Holiday Magick (29 page)

Neither cop moved.

Aunt Rosie sighed. “Fine, I'll do it. I saw a front-end loader in the equipment shed out by the highway. That'd work for moving the bodies. Can you get me the keys, or will I have to ask one of the soldiers to unlock the office door for me again?”

Whoa—they can touch things? Move things? Real things?

“Miss Dustin, that won't be necessary.” The female cop looked from the ghost soldiers and back to my aunt, and I could see the moment when reality slipped onto a new track in her mind. “I'm sure one of the DOT drivers can handle it.”

As soon as the cops moved away, Aunt Rosie took me by the arm and pulled me aside. “You know what we have to do now, right?”

I looked at her for a long second, and then shrugged. If her next words were, “Find a dragon and bring it home to be our pet,” I wouldn't have been surprised; it'd been that kind of week.

“We have to do a counter-spell—a contagion, as it were—to the necromancer's.” She leaned closer, giving me firsthand proof that she hadn't had access to a toothbrush or mouthwash in that jail cell, and handed me a scrap of paper. The Latin on it looked to have been written in crayon. “We need to strengthen our army further, so that their touch not only can remove the hold of the necromancer, but passes along that same touch to the freed spirit, so that it, too, can fight. They can also use that power to rally the spirits from other cemeteries—especially the military cemeteries. Trained soldiers will be best for a battle like this.”

She let out a heavy, sad sigh. “There's a problem with that, though.”

I snorted. “Only one?”

“Two, actually. It'll be tough on us—being conduits for as long as we'll need to be, it'll be exhausting. But the real issue…spirit magic that powerful, it—it takes away the free will of the soul. They'll be forced into service, whether they would choose it or not.”

I felt the giant rubber band around my chest pull tight. Should we force people to fight for us? We
were
the good guys, right?

I stepped back, shaking my head, just as another wave of zombies crested the hill and moved toward town. By this point, a few dozen people had come out to the sidewalk, standing well back to watch the soldiers in their antiquated uniforms face down the threat. The spirits of the first wave of zombies erupted in churning confusion. Without thinking, I yelled out, “Get over here, out of the way!” and was surprised when they all did.

While the ghost soldiers closed in on the new wave of zombies, I looked around at the spirits encircling me. They looked like normal people, although pale and clammy, as though they all had the flu. And then I decided to come clean. “Look,” I said, first meeting the gaze of the young guy, then a goth-girl—which seemed an ironic look to be rocking when made into an undead monster—and then the bald guy in turn. The others all came closer, as well; I guess having someone acknowledge their existence when no one else could was a pretty good ice-breaker.
Great, I finally have a chance to be popular, but it's with dead people
. “We have a way to fight back, but there's a catch. If we do it, gho—uh, people like you will be forced into fighting. You won't have a choice. So, I gotta ask—should we?”

The spirits looked at one another, and finally, the goth-girl nodded. “What happened to me—to all of us, I guess—was scary as hell. I was inside my own body, in pain, being forced to—” She shook her head.

Bald guy chimed in. “If you have a way to stop this, take it. It might be too late for us, but I'd like to be part of making things right. I'll volunteer, if that makes it easier.” His gaze flicked to the soldiers in blue. “After all, they did.”

Several others nodded, as well, but not all, and those few reluctant faces would haunt me—possibly literally—for a long time to come. I turned and met my aunt's eye, giving her a sad nod. I stepped over to her and turned; she unzipped my backpack and handed me two large crystals, taking two more for herself before re-zipping. Without a word, we both looked down at the paper in our hands and began to read.

At the first syllable, every non-corporeal head turned toward us, and my heart fell into my gut. Were we doing something terrible? The spirits absorbed the energy that flowed off of us, their faces smoothing into blankness as the glow suffused them.

As soon as the glow faded, I sat down heavily on the curb and rested my head on my knees—it felt too heavy to hold itself up. I heard Aunt Rosie giving commands to the spirits, keeping a small group here to guard the town while sending out the others first to spread the energy to other cemeteries, and then to make war against the minions of the necromancer. “Do not make yourselves visible if you don't have to—save your energy for the fight.”

What was the difference between us, if I could take away their wills with a few fancy words? Didn't that make me a necromancer, too?

Over the next week, reports came in from our ghosts—and eventually from the restored TV stations—of the counter-epidemic that had begun in the Northeast and spread across the country, and the world. I heard most of it while lying on the couch. Energy continued to channel through me, night and day, keeping the ghosts strong. The pins-and-needles never went away, and I felt like a half-melted wax figure.

