Fine Blue Steele (Daggers & Steele Book 4) (26 page)

I grunted as the tall youth stumbled forward. “Chester, what are you—”

I stopped in mid sentence as I lay eyes on what had frozen Chester’s feet. Off to the left of the path, a soft, orange glow radiated from within the fog, reminiscent of the light emitted from between a jack-o-lantern’s teeth.

Chester recovered himself—at least physically—as he pointed toward the glow. “That’s where the grave… Master Bellamy’s ex-wife…”

I pieced together the rest as I retrieved Daisy from my coat interior. Though she’d felt the fresh, late autumn air on her face more than once today, she hadn’t seen much action, and for once, I hoped it stayed that way.

“Come on,” I said in a hushed voice to Steele and Quinto. “Stay close. You too, Chester. Don’t get any ideas.”

The fog at my feet thinned as I approached the glow, and after a few more steps around wayward graves and over thick patches of underbrush, the mist fully lifted to reveal the scene underneath.

Julian Bellamy stood at the side of a gravestone that rose to his hip, one free of vines and moss and with a certain roughness to it that spoke of its recent construction. He held his hands in the air, his eyes shut tight as he chanted in a low voice. I couldn’t tell if he spoke in a different language or merely without the intent to be heard. At his feet, a hole six or seven feet long plunged into the earth, and next to it, a trio of shovels stuck out from a pile of fresh soil teetering dangerously at the excavation’s edge.

The orange glow radiated out of the newly opened grave. The color fluctuated between a pale red and a bold yellow, but unlike the lashing tongue of a flame, the glow produced no traces of smoke. I did, however, smell something of an earthy, sulfurous quality—a cross between bad eggs and a wet dog’s coat—and underneath that, a familiar scent of rot and decay.

Around the grave, Bellamy had erected a perimeter of scrap wood and bones, as he had in the basement of his church. The eerie light played off the remains of the living, giving them a horrifying, bloodied appearance, and while the construction appeared rushed and incomplete—especially the portions planted into the loose pile of earth at the grave’s side—it appeared to be serving its purpose…whatever that might be.

A snap of a branch, probably from Quinto’s heavy foot, jolted me to alertness. I took a measured step toward Bellamy and called out to him. “Step away from the grave, Bellamy. It’s over.”

The salt-and-pepper haired pastor ignored me, continuing his barely audible chant that he paired with a delicate dance of his hands.

I thought perhaps the man hadn’t heard me, so I reasserted myself, louder this time. “Bellamy! Step away from the grave!”

Bellamy’s eyelids cracked, though he didn’t bother to look at me. When he spoke, his voice lacked any of the warmth and congeniality I remembered. “Leave, Detective.”

“What?” I said. I wasn’t accustomed to murder suspects speaking to me in such a brazen manner.

“I said
leave,”
repeated Bellamy. “You might think you know what’s going on here, but trust me you don’t. You don’t have even the slightest inkling of what you’ve stepped into. There are powers at work here beyond your comprehension, beyond even your desire to comprehend. Now leave, and let the will of the Divine Rebirth settle a debate whose resolution is long overdue.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what the pastor was talking about, but the distraction I’d caused by my presence seemed to have affected his ritual. A cold tendril of mist draped across my neck, and the grave’s variegated glow dimmed as he spoke.

I took another step forward. “I’m not going to warn you again, Bellamy. Put your hands down and step away from the grave.”

Bellamy’s eyes snapped to me, and the earth groaned under my feet.
“You’re
not going to warn
me?
Detective, it is I whose patience is reaching its end.”

The groan I heard could’ve emanated from Quinto’s lips—he was notoriously ornery as it approached his bedtime—and the shifting I’d felt under my feet could’ve been the hill’s reaction to having Tabitha’s grave dug up. Miners had found themselves trapped under mountains of fallen rock for less egregious excavations. I kept telling myself these things as the mist at the edge of my vision began to swirl, churn, and roil, and as an increasing chorus of moans and groans sounded not from behind me in Quinto’s recognizable bass but from all around.

I swallowed back a lump in my throat and spoke with far more confidence than I felt. “In case you haven’t noticed, Bellamy, there are four of us and only one of you, and no amount of freaky resurrection magic will change that.”

