Page 2 of Death Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

“Dead,” she whispered. “It’s dead, and it’s walking.”

Then she bolted, disappearing into the tide of bodies.

My pulse tripped. I took one step, then another, moving against the flow. It felt like trying to run upstream in a river, except the river was made of screaming neighbors and elbows.

Someone knocked into me hard enough that my robe slipped open at the collar. I didn’t care. I tucked my phone tighter in my hand and kept going, weaving through people, dodging a stroller someone had abandoned on the curb.

A siren wailed in the distance. Not close enough to help. Not fast enough to matter.

The farther I went, the less noise there was. The crowd thinned, as if panic had a boundary it didn’t want to cross.

Then I saw why.

A figure staggered in the middle of the street under the dying streetlamp. At first glance, it looked like a drunk, swaying, arms hanging loose. A man, maybe. Tall enough. Wearing a jacket that hung wrong.

Then it lifted its head.

And my breath caught.

The face was gray. Not sick gray. Not tired gray. Gray like candle wax. The skin around the mouth had split at one corner, and dark, sticky blood had dried down the chin in uneven stripes. One eye was half-collapsed, the lid sagging. The other stared straight ahead, milky and empty.

Its movements were jerky, like someone had tied strings to its joints and didn’t know how to work them.

A zombie.

I’d seen one before, but still, they brought a chill to my bones.

Stories never got the smell right.

Rot had weight. It filled the air. It crawled into your mouth and sat on your tongue like a dare.

The zombie turned, slow and wrong, toward a man crouched on the sidewalk with his hands over his head. The man’s shoulders shook. He was crying. He either hadn’t seen it yet, or he had, and his body had chosen denial as a coping strategy.

I did not have time for denial.

I took a step forward, then another.

The zombie lurched.

The man looked up.

He screamed.

The sound sliced through everything else. It wasn’t just fear. It was the primal understanding that you were about to become something you couldn’t come back from.

I lifted my hand without thinking, fingers spreading. Light flared in my palm, pale and concentrated. Not the kind of magic that killed. The kind that shoved.

“Back off,” I hissed.

Power snapped out of me like a whip, invisible force slamming into the corpse’s chest. It staggered, but it didn’t fall. Its head rolled to the side, neck cracking, and it righted itself with a wet pop.

Okay. That was new.

I swallowed hard and forced myself to focus.

I expected to feel a signature, some kind of residual spellwork. Necromancy left traces. Like smoke in the air, like cold fingerprints on the bones of the world.

Instead, I felt… nothing.