We were cruising our patrol route one evening when Denise got called to the King’s Chapel Burying Ground, the oldest and largest cemetery in Boston, established in the 1600s.
Denise jumped to take the call and zoomed us up into the priority lane. “A cemetery! It’s that fucking berbalang!”
“Denise, what the fuck is a berbalang?”
“Creepy hunched gray monster-thing. Big ears, sharp teeth. Berbalangs hang out in graveyards and dig up corpses of people who used to use magic, so they can eat any residual magic left in their bones.”
“That is… uniquely terrifying.”
“Ugly, nasty little fuckers, and I’ve been tracking this one for months. I’ve been getting reports of disturbed graves all over town, but I can never catch him. He keeps bringing corpses to the surface, cracking their coffins and reburying them after he eats the magic. This is the first call to King’s Chapel, so this may be his lair.”
“So, if this is a monster, am I allowed to punch it?”
“Absolutely. If we see this thing, I want you to smack the shit out of it!”
* * *
King’s Chapel Burying Ground was a national treasure, not just a sacred site for the families of those buried there, but a slice of history, part of Boston’s Freedom Trail, so both our hearts broke when we saw what the monster had done to it.
Denise was getting increasingly agitated as we walked around. She keyed her radio and told dispatch to evacuate the area, but I couldn’t immediately see why.
I tried to do her witch eyes thing, but I still sucked at it. “Denise, what is it? What are you seeing?”
“See this dirt?” she pointed. “This body has been dug up and reburied about a foot down. Previous calls, I found maybe one or two. But this… Oh god. Tim, I’m counting… See this row? It’s all of them on this row. He’s been doing this for months, and it doesn’t make sense. Berbalangs only dig up people who used magic, but this… This is every corpse in every row for…”
She gulped and started to back away. “Tim, we need to get out of here.”
“Get out of here? We can’t get out of here! We’re the fucking heroes!”
“This is a trap. It’s using our magic to… This whole graveyard is a trap, and we triggered it. We tripped something as soon as we brought magic in here. Tim, run for the gate!”
Denise and I took off running, but we were already too far in, when the first line of corpses emerged from the ground and started shambling toward us.
“This is not a berbalang!” Denise said, throwing up one of her vine cage things. “Tim, could this be your next-door neighbor?”
“Nergal? No way. Nergal wouldn’t do this to me.”
“Tim, he is not your big dead drinking buddy! He killed and reanimated like four hundred people! You have to admit this would be on brand!”
“No way,” I repeated. “Nergal really is dead. He wouldn’t be strong enough to do this in his home territory, much less here, all the way across town.”
“Look, Nergal may be a terrifying death machine, but he’s not an asshole! The guy who did this?” I gestured at the zombies, dressed in their ancient church clothes, “The guy who did this is an asshole!”
“Tim, this could be a necromancer. An incredibly powerful necromancer. To prepare something on this scale? He’s been working on this for months. This isn’t a test or a prank. This is a full-on terror attack. I have to call this in.”
There was already a line of zombies coming at us. There was a dozen of them, but they were really slow. I flicked my hand up and hit them with a low-power version of Anson’s artillery spell. The bodies scattered and fell apart, as the next dozen started to stand up.
“Do we really need backup?” I asked. “There are a lot of them, but these things just fall right over.”
Denise pointed at the pile I had just created, and I watched as it slowly grew back together into a shambling pile of arms and legs, a dozen dismembered zombies recombining into one giant super zombie, before it started coming toward us again.
“Oh.” I said. “Oh, wow. That’s bad.”
“That’s not basic necromancy, Tim. This is advanced magic, from somebody who has had plenty of time to set this up!”
The zombies were coming toward us from all sides now. I could already count thirty of them, not including the new giant one, that seemed to be having trouble moving forward on its disjointed mishmash of arms and legs.
I blasted another dozen back, but the pace seemed to be accelerating, as I saw another line of disturbed graves sprout zombies behind us.
