Page 82 of Tell No Tales
"Are you all right?" Vadim asked.
"Fine."
"I'm with you." Vadim's voice was little more than breath in his ear, comforting in his closeness. "I've got you."
Klaus leaned into his warmth as they headed toward a stairway. It still seemed too cold in the basement, a cold beyond any winter Klaus had felt.
"Anything?" Yvette asked.
"No weavers," Klaus confirmed. "There's … something else down here."
"Mundane?" Nola asked.
A hand of nothing but bone reached out of the darkness toward Nola's light globe.
Klaus screamed as more skeletons shambled into the light.
Chapter 20
Vadim
Yvette backed into Vadim as she dodged the reaching hands. "Necromancy!"
"Fuck. This is what Delilah meant." Vadim hadn't understood. "I thought Delilah found a ledger about Coryn's undead army in the library. She must have found them down here!"
"There are so many of them!" Nola surrounded them with a barrier of water, but it didn't hold them back for long. One persistent undead arm after another found the way through the water, and soon whole bodies were free of the barrier.
"Yvette? Vadim?" Nola's voice raised an octave between names.
"Kill." The word startled Vadim, and he felt a spike of fear from Klaus through their link. It came from off to their left, behind the wall of water.
"They can talk!" Nola built another water barrier around them and shoved them back as far as she could. The moment she met resistance and stopped moving them backward, the bodies began moving toward them again.
"Kill," answered a cacophony of other voices, too many to count.
"Healer," the one closest to Vadim snapped at him with a jaw that seemed to be held together with wire. "Die."
"You picked a great time to regain your balance," Klaus muttered.
The body of a woman found her way through the water barrier. She stumbled into their space, and Yvette bumped into Vadim again in her effort to get away.
The way the woman moved seemed wooden and lifeless, not at all how a living person would move. When she rolled her shoulders back to lift her head, it was stuck at a wrong angle, too far bent to the right with bone sticking out the left side of her neck.
"No," Klaus wailed. "No, no, no, no, no."
"I've got you." Vadim wrapped an arm around Klaus's middle and yanked him to his side. They stood back-to-back in the middle of the water cylinder. Too many of the bodies were making their way inside without trouble.
"Can you move the water faster?" Yvette asked.
"I only have enough power to build the barrier again, and then I'll be exhausted."
"Fuck," Yvette whined. "I can't do anything."
Vadim could sense the healing power used to make the creatures, but he didn't have a way to touch the weaves to undo them.
"You control death," Klaus said as the undead woman took another step closer. "Make them stop."
Vadim took a deep breath and reached for the woman. "Halt."
