The Nimble Man

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Kingsley is dead.

Conan Doyle, for that is how he is known to all and sundry, sits in the foyer of the Grosvenor Hotel with an unlit pipe propped between his lips. His eyes glaze as he gazes across the elegant foyer at ladies and their gentlemen, bustling to and fro. It is the middle of November, yet already the spirit of Christmas is in the air. Conan Doyle spies a small boy, perhaps five, running circles round his Ma'am's legs as his Da has an angry word with a bellman.

The father often loses patience with the boy. Conan Doyle can see bruises on the child's inner arms, dark purple marks where his father's thumb and fingers have gripped too tightly. The mother loves her husband, but she holds her breath, hoping his temper is satisfied by berating the bellman, and quietly trying to calm her boy so that he does not draw his father's attention.

The bellman is new to the job. Conan Doyle can see this from his shoes. The uniform is new, the buttons polished, but the shoes are badly scuffed, heels worn. The man had not been working at the Grosvenor long enough to have saved money for new shoes.

And Kingsley is dead.

The bellman has no money. The boy's father is far too rough with him. But Conan Doyle's own son, the pride of his heart, had been taken by the influenza. The wounds that Kingsley had received at the Somme had not killed him, but they had weakened him.

Kingsley is dead, and now a fortnight later Conan Doyle sits in the foyer of the Grosvenor Hotel and frowns as he glances up at the woman who has just entered through the revolving door. She is a large woman, stern-featured and well-dressed, and she carries in each hand a tiny Union Jack, the flag of Britain. As if in a dream, she waltzes silently and alone, waving these small banners, and then she disappears through the revolving door once more, returning to the street.

Moments later, a roar begins to build. Voices. Tears. Dancing feet.

Armistice. The war is over.

Kingsley is dead.

"Peace," a voice says, dry and cold. It is not a greeting, but an observation, and even then it is more cynical than celebratory.

Conan Doyle taps his pipe on his knee and glances up into a the face of Lorenzo Sanguedolce, his olive skin, fancy mustache, and Italian accent marking him as a suspicious character in these times of war.

"Kingsley is dead," Conan Doyle tells him.

Sanguedolce nods. "Yes. But he has not gone far, Arthur. Not yet. You may still be able to speak with him for a time yet."

Ice forms around Conan Doyle's heart and he cannot meet Sanguedolce's eyes. "I think not."

"No?"

"No. If I speak with him, I may become too fond of the idea of joining him."

When he looks up, they are no longer in the Grosvenor Hotel, these two men. Conan Doyle stands on Wandsworth Road, looking up at the face of the Three Goats' Heads pub. The name of the place is repeated on three signs, two on the building itself and one on a post in front of it, along with a faded reminder that one might also find Watney amp; Company's inside. The windows are filthy. Gathered in a small circle is a quartet of rough looking men in dark Derby hats.

The war has not yet begun, will not begin for years yet.

Conan Doyle enters the Three Goats' Heads. Ale spills from glasses as the barkeep slides them along a table. The air is choked with smoke, a fog that obscures his vision.

In the center of the pub there is a table that is clean, save for a single pint of ale. Despite the crowd, no one goes near. Impossibly, there is a circle of clear air around and above the table, as though the wafting smoke is kept out by some invisible wall. Conan Doyle has come to the Wandsworth Road this evening in response to a note, a summons signed by Lorenzo Sanguedolce. He has heard of the man, of course, the one they call Sweetblood the Mage. He has dismissed much of this talk as merely that. Talk.

One glimpse of Sanguedolce's eyes, like bright pennies, and the way he seems to exist separate from the world, even in the din and dirt of a public house, and he knows there is more to the man than talk.

Conan Doyle sits across from Sanguedolce. He says nothing by way of introduction. They have never met, but still they know one another.

"You're a fool," Sanguedolce says, voice dripping with venom.

"What?" Conan Doyle demands, taken aback.

"Languishing in memories, in the comfort of the past," Sanguedolce explains. "You can't afford the luxury."

