SWNOVELS Queens and Monsters: Chapter 47
“Not ghosts, “Ryddyck said. “That’s the wrong word.”
“What’s the right word?” Lou leapt away from a shadowy tendril.
He ignored her question. “I have to find her. Someone broke the rules and now it’s too late. The only thing I can do is find her.”
I really wished he’d make sense, just for a minute or two. “What rules? Who do you need to find?”
His eyes snapped to mine and locked. “Her. The woman from my dreams. She’s the key to the lock.”
“What. Lock?” Lou bit out, her frustration back to boiling.
His eyes unfocused again. Like memories or information were coming to him one at a time. “In the door. You see them now. That’s bad.” He waved at the shadows we called ghosts. “The fighting outside must stop. It will destroy everything.”
“Destroy what?” It was like trying to extract information from a toddler.
“I don’t…I don’t know. Not exactly. I don’t know who I am and I don’t know how I got here, but for some reason I know that what you’re seeing are Grista and Grista are not ghosts. Something bad is happening here. It’s why I was brought here. The bad thing is twisting and tearing the fabric. It will shred. And there will be no stopping it.”
I glanced at Lou. The fabric. This Ryddyck guy didn’t know much but he sure said all the right words. “The bad thing…is it the zombies?”
He let go of the bars and stepped back. His shoulders sagged forward and he let his head drop. Connecting? Thinking? Buying time to build up enough power to kill us? Could be anything at this point. “There are others. Many others. Too many. Dead but not. They are the problem.”
“The fucking Dreg Army,” Lou swore.
“No,” I murmured. “Not the army. The neighborhood. The giant suburbia just over the hill. It’s full of Dreg families and it’s shielded from view so no one can see it.”
“What the fuck!” Lou shrieked.
“Yeah, that sounds right.” Ryddyck raised his head and came back to the bars. “They’ve broken the rules.”
I stepped closer too. “What rules.”
“Too many rules for too long, by the looks of things. Everything is wrong now.” His gaze flicked from me to Lou. “They broke you too.”
Lou snarled. If the door hadn’t been between them, Ryddyck would be dead now. “I am not broken!”
“Sorry.” His reedy, forced voice carried through the air. “I’m not good at your words yet. I don’t think I said it right. I mean…they broke your rules, too. They broke them on you. At you? Does that make sense?”
The fight went out of Lou. I imagined she was picturing Tymothy and Iwan and everything this House had taken from her. “Yes. That makes sense.”
We didn’t have time to dwell on the past. “We can’t do anything about the Dregs right now. If we stop the fighting, does that help with this Grista problem?”
Ryddyck returned to the window. He shook his head, then shrugged, looking past me into the dancing shadows. “Maybe? It will slow things down instead of speed them up. Right now you’re speeding it up. It will tear. Chaos will come.”
That was the only answer I needed right now. If we lived through this I could look for more. “We need to kill the last zombies and bring down the dome so we can stop the fighting.”
“Or…you kill the zombies and send me out to fight.” Lou’s face turned to stone. The face of a warrior. “You got Seema and Tymothy out. You can do it again.”
“No,” Ryddyck said. “Together you are strong. Together you can do this. Separate and it’s over.”
“You can’t possibly know that.” Lou glared at him.
Ryddyck cocked his head again. It was a peculiar gesture and I wondered what the rest of him looked like. “You didn’t see the Grista until just now. I see things you can’t see.”
“You see the Grista all the time?” she laughed.
But Ryddyck just shrugged.
I pulled Lou aside. “We should take him with us. He’s strange for sure, but he’s useful. And we could use another set of hands. Plus, if he finds this woman from his dreams, maybe that helps too.”
“You can’t be serious.”
It was a gamble. There was no denying that. But it seemed like everything had gone down the toilet anyway. What was one more gamble on the path to ruin?
“You’re saying ‘can’t’ an awful lot right now. We’re not going to survive the day thinking that way.”
That…did not win me any Lou points, but she understood. “He’s your responsibility then. I’m going to clear the path. Meet me at the door or I’m going on without you.” She shot Ryddyck a death glare before marching back through the basement, sword in hand.
“She does not like me,” Ryddyck said.
