The place was abandoned, and had been since its owner had died several months before. Mireille and Kirika didn't find that particularly surprising. They had been the ones to kill the previous residents, after all. But despite that, the manor house was strangely empty.
"Everything's gone," Mireille said after they had searched the building. "No records of any kind were left behind. The only question is who took them, Breffort's people or Fortunato's?"
"They even removed all the bodies." Kirika added. Mireille looked at her. "They're not where we left them, there aren't any new graves in the old funeral plot, and nobody's disturbed the soil in the vineyard. Someone must have taken them somewhere."
"Why would they do that?" Mireille wondered. "This villa is in the middle of nowhere, only a handful of people outside the area even know it exists. Removing or destroying records is one thing, but we left two dozen bodies lying around here, and I can't see Breffort going to the effort carting them off when there are plenty of places to bury them right here where nobody would notice. Let's see if there are any graves elsewhere around here."
They searched the grounds for two hours. At no point did the two find any disturbed soil that might conceal a grave or burn scars to mark the place of an old pyre. Nor was there any evidence that someone had carried all the bodies to the lava pit where Altena met her end. The closest thing they found was a stone slab that had once been used as a bier. Kirika picked up the small, bloodstained fork lying on the otherwise empty slab and turned to her partner.
"Something is very wrong here."
Karrin Murphy winced as Butters crashed into the ground again. The coroner turned Knight was hardly the most imposing physical specimen out there. Unfortunately for him, his opponent was.
"Remember, Butters, you were the one who promised you'd start sparring with them." She said teasingly.
"How was I supposed to know that I'd actually end up getting a functional lightsaber?" He groaned as he picked himself up off the floor.
Snorri laughed at his sparring partner's predicament before resuming the match. Murphy cringed as she rose to her feet. Her own match with the Einherjar had driven home something she hadn't wanted to admit. Despite the very expensive physical therapy that Dresden's gift had allowed her to purchase, she wasn't going to be able to return to her peak condition. Age and the beating she had received from Nicodemus the year before had seen to that. It wouldn't be long until she had to leave the field work to other people.
If she was working for any part of SHIELD other than Special Investigations, she probably could have gotten a lot closer to 100% with the help of their new prosthetic technology. Unfortunately, dealing with magic meant that there was a non-trivial chance that Deathlok technology would break down just by being around the things her job required her to deal with. Hopefully SHIELD would eventually figure out a way to make technology not fail around magic so often - at least enough to make things like cell phones and laptops reliable in the presence of moderately talented wizards. It would make her work a lot easier.
Checking her watch, Murphy saw that it was almost time for her meeting. Baron Marcone would be arriving any minute now. Heading out of the training area, she left for her office. As if on cue, the front door opened just as she was walking past the entryway.
It was Marcone, but his entrance was hardly the sort one would expect from one of the most powerful men in the city in both the magical and non-magical worlds. His bodyguard Hendricks was literally dragging him across the threshold.
"We're under attack!" Hendricks announced.
The car pulled up on the street. Sigrun Gard got out, followed by her colleague, Hendricks, and her employer, Gentleman Johnny Marcone, Baron of Chicago. Looking around the area, she saw that there were non-locals loitering on the sidewalk, a dark-skinned man who was tapping his cane against the pavement in a slow, steady pace, and a teenaged girl with red hair so dark it almost looked purple. What were they doing here, she wondered.
If she hadn't been watching them at that moment, Sigrun wouldn't have been able to react in time. The man pointed at the Baron with his free hand. Barely a second later, a knife flew from the girl's hand, aimed straight for Marcone.
"Get him inside!" Sigrun ordered as she blocked the knife. As Hendricks hurried to get their employer to safety, the girl rushed towards them with surprising speed. The Valkyrie moved to intercept her.
A dagger thrust towards her throat. Sigrun sidestepped it, catching her attacker's wrist and delivering a blow to her forearm that should have broken her arm, or at the very least forced her to drop the knife. The girl didn't even flinch. Instead she just produced a second knife in her other hand and continued attacking, forcing Sigrun to release her in order to defend herself.
