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CHAPTER 12

Thirty minutes later we reached the location. The property was in the middle of nowhere and consisted of a couple hundred acres in its own little valley stuck between some heavily wooded hills. It was almost MHI compound-level hidden. Easily secluded enough to be a home for some kind of secretive monster, assuming the gnomes weren’t lying to us and this was just their attempt to have us take out a rival meth cook or something.

The other Hunters were parked in a field off the main road half a mile from the farm. We were the last to arrive. The other vehicles were out of sight and hopefully we weren’t close enough yet to tip off whatever it was that owned the property.

The other Hunters were already gearing up. Mags were being checked, rounds were chambered, and night vision tested. A couple of Hunters had already gone up the hillside to set up sniper positions. Earl—who was by far the stealthiest one among us—had gone ahead to reconnoiter the farm. That left Boone in charge. The Atlanta team lead had a laptop out and was using Google Earth to map the property and give assignments to everybody else. It appeared there was a two-story farmhouse and a big barn, as well as a bunch of smaller sheds and outbuildings.

After an evening being chased by a horrific evil without much in the way of help, it felt really good to be with my team again.

Boone saw me get out of the truck. “I heard you had a rough night, Z. You up to fight?”

“Hell, yeah. This is just a scratch.”

He looked to Doc Sherlock, who wasn’t about to lie to her boss, and raised an eyebrow. Luckily, she covered for me. “It looks like a regular dog bite. He’ll be fine.”

“You sure?” Boone asked.

“How many Vicodin have you taken for your bad back today, Boss?” Sherlock responded.

“Point taken.” Hunters working while messed up wasn’t exactly an oddity. We spent a lot of money on painkillers and energy drinks. “Jump in.”

Holly checked her phone. “Incoming email from Lee. He’s scrounged up what he could about this place. Let’s see what we’ve got . . . ” She started reading. “Okay, for tonight’s location, who had murder-suicide in the pool for what the awful backstory would be?”

“I did,” said Mundy.

“Then Mundy wins it. Albert says thirty years ago the farmer who owned this place went bankrupt, then went insane and stabbed his wife with a pitchfork before hanging himself in the barn.”

“Hey, I had suicide,” declared Gregorius.

“But not murder-suicide. Pay up, suckers,” Mundy crowed. Because, of course, Hunters always placed bets on what the awful backstory would be of the horrible, haunted places we had to visit. I usually put my money on it being the home of a weird cult that had conducted acts of unspeakable evil there, because I’d had really good luck with that one over the years.

Seriously though, not to get all metaphysical or anything, but there’s just something about places with bad energy attracting bad entities. The worse the history, the worse the occupants it drew. Milo always bet on nothing bad ever happened there, it’s just misunderstood—because he was an optimist—but I don’t think he’d ever once won the pool.

Holly continued reading off her phone. “The bank repossessed the farm. The locals considered it cursed, the usual. It lay fallow for decades, rotting and falling apart, and it looks like ten years ago the land was bought by an obvious shell company—Albert can’t track down any actual real people behind it yet. There’re no weird police reports. The number of missing people in this county is about in line with the demographic average for rural America, so it can’t be anything too hungry.” Holly put her phone away. “So what are we thinking moved in here? Vampires? Necromancers?”

Trip said, “If it’s either of those, then Sonya is probably already dead.”

I’d tried to warn her not to run off. “Lack of missing locals indicates it’s not vamps.”

“Unless they get their food delivered,” Gregorius said. “People are always vanishing in Atlanta.”

“I’m hoping for three kobolds standing on each other’s shoulders in a trench coat trying to look big,” said Boone. Then he went into command mode. Whether leading soldiers or Hunters, the man had a lot of practice giving orders. “Time to shelve the guesswork. I hate going in blind, but we work with what we’ve got. Earl’s already snuck up close and has eyes on. It looks like that car Pitt reported as stolen is parked between the barn and the farmhouse. There’s no other vehicles in sight other than some old rusted tractors and junk. I’ve put the Groffs on the hill providing overwatch. Skippy is on standby with the chopper in case we need a medevac. The rest of us will move in nice and quiet, up that field.” Boone pointed at the weed patch that had probably once grown crops. “We get into position and then breach at the same time. My team will hit the house. The Alabama team will take the barn. Once those are cleared, we can search the rest of the smaller structures. Questions?”