Bellamy laughed a grim laugh, and I realized how stupid that last statement sounded. But despite whatever power Bellamy might possess, I didn’t think he could raise an army of the dead before I introduced Daisy to his skull.

I took two quick steps in his direction. Bellamy skirted to the grave’s side, over near the shovels, but thanks to his limp, he didn’t move quickly. I smiled. Ending this would be easier than I’d thought.

“Ah, but Detective,” said Bellamy as he inched toward the mist. “You didn’t think I dug this hole myself, did you?”

Three shovels. One middle-aged man with a limp. I’d curse myself for missing that later, at a more pleasant time when there wasn’t a snarling zombie lunging at me from out of the mist.

42

A big guy, shabbily dressed and cut from the same cloth as Lanky and Burly, hit me square in the chest with the force of a donkey’s kick, knocking me into a thorny bush that tore at my coat as I fell. I grunted as my back hit the earth, and again as the man landed on top of me. His long matted hair fell in my face, bringing with it a strong unwashed odor and the same scents of decay I’d smelled on Burly’s corpse and underneath the residual incense in Bellamy’s basement quarters.

I heard Shay scream and Quinto roar, but all I could see from the confines of my bush was a collection of tiny thorns and the bearded face of my homeless attacker, staring at me with cold, dead, unmoving eyes.

Thanks to my occasional dabbling in classic horror fiction, I knew what to expect from the soulless husk. He’d moan and drool all over me, bellyache about his insatiable hunger for brains, and try to bite me in the neck. Fortunately, I’d be able to outwit him and avoid his chompers and molasses-slow blows through my superior intellect and speed.

Unfortunately for me, everything I’d ever read about zombies had been written by ignorant hacks. I cocked a shot at his face with Daisy, but he avoided it with alarming speed—the same speed as a living man’s. Then instead of biting me, his hands shot to my neck, and he pressed his fingers into the soft flesh around my windpipe.

I clawed at his mitts with my free hand and whacked him in the back with my truncheon with the other, which produced not so much as a grunt. I tried again, harder this time, with the same result.

The pressure around my neck increased, so I focused my labors to dislodge the man’s fingers, and I found some success. I pried a few of them off me for a split second—long enough for me to take a ragged gasp—before he slapped my hand away and redoubled his efforts. I kneed him in the groin, hoping that might have some effect where the blow to his ribs hadn’t, but he didn’t even flinch.

Gods, the guy was strong! Blood pounded in my temples as spots danced in front of my eyes, and I couldn’t help but think of Vo. He must’ve lain there, thrashing as blackness enveloped him, stabbing Lanky over and over with the letter opener, hoping each subsequent puncture would break off his attack in a way the previous dozen hadn’t.

I couldn’t make the same mistake Vo did. My attacker wouldn’t feel pain, wouldn’t care if I broke his ribs and flattened his testicles into pancakes. Only the fundamentals of anatomy and physiology could save me.

With my vision blurring and my lungs burning, I reached up and hooked my elbow over my attacker’s shoulder. Either because of hubris or a lack of functioning brain cells—perhaps the horror writers had been right about that part—the zombie didn’t move to stop me, focused as he was on my suffocation.

I gripped my wrist with my free hand and yanked with all the might I had left. A reassuring pop greeted my ears, and the pressure from one side of the zombie’s grip disappeared.

With one arm dislocated, Rotface became a more manageable assailant. I rolled, tore my neck out of his remaining grip, and shot to my feet. Blood rushed to my head and I staggered, but thankfully the zombie hadn’t discovered the extent of the damage to his arm. As he tried to leverage himself up with an arm that wouldn’t hold weight, I slammed Daisy into his kneecap and followed that with a hefty stomp. His leg crunched and popped in sickening fashion, but I figured he’d have a hard time following me without functioning knee ligaments.

I tried to orient myself as I turned back toward the grave, which glowed with a renewed fury. Before me, Quinto roared and bucked like a bronco as three undead vagrants of varying size clung to his arms and back and tried to choke him into submission. His bellows echoed off the trees, but they couldn’t quite drown out a low-pitched sobbing off to my side—Chester, who’d curled into a ball and tucked himself between a pair of tombstones to avoid the melee. Apparently, the undead didn’t view him as a threat. That, or Bellamy had ordered them not to attack him unless absolutely necessary.