The assassin now had the measure of Sigrun's strength and speed. Her own strength and speed, while lesser, were far greater than a child of her size should have been capable of. She also seemed to ignore pain. While the girl was good enough to avoid or deflect any solid hits, a normal human would have seen sent sprawling by a few of the weaker ones. Sigrun, on the other hand, could definitely feel all the cuts she had received in return.
As Sigrun cursed the mortal laws that made it impractical to keep her battleaxe with her at all times, the door to the castle opened. Hendricks had sounded the alarm, and the Einherjar posted there were responding. Sven the door guard was the first to exit, his own axe at the ready. It did him no good. The assassin ducked under his swing with insulting ease before slicing open his belly and throat. The human warrior Murphy opened fire with her pistol, but the bullets didn't appear to do any more damage than any of Sigrun's blows did.
But the brief respite had given Sigrun enough time to change tactics. Reaching into her pocket, she felt through the rune-engraved stones she kept there until she found the one she was looking for. Tossing the stone at the feet of the assassin, she was rewarded with an eruption of fire. Shrieking in pain, the assassin fell back.
Taking up Sven's fallen axe, Sigrun advanced on her foe, ready to hack her wounded opponent into pieces. But before she could, a car pulled up on the street, its stereo pounding out a massive bass beat that could be heard across the block. The assassin's partner hurriedly got in, and called for the girl to do the same. Moments later, the car's engine was gunned and the attackers were rushed out of sight.
"What was that?" Sigrun wondered as the car sped away. Turning back to the castle, she saw that Snorri and Butters had joined the crowd. Snorri was kneeling next to his fallen brother-in-arms and shook his head. Sven would never feast in Valhalla again.
"That beat..." Butters said. "It was acting like a drummer. We're dealing with a necromancer."
"We have an update from Black Widow and Noir on their interrogations, sir." Agent Koenig reported.
"What have they gotten?" Director Coulson asked.
Koenig dutifully recited a summary of all the information they'd gotten since their last report. "And one last thing. Apparently Fortunato said something about lending some of his men to a man in the service of one of his HYDRA contacts - a Samuel Barone. He didn't know what his men were to be doing, only that it had something to do with a project of Barone's inspired by something he found in a set of old books, and that it took them to a location that Noir identified as a former Soldat stronghold they had eliminated before we recruited them."
"Do we have anything on this Soldat organization they care so much about?"
"Not really. Agent Skye looked into the background of the only senior member of this group that they were able to identify but never got around to killing, one Remy Breffort. She said that there was definitely something fishy about him, but wasn't able to work out what before needing to go out to support Agent Triplett. Certainly nothing to prove that he's a key member of a thousand year old cult devoted to taking over the world - one so highly secretive that we can't even prove it exists. The most the physical evidence Noir had acquired proves is that there was a group known as Les Soldats back in the 18th Century with some connection to the Sicilian Mob, but nothing that would indicate that they're still around or what they're up to.
"Anyway, they said that upon returning to the site, they found it had been stripped of two things since they had last been there - documents, and bodies."
"Bodies?"
"Yes, sir. Apparently they had left roughly two dozen bodies behind from their raid, and they're not there now. The only one they're not sure of is the body of the High Priestess, and that's just because they can't tell if someone pulled her out of the lava pit they dropped her in or if the body simply sank. There's also no evidence that the bodies were burned or buried, either at the location itself or in the only nearby community. They're simply gone, and Noir admitted that they couldn't see a sensible reason to haul away two dozen bodies over mountain back roads when there were plenty of places to dispose of them right there."
"Hm.. They're right. If concealing the bodies was the point of the exercise, it would have been simpler to dispose of them there if they had the time. There must have been some other reason why they removed them. But what?"
Coulson's musing was interrupted by a noise from Koenig's tablet. Koening looked at it for a moment and then looked up.
"It's a report from Special Investigations. There was an attempt on the life of Johnny Marcone earlier today. According to Agent Murphy's statement, the attacker was a... necromancer?"
Coulson's blood ran cold as connections formed in his mind. "Get me what information you can find on Barone, now!"
Minutes later Coulson was comparing the description of the necromancer to a photograph of Samuel Barone, professional criminal and voodoo priest. While it was hardly a conclusive match, it was quite possible that they were the same person.