“What about Harbinger?” Hertzfeldt asked.

Though that was a perfectly reasonable question—you really don’t want your allies to be in your backstop—Holly and I shared a knowing look. Poor Newbie.

“Don’t worry about Earl.” But then Boone unconsciously glanced up to see how full the moon was, but it wasn’t even close. “Earl will do whatever he wants. You stick with me and don’t worry about him. Anybody else?”

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Milo said. “We don’t know what’s hiding in there.”

“You want to just camp here while that shapeshifter gets eaten?”

Milo shook his head. “I didn’t say that. She’s the daughter of an old friend. We have to try. Just be careful, everybody.”

“Noted. Anybody else?” Boone asked again.

There was nothing. Most of us had done this kind of thing a lot. The Hunters were energized, but it was a casual sort of dangerous. You can be confident in your lethality and simultaneously aware of your mortality without getting all worked up about it.

“Move out.”

* * *

The path we took through the fields had already been scouted by Earl, so there weren’t any booby traps—mundane or magical. The worst thing I bumped into was some stickers that attached themselves to my armor like Velcro. We moved, single file, quick but quiet, everyone scanning side to side with their night vision. Whatever they had grown here before had all been replaced by weeds. The trees around the farm buildings were so ancient and overgrown that even if there had been sentries posted, they wouldn’t have been able to spot us through the leaves and dangling vines.

We all heard Earl whispering in our earpieces. “I’m a hundred yards to the northwest of you lying under the old tractor.” The rusting hulk was so covered in moss that it took me a second to pick it out. “I’ve got no lights or movement. No sign of anyone, including Sonya.”

That was worrisome. Earl should have at least been able to catch her scent. The fact he couldn’t meant she wasn’t actually here, or worse, she was, but whatever lived here had a way of obscuring its presence.

“This is Shannon,” said half of our sniper team on the hillside. “The only thing we have moving on thermal is you guys. The car’s still hot though, so it hasn’t been stopped for long.”

We passed a scarecrow in the field, but it was just a regular old boring scarecrow. Not the “built from dead bodies so it can reanimate and murder you with a hay hook” kind of scarecrow. That was the first thing Earl would have checked. But just in case, Holly poked it with the muzzle of her gun to make sure it wasn’t filled with cursed bones.

There was an odd noise. Almost like a high-pitched child’s voice. Every Hunter froze. The noise came again. Eeeeeen. I slowly shifted Abomination in the direction I thought the eerie call was coming from. Milo pointed his rifle that way, cranked up the magnification on his scope, and scanned. A moment later he whispered, “It’s just an owl.” That got relayed down the line and guns were lowered.

That owl had no idea how close it had come to getting blasted. This kind of shit is tense. Even when you spend a lot of time in the country at night, sometimes normal animals can sound really odd. I had almost shot a regular old coyote once on a hunt because it had sounded like it was speaking in a foreign language.

We reached a barbed-wire fence, but it was so floppy and loose that it really wasn’t much of a fence at all. Even our shortest Hunters made it over without getting snagged. Boone started giving hand signals. This was where the teams parted ways. His guys went toward the house. I took point for my team as we headed for the barn.

It was me, Milo, Trip, and Holly now. Earl would join us when he felt like it. I’d worked with these Hunters so many times that we were damned near telepathic with each other. We walked through the pitch-black, stepping carefully, because there was a lot of old wood scattered everywhere. There were piles of ancient garbage, empty paint cans, and scattered tools rusted beyond recognizability. We followed a fence line and stayed low until we got close to our target. The barn was huge, easily big enough to park a couple of combines inside, but it had a slight lean to it. The beams looked soft and were coated in patches of moss like a cancerous growth.