“No. But that’s okay.” I used the Plane to fiddle the locking mechanisms until the tumblers turned and the door creaked open. “You know how to use a dagger?” I held one out for him to take.
A look flashed in his eyes. “Yes…I do?”
Damn, he really was confused. He didn’t even know he could use a dagger until he thought it through. “Good. Take this and stab anything that tries to kill us.”
“So they’re dead?” Ryddyck asked again.
I said yes at the same time Lou said no. This helped confuse our strange new friend even more. “The others are dead but alive, yes?”
“Dregs,” I said, peering around a corner and waving. “They’re Turned humans. No longer human but not quite samhain. In between.”
We moved through the house. Hall by hall. Room by room. I almost believed we killed them all when a horrible screeching erupted from the wing we hadn’t searched yet.
“But the things you call zombies are different?” He clutched his dagger like a child.
Lou shot us a glare. “Why don’t you just scream and tell the zombies where we are?”
“Can we do that? Would it make this easier?” Ryddyck asked, blinking in a strange, jerking way.
“No!” Lou hissed. “What if there are way more of them than we thought? We’d be sitting ducks!”
Ryddyck shrugged and blinked as we hurried towards the new, eerie screaming.
“The zombies went through the same change as the Dregs…except it didn’t go well,” I explained. “They lose themselves and give in to instinct. They become killing machines.” Considering I didn’t know they existed a few hours ago, I had turned into a pretty decent expert.
“That’s what happens when you break enough rules,” he murmured.
“What does?”
We paused at the foyer. The wide, tiled entrance to the mansion had bodies strewn across half the floor. The hallway across from where we stood was dark with only the occasional flickering light. The scream echoed off the walls, weaker now.
Ryddyck shrugged and blinked like he was trying to clear his vision. “If you break the rules too many times, they break right back.”
“I’m going to scout out the situation. Stay tight and don’t die.” Lou scampered down the hallway before we could protest.
Not that I would have. Lou was in a killing mood. Besides, she was much more skilled than I was. She returned in a blinding flash of speed.
“That’s new.”
Lou frowned, then nodded. “Right, you’ve never seen me in action. Good news, I’m finding it easier to access the Plane as well. More good news, there are three in the library.”
Three? “That’s too many zombies.”
Ryddyck reached his dagger out and pointed at each of us. “One, two, three. We each take one.”
Lou shrugged. “He’s not wrong. Besides, maybe this is it? Can you use your gifts to reach out and find any more?”
“I can try, but we need a better plan than this. Tell him how we kill them.”
While Lou explained the need to both behead and stab the heart to cut off the brains and the blood, I centered, breathed, and tapped into the Plane. The black shimmering blanket covered everything now. There was no point past now. No future.
And if that wasn’t scary enough, the darkness of the three zombies down the hall was more than enough to put ice in my veins. I swallowed hard. “There are two more. Down the hall and up a floor.”
Too many zombies. Too many zombies.
Breathe. Don’t freak out.
“We should draw them out. If we have all five in one space we can maybe take one or two out before they realize they’re trapped.”
“A kill box?” Lou asked. “Not a bad idea. Are you sure that’s it?”
“No. But it’s the best I’ve got.” I kept reaching and searching just to be sure. “How do we draw them down here?”
Ryddyck looked to Lou. “You’re very fast.”
“All right then, it’s a plan. I’ll go upstairs and draw the other two down. When they’re inside we attack and don’t stop attacking until their heads are on the ground.”
It sounded great but… “What if you lose your connection to the Plane? What if you aren’t fast?” I couldn’t kill them all alone. No way.
Lou withdrew a dagger and handed it to Ryddyck. “If they catch me I’ll kill them and you two will put those three out of their misery.”
So basically the plan was to hope Lou was fast and Ryddyck was decent with a knife. Great.
Maybe my great connection to the Plane would return and save our asses. Actually…that wasn’t a terrible idea. “You said I can break the spell. How?”
Lou frowned. “Rhysa?”
“We know where the remaining zombies are. If we bring down the wall blocking our gifts then we’ll be at full power to fight them.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
I reached out one more time, feeling the death around us, the dying, and the cold dark zombies. Maybe I was wrong, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t. “If we don’t do something fast, none of this matters anyway.”