"Back during the war, HYDRA was affiliated with a necromancer - a necromancer known for writing and distributing books about his art. Now two dozen bodies go missing on the behalf of a HYDRA agent who is a practitioner of a religion that is often associated with zombies and just happens to have come into some old books. A HYDRA practitioner who is an associate of a Maggia chieftain with HYDRA connections. And then a crime boss at odds with the Maggia gets attacked by a zombie.
"This isn't a coincidence. Barone has some of Kemmler's books, and he's putting them to use. And I doubt he's going to stop with a few assassinations. We're going to have to take him down, fast.
"Send the Barone file to Agent Murphy. Then order Noir to Chicago to hook up with Special Investigations. They knew who Barone's creations were in life, that might help in stopping them. If May or Triplett is available, have them head over there as well to act as liason."
"Yes, sir. One last thing - Romanoff wanted to know what she should do with Fortunato and Solohob once she's finished interrogating them."
Coulson thought about that for a moment. "Fortunato's suspected of being involved in quite a few crimes in New York. Agent Reese knows a man in the NYPD he can trust. Tell her that once she's milked them dry, if we haven't found some other use for them she should have them shipped to New York and arrange for their location and enough of the interrogation to ensure they'll be behind bars for a long time to fall into the hands of Lieutenant Fusco of the NYPD Homicide Task Force."
Koenig nodded, and left to attend to his tasks.
It's a basic law of nature in comic books that heroes never get to take a vacation - whenever they try, something will happen that forces them to put on the cape, or tights, or whatever it is they wear when on the job. Now it seemed like that law was inserting itself into my life. All I had been planning was a simple weekend away from Demonreach. Play with Maggie, walk my dog, see if Murph could get free from her SHIELD work long enough for a date, have a few beers at Mac's, pick up some groceries to test out my latest attempt at creating a magical refrigerator, that sort of thing. My hopes for that ended the moment I saw Will waiting at the end of the alley that formed the Chicago end of the Way between Demonreach and the city.
"Harry", Will greeted me. "Murph was sure you'd be showing up today. We need you at the castle."
I sighed. I knew it. "What's going on?"
"It'd be best if we not talk about it here, but it involves someone named Kemmler."
Heinrich Kemmler. The single nastiest warlock of the past millennium. Directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of fifteen million people, mainly so that he'd have more corpses to work with for his necromancy research, and that was the low-end estimate. I kissed my weekend off goodbye as I followed Will to his car.
Kemmler couldn't possibly be involved directly - the Council had killed him in a spectacularly thorough manner fifty years back - but that didn't mean much. He still had at least one apprentice out there, and his do-it-yourself necromancy texts had been giving the Council headaches for decades. Either of these could easily cause a world of trouble. The only real question was how much.
I wasn't the only one arriving at the castle. Another car pulled up just as I was getting out. A black man got out of the driver's seat, followed by two women, one an Asian girl who looked like she should still be in high school, and a blonde who couldn't have been more than four or five years older.
Inside the castle that had been erected on the ruins of my old apartment, I found that Marcone and several of his people were waiting there. I noted that Ms Gard had numerous minor injuries all over her. The last time I could recall anyone getting past her guard, she had gotten into a fight with one of the Fallen. That alone kicked the danger level of the situation up several notches.
"Agent Triplett, I presume?" Murph asked of the man.
"And you must be Agent Murphy," He responded. "These are the two contractors you were told I was bringing along, Mireille Bouquet," He pointed to the blonde, "And Kirika Yumura." The Asian girl.
"And what do these contractors bring to the table, Agent Triplett?" Marcone inquired.
"SHIELD retains them to capture or eliminate high-profile targets. You've probably heard of them before, or at least their codename: Noir."
While the name didn't mean anything to me, it did mean something to some of the others. The normally unflappable king of the Chicago underworld flinched. His bodyguards edged into a closer formation around him. Gard started eyeing the two as serious threats, even though the younger of the two was now sitting down and stroking my cat. Looking over them, I could see why. Both of them carried themselves like they had been through quite a few nasty situations. I had the feeling that both of them could go from harmless to lethal on a moment's notice, even with my enormous cat now lying on the younger one's lap. Hell, the girl might even find a way to kill someone with the cat (Which might not actually be that hard, given how much Mister weighed).