Aunt Rosie didn't seem as affected, and I sometimes wondered if she'd gotten me involved so that I'd do most of the channeling. She gave orders to the scouts and went out to the breach when groups of zombies attacked en masse. Apparently the necromancer knew we were here and was sending larger and larger groups against us in the hopes of overwhelming our defenses and wiping us out. His attempts didn't work out so well—none of the zombies made it past the breach, and the salt was surprisingly effective.

On Friday morning, nine days after the night in the cemetery, Aunt Rosie bustled into the living room, filled with enough excitement to make me wince. “They found him! I'm sending in the spirits now. We'll need to channel a lot of energy; they're going to need to be able to manifest strongly enough to interact with the physical world.”

Within a minute, the drag on my soul increased, like my energy faucet had morphed into a fire hose. I lay there, face-up on the couch, unable to move, as pale energy coursed through me and away, guided through to the spirits I'd conscripted, tying me to them—all of them, millions now—as though they were extensions of myself. I sensed them all.

Something flitted through my mind like a half-remembered dream—someone, a me-who-wasn't-me, passed through a wooden wall into a small cabin, then sank through the floor into the secret chamber below the braided rug on the floor. A skinny guy with long, greasy hair and a nasty case of acne lay on a couch in nearly the same position as my own. Other people sank through the ceiling, joining the me-who-wasn't-me who had grabbed the guy around the neck and begun to squeeze. The others joined in, their hands sending out icy shivers as they passed through each other's.

The guy on the couch convulsed, and then lay still. A second later, a dark shape expanded from his body—an oily cloud of energy. A ghost threw himself at the cloud, which absorbed him—destroyed him. I felt the light of his soul snuffed out, and a piece of my own died with it. Another ghost launched into the cloud, and another, and another. With each attack, the cloud buckled and twisted in on itself, getting smaller as each attack annihilated another portion of it. Finally, the me-who-wasn't-me launched himself at the small clump of darkness remaining, and then I either fell asleep or passed out.

A cool hand against my forehead woke me. I opened my eyes and met my mother's worried ones. I struggled to sit up, still feeling the drain of power, but the sensation was…lighter, less intense.

I gave my mom a watery smile and moved to stand. Something was pulling me out of the house, and I knew without being told that it came from the breach.

“Honey, I—”

“Mom, I've gotta go.”

“Take it easy, sweetie. You've been unconscious for over two days. You shouldn't be going anywhere.”

Two days? That would make today…Monday? I brushed past my mom and headed out, wincing at the brightness of the cloudless morning. Behind me, screen doors creaked and snapped closed as people came out of their houses, lining the sidewalk, drawn by…something. I saw Ella Eaton and debated giving her a smile and a wave, but it didn't seem like the time to try something.

Aunt Rosie stood in the center of the street. The soldiers from the cemetery—it looked like nearly all of them—formed neat columns in formation in front of her. She smiled and handed me two crystals, her gloveless hands still striking me as strange. “Oh, good. Now that you're here, we'll be able to take it off. And it's the perfect day for it.” The slip of paper she handed me this time wasn't in crayon, which made it seem much more official than the last one. We moved to either side of the street and started to read aloud. I repeated the words as the now-familiar energy swelled within me.

The soldiers lost their blank expressions, and the gasps and shouts from the people on the sidewalk let me know that they must be visible.

My aunt drew herself up, formal and stiff, as she addressed Captain Simmons. “Captain, thank you for your service.” She turned to the assembled columns. “Thank you all. We honor your sacrifices, especially on this day each year.”

I frowned, trying to figure out why this—oh. Memorial Day suddenly was much more than the weekend the beach at the lake opened. The thought of trivializing the sacrifices of these soldiers with stupid stuff like car dealership sales and cookouts made my gut clench. These people had given everything. They deserved to be honored—they and thousands more like them who had sacrificed their futures, given up
everything
—they deserved the respect of a day of remembrance.

The captain gave Aunt Rosie a solemn nod. “Ma'am, we are honored to serve. Should you ever need us again,” he turned and spoke to me as well, “you know what to do.” He turned to his men, and with a silent hand signal started them forward. Their feet made no sound on the pavement as they passed in procession; only the light breeze rustling through the trees made any noise as they filed down Main Street, past people who seemed to be holding their collective breath. The crowd fell in behind the columns, keeping a respectful distance, but unwilling to let the somber parade move beyond their sight.

The soldiers turned right and marched into the cemetery. They reached the flagpole, where they stopped; as one, they saluted the flag. A pale light appeared further back, near where Aunt Rosie had stood that first night, sweeping through the cemetery, pooling into small columns of light over each grave. The captain gave another hand signal, moving his men forward once more. The columns of light grew stronger as they approached, glowing with the same first-dawn energy that had once flowed through me. The soldiers marched into the lights, away from this world and into peace.

For now, at least.