There was a big sliding door, but the rollers were probably rusted solid. Luckily, it was stuck open enough that even I would be able to get through without making too much noise. That was a fortunate break. I’m a big dude anyway, but covered in armor and mag pouches, I’m downright thick.

I peered through the gap, but even with the night vision, all I could see was more old junk piles and dust particles floating between them. I signaled for my team to stop and wait for Boone’s signal. I clicked my radio twice to let the other team know we were in position. There wasn’t anything new from Earl. The Groffs were in an elevated position with precision rifles, but they’d stay quiet unless there was something they needed to warn us about.

Boone clicked three times. They were going in.

I signaled for Trip to follow me, and he passed that on. As soon as it popped off, everybody would go to hyper-speed face shooting, but until then we’d proceed quietly for as long as we could. I moved into the barn.

My team was smooth, practiced, and we went quick, even in the dark. As each of us swept in, we covered a sector. I went right with Abomination shouldered. Trip came in behind me and went straight ahead with his LWRC .45 subgun up. Then Holly with her shorty 300 Blackout, and then Milo with his JP mini-Cazador hooked left. In normal life I’m kind of a clumsy giant but put a gun in my hand and I turn into a tactical ballerina and these guys were my choreographed backup dancers. The idea of Milo in a tutu made me giggle.

It was a big open space, but it was filled with old cars, farm equipment, and piles of assorted junk. The floor was hard-packed dirt. It stank like moldy decaying hay. My eyes immediately started to itch. This was going to be hell on my allergies. I should’ve put my gas mask on.

We moved through the trash, heads on a swivel, checking up and down too, because the things we routinely had to deal with had no problem hanging from ceilings or popping up through floors.

“This is Earl,” he whispered in all our ears. “There’s something talking in the back of the barn.”

We were in the very front of the barn. I looked to my teammates, confirmed they were ready, and we headed for the rear of the building. It was getting really hard not to bump into anything though. The interior was a hoarder’s delight. There were a bunch of rickety shelves close together here, and they were so full that the aisles between them made for a snug fit. There were cardboard boxes melting into squishy mush on the floor, spilling their contents of rusting nuts and bolts. I got spiderwebs all over my face. I bet this place was full of brown recluses and black widows.

There was a loft above us and ladders leading up. Normally I would’ve cleared the high ground before proceeding, but there was no way we’d make it up there without alerting whatever it was that was waiting ahead of us. I pointed it out to Holly. She lifted her gun to cover the loft and watch our backs as the rest of us moved forward.

Then we heard what Earl had gotten through the cracks in the walls. The voice was raspy and barely audible. “Who sent you?”

“I already told you!” That was Sonya, and she sounded like she was in distress. “I got a call. I was told to come here because you wanted to buy the Ward.”

“Do you think I’m a fool? You brought that weapon here to destroy me.” Even though the voice was quiet, I recognized the accent. You don’t spend as much time around the Shacklefords as I have without being able to recognize an old-school Southern accent real fast. “Who sent you against me, child?”

“Nobody,” Sonya cried out. “Wait! Don’t kill me, please!”

I carefully moved around the edge of an old cattle trailer until I could see the conversation. I noticed Sonya first, and she was still wearing the face of the cherubic bubbly blonde girl from next door. Only now she was hanging upside down, five feet from the ground. Her ankles were bound with a thick rope, which had been tied to a ceiling beam.

Then I saw what Sonya was talking to.

The creature’s back was toward me. It was naked and shaped like a man, but way too skinny. Not just emaciated but dehydrated to the point that all the moisture had been sucked out of the tissues, until all that was left had the consistency of jerky. Bones were visible through gaps in the leathery skin. It was like a body that had been left out in the desert sun to blacken and shrivel, only it was moving around just fine.

I turned back to Trip and mouthed the word undead.

Trip shrugged, like what was he supposed to do with that? Undead was a big catch-all term with a wide variety of capabilities.