All other sound in the Three Goats' Heads is abruptly silenced. The smoke thickens, becomes a wall of gray, and their small table is nearly in darkness. Beyond the table, things move in the smoke, and Conan Doyle is certain that they are not the patrons of the bar, not thick-necked men in dark Derbys, but others. Things that move in shadow, thrive in it, even consume it.

He has been drifting inside himself. Lost. Sanguedolce is right. He is a fool. But somehow, despite it all, he has found the arch mage's mind, touched him. Even now Lorenzo's face shimmers and blurs. Morrigan's power interferes, as do the spells Sanguedolce used to hide himself, so long ago. Conan Doyle brushes a hand through the air, clearing some of the strange ash that hangs there, and he can see Sanguedolce more clearly.

For the moment.

"Quickly, then," Conan Doyle snaps, angry at himself, angry at Sweetblood. "Talk. What is Morrigan's plan? What does she want you for?"

"Idiot," Sanguedolce says. "I was hidden for a reason."

The arch mage draws back his hand to strike, but it never touches Conan Doyle. The smoke and ash coalesce around them and Sanguedolce seems a part of it, now, gray shadows enveloping him, erasing him.

"No!" Conan Doyle cries. "Wait!"

"This is not my doing. There is too much darkness between us, too much power."

But his voice sounds distant, muffled, and diminishing with each word. Then…

"Here." And a hand thrusts out of the smoke gray shadow, a fingertip touching Conan Doyle's forehead, a light tap just between the eyes.

Slivers of pain lance through his head. His eyes burn. Bile rises in the back of his throat. Images erupt in his mind. Flashes of color, accompanied by the shrieking of children and the agonized wail of mothers. A city on fire. A highway lined with the dead. A barricade built of rotting, festering corpses. Charred flesh falling like snow from a dead black sky. Holes in the world, craters where entire nations had once been. A small, grinning girl with a bloody mouth and sharp teeth, looking up at her father with a knife in one hand and her mother's eyes in the other.

Armies, marching.

Disease on the wind. Red welts and yellow blisters, a crowd dropping one by one, like wheat beneath the scythe.

And from the darkest corners of the world, hideous beasts begin to emerge. Demons. And worse.

"My Lord," Conan Doyle whispers. "Morrigan doesn't have this kind of power. What does she call?"

Now he feels himself choking on the smoke, the gray shadows sheathing his eyes, smothering him, crawling up his nostrils. Conan Doyle passes a hand before him and the gray withdraws only enough that he can see the outline of a face in the smoke. The lips move, but Sanguedolce's voice is in his head, not in the smoke.

"You don't listen. This isn't Morrigan's plan. But she has already corrupted the sorcery of my chrysalis. My power is already seeping, drawing attention. It must be sealed again. The things you have seen.. they are inevitable unless you can stop her… if I am freed, this is the fate of the world."

Conan Doyle is cloaked in gray smoke again. Once more, furiously, he waves it away, but this time when it clears he is at his table at the Three Goats' Heads, and he is alone.

And he awakens.

The wind whipped Danny Ferrick's face with such ferocity that tears stung his eyes. It tugged at his clothing like ghost fingers and he felt himself spun around, feet dangling uselessly beneath him, a scarecrow in a hurricane. It was all blackness and wind, save for brief glimpses through the dark, eyeblink windows on the world, none of which offered the same view as the last. He squeezed his eyes closed.

A hard gust blew him upward, and as he floated downward again he felt solid ground beneath his feet. A spiral breeze kept him from stumbling. He opened his eyes upon a dark room. The curtains fluttered in the traveling wind and his hair was ruffled a moment longer, and then the breeze died, and all was silence in the room save for the settling of dust upon the wooden floor.

The canopy of the four-poster bed was the same ivory as the curtains. The carved wood of those posts was bone-white. A long bureau was against the far wall and a fireplace, dark and cold, was set into another. Other than these, the room was featureless, with no sign of any occupant. There were no lamps, no mirrors, no books or brushes, and only a single pillow on the bed.

Unless something had gone wrong, this was Mr. Doyle's house. Danny figured it was a spare bedroom, because it certainly did not seem as though anyone lived here. But… He frowned, glancing around the room. The door was firmly closed. He had followed Ceridwen here, let himself be swept along in the wake of her magic. So where the hell was she?