"Noir?" Murph eyed the two women. "The internationally wanted killer?"
"The one who utterly annihilated the Hong Yiban triad and caused the Greones to have to replace the head of the family three times over the course of a week? Is those two?" Marcone added.
"We only killed two of the Greone heads," Mireille corrected. "The other one was the result of internal politics. And there were three of us back when we did the Triad job."
"So, Murph, what's going on and why do you think there are Kemmlerites involved?" I said, not wanting the day to be spent discussing the exploits of a pair of professional killers.
Murphy quickly filled me in on what had happened. While it wasn't bad enough to require the contents of the large bag Butters had with him, at least not yet, it was still pretty bad. Chicago had enough problems without a warlock taking control of organized crime in the city. Though I had trouble taking part of this situation seriously when I saw a picture of the necromancer.
"Does he really dress like this?" I chortled. "Because that thing on the hood of his cloak makes him look like a giant chicken."
"He wasn't wearing it when he tried to kill Marcone." Murphy agreed. "He might know enough about fashion to understand when not to wear outfits like that in public."
"Can you describe the assassin with Barone?" Kirika asked. Ms Gard started describing the zombie. Kirika nodded.
"I was afraid of that. It's Chloe."
"Who's Chloe?" Butters inquired.
"She was the third Noir. She and I grew up together, trained together, fought together. Ultimately, I was forced to kill her."
"How long ago was that?" I interjected.
"Earlier this year."
Not good. The strength of the typical zombie increases the longer its been dead. That was why necromancers never used the recently deceased if they could avoid it. . For this Chloe to be able to kill an Einherjar and fight on equal terms with a Valkyrie while being so recently dead meant that she was pretty much that good back when she was still alive. I didn't want to think about how dangerous she'd get if allowed to age awhile.
"We recently learned from a captured Maggia don - one Vincente Fortunato - that he had loaned some men to Barone to raid the place where Chloe was killed," Mireille continued. Marcone looked as if he was taking a mental note - probably to make some inroads on Fortunato's territory while he was out. "When we returned there, we found that someone had taken Chloe's body, along with the bodies of everyone else we had killed there that day. Now we know why."
I shook my head. "I hope you're not planning on any former connection between you and this Chloe helping you out. So long as Barone's drummer is playing, she'll do whatever he wants to her to do.
"And the important thing right now is finding them. I don't suppose that Chloe or Barone left anything of theirs behind when they tried killing Marcone?"
As Murph and Gard apologized for not being able to get anything like that, Kirika carefully dislodged Mister and stood up. Reaching into a pocket, she produced a small, two-tined fork with reddish stains on it.
"Will this do?" She inquired.
"A fork?"
"I used it as a holdout weapon once. Later that evening Chloe asked if she could have it. She kept with her everywhere, up until the afternoon I stabbed her to death with it. Barone's people left it behind when they took her body. Her blood is still on it."
Okay, so we weren't dealing with a scarily good undead assassin. We were dealing with a scarily good undead stalker assassin.
"Well, I've never worked with the centerpiece of a stalker shrine before, but this should work."
As I prepared the tracking spell, I listened to the others talk.
"Stalker shrine?" The younger visitor asked.
"Kirika, Chloe was obsessed with you," The older of the two visitors said. "Do you remember why you had to kill her? You sided with me over her in a fight, and she tried to kill both of us, screaming 'How could you choose her over me?' the whole time?"
Make that scarily good undead psycho stalker assassin.
Fortunately, the spell didn't take too long to cast, but the conversation still lasted long enough to establish that Kirika was utterly clueless about just about anything not connected with killing people. That was the problem training people from childhood to fit a role - they often didn't know how to be anything else. Hopefully SHIELD would get the girl some help.
"I have a trail." I announced, breaking up the other conversation. After a quick raid of the armory to pick up equipment appropriate for taking zombies apart, everyone apart for a few of the Einherjar who stayed behind to guard Marcone headed out for the cars.
The trail took us to a warehouse. Thankfully, Barone hadn't gone to the expense of setting up any advanced security systems, either magical or mundane, so all it took to break in was a prybar. After walking through a room that contained a ridiculous number of refrigerators, we heard two people talking.
