We all ran to the back of the house to look upon the cemetery down the hill. Emily reached my side and squeezed my hand gently. I wished she hadn’t been involved with this mess, but her spirit calmed me. We turned as the sound of footsteps echoed on the porch behind us.
“So it begins . . . the heroes against the dead, now that love has conquered the curse.” Madam Tully arrived, with her hands lifted toward the sky just as lightning crashed throughout the darkness. Hundreds of torches lit throughout the graveyard, illuminating the small army of corpses that crept up the hill.
Chapter Thirty- Seven
Jude
I knew Rudy had been planning a stunt like this. Half of me expected him to ride on a skeleton horse in front of his army like a dead general. My family—the ghosts who had been trapped at Mallory Mansion—hid behind or within their tombs as the corpses limped toward us like a scene from a zombie movie.
“We can hurt those kinds of dead people, right?” Rose asked with a slight tremor of her lips, and I replied with the only answer I knew.
“We can try.”
Selene’s hand wrapped in mine and squeezed once before letting go. She eyed the army with defiance. It was too early to think about what had happened minutes ago in the cursed room of the gates. Though I sensed the change within me—a cleaned and forged power within my veins—I refused to accept them. Later, when this whole night ended and I woke up in the morning with Selene in my arms would I accept that it was truly over.
“Let’s go kick some dead ass!!” Lilith hooted and was the first to start running to meet the army ahead of us. Her lover, Leon, raced after her with super speed and was the first to punch a corpse back twenty yards.
I didn’t feel back for them, they were dead anyways and chose to escape from the afterlife and follow a blind with hatred ghost. They deserved to be taken back to hell with an ass beating.
Soon everyone had a corpse descend on them with hands outstretched and mouths wide to attack. Some were quick, and some were slow. I snarled as two rotting men tried to grasp my neck, ready to twist, but my power gripped them and ripped them in two.
“They aren’t dying!” someone shouted as I saw the torn pieces of a decomposing man still moving. It wouldn’t be as easy to destroy bodies as it was to release the souls.
“You have to open the gates and take them back. It’s your job to protect mankind from the dead,” Selene called out from my right as she touched a corpse and its soul combusted into a variety of red and golds. It would take a lot of power out of me, but she was right. I had to go back to the gates and use them properly. My fight wasn’t out here with the rest of my friends. It was inside the mansion.
My great-great-grandfather had shared with me his pain of being the one to bring the curse upon the Mallory family. He’d spent his whole afterlife hiding at the dark mausoleum as penance for the sorrow he had brought upon those he cared about. He had told me how to open the gates, and how to close them, something he’d never shared with any of his descendants before me. None of them ever bothered to talk to him, to utter the words he’d been dreaming of for so long. Words about forgiveness. In the end of our talk. He believed I was the true heir of the Hades power. That it may have let each of the Mallory men in the family take a turn but would only yield to me. The crazy thing was I believed him. I left him at the crypt with the hope he’d forgive himself as I had forgiven him, and join us at the mansion, maybe even see his wife who stood watching us all battle against corpses.
“Dorian!” I howled at the demigod, and he flashed toward me while keeping an eye on Esme.
“I need you to take me to a room in my house. You teleport, right? It’s how you got them all here from wherever you were taken hostage?”
The man nodded and grabbed my shoulder. I hadn’t told him exactly where to go, but he knew. The room was empty and remorse flooded through me with the thought of Lucy having been too close to the gates to fight off the draw toward the other side, her soul’s death. But now wasn’t the time. I’d search for her later.
My tendrils of power curved around each golden rod of the gates, twisting and pulling until the gold was no longer seen beyond the black death that covered every inch.
“I am the keeper of the gates, and the master of death. By my right, bestowed upon me by Hades, you will open.” My great-great-grandfather had made me practice the words at least a dozen times before I had left his crypt.
With a creaking shudder, the gates did as they were told. Peace called to me, and somehow, I knew I could go into the sweet heaven that coddled me. But my heaven wasn’t in there, it was above me, fighting the dead beside her friends. Fighting for mankind.
With the gates open, I roared with every strength I had left and released my power through the mansion in search of evil souls that needed to be returned from the hell in which they had come. One by one, my power tangled around a soul and dragged them past the gates. I’d never used my gifts this extensively, and while I was exhausted, I shed my chains, and became free. Like my power had been born for this moment, waiting to be unleashed at this magnitude.
Souls from corpses fighting the Hero Society were ripped from their composing flesh and screamed as they disappeared beyond my sight into the red-and-gold haze behind the gates. When the last of my power returned with a soul of hate and jealousy weaved within its very core, I smiled.
“I’m taking him on, my right as one of his victims, but you can rough him up before I do.” Trixie stood beside a broken Rudy, whose pleading eyes begged for mercy. For once I was glad Selene wasn’t by my side since we had become husband and wife. She didn’t need to see what I intended to do to my old friend. He’d killed innocent women just to fuck with me, and he’d nearly killed me. Threatened our friends and rose an army of the dead to take over the world one city at a time. But most of all, he had tried to take Selene away from me, and I could not forgive him.
“You might wanna close your eyes,” I warned Trixie, but she stood steadfast.
“No, I think I’ll watch.”
Most heroes wouldn’t harm another human. But Rudy was already dead, so technically I couldn’t actually hurt him. However, I could make him feel everything like he was really alive.
Maybe I was more of an anti-hero, with a good conscience capable of being bad if the right justice demanded it. Rudy would be given judgment once he walked past those gates and that would be decided from the stains on his soul. I wouldn’t be the one to deliver that on him. He’d face his maker on his own.
A caw echoed around the room and suddenly Rey landed on my shoulder. He had impeccable timing as usual. He had to have some sort of magic beneath his feathers. Crows never forgot a face, especially a face who had wronged them. Rey loved me. He was here for justice, too.
Rey made the first move, then my power dug into Rudy’s flesh. Rudy’s pain-filled screams fell on ears that relished in his suffering. Two wrongs didn’t make a right, but they did make me feel like I could sleep better after this. Trixie would find peace once she brought him to the afterlife herself.
I’d have the rest of my life attempting to repent for the wrongdoings that occurred in front of the gates.
