Zealot (Hidden: Soulhunter Book 3) Read online

  by Colleen Vanderlinden

  Published by Peitho Press

  Detroit, Michigan, 2016

  © 2016 Colleen Vanderlinden

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email the author at [email protected].

  Contents

  Books by Colleen Vanderlinden

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Epilogue

  Note from Colleen

  About the Author

  Dedication

  In loving memory

  of Margaret Vanderlinden

  1944 - 2016

  Prologue

  “Over 300 Dead Overnight as Undead Sweep Through New York”

  - headline, New York Times

  “Entire suburbs are becoming ghost towns overnight. What are we supposed to do about it? What can we do about it?”

  - caller, WDET, NPR affiliate, Detroit

  “Hey, @POTUS. How about nuking the bastards?”

  - via @deadgods4ever on Twitter

  “I mean… this can’t just keep going on. It can’t.”

  “Yeah? What’s going to stop it?”

  “One of them has to be able to stop it. It’s coming from them. One of them has to fix it.”

  “I think we’ll all be dead before that happens.”

  - Overheard conversation, Washington DC Metrorail, Yellow Line

  “I don’t even know who to pray to anymore.”

  - Father J.B. O’Malley, to his brother. Dublin.

  “Try the new and improved Undead Off, guaranteed to repel the Undead! Spray it once, keep the Undead away for over twelve hours! Just $74.99 plus shipping and handling. Order now, and we’ll send you TWO cans of Undead Off! Get it, before they get YOU.”

  - commercial, CNN

  “This is it. Repent! Repent! The Lord is coming, and He will cleanse the Earth of these false gods, and all who believe shall be lifted up, and will walk beside Him in the kingdom of Heaven. Pray with me!&rdquo

  - Televangelist, Faith Network Incorporated. Dallas, Texas.

  “Cremation has now become the only viable situation for families who have lost their loved ones in the recent undead attacks. We simply cannot take the risk that these bodies will somehow become reanimated. And even if we could, where are we going to bury them? Cemeteries that were meant to last us for another fifty to a hundred years have been filled. We have no other choice.”

  - President’s Special Advisor on Immortal Activities, press conference

  “I know they’re trying. Every once in a while, things get better. But I think this is too big, even for them.”

  - Overheard, The White Hart Bar, Whitechapel

  “I think we’re officially fucked.”

  - The Angel, according to some guy on Facebook. (He has never actually seen The Angel, but it got a shit-ton of likes.)

  Chapter One

  The air hung heavy and damp around me, the glowing lights along the narrow street haloed in a misty glow. My footsteps were silent, my breath slow. I followed a trail few others could see or feel.

  This would, barring any nonsense, be my forty-eighth soul in one day.

  In one neighborhood of one city.

  And I knew why they were dying at such a rate. Everyone knew it, now. Just as I could feel the fresh signature of the newly-dead, I felt the presence of the reason the young woman had died.

  Undead.

  They swarmed across the earth, leaving death in their wake. Multiplying.

  My eight New Guardians and I weren’t enough. We had known it for weeks now. There was no way nine of us, most of them very new to this life, could thwart the unstoppable tide of undead that had been released upon the innocent mortals. Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, had died in the past month as the number of undead grew, as they devoured the bodies of the living in their endless, limitless hunger.

  They grew stronger. They were learning, and their learning was a nightmare.

  The first few undead had been aided, coaxed, fed the hearts of the living. Created as tools to unhinge my Queen, the Goddess of Death. But now, with so many of them around, they were watching one another and learning. And, as more humans died, many of them became undead, refusing to give in to death.

  Refusing to go to my Queen for their final judgment.

  We were losing.

  And, still, I hunt. It is the only thing I know how to do.

  I tracked the energy signatures to a dark alley. The new soul, who I knew to be Marilyn Smith, had been murdered by the very undead who now struggled with her. Marilyn wasn’t going down without a fight, even in death, and that was something I could appreciate. She hit the undead hard in the face, stomped his foot. The undead, now sated with Marilyn’s flesh, just wanted to get away. It had not counted on Marilyn’s rage. This was not the first such scene I had witnessed, and I had a feeling it would not be the last. People were angry. Some of them were angry enough to try to fight back. If only intentions and emotion were enough.

  As they struggled, I crept up behind the undead and plunged one of my Netherblades into its back. It howled, screeched, flailed, and did everything it could to reach the blade. When it failed to manage that, it lunged for me, its breath stinking of decay and death.

  This one was partially-corporeal. Two hearts eaten. It sickened me that I knew these things now the same way I know my own name or the tapestry of scars across my flesh. I punched the undead in the face, satisfied by the crunching, squishing sound its face made when met with my fist. It slumped, and I quickly pulled the large black sword out of the scabbard I carried it in and removed its head with one swift motion.

