I PULLED.
And from the earth arose the dead.
They clawed their way out of the ground, their fingers broken stumps by the time they emerged from the red clay. They could not walk; they shambled. Their jaws were slack, their tongues fat and lolling, some eaten away by worms. I turned in circles, and I saw more and more, each of them drawn to me, to my power.
The wards Adelaide had placed on the graves—the iron rings—slowed the decomposition process, but the inevitable could not be put off forever. They were rotting. They were broken.
But they were standing.
And moving closer.
Hundreds—a thousand or more.
More, more, my blood sang.
The skin drooped under their eyes, sagging low, exposing the underside of their dull, red-rimmed eyeballs. Their faces were like melting wax. The one closest to me twitched its lips, spasming over the yellowed, dirt-encrusted teeth and white-pink gums. It made a grunting-moaning sound, nothing at all human or even animal-like, the sound akin to air being forced out of a bellows.
They waited. For my command.
Black, raw energy poured from my crucible. A spiderweb of black crept from my heart, down my shoulder, then spilled over my ghostly arm, forging an obsidian limb that felt more powerful than any muscle of flesh in my weak corporeal body.
“Ned?” Grey’s voice quaked. His fear was primal, based on the living’s anathema to death. The dead were nothing to fear. Flesh and bone were nothing.
Nothing at all next to my rage.
The dead all turned, as one, to face Bennum Wellebourne.
“Nedra,” he called, his voice high-pitched. “You don’t want to do this.”
I licked my lips. “Oh,” I breathed, my voice crackling with power. “But I do.”
I thought of my revenants, my beloved friends, who had been ripped apart, their flesh shredded, their bones splintered, their skulls fractured. My nostrils flared, remembering the sickly sweet and coppery smell of rotting meat that had once been a person. He had done that, I was sure of it now. He needed undead blood to open the box that held the crystal knife, and there had been gallons of it congealing on the black-and-white tiled floor.
It was this image that I pushed into the minds of the thousand dead plague victims. It was this idea.
They descended upon the Emperor’s body with cold, methodical glee.
His screams were quickly drowned out by the sound of flesh being torn from his bones with teeth and hands crooked like claws. My new revenants pulled at his arms and legs until they burst from the sockets. They rended his flesh. They trampled his rib cage, mangling the twisted heart, squishing the soft organs. They dug at his body like a dog digs in the sand, clawing through the gore, blood spattering in arcs through the air.
It was done all too quickly. But it was done.
I breathed out a sigh, tilting my head back up to the darkening sky. “It’s over,” I said aloud.
And then I turned to Grey.
His head was cocked oddly, his eyes alight, a teeth-baring grin spread across his face. “You silly little girl,” Grey said in a voice that wasn’t entirely his own. “You think I can be killed? My soul is immortal. All I need is a body. Any body. And this one will do just fine.”