the Fae or FBH witches hanging around. Maybe Gulakah didn’t realize we’d found this one, or maybe their energy wasn’t useful until the egg was almost ready to hatch. Whatever the case, the fact that they weren’t around meant one less worry for us.
“We need to stop the bone-walkers. Menolly, can you and Roz and Delilah go after them? Smoky, Morio, Trillian, and I will take on the egg.” I wasn’t sure just exactly how we were going to do that, but lack of a plan had never stopped us before.
Menolly nodded, and the three of them moved toward the bone-walkers. As we watched, they began trying to herd the shuffling creatures away from the egg. The skeletons, which had paid no attention to our presence before then, suddenly seemed to notice that yes, there were obstacles in their path. Rather than fight back to harm, they fought to get past my sisters and Roz. Which meant they were just as dangerous as any unbewitched bone-walker.
Meanwhile, my men and I headed over to the egg. We walked around it, staring at it. Smoky reached out to touch it, but I yelled at him, startling him enough for him to step away.
“Don’t touch the shell—that’s how it sucks you in, and I don’t know if a dragon can resist the pull.” I was pretty sure that Smoky would be okay but didn’t want to find out. After all, we were dealing with demons.
“Well, there’s no other way to do this.” Smoky pulled out his silver sword.
“Was that your grandfather’s?” I asked, as we waded into the fray.
