Haunted Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

detective into his arms.
    Morio shrugged. “Dude, it’s going to be quicker if I carry you.”
    “Fine, but hurry. You’ve got some pretty funky B.O. going on in this form.” Chase gave me a wry what-can-you-do shrug. Over the past few months, he’d managed to rein in his ego and had fallen into his place in the group. He was a vital member, and now he knew we thought of him that way. So he’d started accepting his physical limitations even as his psychic powers burgeoned out.
    Morio set off with Shade behind him. Smoky, Delilah, and I turned back to the graveyard. The night was growing darker, and the clouds now covered the moon. I was tired, both magically and physically. The sugar and adrenaline rushes had worn off, and I just wanted to drop into bed.
    “Come on, let’s get this over with.” I hoped, really hoped, that Chase’s men had found a place to hide, or that somehow they’d made their way back to the parking lot, but the cynic in me wasn’t betting on it. Zombies and bone-walkers might be slow, but they never tired, and fear made for clumsiness.
    We headed for the nearest sidewalk—probably fifty yards away—in silence. The scattered remnants of the bone-walkers still twitched, fingers inching along the ground, toes struggling to move on their own. I passed an arm bone that still had a hand attached to it, and the fingers were pulling it along the ground, grasping at blades of grass as it inched toward us. Smoky gazed at it silently for a moment, then walked over and stomped on it, crushing it beneath his foot. That took care of that. He looked back at us.
    “Once we find Chase’s men, we should bury this flotsam.These were once living, breathing people. Their remains deserve respect, not this desecration.” He rejoined us.
    “That they do.” I led the way off the grass onto the sidewalk. The path wound through another thicket of trees, this time birch and maple, out into another section of the cemetery. The gravestones here had been toppled, too.
    Everything felt empty, eerily so. Though I knew most of the dead were still in the ground, the spirits were gone. Shortly after death, the majority of spirits went on to their next phase in life, or to be with their ancestors, but every graveyard held at least a handful who could not let go. I’d never encountered a completely clear and empty boneyard before, and the feeling unsettled me. It wasn’t normal.
    “There’s nothing left. Whatever sucked up the spirits got them all. Who could do such a thing?” I shivered, drawing my jacket tighter around me.
    “Ivana Krask?” Delilah grimaced.
    I thought about it for a moment. Ivana Krask, the Maiden of Karask, was one of the Elder Fae—and a definite freak show. She kept a garden of spirits, where she would torment them. For the most part, she took only the angry and dangerous ones. But even though Ivana had a staff that could clear out the ghosts in a limited area, this sort of wholesale pillaging was beyond even her. At least I
thought
it was.
    “We’ll ask her, but I don’t think she was responsible. Never hurts to check, though.” As I pushed aside a low-hanging branch overshadowing the sidewalk, I stopped cold. Up ahead, just off the path to the left, was a man, in uniform. Or what was left of a man. And over the body hunkered a pair of zombies, feeding. Great, first bone-walkers, a bloatworgle, goblins, and now walking meat-bags.
    I grimaced as I noticed they’d ripped open his torso and were dipping into the organs. One of the zombies was feasting on intestines, and the slick tubes of viscera hung limply out of the creature’s mouth. The zombie had been a young woman, and the sight of her shoveling the offal through her bloodstained lips made me want to retch. I sucked it up—I’d seen a lot of sick things in my time and this was no worsethan some of the others—and looked around for the other officer.
    A ways up the path, we caught sight of the second body. Again, a zombie was