“And maybe he doesn’t bother!”
“Again, do you have a better idea?”
“Ido,” someone said, and I looked over my shoulder to see Jen with her eyes glowing green.
“Who are you animating?”I asked because the guys in the cages were alive.And the crowd back in the corridor had barely left enough of the dark mages they’d attacked to wet the concrete.Nobody was raising them.
“Not me,” Jen said.“The Black Circle.They’re using zombies as workers.See?”
And I guessed she meant that last word literally.Because a slim hand found my shoulder, burning cold even through the leather.And the next moment—
“Auggghhhh!”
“Shhh!”Jen hissed in my ear.
“Auggghhhh!Auggghhhh!Auggghhhh!”
“Be quiet!You’re going to give us away!”
“I’mgoing to?”I whispered-screeched, right before the finger I was shaking in her face fell off.Thankfully, it wasn’t mine, but that didn’t make me feel much better.Because it was a gross, gray-green that flesh absolutely should never be, and definitely, one hundred percent, not alive.“Shit!”I stared down at the rotting thing on the filthy floor in front of me.“Shit, shit, shit!”
“It’s okay,” Jen soothed, or rather, she tried.But her voice was as horrible as she currently was, gravelly and rough, and it didn’t help.“Your body is fine.Your body is back where it always was.Caleb has you.This is just a kind of far-seeing—”
“Which I didn’t know you could do!It’s not in your papers!”
“Oh, did you finally get around to reading those?”
“Do not.Be sarcastic.With me.Right now!”
“Sorry.And uh, the reports might have left out a few things.We didn’t volunteer a lot of information back at school.The more dangerous they thought we were, the less chance of us getting out.”
“Fine, but you warn me about this shit first!”I hissed back because that was all I could do at the moment.
She and I were somehow inside a couple of the shambling corpses who were pulling people out of cages to load them onto the trucks, all under the watchful eyes of a bunch of well-armed dark mages.They were guarding small openings in the wards that they had made to use as doors, but nobody seemed to have noticed that a couple of their dead workers were acting a little funny.Maybe because they were focused on the people in the pens instead of us.
And some of those looked worthy of attention.The still-closed pens held Weres, as Gerald had said, and they were furious.Half had transformed already, and the rest looked likely to follow at any moment.
They kept charging the wards, trying to break free and getting the crap shocked out of them for their trouble.But the rest, the people we were loading up now, were just magical humans, the kind the dark must hope would show some useful talents after dosing them with whatever brew they’d come up with.Meanwhile, I was seeing all this through a zombie’s eyes, my rotting clothing clinging to my desiccated corpse, and even trying to wrap my head around that was insane!
“Sorry,” Jen said again.“I forgot to mention, I can see through another necromancer’s spell, although I cannot control the bodies.Not unless I fight him for them.But this should allow us to find Jace, if he’s here.”
I fought an instinct, a strong one, to just start screaming.This wasawful.This was…
I didn’t have words for what this was.And I couldn’t even see properly, because a flap of skin was covering one of my eyes.“Why do I only have one eye?”I growled.
Jen’s rotting corpse shrugged.“The other fell out?”
“What?It’s not eventhere?”
I reached up to grab it, and something hissed in my head.“Augghhh!”
“You need to calm down,” she told me sternly.“Or you’re going to ruin this.That was the necro controlling these things.You got his attention for half a sec.”
“Ruinthis?”I whispered because the words didn’t even make sense.
“You’re a war mage!”she snapped.“Act like it!”
“If I acted like a war mage, I would have already attacked everything in sight,” I snapped back.Including the rotting corpse I was currently wearing like a dress.