The darkness of the room felt comfortable to him, as though it was a robe he had slipped on. His eyes had always adjusted well to the dark. Danny moved soundlessly across the room and opened the door just wide enough to peer through, and pressed an eye to the crack. The room he was in was at the end of the hall, and the corridor outside the door only a wing. There were five other doors, two on the left and three on the right, and then a left turn. It was dark, but where the corridor turned there was a glimmer of distant light, perhaps from a room around the corner.

Ceridwen's shadow was on the wall at the end of the corridor, thrown by the glow of that dim light.

With no sign of anyone else, Danny slipped out of the room and pulled the door softly shut behind him. His nostrils flared and he smelled blood in the house. Somewhere. And it wasn't human blood. His forked tongue slid over sharp rows of teeth and he felt his lips pull up into a kind of smile, as if he had no control over his response to that scent at all. Then he realized that it wasn't a smile. It was a snarl.

Danny moved in silence through the dark corridor, still wrapped in shadows. He felt invisible. He had always been good at hide and seek as a child, always had an uncanny ability to sneak up on others unawares. For the first time he realized this was not an ordinary thing. He cloaked himself in darkness and slipped quietly down the hall, and this time when he smiled to himself it was genuine.

At the end of the hall he peeked around the corner, remaining out of sight, and when he saw Ceridwen he caught his breath.

This new corridor was far longer and halfway down its length was a balustrade, and a stairwell that came down from above and continued on toward the first floor. Danny had no idea what floor they were on now. The dim light upon the walls was from somewhere below. At the landing, just beside the stairs, were two creatures unlike anything Danny had seen before. They were stooped, hands twisted into claws, long talons dangling by their knees. Their skin was leathery brown and rutted with lines that might have been scars or wrinkles or grooves in tree bark. And yet he had the idea that if they stood up straight and hid their faces, they might have been able to walk the daylight world and pass as human.

Just the way Danny did.

But he would have seen them for what they were. He would have smelled them. They had the stink of raw meat and sewer on them, these things. Danny had heard enough from Conan Doyle and the others to know they had to be the Night People. The Corca Duibhne. Seeing them made him tremble, but not with fear. He shook with the urge to kill them.

Ceridwen was in the hall as well, only ten or twelve feet from the Night People. The ice blue sphere atop her staff glowed softly. Danny could not help but notice the way her long limbs moved beneath the sheer fabric of her dress. She was breathtaking. Her whole self seemed illuminated by the same ice blue light that glowed within that sphere.

Magic, he thought. For even as he watched she moved nearer the two hideous creatures, and neither noticed her.

With an elegant flourish, Ceridwen spread her arms and glided toward the Corca Duibhne; to Danny it almost seemed as though she were dancing. It was a strange moment of ballet, that ended with Ceridwen reaching out to touch the nearest of the two Night People. A blue light blossomed from her fingertips, blue-white mist leaked from her eyes in streams that floated on the air, and the sphere atop her staff flared with a moment of brilliance.

The monstrous creature froze, leathery skin turning that same ice-blue. A wave of chilling cold swept up the corridor and Danny shivered, staring at the scene that played out before him.

The second Corca Duibhne turned, shivering at the blast of frozen air, and its eyes widened. It opened its mouth, flashing yellow razor teeth, but before it could sound an alarm Ceridwen's free hand flashed out and gripped it by the throat. Her muscles were taut, but even in profile Danny could see her face was expressionless. Her eyes were as cold as the ice of her magic. The creature let out a single groan, but no cry of alarm came.

The ice formed first upon its yellow fangs. Then its eyes froze in its head. Moments later it was little more than an ice sculpture, just like the other.

"Holy shit," Danny whispered from the shadows.

Ceridwen swept her staff around in an arc that shattered them both. Thousands of shards of ice cascaded along the floor of the corridor. Then she stood still once more, as though she had not even moved, and she held her staff before her in both hands.