"Your secondary project seems to be working out better than your primary, Barone," The first man said. "Marcone is still alive. Your servant wasn't able to get past his bodyguard, much less kill him. I think it's time you were pulled out of the field and put on interrogations."
"You dare question my power?" The second man, who was apparently Barone, bellowed. A peek around the doorframe showed that he was wearing the chicken cloak, and had painted an inverted cross on his chest for some reason. The only times of year a man could dress like that and not stick out like a sore thumb were Halloween and Mardi Gras, and we don't even hold big Mardi Gras celebrations in Chicago.
"Your powers are more useful extracting the secrets of the dead. It means we don't need to worry about taking enemies alive if we need to interrogate them. We have plenty of people capable of killing our enemies, and most of them don't require some elaborate system to ensure that they always hear drumbeats to keep them from disobeying orders."
"Fool! Soon I will have an unstoppable army. Today I have only a few servants. Soon I shall have thousands. And who would dare challenge a man who commands the dead?"
I grinned. It's always nice when the bad guys give you a cue.
"Samuel David Barone!" I bellowed. "You are charged with violating the Fifth Law of Magic! Surrender yourself to the judgment of the White Council or we will cut you down where you stand."
Barone may have been a cheesy dresser, but he wasn't a complete idiot. He reached over to flip a switch on a radio he was standing next to. "Destroy the intruders!" He commanded, then grabbed a satchel and ran.
Behind us, the refrigerators started opening. And from within them emerged horde of zombies.
Unfortunately for the horde of undead women, we had brought along a dozen undead Vikings, all of whom were carrying big axes and were looking for payback. Cutting through the zombies took time, though. By the time they had been dealt with, Barone and his associate had fled.
Racing through the door they had escaped through, I found a staircase leading into the undercity. The tunnel was strewn with recently dead bodies. A little further down, I found the body of Barone's associate. He had been knifed. Two sets of footprints lead away from the scene. Following them lead me back to the surface, and a place where he had apparently stashed a car. I had lost them.
When I made it back, Murph and the others were taking the place apart.
"It looks like Barone was using the other zombies he had to grab people for interrogation." Triplett said as he photographed a thick stack of papers. I kept away from him to reduce the risk of damaging his cell phone. "People wouldn't be able to expect that their kidnapper wouldn't be capable of feeling pain, making it harder to escape. Besides, if he really was interrogating their corpses, he wouldn't need to care about whether his targets were damaged when being grabbed."
"I figured out how Barone controlled those zombies without a drum." Butters said. "These devices by the wall are crude radio transmitters. Each of the zombies is wearing earbuds. The transmitters were probably transmitting the drum to one ear and any commands he might have had to the other. So long as he took care not to use magic around them, the risk of breaking the transmitter or the receivers was minimal."
"Then why did he need to manually drum for Chloe during the attempt at Marcone?" Murph wondered.
"At a guess, he ran out of receivers after equipping everyone else."
"That might explain why she isn't here." Kirika added.
"I think she might be with Barone." I joined in. "He killed the person he was talking with, but there was a second set of footprints going on past the body."
"Do you know where he went?" Murphy asked.
"To a place where he had a getaway car. He had driven away by the time I got there."
"Then we'll have to see if any of the things he left behind might tell us where he's going. He said something about an army. That probably means that he's going to some cemetery to make more zombies. The question is which one."
While I burned the remains of the zombies, Murphy helped photograph the rest of the papers and contacted her old partner at CPD Special Investigations about all the bodies in the tunnel. It wouldn't be long until Barone found himself hunted by the local authorities for that.
One of the papers that Murphy found turned out to be a map, which unfortunately didn't contain the region that the various roads and rivers depicted in it were found in. Triplett sent a copy to a colleague at SHIELD named Skye and told her to figure out what it was a map of. A few hours later, she called back.
"The map is of Arlington County in Virginia." She reported.
Triplett turned to look at the rest of the group. "Arlington County contains the Arlington National Cemetery - the largest military cemetery in the country."
