Across the cemetery, phalanges poked through soft earth, up through the dewy green carpet that, over some, had grown thick and matted and unkempt. Most remains were largely skeletal, their flesh having been devoured long ago by parasites and fungi, their squishy bits gone back to the earth, but others hung with skin and fabric, dripped juices, shook out larvae with each movement. Some even still possessed eyes, having been interred within the last few days, but those were few, and the bits-and-pieces variety were many. They were all many--many, many more than could ever be decapitated by the one lone warrior attempting to stand guard outside the most ostentatious mausoleum in the entire graveyard. But stand guard he did, sword held aloft, eyes burning with fire, rage boiling in his belly, preparing himself for the mad, mad frenzy he'd soon allow to consume him so that he could fulfill his promise to his lord. With all the insane anticipation he could muster, Cearnach waited . . .

Left quite speechless in the interior of the marble box, two girls and one boy stood in their own frantic anticipation, unsure what to do or think of what was happening. Emery first tried to open the door, but even as the three of them pushed, they knew Cearnach had jammed the heavy thing shut so tight that they'd never open it on their own. The second thought anyone had was to look for a window, but the only one they could immediately see was a skylight way up high, letting in a giant shaft of moonlight that did, at least, light the central chamber enough that they could see. So they had nowhere to go, and they had nothing to look out of, but they could certainly hear, and what they heard was no consolation. Scraping and howling and groaning and rattling--all quite distant for the present but certainly gathering in strength and drawing nearer. And they could hear Cearnach's animalistic barks and snarls as he prepared himself for the coming fight.

"We can't just sit in here!" Emery practically screamed.

Tess and Charlie looked more alike than Emery had ever thought they'd looked, mirroring one another's wide eyes and alarm.

"Em," Tess said in a low, surprisingly calm voice, "what could we possibly do out there?"

"But Cearnach can't fight them all off!"

"Do you really think we could help?" Tess asked.

"No," Emery admitted, "but it's worse being stuck in this thing!"

Charlie shook his head in exasperation. "Emery's right. In here, we're trapped. If something happens to him, they'll get in, and we have nowhere to go." He thought for a moment, then added, "This thing is huge. Maybe there's another way out. See all those coffins or whatever they are? And the pillars? Start looking around them, and behind them . . . maybe we'll find something."

The three scrutinized the mausoleum more closely, the rattling and howling outside intensifying, Cearnach's blade beginning to make contact with things they could only imagine. Emery pressed the walls and bent to the floor to look for any sort of passages and then moved to peek behind some pillars at the back, where the moonlight barely reached. She found nothing in those shadows, but when she turned to go back into the open room, she found herself face to face with Charlie, his features blurred in the darkness, a velvety closeness between them.

"Emery, I--"

He seemed startled, and yet he had to have known she was right there, that he was blocking her way out. Emery felt her heart beating, inches away from him. She couldn't do this right now, and it wasn't just the poor timing. But she didn't want to hurt him, and she did enjoy the butterflies he brought out in her. He held his shovel in one hand, its blade against the ground, and with his other reached to touch her cheek, and Emery didn't know what to do or say because this just couldn't happen for so many reasons even though she wanted it to at the same time and--

Out of the wall, right above Charlie's head, shot a wizened old claw, grabbing with its crispy fingers for whatever it could find. Emery didn't have any time to scream; she swung up her garden shears and snipped the scrabbling thing off its scrawny limb.

Charlie, who'd dodged the falling hand, looked at Emery agape. "Holy shit!"

A little surprised at his swearing (the hand hadn't been that terrifying, all things considered), Emery was about to comment on it when she realized that Charlie was no longer looking at her but beyond her, out into the open area of the mausoleum, where dead things of all sorts were beginning to burst through the walls and the floors, decrepit hands and feet and fingers and even toothless, eyeless, tufty-haired heads.Tess screamed from somewhere out there and Charlie, grabbing hold of Emery, pulled her out of the pillars, more claws reaching for their hair and ankles and faces as they tried to move. Once in the center of the room, they could see better, and Charlie started swinging and chopping his shovel at anything he could find. Tess was there, too, using her rake rather ineffectively but trying. On every neck she could find, Emery worked her gardening shears, and soon heads were rolling with their black, moth-eaten eye sockets gazing up at the skylight. Some of the fresher spines were difficult to cut through, but with some determination and the recently sharpened shears, and with Charlie's help, Emery managed to decapitate quite a few of the creatures. It was their luck, too, that the things seemed to be struggling to get through their tombs in the mausoleum more so than the ones digging up through the dirt.

