The Culling Trials 3 (Shadowspell Academy #3)(10)

I couldn’t stop the shaking, couldn’t stop the tears as they bubbled up. The others were all talking at once—I could hear them in the background discussing what to do, how to get out of here. How to escape.

And all I could think about was Rory.

The way I’d talked to him. My last words to him had been spoken in anger, pushing him away. A wave of nausea rammed its way up my throat, and I threw up over the edge of the roof, right onto a zombie’s head. It blinked up at me with a bemused look.

Nice shot, Pete said from beside me. But what’s got you all riled up?

“Stop it, just stop it!” Wally yelled and I turned to see Ethan pushing her across the roof, toward the edge.

Ethan kept shoving her. “Do something to help. If you can’t be useful, then you can be the bait this time. You can draw them away.”

Orin just watched.

And the grief in my belly turned to an instant white-hot rage. I would not lose another friend to the army of undead.

I didn’t even recall moving across the space between us, I was just there on Ethan, driving him back, my hand wrapped around his throat the way Tommy’s had been wrapped around mine. I held him out over the edge of the roof, balancing him on the backs of his heels, his face red from the lack of oxygen. “You don’t touch her. You don’t hurt her. Got it?”

“Wild, it wasn’t that bad,” Wally said. “Honestly, this is too far, even for you. Don’t drop him. We need him. We need all of us to get through this.”

Ethan watched me with wide eyes, his entire body leaning out over the grasping, broken, and rotting hands that reached for him.

I swallowed hard and drew him back onto the roof. He fell to his knees and coughed, shaking his head and looking up at me. “What does it matter? You might as well have dropped me there? We aren’t going to make it out of this. None of us are.”

We all stared at him.

“What are you talking about?” Orin said. “You want to die now?”

Ethan shook his head. “Don’t you get it? This isn’t normal.” He swept his hand over the dizzying scene. “This isn’t a test for the Culling Trials. I was trained in all the variations on the challenges, going back generations. This was never mentioned. Never. No, this is meant to kill us. Wally was right about that much. Because even if it was meant for one of us”—he shot a glare at me—“they can’t have witnesses. That’s how this world works and you all know it. You can’t allow witnesses to a death that was an assassination.”

While I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that we would make it out of this too, I truly believed our lives hung in the balance.

I would grieve for Rory later, but right now I needed to figure this out. I had to find a way for us to escape this trial.

Wally’s hand slid down to my palm and she linked her fingers with my good hand. A burst of awareness flooded over me, and I slowly turned, hanging onto her as I looked down at the sea of dead.

Glowing lights lit up inside each and every one of the bodies, throbbing with a deep green pulse that I knew without understanding belonged to the necromancer controlling them. “Do you see that?” I whispered to her.

She tightened her hold on my hand. “The light? Yes, but I don’t know how to stop it.”

I nodded and dragged her to the edge of the roof for a better vantage point. The zombies didn’t look as rotted. The longer I stared at them, the more they looked…alive. “You see them as they were, not as they are.”

Wally blew out a slow breath. “You shouldn’t be able to see them like I do, Wild. There is only one—”

“If we can pinpoint where the light’s coming from, we can stop the necromancer.” I looked at her. Really looked. She was as terrified as I’d ever seen her, and I didn’t think it was just the fact that we were facing death. “Wally, why does this scare you?”

“The same reason Gregory was afraid during his trial, the same reason Pete was afraid in his,” Ethan said. “If she fails her own challenge, her memory will be wiped. She will be cast out of the only world that would have her and her skills.”

Her face paled. “He’s right. I’m terrified to blow this, not just for me but for all of us. The undead here, they are going to make a push to kill us. I can feel it growing. I don’t know why the necromancer is waiting, but he is.”

Out in the graveyard the light pulsed and danced, stronger to what I would guess was the north of us. A steady glow of green curled round a bigger clump of stationary zombies.

I watched that group for a beat, and not one of them took a step in our direction. I pointed. “There. That’s where the necromancer is.”

Wally nodded. “I know, but what good does it do? The odds of me being able to beat a necromancer of this calibre…well, they’re not good.”

“At a loss for stats. Finally,” Ethan grumbled.

I stared out at that green glow and the light that radiated from the individual who had done this to us. “We kill that necromancer, and the dead go back to their graves?”

“Yes, in theory. But we only really need to knock the necromancer out,” she said.

Orin had been quiet until that moment. “And just who is going to run the gauntlet and knock him out? If someone can get to him, they’ll still have to fight the zombies around him, no doubt some of the strongest undead.”