Page 24 of Rory

Harper stiffened, and suddenly ended the embrace, turning around to face the other woman. “We’re a little busy right now, Lady A. Can you come back later, like tomorrow afternoon?”

Rory dropped his arms as he looked at Ava, whose stunned expression quickly faded into a pleasant smile.

“I wish I could, but we have a problem in the gardens,” the laird’s wife said.

Before Bodach left the old prison cemetery, he ordered his new army of revenants to march from there to McKeran’s Castle. He had planned to load them into the back of the rental truck, but there were too many. One by one the dead criminals formed a single line and proceeded to do just that. He parked the truck a half-mile up the road, waiting until he caught sight of the first revenant trudging in the right direction before he drove away. He wanted to be sure that the containment spell he’d cast over them would keep their bodies from literally falling apart on the long trek.

All I need them to do is remain intact until we cross over into the spell trap, and the enchantment will do the rest.

Their gruesome appearance would terrify the McKeran’s vassals, but it was their memories Bodach was counting on to do the most damage. At the castle he would bespell them to reenact the crimes they had committed during their mortal lives as they attacked Dun Talamh inside the spell trap. Since the revenants had in life been some of the most vicious repeat offenders in the country, that would result in some spectacularly horrific assaults.

Bodach drove the rental truck from there to the storage facility that he’d bought after closing down the tours of McKeran’s Castle, and used his passcode to open the back gates. He’d had all the furnishings and possessions belonging to the clan moved and stored here in the event he would need them again, and was very glad now that he had.

Will they recognize them? he thought as he parked by and unlocked the first of the units. A slight weariness made him wish he’d brought a few revenants with him, but he ignored it as he grabbed the first crate marked “Dun Talamh artifacts” and carried it out to the truck.

Being a thousand times stronger than a mortal should have allowed Bodach to retrieve what he needed in only a few minutes, yet the more crates he loaded, the more exhausted he grew. After he’d taken all he’d need from the units, he reached into his pocket for a red crystal to eat, only to pull out a handful of colorless dust. A search of his other pockets revealed the same thing had happened to nearly all of the crystals he’d carried. He also saw sores had formed on the back of his hands, which had turned an odd pink color. His guise spell should have maintained his appearance as the handsome Renard Beaumont, but that seemed to be fading.

Two of the bigger shards of crystal from his pockets remained a healthy dark red, and Bodach ate them quickly, savoring the torrent of power they sent coursing through him.

“I didn’t use that much magic tonight,” he muttered as he climbed into the truck.

He drove back to the castle in time to meet the long line of his revenant army waiting in a single file outside the gates. That presented a problem, as dawn would arrive in half an hour, at which point commuters would start driving past his property. If they saw hundreds of rotting dead waiting to file into the castle they wouldn’t ignore them. Phone videos would appear on social media, someone would call the police, and before noon the castle would be swarmed. He needed to get them all inside quickly.

Bodach hated using up more of his power for such a mundane task, but he had no choice. He got out of the truck and opened the gates, walking a short distance up the drive until he could see the outer wall closest to the spell trap entry. Lifting his hands to remove it, the glow of his power shot out, racing up and along the old casing stones and making them shake. He controlled the magic, forcing it to absorb the sounds and stone dust as the wall developed cracks and fissures. By the time it vanished and exposed the interior passages, he’d nearly exhausted his power.

He walked back to the front gates and said to his revenant army, “Walk up to where I removed the wall.”

As they passed by him and up the drive he noted some of the dead men appeared a little worse after the long walk. Several were missing hands and arms; one headless revenant passed him holding his own skull. A couple were crawling, apparently after losing their legs during the long trek. The containment spell he’d cast should have kept their bodies intact; why was this happening? When he got out and went to one of the half-corpses dragging itself through the gates, he sensed nothing but the animation spell he’d used to bring the dead criminal back to life. He had no more power to draw on for the moment to correct the problem, either.

“How did you shed my containment spell?” Bodach demanded, kicking the revenant.

The corpse raised its head and stared at him with its empty eye sockets, as if it could see him. Its jaw dropped and a low, scratchy keening sound came out of its mouth as it tried to give him an answer.

“Oh, shut up.” He stomped on it with his shoe until it stopped making noise and fell apart.

Bodach drove the truck up to the front of the castle, where a towering, hairy figure dressed in a hot pink baby doll dress trimmed in magenta lace was waiting as well. That she resembled Bigfoot playing dress-up didn’t surprise him, for they had known each other since being kicked out of Elphyne to the mortal realm. As soon as he got out of the rental truck the giant female lumbered over and frowned down at him.

“You’ve got stinky mortal corpses walking into your place, Gobby Boy,” Mirry said, turning her head and frowning at the revenants. “What’s that all about?”

He forced a pleasant smile for her, as the dark Fae outcast had long been one of his few allies. She’d also helped him numerous times in the past when no other immortal would even answer his summons. None of her aid had helped him find and claim Torra MacBren’s ancient druidess spirit, of course, but he couldn’t afford to burn this bridge just yet.

“They’re just temporary help.” He needed them to unload the truck and bring the crates inside, but decided to wait until Mirry left before he attended to that. The dark Fae giantess was too curious for her own good. “What brings you into my territory this late?”

“I wanted to warn you that you’ve got a real problem going on here. I mean, other than losing your wall and the animated dead things.” She gestured toward the woods outside the castle. “I smelled it all the way over at my place tonight. It’s like a power sink or something. What do the mortals call it…a vortex, yeah, that’s it.”

Bodach squinted at the trees, the branches of which were stirring slightly. Then he saw the direction they were moving, as if being threshed by the whirl of a tediously slow tornado.

“It could be a microburst, too,” he said.

“There’s no thunderstorm to cause one,” Mirry countered. “Did you do something to piss off Chlíodhna again?”

“I haven’t seen the old witch for weeks,” he told her, leashing his annoyance. Because Mirry had long ago befriended the melia, she was more sensitive to their magic. She could also sense Chlíodhna, an ancient being said to be a distant ancestor of the forest Fae, whenever she was active in the area. “What did you mean by power sink?”

“I’m just guessing, Gobservant,” she admitted. “It’s the only way to describe something this super weird and spinning the wrong way in the woods, like melia magic in reverse. Their enchantments follow the rotation of the planet, while this one… Oh, never mind. Just trust me, it’s bad. You didn’t open another doorway into that spell trap, did you? Because if you did, and you’re keeping it open, the chaos going on in there will spill out into the realm here.”

“No, I haven’t.” He intended to, however, so he needed to get rid of her. “Thank you for coming all this way to tell me, but you should head out of here. Whatever it is, I don’t want it to hurt you.”

Mirry sniffed. “Come on, Goblivious. You always lie to me. I know because I can smell that, too. Why aren’t you honest for once? I put up with your smelliness, which is worse than theirs.” She flung a ham-sized hand at the revenants.