But at some point, the three found themselves back-to-back with crawling things closing in around them and their energy flagging. Cearnach's war-cries could still be heard amidst all the clashing and yowling beyond the tomb, which was heartening, but even he couldn't go on forever, and the undead seemed numberless.

"I found a window!" Tess suddenly cried.

His back to his sister, Charlie yelled, "Why didn't you say so?" before jabbing a corpse in the throat.

"It's really small!" Tess called out. "It's stained glass! Back in that corner!"

How they'd get to it, Emery had no idea, but then she suddenly thought of something just stupid enough it might make a difference. Whipping out her phone, she swiped on the light and some music, turning it up as loud as she could and throwing it to the left. The zombies seemed, just as she'd hoped, stalled momentarily, sort of swaying toward the glowing noisemaker a little, giving the three just enough time to carve a path to the back right of the mausoleum, where Tess said she'd seen that window. When they reached it, they were disappointed to see that it was, indeed, quite small. There was no way Charlie could get through it, with his athletic figure, but Tess was pretty tiny.

"Absolutely not," Emery commanded, seeing Tess start toward it. "They're after me. I'm going out, and hopefully they follow."

With the end of Tess's rake, Emery punched out the stained glass, running the long handle around its frame in order to get out as many shards as she could. The opening was the size of a pizza, and though Emery was taller than Tess, she was slender enough to get through if she moved her body properly.

Charlie was in the process of beating at the bedraggled corpses that had lost interest in the phone, but he managed to yell, "Emery, no! Don't go out there!"

"I'll draw them away!" She urged Tess to give her a boost. "It's the only way! Find Cearnach when they're gone, and then find me!"

There was no time for anything else. The window was about seven feet up, and with Tess's help, Emery managed to grab its rim and pull herself through into the cooler night air. She hadn't realized how disgustingly stuffy the mausoleum had grown until she'd re-entered that late summer night. The undead were everywhere, though most nearby were concentrated around the front of the mausoleum, no doubt fighting Cearnach. Emery had a clean drop to the ground, though she fell pretty much head-first and twisted an arm. Once she hit land, though, the zombies seemed to know it, and they immediately turned toward her. Paying no attention to direction or anything else but where the zombies weren't, Emery started running blindly, and the rattling behind gave her hope that her plan to draw them away from the others, however foolish, was working.

Only when she found herself approaching the treeline did she slow. The forest was exactly where Death would want her to be, wasn't it? It was where he could get closest to her. But the zombies were mere yards behind, shambling along, closing in slowly enough but in numbers far too great to get past. She had no choice--she'd have to head for the trees. Could those corpses climb? She didn't know, but she couldn't run too deep into the woods, either, or Cearnach and Tess and Charlie would have no hope of finding her. There was just no real time to make a rational decision, so she kept running toward the murkier darkness beyond the graveyard.

The moment Emery crossed into the trees, however, the undead stopped moving. She could tell first because the noise of their clacking bones and brainless grumbles ceased, and when she turned, she saw that they had, indeed, just stopped. They seemed to be watching her with their empty, unseeing holes, but for as close as they'd come, they didn't appear willing to follow her. That was . . . good? She didn't know what it meant.

As she stood there, though, pondering it all, an utterly loathsome stench crept into her nostrils. It was the smell of putrescence, of liquefying flesh and organs--of rancid decomposition, meat moldering, once-living material being excreted and regurgitated and consumed again by mildew and mold and vermin. Emery began to retch and brought the back of her hand up to cover her nose, as the noisomeness permeated the air in an almost tangible funk. This couldn't be the odor of the undead . . . she'd been surrounded by them in that mausoleum, and though they'd been stale and musty, they hadn't reeked like this, like . . . like Death itself . . .

Emery spun, and behind her was a towering figure, far blacker than anything else around it, like the depth of outer space without the stars and planets, a black hole hungry and gaping. As black as it was, she made out the stinking carcass of a wolf hung over it, the eyeless head of the dead animal dripping with foulness.

Stumbling backward, Emery panicked. The thing was reaching for her; she felt it more than saw it doing so, and she didn't know whether she could escape the dizzying effects of its absence of matter and its overwhelming emanation. Back, back a little more, and the undead began jangling and muttering again--where could she go?