  At least Mollis would not have to deal with this one. Its soul, anything that was left of it, had long since been destroyed in its lust for flesh, for a living body of its own. There would be no soul to judge.

  But it was still a soul that Mollis would miss, knowing that a being had died and she had been unable to punish it. It was one of many things making life worse for the Goddess of Death of late.

  I turned to the soul of Marilyn Smith.

  “Will you come quietly?”

  She nodded and held her hands out.

  “I am sorry you ended the way you did,” I told her as I fastened a gleaming black chain around her wrists. The words came automatically now. Too many of them had expired this way, murdered by the mindless beasts Mollis Eth-Hades’ enemies had created. I was numb. At a certain point, death becomes routine. The Black Plague, the second World War had both been like that for me, since Europe had always been considered my domain.

/>   This… this was worse than that. This would never end, not the way it was going.

  I shook my head. Such thoughts did not do anyone any good. All we could do was keep fighting, keep hunting.

  Keep hoping my Queen managed to keep her sanity long enough to bring her enemies to justice for the devastation they’d caused.

  I shoved that thought away as well as I glanced at the body of the undead I’d destroyed. It was already in the advanced stages of decay. The only good thing I could say about the undead is that at least we did not have to deal with the bodies after we killed them; they just sort of melted away like filth being hosed into a gutter. I put my hand on Marilyn Smith’s shoulder, then focused on rematerializing us to the Netherwoods, where she would face her final judgment.

  Before, first working for Hades and then later for his daughter and heir, Mollis, we would simply bring the souls and be done with it. Now, with such a ridiculous number of souls needing to be judged, and only Mollis capable of doing the judging and sentencing them to their punishment, there were long lines of them waiting even to be admitted to the area where they would await their judgment. Each of the rooms of Mollis’s palace, other than her personal quarters, had become holding areas for the souls of the dead. Demons guarded each room, swords and axes in hand, their glowing red eyes constantly surveying their charges, watching out for trouble.

  “Guardian, do you ever sleep?” One of the demons said when I walked into the least-full admitting room.

  “Do you?” I asked him, and he shook his head tiredly.

  “If I do, it’s likely happening when I’m on my feet,” he said, and I nodded.

  “How are things moving along?” I asked, glancing around the room.

  “Our Lady has been working tirelessly. We’re now grouping the souls in terms of how much evil they caused, and she’s sentencing them in groups.”

  “Efficient,” I said.

  “She hates it. You know she likes to give each soul her personal attention,” the demon guard told me, and I nodded.

  “Let me guess: this method was her husband’s idea.”

  The demon guard nodded.

  “I thought so,” I said. Mollis’s husband, the demon Nain, was in charge of her army of demon guards, and it was easy to see his hand in the way the demons behaved. They were disciplined, but ruthless.

  “So where do I put this one?” I asked, nodding toward the soul I’d just brought in.

  “The room down the hall, last on the left, is for those we believe are low risk,” the demon said in its low, growly voice. “Still very well guarded, so don’t try anything,” he said to Marilyn Smith.

  “I-I won’t,” she said, giving a small shiver beside me.

  “I will take her down there now.” He gave me a nod, and I led the soul away. We made our way down the wide stone corridor, black stone beneath our feet, stone walls rising on either side of us. Elaborate iron chandeliers were spaced at even intervals along the ceiling, lighting our way.

  In the distance, I could hear screams echoing off the stone; evidence that Mollis and the Furies were working.

  I found the room the demon had directed me toward, and handed her off to one demon as another walked toward me.

  This one, I knew. Unlike the others, he wore his human skin, even here where his demon form would have been totally acceptable.

  “E,” Nain said as he stalked toward me. “Answer your fucking phone.”

  “Hello to you, too,” I said, raising my eyebrow.

  “Yeah, hi. Answer your fucking phone,” he repeated.

  “My phone hasn’t rung in days,” I said, pulling it out of my jacket pocket to show him. It was only then that I saw that it had been punctured, a nasty-looking hole going from the screen out the back of the phone.

  “I wonder why,” Nain said drily.

  I tried to remember when that had happened. I remembered fighting an undead who’d had a spear-type weapon.

  “Was Mollis trying to call me?” I asked him, tossing the useless phone into a nearby trash can.

  “Not Molly. Brennan.”

  I blew out a breath.

  “When’s the last time you even talked to him, E?” Nain asked. I was about to answer when he stopped, stalked over to a soul, said a few low words, then came back.

  “What was that about?”

  “That one was trying to incite bullshit earlier. That was his second warning.”

  “And when his third warning becomes necessary?” I asked.

  “He’ll spend a little time with Megaera. She’s always good for helping to keep them in line.”