I blasted two more groups, but a third one got so close, Denise had to use her vines to hold them off, as she launched tiny burning pellets at them.
Any zombie hit by the pellets seemed to stop moving, but she could only shoot one at a time, and we had maybe a hundred closing in.
“Tim,” Denise said softly. “You’re a beautiful person, and I’m glad I met you.”
“Hey!” I shouted. “We are not done yet! It’s way too early for poetic last words! I can knock them back with my artillery spell, but they’ll just keep coming!”
“It has to be acid or fire!” Denise shouted.
“Again, with the acid spell. I really need to spend some time learning that acid spell if we live. Denise, I’ve got another idea, but I’m gonna have to improvise. This artillery thing is an air spell, but what if… What if I cast it with fire?”
“Tim, it takes weeks to work out a spell variant! And even if it works, you’ll probably blow yourself up!”
“Keep your distance! I just have to trust my wards!”
I pulled up the artillery spell and cast it again, swapping out the rune for air with a rune for fire. The resulting explosion blew a bunch of zombies back and set them on fire easily enough, but it was centered on me, like I had no control at all. If I hadn’t been using my wards at full power, I would have burned myself alive.
Denise shouted my name, but I yelled back, “I’m okay! Just stay away! I’m gonna try it with air and fire at the same time!”
This time I cast it with the standard air rune and added the fire rune right behind it. The spell went whump like usual, but this time the whump was followed by a woosh, as the air caught fire, scattering burning zombie parts in all directions.
Denise yelled, “How the hell?” and decided to roll with it. “Just keep doing that! Fast as you can, all around us!”
“I think I just reinvented the fireball, but this thing is a bitch to control, and it’s taking a huge amount of magic! Tag me!”
Denise reached out to grab my hand through her vine cage, and a surge of magic flared between us, taking me back to our first fight, when her simple presence filled me with power and confidence, making me feel like I could do anything, as long as she was with me.
Our bond was stronger than ever, but we were both tired and scared. My aura popped out into the visible spectrum as my own power surged, outlining my body in white fire, while hers was more of a warm amber glow.
Our auras merged into a bright, jagged off-white, and I got maybe four blasts off before I started to run low and had to make do with smaller versions.
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I was pushing the zombies back and burning them so they couldn’t get back up, but that big one was getting closer.
We joined hands and shot it together, like I was lobbing an incendiary grenade, immediately followed by a giant burning pellet from Denise.
The corpse pile stopped moving and fell apart, as an entire horde of zombies came around the corner, marching slowly toward us.
I was blasting them back as fast as I could, but they seemed to be multiplying, feeding off the magic I was using to kill them, so every time I used a fire blast to destroy a pack of six zombies, a fresh dozen popped out of the ground.
They were coming in waves, and it only took a few blasts to knock a wave back, but I could see the ground churning in all directions, as the necromancer’s trap used our stolen power to push fresh reinforcements to the surface.
Jeeves said there were about two thousand people buried in this cemetery, and if they kept up this pace, we were going to end up fighting all of them, all at once, in a matter of minutes.
And when they got done with us, they were going to go rampaging through the city, turning living people into new recruits, until…
“Tim,” Denise said my name, almost in tears. “I have to call this in. I have to call for air support, and if they send air support… I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, but I have to.”
She switched to her emergency channel and said, “Bluestar Adjunct Denise Hardy, reporting Code Orange undead incursion at King’s Chapel. I count fifty, maybe a hundred entities visible, but the full scope of the threat is unknown. Apocalypse protocol.” Then she paused like she was listening to a dispatcher and said, “DJH 0106. Supervising Timothy Erin Kovak TEK 0413. Requesting incendiary strike on King’s Chapel. We’ll keep them focused on us for as long as we can.”
She was crying now. “Tim, we’ve got two minutes.”
“What happens in two minutes? Do we need to run for the gate?”
“We can’t run anymore,” Denise said. “We have to keep them clustered in one spot. The National Guard is about to drop a bomb here, and if we want to get all of these things in the blast, they have to drop it right on top of us. It’s probably time for those last words now.”