To her right--a faint, very faint light . . . an ethereal pale, pearly blue, before which was silhouetted one of the largest trees she'd ever seen, and it seemed to pulse with a whisper that beckoned to her . . .

Emery ducked out of Death's grasp, nearly fell, but managed to regain her footing and fly headlong toward that light. The moment she reached the trunk of the tree, she realized that it wasn't quite one but dozens of smaller trees connecting and winding into one living thing, and the light she saw much more clearly now was glowing from within its depths. Behind, the blot of total darkness moved her way, but Emery found a narrow opening between two of the trunks and slipped into the interior of the tree, where she was engulfed in the aqua brilliance within the small chamber.

The light was strange; she couldn't make out its source, and it seemed attracted to her, attaching itself to her clothing and skin and hair in tiny beads of brilliance. It was beautiful, but Death could still move in the darkness beyond, and she was trapped, now. If at any moment the light went out, she'd be his prisoner.

A warmth, from her anxiety or from some other source, wrapped Emery in its blanket, and as she stood, terrified and hypnotized by the light, she recognized the familiar sensation of dizziness, of the world tilting, of her sight blurring, and she fell to her knees . . .

When she looked up, no longer was she in the woods, in the strange ghostly insides of the tree; she was on her hands and knees, pebbled earth beneath them, and before her lay a vast range of barren, foreboding hills, windswept and gloomy. A harsh, biting wind whipped her hair around her face, and she struggled to stand against its force. When she managed to get to her feet, Emery saw no more than thirty or so yards away, a heaping pile of what appeared to be dead things . . . not people, she thought. Not people, but . . . horns, and claws, and strange-colored skins and furs. And as she stood in confusion, a figure walked into view, hauling over his shoulder the body of some sort of lionish beast, its hindquarters and tails dragging on the ground behind him. The figure flung the dead creature onto the pile and turned to go back the way it had come, but then it caught sight of her, standing, staring. It was him, again. It was Cullen. Blood stained his face and hands and clothing; everything was askew, from his cloak to his hair to his weaponry. He looked absolutely exhausted and pained, as if he'd spent days without comforts of any kind, and yet, in spite of all of his dishevelment, Emery's breath caught. His intense green eyes, their color vibrant even from that distance; his masculine stature and refined though strong features; the ferocity of his gaze--

She couldn't bear the way he looked at her, as if he saw into her soul, as if he were confused and in awe and desirous of approaching her, which he was beginning to do, and her heart skipped, and she backed up and he was coming closer, and just as he was a mere few feet away from her, he reached out--

But she was suddenly back in the light, that pale misty light, and instinctively, she crossed her arms across her chest, as if to keep in all the heat and emotion of her encounter with Cullen, and instantaneously, from all around her burst a brilliance far more dazzling than anything she could've imagined; her whole body resplendent with opalescence.

The very world seemed to disintegrate around her.

When she woke, for she'd somehow slept, she found herself nestled on the mossy earth in the chamber inside the tree. The light now peeking in slivers through the trunk was sunlight, and Emery sat and yawned and stretched before slipping out of the narrow opening she'd slipped into the night before. The woods were glistening with dew and vivid with birdsong. Who was she? And why was she here, in this place? Were there others, anywhere? And those small, sparkling things in the distance amongst the trees--faeries?

"Em!"

Emery slowly turned toward the voice, which had come from somewhere far away. There was a person running toward her, and she recognized this girl . . .

Tess threw her arms around Emery the minute she reached her, practically sobbing. Beyond Tess, the figures of Charlie and Cearnach were approaching.

Surfacing as if from a dream, Emery shook her head, shivered all over, and promptly forgot all of the confusion she'd felt only a moment earlier. "Tess! Everything that happened--are you ok?"

"Me?" Tears running down her cheeks, Tess held Emery at arm's length, even though she was a good deal shorter. "We couldn't find you! Everything disappeared, and we looked for hours! Where did you go?"

Looking behind her, Emery waved toward the tree that had held her safe in itself for hours, apparently. Just as she did, Cearnach and Charlie reached them, and when the warrior saw Emery pointing at the tree, he got down on one knee and gazed at it in wonder. "Lady!" he said in his gruffness.

Emery frowned at him. "What are you doing?"

"Here! In this place?" Some strange fascination had taken hold of Cearnach, and he added, reverently, "It's found favor in the Lady, the sacred yew, the tree of life."