Dahlia Falz's Arc

Chapter 3 of 7

"Enough," Phyllis said. She knelt on the cold stone and pressed both palms flat against the floor. Dahlia watched her daughter close her white eyes. This was the child she had searched three centuries to find. Now she would learn what that child had become. The manor answered. Bone scraped bone in the walls. From the cellar and the yard, the dead climbed. Skeletons with cracked skulls filed into the great hall. Some carried rusted swords. Some clawed the air with fingers. Phyllis counted them in a whisper, the way a farmer counts stock. Forty. Fifty. Then no more. "That's all," Phyllis said. Sweat ran down her pale face. "The ground here is old. There aren't many left to raise." Cynder folded her arms and studied the ranks of bone. Dahlia's eldest sister carried her strength like a lit match, always ready to burn. "Fifty walking corpses," Cynder said. "Against whatever comes through that door." She grinned, fangs bright. "I like bad odds." Luna pushed back her hood. She moved along the line of skeletons, silent, testing each one with a glance. Her cunning had saved them before. "Then we don't fight fair," she said. "Send the dead to the door. They feel no fear and no pain. Let the enemy spend themselves on bone." Dahlia understood. "And we take the back stair," she said. "We guard whatever they want beneath the house." Phyllis rose. Her small hand found her mother's. "They'll come at full dark," she said. "I can hold the skeletons at the front. But holding them costs me. If I break, they drop." "Then don't break," Cynder said. Dahlia squeezed her daughter's fingers. "You won't stand alone. Not again." They set the trap fast. Phyllis marched her dead to the broken front door and packed them shoulder to shoulder. A wall of bone filled the entry. Behind it, the four of them slipped toward the rear of the hall, where a narrow stair curled down into dark. Dark fell. Something struck the front of the manor. Wood cracked. The skeletons braced. Through the shattered door poured shapes Dahlia could not name, hooded and fast. Bone met flesh. Swords rose and fell. Phyllis gripped the wall and shook, holding fifty corpses upright by will alone. The dead held the line. The hooded attackers piled against them and could not break through. Cynder laughed low and ready. Luna crouched at the top of the stair, watching the enemy waste their strength. Then Dahlia felt it. Cold air rose from below, from the dark the enemy wanted. Not from the door. From under the house. She turned from the fight and looked down the curling stair. Something moved in the black beneath them. The trap had worked at the front. But the true threat had never been coming through the door. It was already inside, waiting under her mother's house.