Butters paled. "There are hundreds of thousands of bodies interred there. Tens of thousands of them are close to a hundred and fifty years old. Could Barone raise that many people?"
"Even if he can't, he can certainly raise enough to make things very unpleasant for wherever he marches them." I answered.
"And two places that are in the general direction of the areas he's thinking about marching them are Washington, DC and the Pentagon." Skye added.
"Agent Skye, contact the Director about this. See if he can get us any reinforcements." Murphy ordered. "Dresden, get on the line to Edinburgh, and then find us a Way to Arlington. If we can't beat Barone there, we're going to need the help of the Wardens to keep him contained."
"Right," I said. "Butters, make sure to grab the Plan B bag on your way out. If things go south, we can probably grab the rest of what we need from the Smithsonian."
When Kirika heard the term 'Way to Arlington', she expected Dresden to book a train ride or flight to Virginia. She didn't expect a multi-hour hike through a surreal other world. She certainly didn't expect the fastest route from Chicago to Arlington to go through Phoenix, Arizona.
After finally reaching their destination, the group rented some cars and drove to their destination. The sun was setting as they arrived at the cemetery.
"If he's here, he'll almost certainly be at one of the plots for Civil War veterans," Dresden said. "They're the oldest ones here, so they'll be the most powerful."
The group started making their way towards the oldest section of the graveyard. It wasn't long until they spotted a group in the distance. The hooded cloak with the thing on top that looked like a rooster's comb easily gave away the identity of one of them.
"There he is," Murphy pointed. "We don't have time to wait for any reinforcements. We have to take him down now."
Barone wasn't alone. Chloe was standing next to him, and a short distance away were a group of blank-faced members of a military band, mindlessly tapping out a slow rhythm on their drums.
"You're too late," Barone gloated. "My spell is complete. Within moments my unstoppable army of the dead will rise. HAIL HYDRA!" He cried out.
The ground around them started to stir. Skeletal hands forced themselves out of the ground, followed by the rest of their bodies.
"Just try to stop me now." Barone dared them.
Butters, the short medical examiner, pulled out a broken sword hilt and grinned. "There is no try." He said as a blade of pure light emerged from the hilt.
The sword sliced one of the undead soldiers in half with a single swipe. Recognizing the coroner as a primary threat, Chloe threw a knife at him. Kirika swiftly drew her gun and shot it out of the air. The undead Soldat assassin looked at the ex-Soldat assassin and charged.
Kirika dropped the gun - bullets wouldn't do any good against her current opponent. As the sounds of battle spread around her, she sidestepped Chloe's first knife thrust and countered with an open palm strike that should have put her on the ground gasping for breath. Unfortunately, Chloe no longer needed to breathe. She simply took the blow and kept on attacking. In desperation, Kirika rolled backwards, turning the strike into a throw.
Around them, more and more skeletons started rising. The others were holding them back, but they were a lot harder to take down than the resurrected priestesses Barone had kept at his hideout. Killing Barone might stop the dead from rising, but nobody could get free of their current engagements to make a try for him. They might not even be able to retreat to attempt Dresden's plan B, whatever it was. As Kirika fought to hold off her former friend who could no longer feel pain or fatigue, she realized that this wasn't a fight they could win. Triplett had said that someone known as the Hawk was coming after fielding a call during their stop in Arizona, and Dresden had promised the aid of some members of a group called the Wardens. The only question was whether they would come fast enough. All she could do until then was keep Chloe occupied so that she couldn't attack Butters or Dresden - the wizard's magic and the coroner's magic sword were doing more damage than any three of the others fighting, losing either of them would doom them all. She couldn't even spare the time to draw the sword she had borrowed from the BFS.
Endless minutes passed. Skeletons rose from the grave only to be cut down, only to be replaced with even more skeletons. Wounds started to accumulate as the defenders tired, preventing them from stopping all their attacks. It was only a matter of time before somebody fell, at which point it would become progressively easier for the undead to swarm under the others.
A series of explosions cracked through the graveyard. Chloe leaped aside as an arrow streaked through the air where she was standing and exploded when it struck the ground. Kirika took advantage of the distraction to draw her sword. With the added reach the blade gave her, she was able to fend off the attacks of the undead Noir far more easily. Through the corner of her eye Kirika could see figures in grey cloaks joining the fight. The reinforcements had arrived.