  I nodded.

  “So. Brennan? Call your husband, E.”

  “He knows I am fine.”

  “When’s the last time you talked to him?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “I know how long it’s been. Do you?” Nain asked.

  “I have a few things going on right now,” I snapped.

  “Yeah, no shit. Call him anyway. Or, better yet, go home and get some sleep. You look like shit and if Molls saw you looking like this she’d want to kick your ass.”

  “You do know that the flood of souls isn’t slowing, yes?”

  “And you and your New Guardians are doing more than anyone ever thought you could do in terms of bringing them in. Every single one of you looks like a fucking zombie or something, which is saying something since you all have that Nether pallor going anyway.”

  I gave him a dirty look.

  “Quinn fell asleep while I was talking to him. Erin and Catherine both got injured because they were so tired they—”

  “Are they all right?” I asked.

  “Yeah. They’re okay.”

  “Why didn’t anyone tell me? They know how to contact me,” I said. Quinn was going to hear about this.

  “Because they’re just as busy as you are, and unless one of you has a limb cut off, you seem incapable of stopping.”

  “It’s what we were made for,” I said with a shrug. “And she needs us to be doing this,” I said, nodding my head toward the rear of the palace, where I knew Mollis was working.

  “She needs you. But even she rests sometimes.”

  “Only because you insist on it.”

  “And because seeing our kids helps her with all of the sick shit she has to see. Go home, E. Take a few hours to get some rest. All the undead fuckers will still be there when you go back out.”

  “Except that there will be more of them,” I argued.

  He sighed, and then he rubbed his hands over his face. “I know. But all of us running ourselves ragged isn’t working. There has to be something else. This isn’t doing it.”

  I have rarely heard despair from the demon Mollis married. Only once, when we’d believed her dead. But I heard it now, and I well understood why: he was watching her slowly but surely lose her mind. She was losing herself in the constant evil she was faced with, with the mounting numbers of souls that were slipping away from us.

  “I need to help her,” I said.

  “You need to go home for a while. A few hours isn’t going to make or break any of this shit,” he said tiredly. And then he turned and walked away, taking a corridor that I knew would lead him to where Mollis was.

  I glanced around, then rematerialized myself back to London, back where I’d collected Marilyn’s soul. I would make one more circuit of the neighborhood, and then I would take the demon’s advice and check in with Brennan.

  I hadn’t even given it a thought, that he might have been trying to contact me. Hadn’t even glanced at my phone, expecting that it would ring if he really needed me for something. A wave of guilt crashed over me. I knew how he worried. And, more, I knew that he missed me when I was not there.

  I was a few streets over from where we were staying, our little flat in Whitechapel, when I felt an immortal nearby.

  I spun around, looking in all directions, trying to decipher where the power source was. It was not overly strong, the way Mollis or one
of the other gods’ powers would feel. This was weaker, lighter, like one of the lesser gods.

  Like my own power, I suppose.

  I felt other energy signatures nearby as well, and I headed toward where all three were, cold rage already coursing through me. The last time I’d found a lesser god with the undead, it had been because my sisters were working with the undead, working to undermine Mollis.

  Working to throw the world, apparently, into chaos. I did not understand it, but seeing the effect their actions had set into motion made me angrier than I’ve ever been.

  I sped up. My sisters, other than my two missing Guardian sisters, Amalia and Zara, were all dead. If this was one of them, with the undead…

  Well. Then at least I would know that my instincts had been correct, that if they were truly innocent of any wrongdoing, Amalia and Zara would have come forward to help Mollis.

  As I got closer, I knew it wasn’t either of them. This wasn’t a Guardian or even a New Guardian power I was feeling. I ran around a corner, hearing the scuffling of feet, followed by a weak moan. Straight ahead of me, I saw four undead surrounding a lesser god I knew well: Lethe, the goddess of forgetfulness. She was fighting them back, but Lethe was never a warrior god. Most gods aren’t, especially not the emotion or nature gods; Poseidon and his family are the exceptions there.

  I ran toward the group and started stabbing out at the undead, quickly taking two out as the other two started to run away.

  That, in and of itself, was unnerving. That much immortal blood and flesh should have made them stay. It was usually irresistible to the undead. But just as they seemed to have learned, over time, how to gain a corporeal form, they seemed to have learned something else as well:

  Fear of me.

  I was about to chase them down when I saw Lethe stumble, then fall, a pale shadow glinting in the dark recesses of the quiet street. I ran over to her, noting with disgust the bite marks on her, the sickly pallor of her usually luminescent skin. Her eyelids were closed over her silvery eyes and her breathing was shallow. I gently picked her up and started to focus, attempting to rematerialize with her. She would need healing.