scrounge up. I had brought my bow, Serafina, and my sword, Brighid’s Flame. I was proficient with both, but right now I wished that we could just raze the creatures down with a spray of bullets. I didn’t like guns, but they had their uses, and facing off against a mass of undead who were out to eat our flesh was unsettling at best. Even more nerve-wracking was the thought that this wasn’t an isolated incident. This was happening all over the country.
Angel had brought her training bow and some arrows. She wasn’t that good of a shot yet, but she and Rafé were practicing every week with Herne, and both were coming along nicely. She had also brought the crystal shard that Marilee had given her a few weeks back, which allowed her to regroup faster, and to strengthen the energy she was utilizing.
“Are you scared?” she asked. The Worchester District was slammed with ghosts already. This just made it more frightening.
“Am I scared? Yes. I’d be a fool not to be, but I’m more scared of the vulnerable people who are going to be caught unprepared. If these things get into the general population, well—we can pick them off one by one, but that doesn’t ensure we can do so fast enough to keep anybody else from dying.” I glanced sideways at her. “You scared?”
I didn’t have to ask. I knew she was terrified. Angel had been in very few actual fights. But she was doing her best, learning to fight, learning to strengthen her basic abilities. And to me, that was an important step. But not everyone could—or would—take that step. Single mothers didn’t have the luxury of time required to learn self-defense, and the elderly didn’t have the strength. And then there were the kids who simply couldn’t mount their own defense.
“What are you thinking about?” Angel asked.
“All the potential victims out there who can’t fight off the monsters under the bed. If this situation gets out of control, cops won’t be the only ones dying.”
“I know,” Angel said. “Truth is, I’m terrified. I think about DJ. He’s down in the Centralia–Chehalis area, but this is happening everywhere and it’s bound to hit there, too. And DJ’s not going to sit around while people are in danger. I just wish he was in the academy now, instead of at home. They’d make sure he stayed there.”
DJ was Angel’s half-brother. He was twelve and a genius. Scheduled to enter the Rainier Forest Academy for the Gifted come the fall semester, DJ was getting close to puberty, when his full Wulfine nature would blossom. Which was one reason he was fostering with a family of wolf shifters.
DJ’s father had been a lowlife wolf shifter who abandoned Mama J.—Angel and DJ’s mother—when he found out she was pregnant. DeWayne had come sniffing around recently, trying to find out everything he could about the child he had abandoned. Angel surmised that he was looking to see if there had been any inheritance when Mama J. was killed. She had managed to put him off, but I had the feeling we hadn’t seen the last of him yet.
“You think he’d do something stupid? DJ’s a smart boy. He’s got to realize he wouldn’t be able to fight them.”
“Maybe, but he’s reaching the stage in a wolf shifter’s life—especially a male—that they really go all into the protect-the-pack mindset. Cooper was telling me about it.” Cooper was DJ’s foster father. “We’ve started having monthly meetings over Zone to discuss DJ and his life and future.” As we jogged along, she pointed to the right, up ahead. “Is that the graveyard?”
I squinted. Sure enough, there was a turnoff into what I had thought was a wide, grassy meadow, but as we neared the entrance, I could see the headstones and the line of cops at the fence. They were shouting and pointing. I tried to get a glimpse of what they were pointing at, but we were still out of the sight line. At that moment, I saw Herne ahead of me, talking to one of the officers. We switched directions and headed over to where they were standing. Yutani and Viktor were beside him.
I went up to Viktor. “Where’s Talia?”
He nodded at a parked car on the street. “There. We told her to stay in the car and keep tabs of everything via her laptop. She’s also our main dispatcher. In other words, if you don’t know where one of us is,