Her eyes met his. No fear. Only steel. “Councilor Shen?”
“Yes?”
“We need to leave. Now.”
Fog clung low across the garden, swirling around toppled hedges and the fractured stone railing where Mr. Hale’s body lay motionless, thickened blood oozing onto the gravel.
Penelope stepped back from the corpse, chest rising and falling in slow, controlled breaths. Mingxi watched her closely, but she wasn’t trembling. She was calculating.
“The Guardian took the maid,” Mingxi said quietly, scanning the darkness. “She’s already past the ward line.”
“Good,” Penelope muttered. “She can warn anyone still on the estate road. We need to—”
A shudder rolled beneath the earth.
Penelope stilled. “That wasn’t the portal,” she said.
“No.” Mingxi’s tails bristled. “It came from inside the manor.”
Penelope didn’t turn back toward the house. She didn’t need to. She knew what it meant.
“Councilor Shen,” she said slowly, “how many bodies are in there?”
“Too many.”
Another tremor.
Chapter 13
Penelope’s jaw tightened. “The magic… it’s waking all of them, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Mingxi said. “Slowly. But once one rises, the others follow.”
Penelope inhaled once, deeply, and then exhaled through her nose. “I refuse to be here for the encore.”
A wet thud sounded from inside the shattered doorway.
Then another.
A series of dragging footsteps… slow at first and then picking up irregular speed.
Penelope didn’t wait to hear the rest.
“Portal. Now.”
They moved—fast—across the blood-soaked lawn. Her skirts soaked through where they brushed the grass, but she didn’t falter. Mingxi took point, senses stretched razor thin.
Behind them, the manor groaned.
Something heavy slammed into the interior wall, rattling broken windows.
A chorus of faint, staggered breaths followed, dozens of them, out of sync, unnervingly wrong.
Penelope quickened her pace.
“How long do they take to fully rise?” she asked.
“It varies,” Mingxi said. “The necromantic spell is not designed for instant reanimation. But once awakened—”