The military didn’t technically use napalm anymore. The new version was a fuel gel mix made from kerosene and benzine. The Pentagon said it was better for the environment than the old kind, so hey, on the bright side, we were about to get a nice, eco-friendly death.
“They’ll give us a few seconds warning before the bomb drops. Tim, you should just drop your wards when you hear it. Whatever this bomb is about to do to us, you do not want to live through it.”
“So that’s it?” I complained. “Somebody finally makes me a superhero and I don’t even get two months? This is bullshit! When I get to Hell, I’m filing a complaint!”
Denise laughed through her tears. “You never stop, do you? I love you, Tim.”
“I love you, too. I’m sorry we didn’t get to finish our date.”
We heard the planes coming before we saw them, blinded and deafened by emergency warnings telling us to clear the area.
Denise dropped her vine cage and grabbed my hand, hoping that the bomb would get us before the zombies did. I knew I was supposed to just stand there and die, but when I got that last warning, I threw Denise to the ground and threw myself on top of her, pumping everything into my wards.
We knew it was probably hopeless, but we decided to go out fighting, joining our power like we were one person, pouring everything we had into staying alive.
I closed my eyes when the bomb hit, but I could still see the fire, visible as blooming shapes and billows of orange through the blood red of my eyelids.
Denise and I screamed with one voice as the fire rolled over us. My wards flickered, and I could feel the heat across my back, as the flaming gel turned my skin into crispy black meat.
Denise was healing me, pumping power into my chest from underneath while I put everything into my wards. I could feel the spells flickering as the fire went on and on, burning and healing, burning and healing as we screamed.
Then we passed out, clinging to each other in a pile of ashes until the paramedics took us away.
* * *
We woke up in the hospital, in separate rooms in the ICU. I was on my stomach, strapped down so I couldn’t move. I freaked out so bad at being restrained, I almost triggered my strength stuff and hurt myself, but I forced myself to calm down, and noticed a message from Denise, lingering in the corner of my eye.
Nice to know my new lenses could survive a napalm strike. Thank god I wasn’t using plastic contacts anymore. That fire would have melted them to my eyes.
Her message said, “Please wake up.”
My Datacore cylinder was on the nightstand, but my lidar still worked, so I twitched my finger and used eye movements to send a message back. “Awake.”
Denise initiated a voice call, and I had to crane my neck a little to keep my words from being muffled by the pillow.
“Tim! Are you okay?”
“I have no idea. Are you?”
“Doctor says I’m medium rare, but if he’s joking about it, I guess I’ll be okay. You got burned a lot worse, but you had your fortitude thing going, so I think you’ll recover.”
“I hope so! Hey Jeeves, hack medical records for Timothy Erin Kovak, born April 13, 2033.” I had Jeeves clean up the handwriting and scanned the doctor’s notes that I wasn’t supposed to see. “Looks like I’ve got a synthetic skin graft on my back. I could probably do better with healing magic, but I’ll have to wait until they send me home. What is this other shit? Deep tissue damage from magical regeneration? Oh fuck, I guess I better look that up. My blood pressure is still through the roof, and I have chafing on… Oh, nevermind.”
I smiled as I saw a tiny thumbnail of Denise laughing in the corner of my eye. “How about you?”
“I’m okay. Tim, you saved me. I can’t believe we survived that, but you saved me.”
“Just call us even, you saved me first.”
“When did I save you?”
“I’ve been thinking about it, and I think my fight with Baalphezar, I think you’re the real reason I won that fight, the real reason I didn’t turn evil like my ancestors.”
“You’re giving me too much credit.”
“Nope,” I tried to shake my head. “Everybody else in my family, they couldn’t feel magic until they had sex with Lydia, and for the first six generations, they got most of their power from her. They all used Earth magic a little, but starting out, all they had was Hell magic, and every bit of that was regulated through her.
