Strong arms circled me, and Luke's voice spoke into my ear, "What have you done?"

Me? I haven't done anything. I'd just walked into the room. I'd looked at the bodies, but barely touched them. Whatever was happening had nothing to do with me.

The woman's body was rising. She was getting up off the table, stiffly. The sheet dropped into a pile on the floor. She was completely naked. A large, jagged, open wound ran down her left leg. The cut was so deep I could see all the way to the bone. Pieces of tendon flapped, dangling down. Her dead eyes focused on us, and she let out another eardrum busting screech. She took an awkward step, her good arm reaching out toward us.

And there was Wanda's voice again, moaning from the man's body on the floor. "Girly, what have you done to me?" The body was moving, inching forward, trying to rise. I could hear fingernails scratching against the tile.

Both bodies were intently focused on us and moving in our direction. Could they hurt us? I didn't want to stick around long enough to find out.

Apparently, Luke felt the same. He shoved me behind him and yelled, "Move!"

We both scrambled out the door. I stood in the hallway, not sure which way to run, and that's when the mob of angry people appeared around the corner. They must have been searching for us throughout the hospital. By the looks on their faces, they weren't about to give us a warm reception.

At the end of the hallway was a sign with the word exit in large red letters. I started toward it, Luke close behind me. I couldn't help but look over my shoulder, and what I saw made me stop in my tracks.

The mob was following us, but as they passed the morgue, they ran smack dab into the dead bodies. High pitched screams were followed by a frantic scrambling for weapons. A handful of mob members began wailing on the dead bodies with IV stands and oxygen tanks.

I could hear Wanda's yells of "Help me! Get off me, you idiots!" echoing down the hall.

I don't know how long I would have stood there, looking on in astonishment at the ruckus, if Luke hadn't grabbed my arm. We both ran flat out down the hallway and out of the hospital. I came to a halt only when my fingers gripped the handle of the car door.

Luke opened the driver's door, unlocked the passenger side, and we both slid in. Before I could speak, he had the car started and we were moving down the street. We zigzagged up and down side streets for a while, and then Luke suddenly pulled over and turned off the car. I expected him to say something, but he just sat there in silence.

"What happened back there?" I asked, still breathless.

Luke didn't answer.

I spoke louder this time. "I wasn't hallucinating. You saw it, right?"

Luke turned and gave me a brief, anxious look. "Why did you go into the morgue?"

I sat staring out the window, trying to make sense of what I'd just seen. "I don't know. I felt compelled to go in."

"Was anyone else in there?" Luke asked.

"No, the place was empty except for the bodies."

"You didn't feel any spirits?"

I shook my head. "No, I didn't. I just felt this urge to go in and then, I had to see them—the bodies." How could I explain it? "I didn't mean to lift the sheets. I didn't mean to touch them."

"You touched them, and they came alive?" Luke sounded shocked.

We'd been through a lot together, Luke and I, but up until this point, even with all the strange stuff that had happened, nothing had fazed him. His shock meant that whatever had just happened was unexpected.

"I recognized the voice coming out of the dead man's mouth." I paused and took a deep breath. "It was Wanda, the spirit who possessed me during the second ritual."

Luke shook his head. "Impossible. Restless spirits possess the living, not the dead."

"It was her." I'd never forget her voice or that terrifying moment when she'd whispered to me in the darkness. It was Wanda; I was sure of it. She even called me "girly."

In a rush I said, "It was the same spirit from the second ritual. Wanda. I thought spirits were bound to the place they died?"

"It's not that simple. They can be bound to objects and death dealers can bind them, but..." He took on a puzzled expression. "I've never heard of an unbound spirit following someone around."

"All I did was touch the body." Whatever I had done was unintentional. I didn't mean to raise the dead. I wasn't thinking at all when I went into that room. I was feeling an urge, one I couldn't ignore. And now dead bodies roamed the hospital hallways.

"I heard the scream—that's how I found you." Luke looked in the rearview mirror.

Does he think they're following us? Could they? "That scream sounded like one of your banshees."

"Those bodies were dead. All you did was touch them. You didn't say any words? You just touched them?"

"No words. I barely touched their skin and then I saw a bright, orange light. And there was noise. I saw things rushing by in my head, but I'm not sure what the images were. It all happened too fast."

"A bright, orange light?" Luke demanded.

I nodded my head. "So bright, it blinded me."

"That sounds like death dealer magic. But how can the dead come alive?"

I realized Luke wasn't asking me; he was asking himself. I answered anyway. "They weren't alive. They were possessed."

"I just don't understand what happened," Luke said.

We sat there, neither one of us talking for a long time.

When Luke finally spoke, he said, "I remember my grandfather talking about an old folktale." He tapped his finger on the steering wheel. "What was it? The old man used to tell us stories, bedtime stories to scare us... Oh!" He slapped the steering wheel. "It could be a draugr!"

I raised an eyebrow and waited for him to continue.

Luke turned and looked at me. "The Vikings believed draugrs were ghosts that animated dead bodies. They could roam around. They devoured human flesh. Anyone who hung around them for too long would go insane. It's not exactly what happened, but maybe what happened is the truth that they're based on."

This time I was the one sounding shocked. "Could they be zombies? Maybe they were bit by something before they died? They have something like that in voodoo culture, too, don't they?"

"There is no such thing as zombies," Luke answered, though he didn't really sound too sure.

He could say that all he wanted, but I'd just watched a guy with a gaping hole in his face crawl across the morgue floor. "And spirits can't possess the dead, yet I swear Wanda was in that man's body." What happened to them after we left? "Should we have left them there?"

"What would you suggest we do with them?" Luke asked sarcastically.

"I don't know. Buy an axe, go back, and chop off their heads? That's what they do with zombies in the movies."

Luke's expression turned serious. "I've never seen or heard of this kind of magic. I don't even know if they're draugrs. Draugrs are just something old people tell children to keep them from roaming the streets at night; bedtime horror stories they tell to scare and entertain gullible children." He looked thoughtful for a moment and then shook his head, as if the notion that a draugr might be real was ludicrous.

"But those bodies were dead, and now they're crawling and walking around. You were there. You saw the same thing I did—I wasn't hallucinating."

I wasn't seeing things, not like before in Anna's room. That devil's berries ointment had done a number on me. It set my body on fire and filled my head with visions.

Could this have something to do with the devil's berries? Maybe it had something to do with the last ritual.

Dead bodies walking around. This wasn't something that would go unnoticed.

"That mob was fighting them, Luke. Those people saw us coming out of the room ahead of those things."

As I spoke, a look of horror filled Luke's face. "They know we're death dealers. They'll blame us for what happened." He reached out and grabbed my hand. "We have to figure out what happened. If you did do something, what was it? And how did you do it?" His grip tightened. "We already scare the general populace. They know we raise spirits, and we have banshees do our bidding. Those things alone scare them enough to treat my—our—kind with disgust. But this..." His voice broke. "If they think that we can raise up the dead, if they think we can create walking corpses...draugrs... whatever those things are, people won't just despise us. They'll start to hunt us."

***