Building Faith

By Ellf

Fools Rush In 33

Disclaimer: Jim Butcher owns the Dresden Files, any other works of fiction mentioned are not owned by me.

Beverly Cemetery isn't really all that famous; there are cemeteries with far more history, far more stories, and far more prestige than Beverly in Chicago, but the cemetery held one little secret: it was where four leylines crossed, one that ran through Mount Hope cemetery, one that ran through the Catholic cemetery nearby, and one that ran all the way through Graceland. Most of the time, the leylines didn't do a hell of a lot other than just move energy, and given the state of Beverly, it really wasn't what you would expect from an area that had such high magical potential. The cemetery was surrounded by a simple chain link fence, not even any barbed wire. Sure, the main gate had a stone wall near it, but the bulk of the cemetery was just that chain link fence Gravestones had been stolen from plots here before, and from what I understood, several of the grave plots had multiple people in layers. Of course, that might have just been hearsay. All in all, it really wasn't the kind of place you'd expect a magical ritual to be performed at, even one that was as specialized in necromancy as this one. Honestly, if I hadn't seen the leyline crossing before, I would have picked out Mt. Hope as the more likely place, or Graceland itself, but this evening… This evening, Molly and I felt it. The leylines were charged tonight.

As we approached the cemetery, the wind blew strongly, as if pushing against our advance. I was thankful for my gloves and zipped jacket as my hair whipped around my face. Luckily, it hadn't started snowing yet, but I had no doubt it would soon. The necromantic energy hung in the air like static, making the hairs on my arm stand on end. To my right stood Molly, her wands in her hands and Murphy with her pistol down toward the ground, ready to be shot. To my left, where Drew would be, stood four wolves; the Alphas kept pace with us, guarding our flank. They hadn't scouted ahead like they'd wanted, mainly due to those Marcone had brought. Some of Marcone's men had taken point, hands reaching into the duffel bags they carried around their necks. They must have had some sort of long-barreled guns within them, but even if I could see them, I doubt I'd be able to ID them. Marcone himself stood only slightly behind us, flanked by Miss Gard wielding a massive axe and Mister Hendricks in much the same position as Murphy.

The energy flowed down the leylines, pushing toward Beverly, and the normally peaceful, if poorly reviewed, cemetery loomed forebodingly ahead. The trees loomed menacingly, their skeletal branches curling toward us as we approached, reaching out as if to grasp us in place and drain our lives away. The clouds above swirled, lit to those who could see it with cold blue energy. The gate to the cemetery had been left wide-open, and within, we could see a group of what looked to be people dressed in ragged clothing. The wind changed directions again, and the air carried the repeated beat of a marching snare drum. It was then that the wounds on the people became obvious as they shambled seemingly aimlessly through the graveyard. The wind carried the smell of their rot, their decay, and the drums beat louder.

"Zombies," Molly hissed out, and Murphy nodded. Marcone's men up ahead drew their weapons as we entered the cemetery. Upon entering, they fanned out, and I kept my gaze looking, following the energy. The leylines pulsed, and I could feel them drawn down the paved line toward wherever Guase was performing her ritual. Marcone's men used hand signals to communicate between them, ones that Murphy seemed to understand, so Molly and I followed her lead. The Alphas circled around, sticking in a loose formation nearby while the rest of us crossed the threshold of the cemetery.

Then the zombies all looked up in unison from their shambling walk, and as they turned toward us, the drumming got louder. Thump-tha-tha-thump tha-tha-thump-thump thump. It came from beyond the memorial at the end of the pavement, and it had to be what held the control over the zombies. I counted the zombies. Fourteen of them. Molly, Drew and I had had trouble with merely three, albeit three made from ghouls. Oh wait… two of the bodies I'd assumed were zombies started shifting, hooked claws growing from their hands, and… oh, fuck. Great. She'd managed to keep two ghouls on the payroll. Fucking hell, as if this fight wasn't already going to suck.

No choice. Hard and fast.

"Now!" I crowed, magic running down my right arm and through my glove and wand, lighting them both red. What would Dresden do? Fire seemed appropriate. "Hinotama!"

I threw the fireball at the nearest enemy, and it exploded, knocking the zombie back, and burning through some of its clothes without igniting them. At the same time, each of Marcone's forward guard unleashed a hail of bullets from their guns, firing at a rate that shouldn't have been possible with a legal weapon. The Alphas circled around into the park, baring their teeth, ready to pounce any zombie that dared to get close, and the three larger men that Marcone brought with him took off their jackets and pulled swords from sheathes on their backs.