I spread my hands like beats me, because I had absolutely no idea what kind it was. It didn’t feel like a vampire. It was obviously intelligent, but that could still be a bunch of things. If it was a revenant we’d be able to put it down with a few bullets and go home. If it was something like a lich, we were in deep shit. So we’d just have to proceed with caution. I peered back around the trailer.

“Last chance, child. Who sent you to kill me?”

“I told you nobody! I mean, somebody sent me, but not to kill you. They told me you were going to give me five million bucks in cash for the stone.”

“I live in a barn because I have to hide from Hunters. I have to pay degenerates to steal bodies from funeral homes to continue my work,” the thing snapped. “Does it look like I’ve got that kind of money?”

“I thought maybe you were laying low.” Sonya was quiet for a moment. The only noise was the creak of the rope holding her up. “Okay, so obviously there’s been a big misunderstanding here. How about you let me free, I’ll take the stone away, and get it out of here? Your secret’s safe with me, Mr. Phipps.”

“That’s Colonel Phipps to you.”

Earl must have caught that exchange. “Aw, hell. It’s Buford Phipps.” And from the way Earl said that, it was bad news. If Earl had covered this particular undead asshole during Newbie training, it must have been on a day I’d fallen asleep during class. I looked back at Trip but he didn’t seem to know either. “Give me one minute to change, then distract him. I’ll take Phipps. You free the girl and run.”

That was not good. That sounded like Earl was going to wolf out on us. He had the control to force a change whenever he wanted, but he rarely did it this far from the full moon, and only if we were dealing with something crazy dangerous. Shit had just gotten real.

The abnormally gaunt form of Phipps was walking around Sonya. He didn’t look like much more than an awkwardly thin zombie, but Earl wouldn’t risk transforming around other Hunters unless it was absolutely necessary. Phipps was appraising Sonya like she was a hanging side of beef. I could see the profile of his face now. There were patches of skin and hair stuck to it, but most of it was bone. It turns out a skull can still look hungry.

“It’s too late for your conniving ways now, girl. You got spirit-world blood in you. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a feast like that. I’m going to bleed you slow, because spirit blood has so very many uses in my work. Then I’m going to eat you alive, piece by piece. It’ll hurt more than you can imagine. Or you can tell me who sent you, and I can put you out of your misery quick and clean, no suffering. I promise.”

The undead monstrosity didn’t sound particularly trustworthy as he said that either.

“I don’t know. I swear!”

“That’s fine. I’ll ask again after I eat your hands. We’ve got all the time in the world.” He grabbed her wrist and tugged. Sonya shouted and thrashed. She hit him with her free hand, and from the solid noise it made, even hanging upside down, Sonya packed a right like a heavyweight boxer, but it did nothing to the monster. The rope creaked as he dragged her over to his mouth. Phipp’s jaw hinged open. The jerky skin stretched. The mouth got bigger and bigger until it could have fit Sonya’s whole arm inside.

Earl hadn’t gotten his requested sixty seconds yet, but I couldn’t let Phipps bite her limbs off. “Hey!”

Phipps spun toward me. My boss had asked for a distraction. Figuring that nothing was quite as distracting as a magazine full of silver buckshot to the face, I put the IR targeting laser on the monster’s skull and fired.

So did Milo. Half a second later so did Trip. The monster let go of Sonya and staggered back until he hit the wall. Multiple lasers danced across his body as sparks filled our night vision. Sonya was sent spinning back and forth like a punching bag that had just gotten violently kicked, and I just hoped that none of us plugged her by accident. Milo’s and Trip’s guns were suppressed, and quiet. Mine was the only one that was loud as hell.

We had probably pumped a pound of silver and lead through Phipps, but as the smoke cleared, he was still standing. Splintered bones immediately fused back together and the dangling bits of jerky sucked back into place. Our projectiles hadn’t accomplished shit.

Buford Phipps roared, “Kill the trespassers!”