Danny felt a warm breeze begin to ruffle his hair. A wind sprang up in the corridor. One moment it was gentle, even pleasant, and the next it whistled in his ears and nearly knocked him off of his feet, a tropical blast of heat that seared his lungs when he inhaled. His claws dug into the wall and he clung to the corner, knowing if he fell he would give himself away. He watched in awe as the frozen remains of the two Corca Duibhne swirled and eddied in the hot wind.

They melted away to nothing, leaving not a drop of condensation on the floor.

Gone.

The wind died and Danny held his breath, staring at Ceridwen. The Fey sorceress went to the stairs and glanced upward, and then leaned over the balustrade, getting her bearings.

Then she turned her icy eyes upon him.

Danny shuddered. He had cloaked himself in darkness, had felt sure that his stealth was part of what he was, one of the few benefits of his supernatural genesis. If this was to be his life — the life of a monster — he'd thought at least there might be something good to come of it.

"Come here," Ceridwen said, and though she spoke in a whisper her words carried to him.

Abandoning any effort to hide himself, Danny hurried down the corridor to her. He glanced around at the many doors along the hall and at the stairs, worried that at any moment more of Morrigan's followers might discover them.

As he approached, Ceridwen grabbed his wrist and drew him up to her. Her fingers were ice upon his skin and that frozen mist still leaked from her eyes. She towered over him and he had not realized before just how tall she was. A shiver went up and down his spine but it was not the cold that made him tremble. Ceridwen was indeed beautiful, but it could be a terrible beauty, a cruel flawlessness.

"What do you think you're doing?" she demanded in a terse whisper.

"Helping," he said. "I wanted to help."

"Arthur told you to stay behind."

Danny had no response to that and so he said nothing. He felt his brows knit, felt his upper lip curl into another snarl, but could not prevent these reactions. They were instinctual. As much as he feared her, if Ceridwen did not let go of his wrist, he thought he might try to hurt her.

His ears twitched. Voices reached them from the stairwell. Someone was coming up from below. Ceridwen turned toward the stairs and raised her staff, but this time it was Danny who grabbed hold of her wrist.

"No," he whispered. "We're here to learn. To do that, we listen."

She glared at him a moment, and then she nodded. Danny moved swiftly and silently to the nearest door. It was unlocked, and he led Ceridwen inside. He left the door open several inches and knelt to put his eye to the crack. The room was dark, and once more he gathered the shadows around himself, hoping Morrigan's followers wouldn't be as perceptive as Ceridwen, hoping the darkness would keep them from noticing him spying.

He knew Ceridwen was behind him. Even now she would be standing above him, trying to peer into the hall. Danny could feel her there, could feel the cold. And that was the two of them. Ice and shadows.

Together they waited, and they listened, in the cold and the dark.

The glass was shattered in the doors of the Museum of Fine Arts. The broad stone stairs in front of the building's grand facade were swarming with the dead. Corpses crawled over one another, trying to get to the doors. The red mist that enveloped the entire city churned and rolled in clouds that obscured the horror surrounding the museum for a few seconds before thinning once more. Flags beat the air, jutting from the brow of the building, and banners advertising their latest exhibitions covered part of its face.

There were walking dead who were crumbling with every step, who were clothed in tatters. Some of them had lost arms or hands, even lower jaws, and what skin remained was parchment stretched across their cheeks or sunken eye sockets. Muscle tore as they walked, but the magic that propelled them was merciless. Some of them were brittle and withered.

Eve moved through the dead with her long sword like the reaper with his scythe. Yet this was a bloodless harvest. Her blade hacked into them with the pop and dry cracking noise of snapping kindling. Her coat flowed around her like a toreador's cape, but she did not need any red flag to draw their attention. The restless dead had been sent to the museum for a reason, but presented with targets, with vibrant, alive creatures to kill, they deviated from their mission.

She felt the blood race through her, her mind descending into a primitive rage that often enveloped her in combat. Her mouth opened and she howled a cry of battle that echoed out across the empty street. Her heightened senses brought to her the scent of Clay nearby, but he and the specter, Dr. Graves, were lost in the mist and the sea of staggering dead.

