when he was hit in the shoulder, causing him to drop her in the middle of the street. And then panic and run away, leaving her standing there, screaming—
Until I shifted her into my arms.
I clutched the crying child and stared at the burning street in horror. But also in dawning realization. I didn’t know what this was, but I bet I knew who was behind it.
“Jo!” I yelled at Pritkin, but wasn’t sure he heard.
I barely did. The blast was echoing in my ears like a hundred kettledrums, while he looked like he had on the train, with the cords on his neck standing out and straining, broken blood vessels in his eyes, and his face flushed bright red. Although that may have been the hellish light from the burning building and burning skies and burning street. The whole damned place was burning!
And then, just when I thought things were as bad as they were going to get, one of the pretty blue shapes started to descend, and it was dropping something, too.
I stared up in disbelief as it began spewing forth a crowd of pale bodies. And since it was still three or four stories off the ground, they slammed down on the pavement with meaty-sounding splats, in a jumble of broken limbs, cracked skulls, and ruptured torsos. Where they lay seemingly unfazed.
Probably because they already looked like corpses.
There were huge black lumps on their skin, blood and pus on their faces, and they were naked and filthy and all tangled up, like they’d been in some kind of communal grave. A young woman caught my eye, tinged a sickly greenish hue, as if mold had already started to grow on her body. She had a baby clutched to her breast, and looked like a Madonna from a funerary monument, beautiful and marble-cold. I stared at her, at the fall of matted dark hair, at the sweet face that couldn’t have been more than sixteen, at the long lashes shading the youthful curve of her cheek—
That suddenly opened, revealing a cavity crawling with maggots.
Pritkin cursed and stumbled back, almost losing his grip on the shield, as the whole pile started moving. The dead baby mewled and tried to suck; limbs writhed like pale snakes, attempting to detangle, and the corpse of a dog began silently barking. It was beyond horrible—
But not dangerous—except to my sanity.
“She’s trying to scare us!” I yelled at Pritkin, because the street was suddenly filled with screams, ones I could barely hear because the sound of the explosion was still echoing in my ears. “No necromancer can animate more than two or three zombies at a time! I don’t care how powerful she is!”
“Then explain that!” he said, as a dozen of the creatures leapt for us all at once, clawing and biting and digging at the shields he’d just pulled tighter around us.
“Fuck!”
I stumbled back, despite the fact that they couldn’t reach me, then shifted them into another group leaping for some of the shoppers. And I do mean into. I didn’t mean to do it, but I was freaking out and hurrying, and there were a lot of them, and—
And that, I thought, doubled over in pain from multiple shifts in close succession, yet still staring. At what looked like a human rat king, with the bodies of one group spearing those of the other, in a huge, meaty mess that had the shoppers retching and slipping on decomposing entrails, even while the bloody, filthy mass of limbs kept on squirming and reaching out, trying to drag them down—
“Jo!” I screamed, staring at the skies. “You want me? Come after me!”
But there was no answer. Unless you counted the other two blue diamonds suddenly starting to descend. And that was while bodies were still spilling from the first, and now jumping for people in midair.
Pritkin stared at them, but there was nothing he could do without dropping his shield, and people continued to stream out of the massive apothecary. Strange as it seemed, all of this had happened in maybe a minute or two, with no opportunity for those on the upper levels to even reach the street. So I did the only thing I could think of, and threw a bubble of slow time over the surface of the nearest blue hell.
But while it didn’t stop the flow of bodies, it did slow them way, way down, leaving something that looked like a modern sculpture hanging in the air as they