Which caused all the many corpses buried in shallow graves around the farm to wake up. Hands erupted through the floor. Bodies that had been hidden on the loft flopped over the edge. Shelves of junk toppled over as the dead rose. Milo yelped as claws grabbed his boot.

The lead monster pointed one bony finger at me, the jawbone moved, and sanity-rending arcane words spilled out. He was casting a spell. Phipps was a lich!

But before he could finish the incantation and rip my soul out or turn me into a frog or some other awful fate, a hairy werewolf arm punched through the wall. Claws sank deep into Phipp’s rib cage, and Earl yanked the lich right through the planks and into the night.

Holly moved up, stubby carbine shouldered, nailing undead in their heads as they crawled toward us. Her gun was so quiet the impact of the bullets made more noise than the action. Skulls popped and the bodies went limp. From their sluggish movement, mummified appearance, and rotten clothing, these were old zombies, stashed here for who knew how long. But there was a lot of them. It was like the entire floor of the barn was moving all around us.

“Mundy might not have won the pool after all,” Holly said. “I had serial killer burial ground.”

“Great,” I shouted back. “I liked his better.”

Earl had the lich. We needed to rescue Sonya and get the hell out of here. But that was easier said than done, as the ground split open between me and her, and there was suddenly a sea of grasping hands and snapping teeth between us.

“Hang on, Sonya,” I said as I reloaded Abomination.

“What’s going on?” Sonya was still swinging back and forth and couldn’t see in the dark, so all she probably knew was that there had just been a lot of gunfire and chaos. “Is that you, Opie?”

Her getting my name wrong again made it awfully tempting to just shoot the rope holding her up so she’d fall on her head, but there was a zombie crawling out of the ground directly beneath her. “Can you climb up? There’s zombies under you.” Sonya bent at the waist, caught the rope, and with a couple quick tugs, propelled herself to the ceiling, where she grabbed the beam and hung there, far out of reach of the undead. The move was impressive. It must be nice to be half yokai. She’d probably be fine up there while the rest of us down here got devoured.

Milo stomped on the hand holding his boot until enough bones broke that the zombie had to let go. Then he stuck the muzzle of his carbine close to the lump of a rising head—Whump!—and pierced the skull. The experienced Hunter took one look around the barn, realized we were about to be swarmed, and said, “We’d better boogie!”

He was right. Our position was indefensible. “Sonya, can you get free?” A zombie lunged at me, coming seemingly out of nowhere through the dust, but I blew its head off. “We have to go—now!”

“The knot’s too good.” She had moved into a sitting position on the beam but was clearly struggling with the rope around her ankles. She was supernaturally athletic but good luck hopping out of here with her feet tied together. “I need something to cut it.”

Trip had that covered. He ripped the RMJ tomahawk from the sheath on his belt. At first I thought he was going to say catch and toss it to her, but instead he just hurled it. The hawk flipped end over end and the head got planted into the wood next to Sonya with a thunk. It hit so close that she flinched in surprise.

“There’s a tomahawk by your hand, kid! Hurry up!”

“Nice throw,” I said as I used Abomination’s buttstock to brain a zombie that was reaching for Trip.

“Cheryl and I have been going to this ax-throwing place on date night,” Trip said. “It’s fun and practical.”

Sonya wrenched the hawk out of the beam and slashed at the ropes. Trip kept his blade sharp enough to shave with, so she cut right through. “Got it!” She flung the ropes away.

Now for an orderly, fighting retreat. “Head for the exit.” Holly and Milo crowded in next to us, and the four of us fought our way toward the door, shooting and moving.

Except then Phipps hurled Earl through the wall. Our werewolf crashed through several zombies, broke through two big support beams, and then bounced off a third. Decades of dust and owl poop rained from above. It was like our night vision turned to static as swirling dust filled the air. We were blind.

The already leaning barn shuddered. Earl’s body had broken the supports. The whole structure groaned.

The barn was going to fall on us.