Cold fingers clutched at her jacket and snagged in her hair. Eve spun, bringing the sword around with both hands upon its grip. This time, however, the blade met more resistance. Some of the walkers were freshly dead, their flesh and muscle more substantial, their bones harder. Two hands grabbed her head and a pale, fat man in a three piece suit dipped his jaws as though he might tear out her throat.

Eve gave a cruel, rasping laugh as she thrust her sword point through his mid-section. With her preternatural strength she hoisted the fat cadaver off the ground and dumped him on top of several others. A dead woman, her face painted in the garish makeup of morticians the world over, seemed to grin as she reached out and twisted her fingers in the fabric of Eve's blouse, tugging at the spaghetti straps as though intent on tearing it off. Eve hacked her hands from her wrists.

It was a perverse death dance, a black-tie event, every corpse dressed in its Sunday best. But Eve wasn't getting anywhere. The limousine was back at the curb and she had made some progress, but not enough. She was at the bottom of the museum steps and cutting through the dead was taking too long. There were just too many of them. The sword was too slow.

"Squire!" she roared into the sky, into the red mist.

Off to her right was a statue of a man on horseback. She heard the goblin replying even as she spotted him, emerging from the dark shadow beneath the statue.

"What can I do ya for, darlin'?" he called.

Eve sheathed her sword. A pair of dead walkers, one only days dead and one rattling with every step, tried to take advantage of the moment. She lashed out at the fresh one, grabbed it by the face and yanked it toward her. With her left hand she dug her talons into the flesh at the back of its neck, plunged her fingers in around bone and gristle, and tore out its spinal column. The other, the crumbling, brittle one, she shattered with a single kick of a designer boot.

"This is taking too long!" she called to the goblin. "I need something that's going to clear a bigger path."

Even through the mist she could see Squire grin. The goblin slipped back beneath the statue and disappeared in the darkness there. Squire could fight when necessary, but that was not his purpose among Conan Doyle's agents. He drove, yes, but only because he enjoyed it. Squire was the armorer, the weapons master. As long as there were shadows for him to pass through, Eve knew she would never be without a weapon when she needed one.

The dead continued to grab at her but now Eve was less concerned with fighting them. Destroying each one would take forever and was a waste of time. Getting through them, past them, that was the priority. She felt her rage begin to subside. Had these been living enemies, bodies humming with fresh blood, she would have found it much more difficult to sublimate her fury and her bloodlust.

But they were dead, hollow things.

Obstacles.

Eve tore through them, picking up one dead walker and tossing it at the others. With a single swipe of her hand she tore the head off of the corpse of a teenaged girl. Her gaze swept the crowding dead and she saw a skull-faced cadaver, a man who had been extremely tall. She pulled the arms from the withered corpse and drove it down in front of her. It fell across several others and they scrambled to get up, to get free, to get at Eve. Planting a boot solidly on the dead man's chest she launched herself over the heads of a dozen of the staggering zombies.

Eve landed in the midst of another horde and began to fight them as well. She was halfway up the stairs when she heard Squire call her name. She turned to see him slip from the darker shadows up against the wall of the museum.

"How about this?" Squire asked.

He raised a pump shotgun in one hand. Eve grinned and raised her own hand and Squire threw the weapon to her. She snatched it from the air.

"I could kiss you."

"Don't flatter yourself, babe," Squire replied, and then he was gone again, lost in shadows.

Eve turned the shotgun and aimed in the general direction of the museum's front door.

"All right, numbskulls. Now the fun starts."

She pumped the shotgun and fired. The blast tore the torso out of a corpse right in front of her, ripping through two others behind it, and knocking down several others that were clustered with them in a tangle of clawing arms and twitching legs. Tiny bits of human gristle spattered her shirt, but at last she was beyond caring about her clothes. There were always more shops, always something pretty to wear. But she didn't get an evening like this very often.

Again she pumped and fired, racing forward, leaping up stairs. She found her footing where she could, crushing bones under her boots, darting in amongst the dead. The shotgun boomed in her hands and she neared the top of the stairs.

Then the shells were spent, the shotgun smoking. Eve dropped it to clatter on the stone steps and drew her sword once more. The museum doors had been torn open and they hung off kilter in their frames.