The grey-cloaked figures quickly established a perimeter and started closing the circle. But it was slow going.
"The drums!" Dresden called out. "Shoot out the drums!"
The drums had been playing at the same slow rate for the entire battle. One by one they fell silent. As they did, the skeletons rising from the ground stopped attacking. Instead they all turned towards Barone.
There wasn't a single person buried in Arlington who hadn't fought for his country. A great many of them had also died for it. With an arrow stuck through each of the drumheads, the beat which allowed Barone to control the undead veterans was gone, allowing them to express exactly what they felt about the man who was ordering them to destroy the country they had fought and died for.
"No!" Barone protested. "I am the Black Talon! I am the Master of Death! You serve me! Aargh!" His chest suddenly sprouted a throwing knife, and he toppled to the ground.
"No," Hissed a voice that Kirika barely recognized as Chloe's. "I am the maiden who governs death. You are nothing."
As Barone died, the skeletons all started falling, their unlife fading as the spells that resurrected them unraveled. Chloe turned around to face her former partner. Extending two figures, she placed her hand on her heart and bowed. Kirika returned the gesture. Then Chloe's forearm flopped over, the enchantments holding a shattered forearm in place having faded. Her appearance blurred, becoming something that rather obviously belonged to someone who had been dead for some time.
Chloe staggered toward Kirika, stumbling as the magic that allowed her to walk on a leg that Kirika had hamstrung during the fight gave out. Kirika raised her sword in defense, but Chloe simply allowed it to impale her as she grabbed Kirika's shoulder with her good hand and pulled herself up.
"Kirika..." She whispered as she pressed her lips to Kirika's own. Then the light in her dead eyes went out and the maiden who governed death surrendered herself into her servant's care once more.
As Chloe's once again lifeless body slumped to the ground, Kirika looked around. One of the people in gray walked over to Barone's body, examined a satchel he had with him, and burned the contents. Some others went to examine the drummers, who were now looking around bewilderedly wondering what they were doing in this area of the cemetery at this hour, what had caused all the carnage around them, and what had happened to their drums. The rest were cleaning up the graveyard. A man with a longbow was scanning the area for any further trouble, while Murphy and Butters talked with some people who looked official who had been attracted to the sounds of violence.
"Who are you people?" One of the officials demanded.
"The name's Butters. I'm a medical examiner."
"What does a coroner have to do with all this?"
"We really don't like it when the dead come back to life. Do you have any idea how much that complicates the typical autopsy report?"
After finally clearing things up with the local authorities (At least sufficiently that they were willing to let them leave the cemetery with the understanding that they could be called in to answer more questions at a later time, and Murphy privately suspected that the unnatural luck granted to all Knights of the Cross like Butters had something to do with it), Murphy took her ad hoc team into town to find a motel for the night. In the morning, Dresden took them back through the Ways to Chicago.
When they finally made it back to the castle, Ms. Gard had dragged Noir away for an explanation of the term 'Maiden Who Governs Death'. This was followed by a great deal of violent-sounding noise from the training area as she checked to see if the two were actually good enough to claim that in the presence of a Chooser of the Slain.
Cringing at the sound of another crash, Murphy asked one question of Butters. "By the way, what is in the Plan B bag that you and Dresden threw together?"
Butters opened the bag. Murphy stared.
"Why does Plan B for a zombie invasion involve a polka suit?" She demanded.
"Because polka will never die." Dresden and Butters said in unison.
Murphy sighed. She was afraid to ask what that meant, but equally certain that she had to.
A/N:Kirika, Mireille and Chloe are from the anime Noir, which was introduced to the Recruitment Drive series in the Black Operations stories. Samuel 'Black Talon' Barone is a C-List Marvel villain known for voodoo-style necromancy.
The term "Maiden who governs death" to describe Noir doesn't appear to be anything other than an ominous title in canon, but it sure does inspire questions in a world with zombies and Valkyries in it, doesn't it?
No, there aren't any T. Rexes like Sue in the Smithsonian Museum of National History. It does have a nearly complete Stegosaurus named Roadkill, though.