dropped the stick of dynamite, the fuse exploded in a shower of brilliant sparks.
“Ten seconds of fuse!” Emily yelled, kicking the dynamite against the timber brace that framed the mine’s opening. Then she dove under the board sluice, clasping her hands over her head. Stanton, however, remained at the mine opening, apparently determined to keep the corpses at bay.
“Get clear!” she screamed at him.
At that very moment, Stanton threw down the branch and gave an exceptional leap—a leap given far greater distance by the energy from the flash and roar of the explosion at his heels.
After the roar subsided and the last chunks of muddy rock and splintered timber had clattered to still silence on the ground around her, Emily rolled out from under the board sluice.
The mine entrance was gone, replaced by a sundered wreckage of tumbled rock and twisted trees. Emily listened for the sound of the undead shrieks, but all she heard was her own breathing, heavy and irregular.
“Mr. Stanton, are you alive?” she called.
Her answer was a groan from a clump of blackberries a good fifteen feet distant from where the mine entrance had once been.
“Showing off like that, you deserved to get blown to kingdom come.” She scraped heavy handfuls of red-clay mud from the back of her skirt as she spoke.
“I’m fine, thank you for inquiring.” Stanton straightened unsteadily. “And yes, I did do quite a fine job of keeping the undead from escaping before the dynamite blew. Thank you for mentioning that, too.”
Emily leaned against the rough wood of the board sluice as he limped up beside her. One side of his hair stood up like an exclamation point, and his broad forehead was streaked with soot.
“How are my eyes?” she asked. He squinted at her face in the moonlight.
“Still black,” he said. “And your hand?”
“Still got a rock in it.” Emily lifted her hand with fingers spread, then flexed them experimentally. It didn’t hurt, precisely; her fingers felt clumsy and stiff, but her hand felt warm. She held the stone up to the moonlight; it glowed clear through. She could see no bones, no muscles, no tendons …
She closed her hand over the stone. “So, you’re the great Warlock. Explain what this is.”
Stanton rubbed the back of his head.
“Well,” he averred finally, “I’d hate to jump to any hasty conclusions.”
“Mr. Hart said that the zombies were afraid of it.” Emily said. “They were trying to rebury it and he got in the way.”
“Horrible,” Stanton said.
“Will it hurt me, do you think?” She struggled to keep fear out of her voice.
Stanton shrugged with his customary dismissiveness. “Well, you’re not dead yet,” he said.
Here, she thought, is where I treat this tactless lout to a snappy retort. But suddenly, she didn’t feel like doing much of anything snappy at all. Instead, she looked back over her shoulder toward the mouth of the mine. She thought of the man who would remain buried there forever. She clenched her fist around the stone, as tightly as she could.
“I’m going home,” she said.
CHAPTER THREE
The Rule of Three
By the time Emily got home and was able to get a look at herself in the mirror, her eyes had returned to normal. Her hand … now, that was a different story. Nothing would shift the glimmering blue stone from where it was embedded in her right palm. No amount of distracted fiddling, pressing, or pushing helped in the least. The gem remained firmly and stubbornly imposed.
She and Stanton had parted at the bottom of Moody Ridge. Emily, turning up the path that led to Pap’s cabin, had been more than willing to forgo the niceties of a good night, but Stanton had stopped her.
“Listen, the crate that came for me today is a shipment of periodicals and collected journals. I’ve been waiting for them all winter. I’ll look through them and see if I can find reference to such a singular occurrence.”
Early morning sunlight, pale and peach-colored, peeked through the back windows as Emily went to kindle the stove. While the water was heating, she climbed to the attic loft and changed out of her mud-caked calico dress. She frowned at the stains. They’d never come out. Spoiling her best dress would have seemed an utter tragedy twenty-four hours ago, but now it seemed a pretty trifling thing.
When the water boiled, she made a pot of fresh coffee (clumsily, for she wasn’t used to working with a hand half crippled) and set out some of the cornbread that Mrs.