Page 138 of The Rut in the Road

Now I had their attention.

Sometimes, when they’re left for long enough and their emotions are strong enough, the dead lose some of who they are. Places become haunted when the dead forget their own names and remember only their grief or rage. Someone like Ward or Beck could help them remember, but I wasn’t a medium. I was—whatever I am. A witch of life and death. I could blend the two, but I couldn’t give them back their identities.

But I could channel their anger.

And these dead were very, very angry.

That’s the thing about slavery.

The people who lived and died under its lash were not happy about it. They hadn’t been when they were alive, and they hadn’t given up that rage after death, either.

It was one thing to raise rats or mice or bugs.

It was a very different thing to raise people.

Animals have animal personalities. They don’t hold grudges.

A hundred murdered slaves absolutely do.

Sweat beaded on my forehead as I called to them, raising bone and flesh and dust, binding it with spirit. Urging them to balance out the wrongs that had been done to them by stopping the wrongs these people would do to others. I pushed my will and anger into them, feeding their rage with my own.

Because underneath all the fear and doubt and self-loathing, I was also angry.

I was angry that my parents had locked me in an asylum so that my magic could be taken from me. Angry at the doctors and nurses and orderlies who had done it again and again or let it happen and did nothing. Angry at the people who thought I was less than fully human for being a witch or a psychic. Angry even at the people who cared about me, but who sheltered me and treated me as though I were made of hand-blown glass. Angry that I’d let people treat me that way for so long that I no longer knew what I wanted.

Angry that I’d never gotten the chance to figure out who I even was, much less who I wanted to be.

A low rumble sounded below us, the metal and cement of the warehouse trembling as a hundred long-buried dead began to claw their way to the surface.

“The unholy fucking hell is that?” Hart rasped.

“I don’t know,” Cass hissed.

“This part of your vision?” Hart asked.

“N-no,” she answered, the fear clear in her voice.

“Good,” came his response, although his tone was grim and serious.

A breath after the screaming and shooting started, I heard him breathe out a “What thefuck…?”

Then I heard a slight crunch of glass as he moved, presumably trying to see what was going on down on the floor. I kept my eyes shut. I knew what was happening and I definitely didn’t want to see it.

Maybe I should have. It was my fault that the dead were unleashing their centuries-pent-up fury on the people below.

“R-Rayn…” Hart stammered, and there was fear and something else in his voice. Enough that in spite of the bone-deep ache that using this much magic had caused, I tried to respond.

Because I’d never heard him stammer before.

“Yes,” I managed. I was answering the question he hadn’t asked—Are you doing this?

“Jesusfuck.”

I could hear Cass’s ragged breathing over the screams and cries in the beats between gunshots and explosions.

Oh.

It wasn’t Cass’s breathing.