Page 137 of The Rut in the Road

And that left me with a very different conundrum.

I wasn’t sure how many undead I could control at the same time. Raising spiders and flies and, yes, Victor, was different. The shadow of their lives was very small—it took much less to raise them than it would a person, to say nothing of multiple people.

But when you raised a corpse, you raisedonlya corpse.

Supposedly.

I’d raised the husks of spiders and flies under Archie’s very careful supervision after I’d accidentally resurrected Victor—because Victor wasn’t just a corpse.

But what would happen if I life-cast into human dead on purpose, the way I’d accidentally done to Victor?

I had no idea.

But my life casting was much,muchstronger than my death magic. For all I knew, I was actually doing both at once, which, now that I’d thought of it, might actually make the most sense out of anything we’d come up with so far. Not that it really mattered at this point.

All that mattered was that I’d be able to do what I had to.

Three more bullets ricocheted through the windows overlooking the warehouse floor, making me flinch.

“Okay, Cassie, you with me?” Hart asked.

“Here,” she replied, although her voice shook.

“The plan is for you to scoot your pretty ass over here and we try to pick some of them off. Preferably the fuckers on the stairs so that nobody kicks down the door. Got it?”

“Got it,” she replied, but despite the words, her voice was anything but confident.

Hart popped up and fired first, dropping back down with a curse after only a few shots. “A dozen, maybe more,” he said, and his voice was flat. “They’re mostly behind the machine guts.”

“Got it,” Cass repeated.

It was bad when I—a human—could smell the sour scent of sweat-soaked fear.

Cass didn’t even get off a single shot before Hart hauled her back down by the shirt.

If I was going to do something, I needed to do it now.

I closed my eyes and reached out, seeking only those whose spirits still lingered.

I swallowed.

“Fuck!” came Hart’s voice as something a good deal larger and more explosive than bullets slammed into the balcony. “Jesus fucking Christ, they’d better not get one of those over the fucking railing.”

“Was that a goddamngrenade?” Cass hissed.

“Either that or they have a fucking rocket launcher,” Hart snapped. “Honestly not sure which I’d rather at this point, but both of them are fucking bad news bears.”

I had no idea what that meant in literal terms, but I knew we were in trouble.

Cass had seen at least one of us die. Given what was happening, probably all of us.

I reached out to the dead buried beneath the poured cement of the warehouse floor. The dead who’d been left in unmarked and unremembered graves, and whose desecrated bodies even the construction workers hadn’t bothered to report.

Please help us,I begged.

They were uninterested.

We have magic, I told them.So they want us dead. They’re hunting us. Killing us in the streets. Because we’re different. Like you were different.