“I’ve been working as Gabby’s chambermaid, and Nicoli serves as one of her guards,” Helena said. “She never suspected us, because she thought we were loyal to her.”
“Indeed,” Nicoli added. “Our loyalties have always lied with thetrueking and queen, your highness.”
He bowed his head to me. I didn’t realize that Helena and Nicoli had been Finlay’s spies inside the palace. They were both very brave.
Emma didn’t bother with pleasantries; she had no time for them. “Do you guys know where she’s keeping—”
“The Crystals of Harmony?” Nicoli asked. “Yeah, we know about them. Droga never stops bragging that he has them. They’re in the school armory.”
That was on the top level of the school. “Can you take us there, and guide us around Gabby’s guards?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” Nicoli began, but as he spoke, an ungodly wail began emitting from the corpses around us. Sheer horror twisted my soul as I watched the bodies around us start tomove.
The soldiers that had died from Emma’s spell staggered to their feet. The corpses moaned as they slowly reached out to pick up their swords. They dragged the blades on the ground as they marched toward us, the whites of their soulless eyes showing.
Andrick’s headless corpse got to its feet. It ambled around the courtyard until he found his head, which he carried in one arm. He grabbed his sword with his free hand, advancing on Stefan with a grim smile.
Zander’s organs flopped out of the slit in his belly as he stood on bloody hooves. Even so, he ambled toward us with his head down and horn pointed, though there was clearly no light in his eyes.
These corpsesmoved, and yet, they weren’t alive. They were nothing but mindless flesh bags designed to kill.
“What is this dark magic?” Professor Victor yelped as we were pressed against the wall.
“Fight back!” Emma shouted. Spells and blades whizzed through the air. I cast an Unseelie battle orb, which created a giant hole in the torso of the soldier in front of me, but it did nothing to slow him up. I was forced to put my sword up to block him, dueling hand-to-hand combat with a corpse.
The others were in similar positions, and no spell or blade managed to stop the dead from marching onward. Even as Stefan hacked Andrick’s corpse to bits, it continued to move, limbs dragging along the ground as the dismembered head moaned. The dead began running toward us as fast as they could, on two legs and four, charging forward and intent on the kill.
Emma gave a violent cry. She cast her hand out, extending a wave of Unseelie magic over the enemy. Purple energy ricocheted through the air, and once her magic hit the bodies, each of them turned to tiny fragments that fluttered into the air like paper. The courtyard was soon full of the hovering ashes, which coated the air like floating confetti.
I thought it was over, then, but far from it. Dread comparable to the Underworld itself infected my bones as green, ghostly figures began to form around the courtyard. I recognized the souls of Andrick and Zander standing amongst the bodies of the soldiers that we’d just incincerated. Turned from moving corpses to ghosts, each specter unleashed a sword from his side and bore down on us with eerie cries.
“They can’t be killed!” Alexei screamed.
He was right. I swung my sword through one such ghost, and it did nothing but go through thin air. When the ghost swept out its weapon at me, it cut into my arm, drawing blood. I narrowly avoided having my head sliced off by a ghost as I ducked out of the way. Emma put up a shield, and they floated right on through it.
Not even Emma’s magic could take them. There was nothing we could do to stop the walking dead. They could hurt us, but we couldn’t hurt them. They wouldn’t stop until all of us had joined them from beyond the grave.
“The rest of you must keep going!” Professor Lunesta cried, and she summoned a spell to her hand as she faced the ghost army. “We’ll hold them off!”
Victor, Helena, and Nicoli rushed to help her, while the rest of us took off into the palace. We had no idea what was going on, and that aspect was made only more terrifying as I glanced back and watched Lunesta battle an army of ghosts.
The door shut behind us, and we hurried down the hall. We only stopped to catch a breath when we reached an abandoned corridor that was completely vacant of anyone.
“What the hell was that?” Emma rasped. Each of us was gasping to fill our lungs.
“Gabby’s using the Crystals to create an army of the dead,” Kiara said.
“Can she do that?” Stefan asked skeptically, even though we’d all seen it with our own eyes.
Emma shook her head frantically. “That can’t be right. When he was first resurrected, Gabby asked Droga to bring Elijah back to her. And he said hecouldn’t, because that ability was only given to the goddesses of creation— one of them being Milonna. He specifically couldn’t override her power, even being the god of death.”
“He didn’t have the power to override all the other gods and resurrect anyone until he had theCrystals,” Kiara pointed out. “But now he has all six, and the stones include Milonna’s power. Because they do, he can use the stones to create a dead army to fight for him.”
“And doing so won’t drain the energy of the Crystals, because they’re gods, not mortals,” Theo said fearfully. “They can utilize the power of the stones to their full effect without worrying about rendering them useless, because as gods, they’re able to effectively channel the magic of the Crystals without losing any of it.”
“They’re not eventrulyresurrected. They’re just mindless walking corpses and ghosts to fight for him,” Alexei muttered. “Ones that we can’t defeat.”
A shudder rattled up my spine. Every soldier we killed was just more fodder for Droga’s army. They wouldn’t stop fighting for him, dead or alive.