I flipped up my goggles and turned on my light. That wasn’t much better. The choking dust was reflective. I could hardly see, hardly breathe. That crazy impact would’ve killed most things, but there was a flash of pale fur as Earl leapt up and rushed past me to get back into the fight. Werewolf Earl is terrifying. Even with some bones sticking out, he was fast as lightning, and I was super thankful that he had the self-control to not accidentally disembowel me on the way. He jumped out the hole his body had just made in the wall and went after the lich.

Sonya leapt from the beam to the loft. It was a good ten feet but she made it, and disappeared from sight.

Nails popped like gunshots. Boards splintered. “Run!” I screamed.

The suddenly awakened dead struggling up from below shoved over the shelves in front of us. More zombie hands burst through the ground, clawing. All they had to do was slow us up for a second and we were doomed. There was a mob rising ahead of us and more behind. We were still a few feet from the door when the back quarter of the barn came crashing down, crushing zombies beneath tons of wood and shingles. And it kept collapsing in sections, coming for us like a slow-motion train wreck.

We riddled the zombies ahead of us as we rushed for the door. Trip and Milo dove through the gap. I could barely see through the dust, but I knew Holly was right next to me.

“Where’s—” But before I could finish shouting for her, Sonya seemed to fall out of the sky. She landed and nailed a zombie right in the forehead with the tomahawk’s back spike. She ripped the spike out and congealed black ooze sprayed out of the hole like its head had been pressurized. “Go! Go!” I blasted zombies until Sonya and Holly were outside, then I hurried and squeezed through the door after them.

As soon as I was clear, Trip and Milo immediately began trying to force the rusted roller door shut, but a pile of dead flesh crashed against it. Several arms shot through the gap, and the only reason the barn didn’t barf out an army of zombies was because the stupid things were temporarily getting in each other’s way. It was five zombies trying to fit through a one-zombie hole.

But while we were plugging the hole, the barn was still falling down, and if the front fell over on us . . . 

Holly yanked an incendiary grenade off her vest. I realized what she was trying to do, so I stepped back and immediately blasted a couple rounds of buckshot through the door. This close the buckshot pattern just chewed a single big hole through the wood. “Grenade!” Holly yanked the pin and shoved the grenade through the hole. The canister bounced across bare zombie feet. “Move!”

The rest of us didn’t need much encouragement. As soon as Trip and Milo let go, the door burst open and zombies piled out, but that only mattered for a second, because then they were all bathed in chemical fire. The whole front of the barn was consumed in a flash. The zombies were so dry they went up like kindling.

Fire leapt up the walls. Just as it reached the last remaining section of roof, the whole front of the barn collapsed. Heavy beams landed where we’d just been standing. The impact launched a cloud of choking dust outward.

I turned back and gunned down one of the burning zombies which had made it through. Milo head-shot the last one. Zombies don’t feel anything, but it never seems right to let something that was once a person wander around burning until it quits kicking.

The barn was just a pile of wood now, and most of the stuff buried beneath must have been extremely flammable, because it went up fast. Zombies who hadn’t gotten their heads smashed were still struggling to get free. Arms poked through the debris but the fire was spreading fast. All those buried zombies would get burned to a crisp. We had to move away because the heat was becoming too intense.

Boone got on the radio. “What is your status, Alabama?”

Milo responded. “Watch out for zombies. Their boss is a lich. Earl is fighting him. We don’t know where they are. We’ve recovered the hostage and are falling back.”

“Gregorius, ready the SMAW. Milo, we’re headed your way. Come in, overwatch.”

“This is Shannon.”

“If you see a werewolf, do not shoot the werewolf. I repeat. Do not shoot the werewolf.”

“Don’t worry. We already know about him. Make sure you warn the new guy though.”

Milo keyed his radio. “Boone, the lich is Phipps.”

“I didn’t catch that. Say again.”

“Colonel Buford Phipps.”

“Oh shit. Not that asshole! Everybody prepare to fall back. Hit the lich with the biggest guns you’ve got and retreat toward the vehicles.”

Boone was clearly scared, which didn’t happen very often.

“Milo, who is Phipps?” Trip asked.