"In," she snarled.

Clay could be anyone. He had met warriors in his long, long life who were terrifying in every aspect. Some of them were unnaturally strong, some large enough that ordinary men would have called them giants. Some were like gods to the simple people who worshipped them. But he could also be anything. A tiger. A grizzly. A snake. Even some things that had only existed in the imagination of the Creator, things that had never walked the Earth but that He had considered.

The dead were quicker than they looked, jerking and lunging and clawing. But Clay did not need swiftness or skill, did not need agility to deal with these mindless abominations. All he needed was power and an appetite for destruction, and he had both in quantity today.

Once outside the limousine, and away from the eyes of his comrades, he changed. There were times when he felt awkward about his nature, about the malleability of his body. He wanted them to see him as Clay, to have an identity in their minds, and experience had shown them that anyone who saw his flesh run like mercury and his bones reshape often enough could lose track of who he was.

He hated that, for there were times when the only way he could know himself was to see how he was reflected in the eyes of others. That was the fundamental truth of what he was.

He was Clay.

Now his hot breath snorted from his nostrils and he felt his muscles ripple in his chest. Black fur stood up on the back of his neck and he felt the crimson mist caressing the tip of each hair. He was a five hundred pound mountain gorilla, a silverback. Clay marched forward, trampling the walking dead beneath him, feeling their bones crushed to dust under his feet. Seconds passed as he cleared the area around him of zombies. His massive hands closed on the heads of the corpses. Some of their skulls shattered in his grip. Others he tore away from their shoulders.

"Having fun, big boy?" a voice asked.

With a grunt, the massive gorilla turned and stared as a slit appeared in the undulating darkness beside him. Like some grotesque birth, Squire slipped through the womb of shadows and stood before him, holding out a huge Turkish battle axe, a weapon almost as large as the goblin himself.

"Fun," Clay replied.

He snatched the axe from Squire in one enormous gorilla hand. The goblin took two steps backward into darkness and was gone, even as the walking corpses tried to grab at him. Clay swung it with such power that he cleaved the heads from two of the dead and in the same blow cut a freshly dead man completely in half, the divided portions of his corpse striking the paved sidewalk with moist weight.

He threw back his head, free hand pounding his chest, and let out a gorilla roar that echoed back from the enveloping mist. The dead surrounded him and Clay began to trample them again. The axe swung out, clearing a path, and with his free hand he slapped others down to the ground. He reached the stairs, huge feet cracking the stone beneath him. The dead fell before him. His progress was slow, but inexorable.

Then, with another snort of hot air, the mountain gorilla paused. There were times when Clay transformed that he lost himself in his new shape. It took him a second to clear his mind, to make sense of what he was seeing.

Just ahead, the ghost of Leonard Graves walked toward him down the stairs. The dead sensed the phantom of the dead adventurer. They could feel Graves's presence. But they could not touch him. Their fingers, sometimes little more than bones, snatched at the spectral form of Dr. Graves, tried to tear his flesh, to grab hold of his clothes. But there was nothing there. It maddened them, and some of the mindless dead seemed somewhat less mindless now, their faces etched with a vicious frustration.

"Clay," Dr. Graves said calmly as the decaying corpse of a woman in military uniform reached through his ghostly flesh and grabbed hold of another of the dead.

With a shudder and a grunt, Clay twitched and transformed back into the human form he most often wore. There was something in Graves's tone and bearing that made him feel foolish. And now that he no longer wore the body of an animal, he thought he knew what it was.

"There are too many to fight," Clay said.

He swung his axe, not to cut but to batter, and knocked away three of the dead who were clutching at him.

Graves could not be touched, but his expression revealed his frustration. Abruptly he tore his gaze from Clay and reached out to the two zombies nearest him. His hands, pure ectoplasm, reached inside the rotting corpses, disappearing within. Their spirits had been forcibly pulled from the afterlife, restored to dead flesh, to rotting brains and madness. Now, with a single tug, Dr. Graves ripped those souls back out of their bodies.

