Clouds dripped from the sky, seeping down to the sodden earth below, long gray streaks of fog and rain. Dark fog billowed over hills of tombstones, melting with the sky. Fog pooled at his feet, spilled into the open grave. Fog and rain and earth, black and gray and white, the whole world a blot of ink on paper.
Fog curled. And it was no longer just black and white and gray.
Red seeped through.
Red from rain. Red from rain and blood.
A lot of blood.
Blood from the black-clothed bodies strewn about him, their faces twisted in horror. Blood from the sky, raindrops thick and congealing like scenes from Revelations. Blood that soaked into his clothes, stained his skin. And when he turned toward the open grave, he realized he wasn’t the only one amid the massacre.
The Dark Lady knelt beside him, staring down into the grave. Fire burned in her chest, glinting off her golden hair. Her black dress was slicked with rain, but she didn’t shiver. Like him, she didn’t mind the cold. Not with Fire burning the chill away, making rain sizzle and steam.
She stared down at the black casket, and it was then he saw the shard of crystal she held in one hand. Black as night, curled with pewter and engraved in countless silver symbols that writhed and whispered under her touch. It spoke through his mind, calling like a void, a broken sun he couldn’t escape, snaring his chest and pulling him closer to the heart of all darkness. Aidan broke his gaze away. Realized the Dark Lady was whispering something he could barely make out over the thrum of rain, the hiss of steam, the splashes of water in blood.
He stepped forward gingerly, his feet slurping in the blood and mud, until he was right beside the grave. Smoke curled from the casket lid, where the wood had been burned away, the edges glowing red and orange with embers. The corpse within, however, was untouched.
The man’s hair was light brown and short, his eyes closed and hands clasped across his chest. He looked like he was in his late forties. But Aidan knew that face, as well. Calum. Looking so much younger here than in life.
“You have fulfilled your end of the bargain,” she whispered to Calum’s corpse. “And now, I shall fulfill mine.”
She opened to Air then, and reached a hand into the grave. Calum floated up from his coffin, his limbs dangling limp like a rag doll. She followed him with her hand, bringing him to hover a few feet from the grave’s lip before rotating him to standing. Another curl of her hand, and the suit he wore snapped open, his dress shirt slicing down the middle to reveal lightly tanned flesh. And the countless tattoos that snaked over his body. She smiled at them. Admired her handiwork.
Calum floated closer to her, until she could reach out and touch his dead skin. She did so, trailing a finger over the runes. They curled under her touch, shivering and twisting like insects, like serpents. He heard them hiss in his brain. Their words. Her words. Whispers of power, of eternity, of nothingness. Of return.
“Death is but a doorway,” she said. “And through that void, that which is fallen may rise again.”
She pressed the black crystal to his chest, right in the center of that dark circle. Fire flared in her chest as she twined its magic through her fingertips. Into the shard.
The crystal burned white hot, silvered runes turning black, shadows burned into Aidan’s mind. The runes snaked down the crystal, melted against Calum’s flesh and spread across his skin, inking themselves beside their brethren, completing phrases that howled in the echoes within Aidan’s ears. Calum shook with power. Arcs of energy lashed around him, red and black, shadow and light, all snapping out and back toward the shard in the Dark Lady’s hands.
That’s when Aidan realized that the crystal wasn’t exuding energy—it was stealing it.
He squinted. Calum’s Sphere of Fire still smoldered in his chest. Impossible. The Spheres died when the body died. So how was it still active? How was it being drained, when at death it should have just...winked out?
The runes.
Truth shattered through his mind. The runes inked into Calum’s skin had kept his Sphere of Fire going even in death. And now, the Dark Lady was draining its final energy. Inverting it.
Turning Calum’s corpse into a Howl.
It should have been impossible. Howls could only be born of living hosts. If they could be brought back from the dead...
Aidan felt it in his own chest. The moment when Calum’s Sphere tipped over. The moment Fire stopped exuding power. There was a stutter. A skipped heartbeat. An ache of recognition as the crystal pressed to Calum’s chest pulled out the very last shred of energy Fire could create. And kept going.
The pause.
The pain.
And then the transformation.
Aidan had never seen a necromancer turn a human into a Howl up close. Only on television, in the aftermath of the Resurrection, when every single station showed the woman before him turning a man into a kraven.
This was worse.
Life leached from the man, his skin freezing in a second as all heat drained from him. Ice shattered over his flesh, turned him white-blue, while deep within, his Sphere turned black. Red swirls of light inverted to shadow, the spiral and swirl switching directions. Even as the shard of crystal burned white-hot and curled with flame, the air around them froze. Rain shattered to ice and snow. Bloody puddles crackled purple and crimson as shards struck from them like lances. The Dark Lady’s breath came out in a cloud, and even Aidan—in the grips of the vision—felt his skin freeze, felt the heat rip from his chest. Felt his own heart scream in pain.
Then the ice on Calum’s body shattered, his entire body convulsing, a cloud of crystalline white falling from him like dust.
He fell to the ground. Collapsed to his knees.
But he didn’t fall forward.
Instead, he looked up. His movements shaky. His pale eyes rimed red. The moment his eyes locked on the Dark Lady, he smiled.
“It worked,” he whispered.
She nodded as she lowered the stone. It still burned red in her grip, sizzling in the rivulets of rain that ran down her snow-flecked skin. She didn’t seem to mind.
Calum looked around. At the empty grave. At the bodies scattered about like dominoes, offerings to his resurrection, black and white and bloody. He pushed himself to standing.
“They...they are my family,” he said. Was Aidan imagining the tilt in his voice? The tinge of doubt? Of anger?
“Were,” the Dark Lady corrected him. “They ceased to be your kin when you turned to me. Consider them offerings to us. To our reign. To your true family. They will not be the last.”
“As you say.” His face cracked back into a smile. It seemed forced. “In their blood, we will rule.”
“Indeed we shall.” She pressed the shard to Calum’s chest. He held it like a child, fierce and protective. “Behold, your scepter. And soon, you shall have your throne and crown. I will give you Scotland. There, you will spread my truths. There, you will help me rule.”
The Dark Lady looked over then, as though she heard a voice in the distance. But her eyes weren’t turned to the horizon. They bore straight into Aidan’s heart.
“And you, my Hunter, you will help me rule again.”