Ryddyck wavered in the space between us like a passenger willing to go wherever the car took him. Lou, on the other hand, hated being out of control. “I don’t like it, but I don’t have a good reason to stop you.”
“I’m all ears, mysterious stranger man.”
Ryddyck blinked at my strange words and shrugged. “You have a great deal of magic flowing through you. The wall is created by magic. It’s all the same particles. All the same energy.” He nodded once like he’d fully explained what I needed to do.
Lou made a face when he wasn’t looking that screamed, you’re seriously trusting your life to this male?
Maybe it wasn’t all that different from working with Saoirse in the meadow. My magic was also a wall. Everything was energy and it was simply a matter of controlling it, telling it how to behave. The Nala spoke that language and even though I hadn’t had much time to learn it all, there was a certain amount of instinct and nature to the concept.
I thought of Dray, fighting for what he believed in, of Gigi out there somewhere, Bo, and Kris, and Leena, Tymothy, and Seema. My love for each of them surged through my veins, helping me find and control the magic inside me until it burst forth in a blast.
The change was immediate. Like having all your bedroom lights turned on at once, plus the speakers on full blast. Overwhelming and loud.
“You did it!” Lou whispered.
But she was wrong. “I punched a hole in the wall. I didn’t bring it all down.”
“Who fucking cares? It’s enough! Are you ready? We need to get this done!”
I nodded, still getting my bearings. “I’m ready.”
“Then let’s kill some fucking zombies.” Lou disappeared in a flash.
“So we just wait here?” Ryddyck blinked.
“No, we’re going to slip into the room across from the zombies and wait there. It’s closer.” It took us a minute to silently pad down the hall and into the dark of the room. The dark swirls of the Grista appeared again. Stronger now.
“The wall is down,” Ryddyck answered my silent question. “It’s worse out there than it was in here.”
So it was equalizing. Things were getting worse. I heard voices saying words I didn’t understand, felt bodies moving near me, the air shifting. These not-ghosts felt a lot like ghosts.
Lou flashed by in a blur, stopping in the room with the zombies. Our eyes locked and I nodded that we were ready.
Two gray, gaunt looking zombies began lurching down the hallway. Blood stained their clothes and hands, it dripped from their lips and chins. One had been female, the other male. Their lives were over and now their bodies could finally rest.
I used the Plane to mask us from the zombies while Lou waited like bait. My nerves spiked and jumped while Ryddyck remained silent and calm beside me. The zombies behind Lou finally took note of the new flesh, the new blood it could feast on, and stood up, leaving the eaten corpses behind. Lou moved quicker than any of them, confusing them and drawing them all deeper into the room.
They each had a hole where their hearts had been by the time I used the Plane to shove them against the wall and hold them in place. “Take their heads!”
Lou didn’t waste a second while Ryddyck walked up to the closest zombie and sniffed it. “So curious. So very strange.” Then he slid the blade of the dagger across its throat, deep enough to sever everything but the spine.
Lou cut off a second and third head. I let each of their bodies drop. “Faster!” The shadow ghosts slithered around, making my hair stand on end. I got the overwhelming sense they were watching us. Interested in how this played out.
Ryddyck examined the zombie as he slit the second throat, watching the blood spill out.
“Come on, you can do better than that! Kill it or get out of the way!” Lou kicked the bodies out of the way. Blood dripped from her blade. She pushed Ryddyck back, ready to remove their heads once and for all, but the last zombie broke free of my power and lunged for Ryddyck.
“I’ve got it!” I used all my magic to put a shield between Ryddyck and the zombie while Lou removed the other head and then, with one final swing, the last. I let it all drop.
“I knew you couldn’t be trusted.” She shoved Ryddyck.
“What? What did I do wrong?”
The ghostly swirls of the Grista stopped moving for a moment. I would have sworn they were sad to see the zombies die. And then they began to fade.
The ground shook again.
Ryddyck looked up. “They’re angry. We should go now.” Then he grabbed Lou with one hand and me with the other. Enormous black wings unfurled behind him.
And then he flew us through the hole in the magical wall.