“A total freaking whackadoodle jerkface. I’m talking eugenics, mad-science nutball stuff before he discovered necromancy.”

“Is he powerful?”

“Crazy powerful. This is why we shouldn’t go on rescue missions without doing our homework.” Then Milo pointed. “There’s Earl!”

I turned my flashlight that way just as our werewolf boss got hurled across a field. Phipps must hit like a truck because Earl was airborne for fifty feet before he hit the ground and rolled through the weeds. He lay there, a great hairy mass, breathing hard, and bleeding from several deep lacerations. Werewolves regenerate crazy fast, and Earl made a regular werewolf look like a wimp, but as he started to get up, he wobbled, then sank back down into the grass. Even the king of the werewolves needed some time to heal.

“That’s bad,” Holly said, because anything that could kick the ass of Earl Harbinger, could eat us mere mortals for breakfast.

The lich came out of the forest. His slender form didn’t look that physically dangerous, but there was a frightening energy building in the air. Phipps wasn’t walking. He was levitating a few feet off the ground, and he slowly began rising higher in the air. The plants around us wilted and crumbled to dust as he sucked the life force out of them to power his magic.

We opened fire. Dozens of bullets smacked into the hovering form, but they seemed to zip right through with little effect. A rifle bullet shattered one of Phipp’s arm bones, tearing the thin limb right off. Only instead of falling, the arm seemed to hover for a moment before suctioning back into place.

Phipps gave us an almost dismissive gesture, and my entire team got knocked off our feet by a wave of telekinetic energy. I crashed into a fence. Milo ended up in an old horse trough. Sonya ran away.

“Hunters!” Phipps voice was loud enough now that it could be heard even above the crackling flames of the barn. “I despise Hunters. I only wanted to be left alone, to continue my study of unnatural philosophy in peace. I was at the cusp of ridding mankind of its impurities when that cur Sherman burned my first laboratory. And every time I have tried to rebuild since, you damnable Shacklefords have been nipping at my heels. When will you subhuman filth learn to let me be?”

I struggled to my feet and launched a grenade at the lich, but he merely floated to the side as the 40mm projectile zipped past. My grenade exploded out in a field.

Phipps looked down at his burning barn. “You’ve destroyed all the subjects of my anatomical study! Do you have any idea how long it takes to collect this many cadavers without being detected? I’ll have to find a new home and start over. Oh, you will pay dearly for this trespass.” He was twenty feet in the air now, and violent winds were whipping through the farm. Then the skull snapped toward the road as Phipps sensed a new danger. “You cowards even brought reinforcements.”

I turned to see what had gotten the lich’s attention. There were a bunch of headlights racing down the dirt road directly toward us.

“Lizard folk,” the lich muttered, clearly disgusted. “So the Hunters have allied themselves with the Lacertian Cult. I should have known you inferior types would eventually commingle with reptiles.”

The reptoids and their followers were the opposite of allies, and if the lich didn’t kill us, they certainly would . . . But for once I was really thankful that gnomes were a bunch of loudmouth reprobates, because if they hadn’t blabbed to the reptoids, we wouldn’t have gotten this great distraction. Everybody on my team used the opportunity to get up and run like hell.

Buford Phipps pointed both of his hands at the road, bony fingers splayed wide, and started chanting. The ground began to shake so much that I lost my footing and fell on my face. The earthquake increased in intensity. The smaller buildings collapsed. Fissures were torn in the Earth. Real magic is some scary shit.

The cultists were inbound fast. The maniacs hung guns out their windows and started blasting, only the growing earthquake was bouncing the vehicles around so much that they weren’t in danger of hitting anything. The lead car suddenly slewed sideways, and the next one in line clipped it. The convoy came to a sudden, dusty halt. Cultists bailed out. Among them were the hulking, shrouded figures of actual reptoids, and there was so many that this had to be the entire Atlanta cell.

The lich clapped his hands.

