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“He is. He’s here.”
And something about the way Louis-Cesare said it, made shivers go down my spine.
“You can’t make zombies out of fey,” Tomas insisted. “They’re not like us. Their bodies and souls . . . they are linked in a way that ours just aren’t. Necromancers don’t want a soul in house. They want to put a bit of their soul in an empty vessel, to control the creature they’ve created.”
“And . . . what would happen . . . if there was already a soul in place?” Sarah asked.
We looked at the horrible creatures in front of us.
I thought we had our answer.
Someone suddenly screamed. It was a high-pitched sound that could have come from either a man or a woman, and it was loud enough that everybody jumped. Even the vamps.
“Shit!” Sarah said. “Shit, shit, shit!”
I’d never agreed with anything more.
We moved back to the area around the burning truck and mostly destroyed entryway of the warehouse. There were a lot more bodies there, but they weren’t fey and they weren’t moving. Zheng turned one over. A little gold charm was on the ground under the corpse. I guessed it was one of the kinds that came off after death.
He picked it up.
“Eternity,” he said, turning it over in his fingers.
“So . . . the fey killed the triad?” Jason asked, sounding dubious. Maybe because those fey didn’t look capable of killing anyone.
“They’re supposed to be working together,” Louis-Cesare said. “They hit Hassani’s court together.”
“Seems like they’ve had a bit of a falling out,” Zheng said dryly.
And then the scream came again, and this time, it was possible to tell the direction. We looked at each other, but we’d come this far. We cautiously followed some stairs down to a basement.
It seemed intact, if dank, with water spots on the walls and suspicious scurrying in the corners. It would have been perfect as an old, horror movie set. All it needed was a monster.
Only, it had one of those, too.
“See? See?” There was a creature on the floor, at the far end of the large space, but the acoustics were good enough for the voice to carry. “There they are! Just as I promised. My creatures didn’t manage to find it at Hassani’s court, but they have it. They have it! They think the girl is here, so they must have brought—”
“I don’t care about the device!” a woman hissed.
“But—but you must. Isn’t that what all this has been about?” The voice turned angry. “You’ve been beating me up for half an hour because I lost the damned thing and now you tell me—”
A large fey stepped forward, and the creature put its hands over its head, cowering.
The woman who had been standing over it turned, and I froze. Long, floor-length blonde hair, beautiful, sweet face, faint silver light spilling everywhere. I knew her.
But . . . that was impossible.
“Efridis,” I whispered, and felt Louis-Cesare stiffen beside me.
She looked at me blankly for a moment, then turned back to what she was doing. Which appeared to be torturing who or whatever was on the floor. There were some fey around her, healthy, normal looking ones, maybe a dozen.
They didn’t react to our presence, either.
I looked at Louis-Cesare; he looked at me. “Stay here,” he told the others.
“Gladly,” Zheng said.
We walked forward.
