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for that. And now that she knew the lightning was on her side, so to speak—
    She fought down the immediate rush of I can’t breathe! and concentrated. There was a spell, if she could keep from panicking long enough to remember it….
    Then the words formed in her mind, and the signs and sigils, and she dropped the shovel and got the hilt of her sacred knife, her atheme, in her hand. She pulled it from the sheath at her side, thrust it toward the heavens, and shouted—as best she could, with fading breath and against the muffling of the thing that had wrapped itself around her—the words to call the lightning to her.
    White.
    It wasn’t a flash of light as much as a moment of searing whiteness. A moment when everything stopped and she stood there, blinded, transfixed, like a bug on a pin of power, at the heart of the blaze of a light that was so much more than light.
    And then—
    Then she was standing in the rain with her right hand stretched up, knife pointing at the sky, her clothing steaming.
    The miasma was nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t mean it was gone. Just temporarily dispersed. She had maybe ten minutes before it was back.
    Better dig faster.
    So she did. She dug as fast as she could, uncovering the coffin, then prying up the lid. It should have rotted away by now, but it hadn’t. It hadn’t because the revenant needed the coffin and what was in it in order to survive and keep killing. And with every kill it made, it got stronger, so it could keep the coffin and its contents intact, and keep killing. It was a vicious cycle and one that needed to end now, or it would not end until the last person with Macreedy DNA in his or her body died. “Unto the seventh generation?” That was a joke. This thing wanted to live on in the only way it knew, and it wasn’t going to abide by any term limit. Once it got done with Macreedy descendants, well, it might find some other targets. That was how these old curses went—if they didn’t get weaker with age, and this one hadn’t, the thing behind the curse had found the way to a mad immortality.
    The miasma began to form again as Di levered up the coffin lid. She was not at all surprised to see the intact body of Taylor Marcham inside, the marks of the rope that had hung him still on his neck.
    The rain stopped, cut off abruptly. The graveyard went deathly still.
    The miasma poured into the grave in a flood of fury and hate.
    Poured into the body.
    Taylor Marcham sat up in his coffin, face contorting in a spasm of rage.
    Di jumped on his chest, driving him back down.
    The body struggled insanely for a moment, clawing at her boots, shredding her jeans with its fingernails. But she was a lot stronger than she looked, she had leverage, and although the century-old body was intact, it was fragile. It broke several fingers on her boots and tried unsuccessfully to buck her off while she beat at it with the shovel. Abruptly it went limp.
    Di wasn’t fooled. She drove the shovel down, decapitating the corpse. In the moment of relief that gave her, she fumbled along the side of the grave and groped in her bag for the jar of salt, the jar of blessed water, and the rope from the noose that had hung him—which, bizarrely enough, she had found in the little wreck of a county museum down the road. Shouting the words of banishment and blessing, she doused the body head to toe in salt, then holy water; she dropped the rope on the body’s chest as the miasma surged out of the neck cavity and went for her again.
    This time she didn’t need the lightning. “Fiat lux!” she screamed, and another burst of white-hot light eruptedfrom her, fueled by whatever that power was that inhabited her.
    The miasma, again in vaguely human shape, was flung from her, breaking up a bit as it was repelled. She took that opportunity to get out of the grave, snatching up the jars of lighter fluid from the bag and flinging them into