I swung my eyes desperately around the scene. Someone was missing.

“Shay!” I called. “SHAY!”

“Over here!” she called, followed by a shriek.

I turned toward the sound, only to be staggered by the force of a body slamming into me from behind. An arm wrapped itself around my neck—that of another homeless zombie, based on the accompanying smell—and squeezed.

I muttered “Not again,” except thanks to the pressure of the rotting flesh around my neck, it came out more as, “Nurgurgh agah!”

My new assailant’s point of attack put me in a compromising position, one without ready access to his joints and sockets, so I called upon my nonexistent martial arts training to save me. I reached up, grabbed the guy’s coat collar, and pitched forward as I bent at the waist. The zombie sailed over me, wrenching on my neck with so much force I thought he might break it, but at the three quarters mark of his arc I slipped free and he collided with the ground, bouncing off it with a thump.

“Daggers!” Shay’s voice reached me through the carnage, but I couldn’t tell from where. “Are you ok?”

If she was asking me, I assumed she was, too. Perhaps, as with Chester, the zombies were largely ignoring her, seeing Quinto and me as the bigger threats—which, literally, we were. I aimed a kick at the undead dude at the ground and opened my mouth to answer yes when another unwashed body slammed into me.

“Do something, Steele!” I yelled as I grappled with the new interloper.

“Do what?” she said.

I tried to locate her voice. Where was she? “I don’t know. You may not be psychic, but you know more about magic than any of the rest of us. Think of something!”

Something grabbed my ankle and yanked, and I fell onto my posterior with a bone-shaking thud. The newest zombie rolled on top of me as the one I’d deposited onto the ground crawled toward me. Quinto stumbled through my line of sight, bellowing and spinning as he tried to dislodge a pair of drifters clinging to his back.

I heard a swish, as if from a sword whistling through the air, and a voice I’d forgotten about. Bellamy’s. “Come out, come out wherever you are you, sneaky little half-breed.”

Another swish. Steele’s frightened cry. I had to help her.

I slapped a zombie hand away from my throat and kicked out, trying to dislodge the guy on me, but the second of the walking—or in this case crawling—undead brought his weight down on my arm, giving the first guy a new opening. Strong hands clamped back on my throat.

Still another swish through the air. Bellamy’s voice again. “Come here, you little
bitch.”

The pressure on my throat intensified. Where was Quinto? Why wasn’t Chester doing anything? I tried to reach for the zombie’s shoulder, but his pal lay on my arm. I could barely move.

I heard a meaty
whump,
followed by a pained “Urnghh…” Then Steele’s angry voice. “Who’s the bitch now, Bellamy?”

The fingers around my neck loosened. Whatever Shay had done had worked. I tried to call out for her to continue, but I still had a thumb jammed into my windpipe, so it came out as another choked warble.

Steele figured out what to do without my advice. A ringing, metallic twang filled the air, and both of my undead attackers went limp—which of course meant the one on top of me tried to smother me with his weight.

I groaned and pushed the rotting corpse off me as I stumbled to my feet. In the fading orange glow of the open grave, I spotted Steele, perched over Bellamy’s still form, one of the shovels gripped in her hands and raised overhead. She looked ready to whack him again should he move.

Quinto approached the grave, dusting his tweed jacket and rubbing his neck. He looked around nervously, his face ashen. “Ugh…thanks Steele. But how’d you know taking out Bellamy would stop his minions?”

Steele took a deep breath. Her arms shook, likely from the adrenaline shooting through her veins. “Well, what Daggers said sparked something inside me. These men… These
dead
men—” She shuddered. “They’re not zombies or revenants or whatever you want to call them. They can’t be, despite whatever Bellamy might’ve believed. If they were, we would’ve had to invent a whole new branch of magic to explain their presence. But they
could
be golems—of a sort, anyway. And while golems can be infused with commands and weighting structures to give them a semblance of intelligence, they can’t think for themselves. They require active concentration to manipulate. So…”

“So you decided to end that concentration with a hearty shovel whack to Bellamy’s head,” I said.

Shay nodded. “That’s right. Although the initial kick to his balls didn’t hurt, either. Well…it did for him. But that was the point.”