The zombies charged, letting out a haunting sound that I didn't know was possible for human vocal chords, even enhanced by magic. The howling roar echoed the howl of the wind, bearing down like a train as they moved. Bullets ripped into their flesh, tearing chunks of skin and muscle out, forcing blood down to the ground, but they still came, seemingly unhindered by the loss of body mass. The Alphas pounced as the zombies approached, using tooth and claw to hamstring them, forcing a few to the ground, but they got up again.

"Scatter!" Hendricks called, and we obeyed. Molly stuck by my side, leveling her right-hand wand at the undead.

"Onkyouki!" A wave of directed sound pulsed out from her wand, colored in green, and it struck a group of three zombies head-on while they charged. I don't know why, but the zombies stalled after being hit by the wave, disoriented.

Marcone's massive swordsmen ran at the disoriented zombies, wielding some sort of giant AK-47 in their off-hand, but then they fired. The sound their guns made wasn't the rapid fire of bullets but instead the rumbling boom of shotgun shells exiting the barrel. The swordsmen were one-handing a rapid-fire shotgun, and they unloaded a few shells into two oncoming zombies that Molly's spell hadn't hit; when they got close to the disoriented zombies, their blades bit into undead necks. However, even with the force behind the impacts, only one head rolled, and its body remained standing. The drums beat louder.

In the chaos, I'd lost sight of the ghouls. They had to be somewhere in this graveyard, somewhere around, but the zombies were the more pressing threat. The ones Molly'd hit started attacking Marcone's men directly, clawing at them, punching at them, and attempting to bite, but Marcone's men seemed to hold them off.

The zombies that Marcone's men blasted climbed to their feet, and they charged my sister's and my position.

Go for it, Fai. Molly encouraged, and I smirked.

I slammed my hands together, pulling them apart quickly as the spark of electrical magic formed between them. The spark climbed up my wand, ready for me to cast. "Fulminara."

Electricity arced from my wand and through the two zombies, a crackling boom of thunder echoed through the graveyard, as my spell managed to slow them down further.

"Sfukaze!" Molly scooped two gravestones off their plots and flung them at the twitching zombies, knocking them to the ground.

Pistol fire came from behind us, and I glanced back to see Murphy standing near Marcone, shooting at zombies that approached. Marcone and Hendricks stood on either side of the diminutive cop, each wielding an assault rifle of some sort, and they fired controlled bursts into the zombies.

A whoosh of wind came from my side followed by the sickening squelch of a blade meeting flesh, and Gard stood there, axe buried in a zombie that managed to sneak up. God, the emotion here was too high… too much of it muddling everything. Too much pain, too much death, too much… fuck. We needed to shut it out.

"Go, girls," Gard ordered. "Get to her, we'll catch up."

Molly and I nodded, and, after slipping our wands away, we joined hands. "Sfumare…" We faded from perception as we activated our veil, and then we started moving toward the source of the necromantic energy. The zombies were just the fodder, meant to slow us down. Guase was the real target. She was the one who needed to be stopped, and it needed to happen as quickly as possible. "Soukotte."

Combining a veil with the increased perception spell was difficult, but it wasn't impossible, not for us. We'd be able to move with speed through the battlefield without being seen, without being heard. We might as well have been invisible with what we did. The world moved at a snail's pace, and we could see it. Bullets hung in the air after leaving assault rifle barrels, the shotgun shells from the massive men exploded into pellets that spread into the oncoming zombies. Gard pulled up her axe from the downed zombie. Billy the wolf was post-pounce as the trail of blood through the air would hit his fur.

We moved. There was only one place that Guase could be. We followed the pulsing energy of the leylines toward their crossing, toward the center of the cemetery. As we moved, we paid attention, at the speeds we were likely moving at, it wouldn't do to slip on a patch of black ice or fall out of the veil at an inopportune moment.

Guase had the book on a podium, a circle drawn in the snow around it with a five pointed star poking into the outside. All of the points of the star save one corresponded with the direction one of the leylines passed, and the fifth pointed to where Guase stood, both hands out, chanting. Unlike before, her hood was down, and snow-white hair reflected the unnaturally blue light coming from the circle. She had no age-lines on her face, and in fact, she looked to be of no specific age at all, really. Ageless, she was almost an ethereal beauty. It was almost a pity that she'd murdered the fuck out of Drew and needed to die for it.