“Denise, you’re the reason I could break that contract. You teaching me to use Earth magic, helping me bypass Lydia and make a connection with my homeworld, you made this whole thing possible.”
Notice that I didn’t tell her about the final thing that took me over the edge, when Baalphezar commanded me to merge the Kovach and Hardy bloodlines and give all the children to him.
Denise was quiet for a while. “You really think so?”
“Yes. I don’t necessarily believe everything Evan said about that alternate universe shit, but if he was right, if all my magic was regulated through Lydia, if I was dependent on her for everything… Denise, I don’t think I would have been strong enough to fight that. So, everything I’ve done since you met me, every spell I’ve cast, every life I’ve saved, it’s because of you. Because you trusted me, from the first minute you met me.”
Denise cried a little and tried to nod. “Nice to know I finally did something right, even if I did it by accident.”
“Denise, how much did you know? How much did you know about my powers and stuff, the night we met?”
“Evan told me you were crazy powerful, but I didn’t believe him right away. I felt… something, the first time I touched you, but for you to be as powerful as he said you were, I didn’t believe it, until I saw it myself.”
“So, is that why you did it? That first time you kissed me? You just wanted to find out how powerful I was?”
She sighed. “Here’s something you need to learn about women. You’re asking me to pick one reason for what I did, but women always have at least two reasons for everything they do, sometimes three or four.
“So yeah, testing your power was one reason I kissed you. But I also kissed you because you were fun, and funny, and I was so relieved to finally meet a compatible guy who had a sense of humor!
“I was so excited to meet a guy who could use magic but was still a normal guy, who hadn’t been spoiled by private schools and scholarships and corporate perks. So yes, Tim. I had at least two reasons for kissing you, and if you really want to get pushy about it, I could probably think of a few more. But you kissed me, too. Why did you kiss me?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” I said. “I kissed you because you were so hot, I lost my fucking mind.”
“So, if you were so hot for me, why did you walk away? Was it really just Lydia?”
“Partly, but really, I walked away, and stayed away, because I didn’t think I was good enough for you.”
“You still think that?”
“Nah,” I said, only half joking. “I think you’re a little more fucked up than I thought you were, and maybe I’m not quite as fucked up as I thought I was, so I figure we’re about equally fucked up now.”
Denise was quiet again for a long time, before she said, “You should probably call your demon now. She’s gonna be worried about you, and you should stop her before she tries to sneak into a hospital.”
Could I really just call a demon on the phone? I had Jeeves pull up the cameras in the ceiling of my living room and open all my microphones.
I could see the wall across from my desk where Lydia usually perched when I was home, but she wasn’t there. Maybe she was hiding in the gray?
“Hey Lydia, can you hear me?”
No response, so I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the golden cord that bound us together, the astral tether that connected mages who bonded with demons.
It had been really thin and weak the last time I saw it, after we went so long without touching, in the weeks before I declared war on Hell, but now, as I tugged on it, it felt surprisingly strong.
I focused on our tether and said, “Lydia, can you hear this?”
Her voice came back immediately. “Timothy, how badly are you injured? Can I come to you?”
“I’m okay, but you better not come here. I’m in the hospital. I suffered some burns, but they’re using conventional medicine on me, and I figure we can do some more thorough healing when I get home. I’m gonna be okay.”
She wasn’t exactly crying, but I could feel that she wanted to.
“I know what I said before,” Lydia said, “about your destiny. But this job… Please, when you get back, please think about this job. Think about what it’s doing to you, and think, really think about, if this is the life you want for yourself.”
I promised her I would think about it, just before Denise came back in my ear. “You see your new badge?”
“What? No.”
“How can you be a huge computer geek and still never check your email! You’re not a trainee anymore. We’re still just adjuncts, but we both got a commendation and a five-thousand-dollar bonus from VBC. We’re supposed to attend an awards ceremony when we get out, and here’s the best part… You see that black bar that just appeared above your badge?”
I tried to nod without suffocating in the pillow.
“Congrats, hero. You just got authorized to punch people.”