The Culling Trials 3 (Shadowspell Academy #3)(11)

Slowly, they all turned to me.

I closed my eyes, taking stock of my body. My arm throbbed, aching deep to the bone where the zombie had chewed on me, and my fingers still tingled as though there had been some nerve damage. Other than that, my body wasn’t in bad shape. I wasn’t even exhausted. I just felt like my heart had been ripped out of my chest.

Just like when Tommy had died.

It took all my strength to push the grief down, to stuff it to the back of my heart where it wouldn’t interfere with what had to happen. My survival wasn’t the only thing on the line here. The others were depending on me too.

“Ethan, what kind of range do you have with that wand of yours?” When I opened my eyes, he was looking out over the milling mass. A few of the zombies were climbing on top of each other, trying to get to us. Eventually they would. They’d be just like those red army ants on the bird that should have flown away but couldn’t.

There would be no waiting this out. “I’m not sure if I can reach the necromancer,” he said.

“Try,” I said.

He took a few steps and stood on the edge of the roof, held his wand up and then flicked his hand forward.

Hope he doesn’t drop his wand, Pete muttered.

Another time I would have laughed. Another time I would have poked fun at Ethan too. But Wally was right—we needed him, we needed all of us.

A flare of light shot out from Ethan’s wand, lighting up the sky with a tail like a comet. It fell about three quarters of the way to the necromancer.

Laughter boomed all around us, the zombies laughing with their master. Pete snarled, and Orin gave a low growl.

I just nodded. “So we know how far you can help us.”

“Us?” Ethan raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to leave me here by myself?”

I shook my head as I ripped a strip of my shirt off and wrapped it around my arm, pulling the ends with my teeth to tie it off. “No. Pete will stay with you. I’ll take Orin and Wally with me, seeing as this is their house and they have the best chance of surviving.”

Wally stood a little straighter. Orin rolled his eyes. “Vampires are far superior to any necromancer.”

“Right, fine.” I was going into battle mode. We had little chance of winning this game, but I intended to give us a chance. “Ethan, can you blast a space clear on this side so we can jump over?”

“Why not ask Wally to do it? Or can’t she control even one zombie?”

His words seemed to spark something in her. She stepped forward, and I saw in her a tiny spark, a flare of pink light deep in her center.

“I’ll clear the way, Wild.” She looked down on the zombies at our feet, and I watched with fascination as she reached a hand out over them. The pink light in her bubbled up and trickled down her arm to drip off her fingers. Like rain drops.

“We need a thunderstorm, not a sprinkler,” I said.

Her eyes whipped up to mine. “I can’t. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

You should get Orin to throw you guys down there, see how you like being chucked around, Pete said.

I glanced down at him and he stared up at me with a wide honey badger grin.

He wasn’t wrong. There was an opening about twenty feet out from the mausoleum edge.

“I’m going to regret this,” I muttered. “Orin, can you throw me and Wally out there?”

Orin grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”

He took hold of me by my forearms and spun. Like he was going to throw a hammer in the Olympics. My bitten arm did not like his grip, but there was nothing for it, I had to go through with this.

Sweet baby Jesus, this was a bad idea.

I swallowed hard with the first rotation, and then he let me go and I was flying through the air, seeing the dead flash below me, their arms raised like I was at a rave and about to crowd surf. It wasn’t so bad, not really.

That’s the last thought that rolled through me right before I smashed into a grave stone.

Head first.





Chapter 5





My first thought as I came to was that I didn’t have a dog, so how could a dog be pulling on my leg and my hand at the same time?

My second thought was that the dog would need to have two mouths.

My third was much clearer as I remembered my flight via Orin’s throw over the zombies’ heads as they reached for me right before I hit the gravestone. “You did that on purpose, Orin!” I managed to open my eyes just as Wally and Orin landed beside me, her cradled in the curve of one of his arms.

I was dragged backward, a low growl reaching my ears. Maybe it was a dog. The pounding in my head told me just how hard I’d hit that rock.

Gravestone. We were in a graveyard with zombies and a necromancer set on killing us.

“Kill our best chance at survival? I think not,” Orin said. “You are more solid than I realized. I couldn’t throw you as far as I thought. And I carried Wally so as not to break her.”

I lifted my head to see a hunched-over zombie with my foot and boot in its mouth, its clawed fingers digging into the leather sole. I jerked my knee toward me, yanking the zombie closer, then got my foot free and booted the undead thing in the head. It fell onto its back and let out a low groan that sounded suspiciously like “Shiiiiiiiiiiit.”