The ghosts screamed in torment, eyes wide with unspeakable agony. But in the moment before they shimmered and dissipated like smoke on the breeze, they gazed at Dr. Graves with profound gratitude.

"You're wasting time out here." Graves told him.

Clay frowned. "Eve?"

"Already inside," said the specter.

"Shit," Clay said, kicking a zombie in the chest as he started toward the stairs to the museum. "It's just second nature. Something like this happens… you know once they're done here these deadheads are going to look for more populated areas. That's what they do, zombies. They kill. I've never understood if they're hungry or just angry, but that's what they do. It doesn't feel right, leaving them walking around."

Graves floated beside Clay, ignoring the carnage as the shapeshifter tore and hacked through more of the dead. "There are already too many of them for us to stop them. It would take hours. Maybe days. We don't have that kind of time. It's not why we're here. And if we do the job — "

"There may be another way to stop them," Clay finished.

Even as his lips formed the last of these words, they were not lips anymore. He opened his beak and cawed loudly, and he spread his falcon wings wide and thrust himself up into the air.

Dr. Graves kept pace. The ghost flew beside him. Clay stretched out his wings and glided in through the front doors of the museum. The huge foyer echoed with the shuffling footsteps of the dead. There were shattered corpses on the floor, unmoving, and it was easy to follow the path that Eve had taken. She had blazed the trail for them.

Up through the main hall Clay flew, the ghost of Dr. Graves keeping pace with him. They turned and passed through arched passages and soon they were moving through the collection of the Art of Ancient Africa. An exhibition of Egyptian burial jars, sarcophagi, bracelets and necklaces, and many other objects was ahead. Though the museum held some of the most beautiful and most celebrated paintings in the world, it was these wings that had always fascinated Clay. Paintings were only that. Art, yes, and some of it breathtaking. But the objects that people held in their hands and lived with thousands of years ago

… those were memories.

The European collection was ahead. Signs announced an exhibit called Life in the Middle Ages. The skull would be there, kept behind glass so that spectators could view the oddity that was the Eye of Eogain, the silver false orb with ancient words scrawled in the metal.

An artifact. Nothing more than that, or so the curators thought.

Clay reveled in the form of the falcon, in the interplay of air and wings, in the feeling of flight. He zipped lower across a vast hall, through another arch, and then dipped his right wing to turn again.

Around that corner, none of the dead were still walking.

Eve marched toward him across a floor strewn with fallen cadavers and the still-twitching parts of the resurrected. She had cleared herself a path, but now she was retracing her steps.

"This doesn't bode well," Dr. Graves whispered, his words reaching Clay as though the ghost had whispered in his ear.

Clay beat his wings, stretched out his talons, and even as he alighted upon the tiled floor he transformed once more. Any reticence he had to do so in front of his comrades was gone, sacrificed to the needs of the moment. Bones creaked and shifted and his flesh undulated and pulsed as it expanded. It happened with such speed that Eve took a step back and brandished her sword toward him.

"Watch where you point that thing," Clay said.

Eve rolled her eyes and lowered the blade. Her gaze lingered on Clay a moment, even as Dr. Graves' ectoplasmic form coalesced alongside them.

"What happened, Eve?" Graves asked. "You couldn't find it?"

She snarled, baring her fangs at the specter. "I found where it's supposed to be, Casper. They got there first. These fuckers are brainless. Morrigan's got to be controlling one of them directly enough to make it her puppet. One of the dead took Eogain's skull, and the Eye along with it."

"Damn it!" Clay snapped. "We've got to get it back! We've got to find the one that took it!"

At this, Dr. Graves raised an eyebrow. Eve stared at him in disbelief.

"Look around, Clay," the vampire said, gesturing toward either end of the hall, where the dead had begun to gather again, staggering toward them. There were dozens, just in this hall alone. There must have been hundreds in the museum and in the streets around it. "How are you going to figure out which one took the Eye?"

"Split up," Clay said, already moving away from them. "You find the one that moves with purpose, the one that's moving away faster and more directly than the others, you'll find the Eye."

"Where are you going?" Dr. Graves demanded.

Clay gave them one final, grim look. "There might be another way."