4
ADDIE
The darkness swallowed me. It was comforting, in a way.
I dropped to my knees. The earth was soft. The weather had been unreasonably warm, and the melted snow had seeped into the ground, turning it to mud that sucked me deeper into its grasp.
I took the swelling arcana inside me and shoved it deep into the ground. The arcana caressed all the dead things beneath me. Dirt was nothing but life that had been left to rot and returned to the earth. I could feel the lives that had been here before, deer, rabbits, mice, and every small plant that ever tried to reach for the sun.
Just when I thought that I’d dispersed every last bit of my arcana, another wave came. It was endless. I could reach and reach, spreading my power all across Syracuse and Lakesedge. Even from here, I could feel the corpses of those who’d never gotten proper funerals. I felt Luca and the other vampires in the night club.
What was this power, and why did I have to have it? What good was this?
When the fingers of my arcana tried to grab ahold of the dead things in the ground, I reared back. Revulsion hit me when I thought about the kind of energy it would take to raise dead all across the city. I would kill everyone.
I couldn’t let that happen.
This power was a curse, and I hated everything about it. Even myself.
A hand touched my back. I jumped and lashed out with a backhand. My knuckles bumped Maddox’s leg. He grunted at the impact but seemed unaffected otherwise.
“What the hell are you doing out here in the dark?” He turned the flashlight of his phone onto me.
I cringed away from the light like a creature of the night. “You shouldn’t be here.”
He snorted. “That’s cryptic. You out here bloodletting so you can summon more zombies? Or do you have a live sacrifice…wait, am I the sacrifice?”
Though he was joking, I could hear the hesitation in his voice. Maddox was afraid. Yet, he offered a hand down to me and helped me to my feet.
He tugged a little too hard, pulling me into his chest. I caught myself, both hands against his chest where I could feel his surprisingly steady heartbeat. As if by instinct, he put a hand to my lower back to steady me. In the circle of his arms, the rest of the world fell away, and I could finally breathe easy.
Maddox smelled of coffee and musk, a scent that I would gladly get used to.
What was I thinking? Had my panic scrambled my brains? This man wanted to accuse me of murder. I couldn’t smell him and indulge in thoughts likethat. There were other men in this city. Other men wouldn’t accuse me of killing my twin from another mother.
But other men wouldn’t save me from a zombie raid. They wouldn’t charge into a room of monsters and face them down without flinching.
I had to admit, as we walked back to the road, that Maddox had a core of steel. Even Ness had panicked the first time she’d come face to face with a zombie, and Ness was nigh unflappable. Maddow, however, kept his head high and his head in check.
“How are you taking this so well?” I asked, my voice nothing more than a whisper in the dead quiet of night.
Maddox grunted.
“That’s not an answer.”
He turned his head ever so slightly to glare at me. I waited for him to turn that flashlight on me and blind me out of sheer pettiness, but he never did.
“Do you think Cerri is okay?” I never should have brought those zombies to her doorstep.
I would have to pay for her to get that window replaced. Windows that big were likely specially made to fit the old, converted warehouse. That meant I would be paying quite the sizeable bill to replace it.
That was if I survived this. I had no idea who was after me, but it was clear that someone with powers a lot like mine was intent on killing me. Now I had two reasons to get to the bottom of this mystery. Maddox wanted to pin that woman’s murder on me, and it seemed that the murderer wanted me dead.
If I was going to take the fall for the killer, why would they come after me? It made no sense. They were better off waiting for me to get sentenced for their crimes. There had to be another reason.
The woman in the ravine had looked a lot like me. While it made sense that a killer would have atype, a kind of victim that they preferred, I never would have expected to come across one with my specific skill set.
Which begged the question: where did they get the energy to summon so many zombies?