The drummer stood nearby, his hands mid-movement, with little snowflakes caught in the air around the vibrating skin of his drum. Then the snowflakes moved again, falling down as the drummer's rapid-fire drum beating continued. We knew that if we took down the drummer, we might have made dealing with the zombies easier. There was, however the chance that doing so would make Guase be able to leave with her prize, and that was unacceptable. Guase needed to suf—she needed to be stopped so that whatever she was planning wouldn't work.

Decision made, we approached Guase's circle. Our veil was perfect. There was no way we were going to fail at what we needed to do. We reached into our jacket to—

"Wucht." Guase waved a hand at us and we flew back, our veil dropping as we slammed into the wall of a mausoleum. "Jian, Zed, deal with these pests."

Oh. That's where the ghouls went. They'd managed to keep themselves hidden behind some of the larger gravestones and trees. We couldn't understand how we missed their sickening smell and hunger. Maybe the rotting flesh and emotions of the zombies drowned them out, but now that we could see them, it was all too prominent.

We rolled to our feet, and thrust out our right hands. Individually, we could move air to lift things of a decent weight, move things around in a buffet of wind, but together? Combined together, especially with the aid of an oncoming storm, we could do so much more. "Sfukaze!"

Channeling our magic, we slammed the wind into the ghouls, interrupting their pounce, and we kept it going, buffeting each of them with enough to throw them back, tumbling toward the trees. Unfortunately, there were no iron spikes here to try and deposit them on, nor were there anything other than gravestones to use as battering weapons. We needed to think of a better plan and fast. We continued to pour wind at the ghouls, not letting up on the spell.

Wait. Couldn't wind also cut? Or was that just an anime thing? Of course, given what one of our spells looked like, who were we to talk about anime things? We curled the fingers on our right hands down while still shooting the wind. We imagined it further shrinking, and words came unbidden to our lips. "Sessakufuu."

The wind pulsed out shrinking down into a scalpel-thin line. We didn't quite hit the ghouls straight on, and instead, several branches fell off the trees as our spell cut through them. How far the spell could go, what its limits were, we didn't know, but we did know that we missed.

"Do I have to do everything?" Guase's voice sounded beleaguered, and a wave of cold energy came from her, shooting out across the graveyard and up into the sky. The swirling clouds and blue energy in the sky started to come down, similar to a tornado, but it wasn't wind. No, the swirling energy… it… Those were ghosts within it. There weren't a lot, just a few moving at a decent speed, including Drew.

"Hinotama." We made four fireballs and chucked them at Guase, who simply batted them away with a wave of her hand. We needed to get her done, to stop her. She couldn't be allowed to finish. We ran at the circle.

"Please." Guase thrust a hand at us. "Wucht." We slammed into a wall of force. No. We needed to beat her. "Let's try something else. Wucht trennen."

We were shoved apart, slamming us into opposite mausoleums just as the group of ghosts hit the book and spread out. No. Drew's ghost approached me, turbulent anger bubbling right beneath his surface. God, I didn't want to see that look on Drew's face. Resentment. The ghost resented me, resented that I couldn't save him. That I let him go. God, I just… I'd tried. I'd desperately tried. I didn't know that the necromancer would be able to… I didn't know she'd try and track him down. If I'd known… God, if I'd known… She'd batted away our best spells. She'd knocked Molly and I out of the veil. How could we beat something like that? And Kemmler was supposed to be worse?

I closed my eyes, and I could see the rest of the battleground. Molly'd been injured in that last attack from Guase. A concussion, bleeding. Murphy and Marcone were working together against stronger oncoming zombies, and they never stopped coming. Hendricks laid bleeding nearby while Gard stood over him with her massive axe, bleeding from her own wounds. The Alphas… God, the Alphas… Andi was dead already… Kirby with his throat sliced through by a ghoul's claw, and Billy with his stomach torn out. Georgia stood guard over their bodies, but even she had wounds. God, what had I gotten them all into? What had I done? Marcone's men were dead save for two… This was my fault. This was all my fault. How could I? How could I have stopped this? I opened my eyes, and all I could see was darkness, shadow growing, but I knew…. I knew…

God, I needed a miracle. Please, God, I don't ask for much. Let this not be my fault.

"You see now, don't you," Guase's voice came from within the encroaching darkness. "You never stood a chance in stopping this, little girl."

"Please, God." I muttered. "Please…"

"Pleas to an uncaring God just show how pathetic you are," Guase's voice said. "You lie there, no friends, no family, no hope. What did you think would happen? You never had any hope to begin with."

A warmth came as I heard a saber drawn from its sheath. A bright light banished the darkness from my vision away, and I heard a Russian-accented voice say, "I believe that I would like to challenge that theory."