The Dire King (Jackaby #4)(68)

“Get back!” I cried, but the undead officer turned on Miss O’Connor. His pale hands shot out and he had her by the neck of her shirtwaist. Jackaby and I leapt forward as one, but Jenny shot past us both.

She threw herself at the reanimated corpse as if diving to tackle him, but instead Jenny’s features sank into his, a swirl of silver mist fading away behind her as she vanished. The policeman froze.

Mona pulled away from him slowly, her eyes enormous, and the officer released his grip. He stood, moving clumsily, looking down at his own limbs.

“I—I have him,” the man said hoarsely. It was hard to hear the voice as Jenny’s through the deep vocal cords, but something in the man’s eyes told me she was in there. “It’s not like a living body,” she said. “It’s just a shell. There’s a voice in here with me. I don’t think it’s his. I can hear it whispering in the back of his skull.”

“Look out!” Lydia cried. A spear came flying through the air, and Jenny slid out of the body half a second before the tip buried itself in the dead man’s head.

The policeman toppled into the grass next to the injured gnome. Jenny hovered in the air. Lydia Lee was quietly sick in the bush behind her. She spat and wiped her mouth. “Enough gawking,” she said. “Back to work, everyone.”

And so the war raged on. The dead of both sides lay strewn across the battlefield. In the dust and smoke and stench, a man was emerging from the church. It was the thin man with white-blond hair whom Virgule had called Mr. Tilde. The battle seemed to bend around him, affording him a cushion of eerie calm. He held a small stone to his lips, and when he spoke, his voice carried over the din of the battle.

“Warriors. The Dire King has a message for you all.”

The clamor of fighting ebbed and a tense hush settled over the battleground.

Tilde continued. “All of the otherworldly creatures currently taking up arms alongside these humans. You are free to go. Leave. Your new king has no need of your blood this day. Assist me in returning to him the human called the Seer, and you can even earn yourself a place in his coming kingdom.”

“Oi! Ye’re supposed ta be one o’ the good un’s!” cried a disgusted voice. It sounded like Nudd’s, but I could not see the goblin chief from where we stood. “Ye’re nae one o’ these Unseelie munters!”

“I am Seelie,” the Tilde confirmed, smiling. There was a rumbling, like a roll of distant thunder, and the ground shivered. “Do you know,” he said, ignoring the seismic interruptions, “that many Seelie fae are born with innate talents? Some control light and shadow. Some can make the plants grow. Some can even change the weather.” The ground shook again, and this time one of the gravestones in the field behind us cracked in two. “We cannot control what gifts we are born with. They are a part of us. It seems wrong, then, to label some of these gifts good and others evil, doesn’t it? Wrong to tell a child that he can never rise to his true potential, that he can never use his gifts.” The soil within the graveyard began to churn. “The Dire King understands that we all just want our chance to bring something . . . beautiful into the world.”

The first decrepit hand to burst free of its grave site was blue-gray, its flesh rotted and sloughing off its bones. It was pitted with stones and dark with wet earth from its journey up from the coffin. As the corpse clawed its way free of the topsoil, a second hand burst up behind it. And another. And another. The entire churchyard was rising.

“They are beautiful, aren’t they?” said Tilde.

“You’re not special,” spat Lydia Lee. She stood with her shoulders squared as she faced Tilde. “You’re a bully. I’ve met a hundred bullies just like you. You’re afraid, so you poison the world into being afraid, too. There’s nothing beautiful about that.”

“You think I am afraid?” Tilde said.

“I know it. I know fear. And I know strength. Real strength comes from courage and compassion and hope. Never fear.”

“You think you still have hope?” Tilde cocked his head at Miss Lee. “Well, I’ll just have to see to that.” He took a measured breath, and then closed his eyes in concentration. All across the battlefield, butchered bodies sat up, their eyes glassy. Imps, goblins, centaurs, even the towering figure of our once-loyal Mr. Dawl rose alongside the human dead.

Any illusion I had harbored that our motley volunteer army might have been a match for the Dire King’s forces vanished. Hundreds of savage corpses had joined the fight, every soldier that had fallen plus a whole field of the properly buried—and with every new body that fell from here on in, their ranks would only grow.

We had lost. All that was left now was the dying.





Chapter Twenty-Nine

The noise of battle renewed itself with deafening intensity. The dead dragged the living to the ground. Screams of fear and bellows of anger and pain echoed across the parish. The air over the battlefield smelled rotten—worse, it tasted rotten, and I couldn’t seem to draw a clear breath. The sound of gunfire pierced the air less and less often as the last futile rounds left the barrels of their guns.

I swung the black blade for all I was worth. The recently unburied dead, at least, were brittle and far more easily decapitated than the freshly slain, but for every one of their ranks that I felled, I could see two more of our own being overtaken.