Mice and shrews and robins and worms and myriad other small creatures that lived in city greens all squeaked and charged toward me, dropping tiny body parts and dragging tiny guts along with them. Tears leaked down my cheeks, and my chest filled up, like all the dead cells in my body were coming back to life and trying to suffocate me. Angry gods I could handle. Murderous banshees were fine. The living dead, it seemed, even in comparatively cute and harmless forms, were not my thing. I was going to be eaten alive by rodents of usual size, and the best I could do was sob and gibber about it.

Right beside me, I heard the distinctive double-click of a shotgun cocking. I didn’t think that was fair. Zombies, particularly rat zombies, shouldn’t be able to use shotguns. A blast of rock salt, even at short range, probably wouldn’t kill me, but it would hurt like hell, and make lots of little holes for the zombies to start nibbling at. I wailed and wrapped my arms around my head more tightly. I’d dropped my sword and didn’t even know when.

A huge blast of rock salt peppered the ground in front of me, tinging off my sword and breaking some of the tinier rodent zombies into bits. Suzanne Quinley said, “Get up,” and cocked the shotgun again. “Get up, or next time I shoot you so I have time to run.”

I peeked up through my arms to see her standing above me like a pale god, shotgun riding on one hip and her hair flying in the wind. Her gaze was implacably calm, not at all like a fourteen-year-old girl’s. She was playing the role of grown-up because the actual adult in this scenario was blubbering like a baby. I had never in my whole life been so grateful for somebody else to have her shit together.

Suzy said, “Get up,” one more time.

Stomach in knots, hands trembling, I reached for my sword and got up.

Suzy gave me a severe nod, then lifted the shotgun to indicate Daniel Doherty. “What do we do about him?”

“Let him get eaten.” I didn’t mean it, and being snarky didn’t make my hands any steadier. “We rescue him.”

“You’re the boss.” Suzy let fly another blast of rock salt, and the air cleared of small flying undead things. I watched them fall to the ground, and wondered why my feet weren’t moving. Suzy crashed her hip into mine. “Move. Move!”

“I’m trying. I really am.” A tiny panicked sliver of silver-blue magic shot down my legs, looking for roots growing up from dead trees and binding me to the earth. There weren’t any. It was good old-fashioned panic holding me in place. “Maybe you better go ahead.”

“All I do is see the future!” Suzanne Quinley, who had to weigh at least thirty-five pounds less than I did, grabbed my sweater in one fist and hauled me a step forward. “You’re the one with the save-the-world magic! You’re the one who kicks everybody’s ass! I didn’t come all the way from Olympia to get eaten by bugs! Come on! Save me!”

I couldn’t even save myself. I had no idea how I was supposed to save her. All I had was a sword that wouldn’t kill zombies and magic that fed the undead until they took corporeal form.

All of a sudden I wondered what happened if you infused a killing weapon with life magic.

Smacking Cernunnos with a bolt of blue magic had made it very clear that my power was not meant to be a straight-out weapon. I’d nearly passed out, and that was from just one hit. I had no doubt that sustained blasts would drain my magic and leave me for the worms. Warrior’s path or not, there seemed to be things a shaman just didn’t get to do. But pouring healing power into a weapon, now that was tricksy, and all the gods and creatures of chaos liked trickery. Besides, I was facing the undead. If there was a modicum of fairness in the world, it would agree that going up against hordes of zombie beasties who were trying to eat me wasn’t at all in the same class as fighting a god who hadn’t done anything worse than attack without provocation.

Juxtaposing those two things made it really clear, once more, how humans tended to think choices were between one good thing and one bad thing. In fact, choices could just pile up on the side of suck without any kind of apology for it. Another zombie rat ran at my foot, and all my frustration and disgust exploded in a thin blue line down the length of my rapier. I stabbed downward with a shout and skewered the nasty little thing.

It exploded.

Bits of blue-white-lit flesh erupted everywhere, like a tiny box of fireworks had gone off at our feet. I yelled. Suzanne yelled. Doherty yelled. The attacking hordes of zombie critters didn’t yell, but they did stop their headlong rush and looked around, my sword’s light glowing in their undead eyes. My yell turned into a triumphant shout and I leaped forward, convinced I could scare off our attackers with a show of strength.

Sadly, zombies are not well known for their brilliance, and me and my glowy stick made a nice bright target for them. I swatted at flying things and stabbed at crawling things in what could kindly be called a panicked flail, while Suzanne blasted the shotgun. We backed up a few steps at a time, pausing so Suzy could reload, and we didn’t make it anywhere near the gates before the first human zombies crawled out of their graves.

I was not a horror-film buff. The thing about horror films, see, is that they’re scary. Scary, or gross, and I didn’t much like either of those things. Despite this, I’d grown up in America, and apparently there was a cinematic image of zombies lurching from their graves that was part of the überconsciousness, because in many ways, I’d seen the scene unfolding before me a dozen times before. Slow-moving cadavers in various stages of decay, their skin peeling back, their teeth exposed, their fingernails too long, their hair falling out, all oozed from the earth—it was more of an ooze than an erupt, since eruption connoted speed—and latched on to us with their rotting eyeballs and began slogging toward us in such stereotypical fashion that I actually glanced around for a camera crew and the pretty heroine who was about to get eaten.

Two things caught up with me at once: first, Suzy, Doherty and I were playing the part of the about-to-be-eaten leads, and second, that zombie movies simply could not in any way get across the smell that preceded our encroaching dance partners. Rotted meat and formaldehyde swept toward us on the cool night air, so ripe that tears burned my eyes. Doherty and Suzy both doubled over, retching, but I held sickness behind my teeth through one part willpower and one part practice from four months of homicide investigation. I whispered, “Get behind me,” and tried not to think about climbing into Petite with vomit on my shoes.

The other thing zombie movies didn’t get right was how dirty they were. Filthy, and not just with rot, but with ordinary mud and grit. I’d never tried digging my way through six feet of packed earth, but I could see it wasn’t a tidy endeavor. The very newest corpses looked as if they’d been in a mud fight, nothing worse, but the oldest were little more than black stickiness clinging to disintegrating bone.

Morbid curiosity made me look again, this time with the Sight, and I wished I hadn’t. There’d been something seductive in the dark, deathless—or deathly, I guess—quality of the cauldron. It’d offered a comforting cessation of everything, wrapping around to draw you into a silence that would never end.

Zombies were what happened to the bodies when it ended. Memories flickered around them like the auras they’d once had, but too far out of reach: fireflies teasing at the corners of their undead vision. Like reached for like, scattered memories reaching for the thoughts and recollections that living humans carried with them. That was what drove empty bodies: their hunger, not for flesh, but for all the moments and details and tribulations that made up a life.