A terrible magic was unleashed. The ground rippled and came alive. It was almost as if the soil became liquid, and the entire field along the side of the road rose into a wave, rolling and growing, racing toward the vehicles. The cultists screamed as it crashed over them. Cars flipped. Bodies were crushed. Then the wave broke. Tons of rock and soil fell, burying them instantly.

As the dust cleared, fifty yards of road was just gone. Other than one pair of headlights sticking straight up out of the dirt, it was as if the reptoids had never been there at all.

Milo hadn’t been kidding about crazy powerful. We needed to take Phipps out fast or his magic was going to smoke us all. I looked toward the car Sonya had stolen from Bonnie. The interrogation we’d overheard had made it sound like Sonya had brought the Ward with her, so it was probably in that car. If I could reach it, I might be able to power it up just long enough to obliterate Phipps.

The insanely dangerous lich turned his attention back toward MHI. “Now, where was I? Ah, yes . . . ” He began floating in my direction. “I was about to twist the blood from your bodies like wringing out a sponge.”

As the other Hunters started shooting at the lich again, I got up and ran for the Hyundai.

Sonya was already there, messing with something in the front seat of the car. At first I thought she was trying to drive away, but then I realized she was struggling with some object inside a plastic grocery bag. It was the Ward.

“Turn it on!” I shouted.

“I’m trying to figure out how.” She got out of the car holding a black rock about the size of a softball. The Ward that MHI had used before had a strange mystical code imprinted on it, where bits of the rock would actually become pliable to be moved into shape. Align the right code and it would activate. This one had to be something like that as it seemed to come to life in Sonya’s hands. “I think I’ve got it.”

The Ward flared with a blinding white light.

When I blinked myself back to reality, all of the windows on Bonnie’s car had been blown out. Sonya was lying on the ground. For a second, I thought that she must have activated it, but then I heard Phipp’s insane cackling. The lich was still alive. It hadn’t worked.

Sonya bolted upright, gasping for breath. I ran to her. She still had the rock in her hand, only now it had turned a bright angry red color, so she’d done something.

“Let me see it.” I tried to take the stone from her but she wouldn’t let go.

“It’s stuck,” she said in disbelief.

I was so much bigger and in such a rush that I hoisted her to her feet and she still wouldn’t let go.

“No! I mean it’s stuck to me!” She turned her hand upside down and shook it, but it was like the Ward was glued to her palm. “Get it off.”

“Hold still.” I grabbed her wrist and turned it so that I could see the Ward better. It was smaller than MHI’s old one, the designs on it were a little different, and it was clearly stuck to Sonya’s hand. Not stuck. Fused. Like welded to her skin.

“Uh . . . ”

“What the hell, man?” Sonya demanded. “The dead guy’s looking right at us. Make it go, Opie.”

“Working on it.” I touched the markings on the stone, but they seemed stuck in place now. I tried to force them to move, but they were totally frozen. “How do you jam a rock?”

The lich was ignoring all the bullets smacking into it and floating our way. “How dare you bring such dangerous alchemy into my presence?” He made a dismissive gesture. A gust of hurricane-force wind smacked into me. I planted my feet and managed to hold onto Sonya for a couple of seconds before she was torn away and I got tossed over the hood of the car.

“Curious. It appears there has been an unexpected interaction between Newton’s natural science and the spirit mongrel. Bring the device to me, child.”

Sonya tried to run, but Phipps clenched one bony fist, and she was instantly frozen in place. The look stuck on her face was one of absolute terror as she began to float up toward the lich. Phipp’s licked his nonexistent lips with his jerky tongue. Not only could a skull look hungry, it could also look greedy.

“A fascinating development. Perhaps this new discovery will make up for tonight’s inconvenience.”

Boone’s voice was in my ear. “Everybody duck and cover.”

The other team had taken advantage of the lich’s distraction. I realized what they were doing, but I also knew that the results would probably kill Sonya too. Without hesitation I sprang up, sprinted forward, and tackled her. We both hit the ground hard.

Then Buford Phipps exploded.



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Framed