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This felt like the magic had poured straight out of the underworld.
That was impossible.
Unless something had gotten out of the underworld while Zal and his friends had been partying at his place last night.
He closed his eyes, pushed out his magic to the closest of the corpses, and poked at it, but the damn thing didn’t stir. Not surprising. Someone was exhausted after their fun night of crawling out of bed when they shouldn’t have. If he was going to get anyone to talk to him about the spellcaster, he would have to wait until nightfall.
And that was going to be even more difficult now. The cops would be extra vigilant about cemeteries for a while.
“Sky? Sky, you okay? You’re groaning and shaking your head.”
Nolan’s worried tone pierced Sky’s swirling black thoughts and jerked his head up. “Huh?”
“Honey, talk to me. What’s wrong?”
“Possibly lots of bad things,” Sky grumbled and glared at the open graves. Most of the dead that crawled free appeared to be less than a hundred years old, which he tried to take as a positive—the older the dead were, the more energy required to raise them. Whatever had woken up the corpses of multiple graveyards was powerful enough. He didn’t want to contemplate what could raise a dead body that had likely forgotten that it had ever been alive.
“Do you have what you need? We’ve been here about fifteen minutes. I don’t want to piss off the groundskeeper.”
“Really?” He could only blink at Nolan. Had he been lost in thought for that long already?
He tried to stand, and his knees protested, refusing to straighten. He moaned and almost fell back. Nolan caught his arm with both of his hands, helping him to rise.
Yes, Nolan was right. His knees confirmed that he’d been squatting in the gravel for way too long. Pain throbbed in both. Squatting was bad. No more of that.
“Let’s get out of here. We’ll go to my place. I need to do some thinking. Talk to Grammy. Maybe she can make sense out of this.”
Nolan continued to hold on to his arm, supporting him as they walked to the front of the graveyard. As they reached the gate, the groundskeeper climbed out of his truck and lifted his eyebrow at them with his eyes locked on where Nolan was gripping his elbow.
“It’s unnerving in there,” Sky quipped, motioning to the cemetery with his free hand. “Hope I don’t ever see so many corpses lying about like that again.”
The old man grunted before closing the gate behind them and securing it with a chain. He didn’t waste another second climbing into his truck and rumbling off down the rutted road.Well, that could have gone a lot worse.
“Did you get any helpful information while we were in there?” Nolan inquired as he ushered him to the passenger side of the car.
“It answered some questions, but gave me a ton more unanswered questions. I don’t know who raised those corpses, or even how it was done.” He stopped and leaned on the side of the car, his arms folded across his chest. He wasn’t ready to sit yet. His knees still ached, and it helped to keep his legs stretched out. Nolan automatically settled on the car with him as he explained about the magical signatures.
“What if it wasn’t a single witch? What if it was a whole life of necromancers?”
“A life?”
Nolan shrugged one shoulder. “I’m still trying out collective nouns. A life of necromancers. A raise? A grim?”
Sky grinned at him and lifted both of his hands into the air, pumping them. “How about a rave of necromancers?”
The cute man laughed and bumped his shoulder into Sky’s. “Idiot.”
“Sometimes.” He rubbed the center of his forehead with the heel of his palm and sighed. “I feel like one because this mess has me baffled. How could this have happened? God knows everyone in the magical community is going to look at me because I’m the only necromancer in the city as far as I know.”
“Well, you’ll have to tell them you were hanging out with a bunch of demons last night, binge-watching your stories,” Nolan replied.
Sky glared at Nolan, making the man wince. Really, who was going to believe that nonsense?
“Let’s head home, and…” Sky pushed off the car but froze, his words dying in his throat. An old maroon minivan with fake wood paneling bounced down the road at a ridiculous speed, dust and debris flying up in a cloud behind it.
Who the hell was racing on this road?
Just as the minivan would have turned past the graveyard, the driver slammed on the brakes, causing the tires to squeal and slide on the gravel.
