he drawled. “That’s all. I got a patch and everything.”
“Well, the idea is to stop them before they get the zombie horde rolling,” I said.
“Aw,” he said, disappointed, “that ain’t half as much fun.”
“Dammit, Bill.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “We’ll get it done.”
“River,” I said.
The Sasquatch nodded. “Can’t stand necromancers. Make the earth scream.”
“We gotta move fast.” I nodded at Ramirez and winced. “Sorry about this, man.”
Carlos looked from me to the Bigfoot. He was having enough trouble keeping up that he spoke in a gasp. “Dammit. Do it.”
“Give him a hand?” I asked River.
The Sasquatch promptly scooped Ramirez up. He could carry the man sitting on his palm under one arm with no more effort than a farmwife toting a basket of eggs.
The raven on my shoulder squawked and took off into the night air.
“All right, Toot,” I said. “Show me.”
* * *
* * *
Graceland is, in many ways, Chicago’s memory. The graves there mark the resting places of titans of industry, holy men, gangsters, politicians, near saints, and madmen and murderers. Tales of tragedy, of vast hubris, of bitter greed and steadfast love, are represented in the markers that stand over the graves of thousands. Statuary, mausoleums, even a small replica of an ancient Greek temple stand in stately silence over the lush green grass.
And yet the walls around the cemetery are there for a reason. The shades of many of those folk walk the graveyard at night and are the source of thousands of whispered tales that make skin creep and flesh crawl.
I’d been one of them once. I had a grave waiting for me in Graceland, kept open by force of whatever contract a deceased foe had prepared for me.
There was no time to go around to the gates. We went over the wall of rough stone behind a large mausoleum and gathered in the sheltering darkness behind it. Toot descended to the ground, something I’d seen him do only occasionally, and the aura of light around him dimmed and went out.
“This way, my lord!” Toot rasped in a low, dramatic tone. “They are near Inez’s statue.”
I grunted. The statue was a local legend. It went missing from time to time, and it came back just as mysteriously. There were often sightings of a little girl in Victorian dress skipping among the headstones when the statue was gone. And I knew it had once been used as a conduit by Queen Mab, when her physical form had been busy keeping mine alive, just as the spirit of Demonreach had inhabited a statue of Death that dwelt not far away.
Graceland is the repository of Chicago’s greatest dreams and darkest nightmares. There is a power there, dark and potent—and I could feel it stirring and swirling in the air, like oil being heated over a fire and becoming steadily more liquid, quicker to move, to shape. The sound of the drum continued, a stalwart tempo. It would do a lot to mask the sounds of our approach, especially if we stepped in time to the beat.
I dropped low and followed Toot into the darkness among the tombstones. I knew the place well enough to get around generally. Toot led me to a position a little uphill from Inez’s spot, and I stepped on one headstone to belly crawl up onto a mausoleum and peer ahead.
Spread in a circle near Inez’s grave were seven cloaked figures, speaking in whispering voices in a breathy chant. One of them held a large drum on a shoulder strap and steadily struck it with a thick-headed drumstick in one hand. From there, I could sense the power of the circle around them, but they were making an effort to work magical forces without any sloppy inefficiencies of energy transfer, which generally manifested themselves as visible light. This was a stealthy working.
There was a lump on the ground in the center of the circle. I couldn’t see who it was, but it was human-shaped, if you allowed for some ropes for immobility. A human sacrifice, doubtless, for the ceremony’s finale. It remained the single most effective way to turbocharge black magic.
Hell’s bells. Seven necromancers could wreck Chicago all by themselves. Four of them nearly had done it, once. Five, if you counted me, which I didn’t, even though my entry in that evening’s animation festival had taken best in show. I could feel the intensity of the working they had underway. I didn’t know who they were, but they were pros. If they were allowed