patchwork quilt of browns, greens, and blues. In the distance, the castle turrets rose above the trees. The view was breathtaking, but I knew that wasn’t why Jamie’d brought us here.
“Wow,” Kenna said under her breath.
Jamie stepped up beside me. “I was scoutin’ the woods for guards and a place to camp, if tha’ became necessary, and I found . . .” His voice trailed off as he took a tubular object out of his pocket and held it to his eye. He muttered a curse and handed me the small telescope. “Look, just north o’ the brook.”
I focused on what appeared to be a field of tilled earth, but even before I raised the spyglass, I could discern an undulating movement, like worms churning up the soil and figures that looked strangely humanlike, but couldn’t’ve been. Their shape was . . . off. Squinting into the magnifying lens, it took me a moment to find the correct spot. I focused on a patch of ground that churned from underneath, the soil spewing up until a skeletal hand broke the surface, reaching for the sky. “What in the—”
I swung the glass in a slow arc to take in the rest of the field. Skeletons were emerging from the ground. One, half out to his waist, pushed against the dirt with both hands. Another got stuck, snapped off its leg, and then clawed itself the rest of the way out. The creatures who had made it out stood in rows, shoulders slumped, like marionettes without a master. There were rows upon rows of them . . . “Oh no, no, no . . .”
Jamie took the glass from my trembling hands and handed it to Duncan.
“What is it, Vee?” Kenna had slipped her arm through mine and gave me a little squeeze.
I faced my best friend, unable to disguise my panic. “Skeletons . . . zombies . . . I don’t know what they are! Gideon said she would do this, but I didn’t think . . . this is just crazy!”
Kenna released me and marched over to snatch the telescope from Duncan. “Let me see that.” She let out a curse of her own and then said, “Well, I guess that guard made it back to the castle.”
“That’s why I felt her rage last night in my dreams.”
“Aye,” Jamie agreed as he took my hand in his and met my gaze, communicating something I couldn’t quite grasp. “I felt it too.”
“But, how do you think she’s doing this? According to Gideon, she needs souls to raise an undead army. The camp is heavily guarded and the people from the cave are with us. So where did she get the souls?” My words dropped off as the realization slammed into me.
Jamie’s stricken eyes met mine. “She must be usin’ the souls of Doonians who pledged to her. Cannibalizin’ them to raise the skeletons.”
“What an evil witch!” Kenna spat, but she didn’t say witch.
I wholeheartedly agreed, but I had to force myself to think. The skeletons were immobile, but I had a feeling they wouldn’t stay that way. We needed to get everyone back to base camp quickly, then get a closer look at the zombies while they were still inactive.
CHAPTER 30
Mackenna
In rare instances, life was less like Broadway and more like a horror movie, unless you counted Evil Dead the Musical . . . or Carrie. Okay, so maybe the recent trend in scary musicals wasn’t helping my argument, but I would take the worlds of Rodgers and Hammerstein over Romero and Hitchcock any day.
I crouched with Vee in the brush behind the tree line, watching as one of Addie’s skeleton thingies clawed its way up from the field. My heart pounded as the undead pile of bones finally freed itself from the earth like a newborn cicada—minus the baby insect cuteness—and stood unmoving.
When I said as much to Vee, she frowned at me like I’d lost my mind. Considering the freak show in the clearing, maybe I had. “But you hate bugs.”
“Sarcasm, geez!”
“Oh. Sorry.” Her pale face mirrored the nausea I felt. Her brows knit together as she puzzled something out. “I don’t get it.”
She trailed off, and before I could ask her to clarify, a bony hand reached for the sky on the opposite end of the field. “Son of a Sondheim! There’s another one. How many is that?” I tried to do a little mental mathematics counting the skellies, but lost my place and had to start over,