“Augghh! Augghh!”
And people were noticing, and turning, and looking a little freaked out, maybe because I was screaming and thrashing around, or maybe because of the big hole in my chest, or maybe because of the gun in my other hand.
Because there was one.
A big one.
And the leader was right in front of me, his barrel just off the edge of the sidewalk I was spazzing out on, and he was turning along with everyone else within earshot, eyes widening, mouth opening, probably to tell someone to shoot the freaking zombie already—
But too late.
I was already dead.
And the next second, so was he, because he hadn’t bothered with shields this far behind the lines. He fell off the barrel, blasted backward from the force of double barrels to the chest at almost point-blank range, and landed in the middle of the street, still twitching. I looked at him, everybody else looked at him, and then everybody looked at me.
And then I was staggering backward, riddled by bullets and spells and—
And zooming up out of the now useless body, scanning the crowd.
For my next one.
Because, okay, yes. This was a thing that was happening. Thanks to dear old Dad, who I knew less than nothing about because what I did know didn’t make sense. But one thing almost everyone agreed on was that, before he hooked up with a goddess on the run, he’d been a necromancer—and a powerful one. And a weird one, because he hadn’t dealt with bodies—he’d dealt with ghosts.
It was why, I strongly suspected, I’d been a ghost magnet all my life. I walked down the street, and ghosts came over to say hi and to tell me their life story—whether I wanted to hear it or not. I picked up a necklace in a junk shop and out popped a nineteenth-century cowboy. I went anywhere, did anything, and if there was a ghost around, it would probably come running.
Which was why the whole shifting-outside-your-body part of the Pythia job hadn’t weirded me out too much. I’d dealt with ghosts all my life; being one had almost felt familiar. Zombies, on the other hand . . .
Zombies were new.
The closest I’d come was possessing a golem—one of the clay creatures rabbis used to make and war mages still did—only that hadn’t gone so well. It almost hadn’t gone at all until I discovered that Billy Joe’s necklace, which contained a central stone that served as a talisman, also worked as a control gem for the golems. Shoved into their clay exterior, it had allowed me to ride an empty one around like it was a car—a huge, clay, robotlike car—and do some damage. But there had been a definite learning curve.
There wasn’t one here.
Because unlike giant clay people, human bodies were designed to hold a soul. That wasn’t a weird state for them—it was the default, and the trick necromancers used to control them. They placed a small amount of their soul in a dead body, using it like the control gem for the golems. To allow their magic to animate it.
And it looked like a whole soul worked even better. Now I just needed a body. And, thanks to the rampage from the hound from hell, there were plenty to choose from.
Of course, also thanks to the hound, they weren’t all in great shape, or even in one piece, but beggars can’t be choosers. Beggars have to take what they can get, even if that means taking a severed torso, which was nonetheless still clutching a machine gun. A machine gun that was soon spraying bullets in all directions, although not hitting all that much, since this body lacked serious motor control.
But it did the trick.
A bunch of dark mages had been headed this way, already looking panicked for some reason, a fact that was not helped by meeting a hail of bullets. The ones in front turned on the rest of the stampede, causing a tangled knot that had several so flustered they started attacking each other in an attempt to get away. And then running over me, trampling my bloody torso into the floor.
But hey, more where that came from, I thought, feeling a little giddy as I rose into the air again. Or a little crazed, because the next dead guy was laughing his head off as he sprayed bullets and threw potion bombs at his former buddies. And then kept it up even while getting stabbed by one guy who had shielded in time, with a vicious upward stroke that broke a few ribs before it bisected the heart—
And didn’t hurt at all.
Because Dead, motherfucker, I thought, still laughing helplessly as I searched around on my new body’s potion belt for something that would eat through a war mage’s shields. He kept stabbing and stabbing, and cursing and cursing, and I kept walking and walking, because he was falling back and I didn’t want to lose him.
And then I came up with something, a bilious green slime I’d seen on Pritkin’s potion rack once, but hadn’t known what it did.
I found out what it did.
The mage went up in green, phosphorescent-like flames, and then lost it as his shields buckled and failed. And then ran off through a thick section of mages, setting some of them on fire, too. And this time, there was no leader to re-form them into a controlled unit. They panicked and ran at another group, who started shooting at them to keep them away from their shields. For a moment, I had the satisfaction of watching two groups of dark mages try their best to kill each other, before I rose back out of my latest, all but minced, body.
And felt the
room spin around me.