Things went better than I expected. Once night fell, I had the help of Drac and Varney, and they were able to change into bats and fly to gather all the zombies, so I didn’t have to race around on my bicycle or tell wights to shamble off to do it. I couldn’t change the fact that the zombies were slow, however.

Most of Shizuka’s people left the moment we had our agreement, to tell the others who were still in the forest to hide as best they could until help arrived. Betsy and Shizuka herself stayed.

“You weren’t planning to do this without me, were you?”

I turned to see who was talking. “Xyla!”

“My abilities are sharply reduced, but I am not totally powerless in forests other than my own,” she said. “I just have to engage in more persuasion.”

“To get the animals to do your bidding?”

“No. I have to persuade the plants. But really, mostly they just want food and water.” She smiled. “Could you have a couple of your zombies carry some bags of poop?” She giggled.

“What’s funny?”

“I said poop.” She giggled again.

She was two hundred years old, for crying out loud.

Heh. Poop.

And Enash was a thousand. Maybe there was a tipping point at which regression set in.

Then Xyla looked serious. “Also, I have to scout out future forests for our children.”

I took that in. “Xyla,” I said. “You know we are doing this partly because you want your forest to be off limits to logging. I can’t have the same thing happen to every source of wood around, because they all have fiercely protective dryads.”

She crossed her arms, and stared at me.

I shook my head. “No, you’re very cute, and I see what you’re doing to push your boobs up, but it’s not going to work.”

“We will have to come to some kind of understanding, I suppose. Our daughter’s forest…”

“You know, children often mature faster when they move further from home.”

“You’d take my only daughter…”

I saw Gren walking quickly toward me. “No, Xyla. Of course, if we could, in a sustainable way, of course, harvest lumber from the forest to our south, then perhaps…” I could trail off a sentence, too, and I timed it so that Gren arrived to interrupt me.

“We’re ready to go, Abby,” Gren said. “We might have some slow stragglers joining us, but our fighting force is more than adequate for a gaggle of goblins.”

“Alright, let’s move out. You’re heading forward to join the scouts?”

“Of course.”

Xyla frowned at me, but went with Gren.

Having the wights to captain the zombies really helped, but I was still busy guiding the undead. Gren had a few scouts deployed ahead, including Lysandra who had a radio, but other than that the zombies were in front, and their slow pace meant that the rest of the army could move at a similarly leisurely pace.

“Abby,” Shizuka said.

Kendala glared at her. She didn’t like the fact that Shizuka didn’t say “queen,” but I didn’t care.

“Yes?”

“This is all going very slowly.”

I shrugged. “An army this large moves slower than a band of a hundred. Especially an army composed partly of zombies. The question is, is it large enough to do the job once it gets there.”

“The others – the orcs and the trolls and what not – would be sufficient without the zombies. It would be glorious. A battle to tell their children about.”

“We happy few,” I muttered.

“Huh?”

“In real life,” I told her, “Glorious battles are ones where you watch your comrades die. The zombies, on the other hand, are expendable. We don’t want a glorious battle.”

“You have no warrior spirit,” she said.

“No. I’m in construction, not destruction.”

“Think of what your chroniclers will say, years from now,” she argued.

“You just want me to get there faster, and for good reasons,” I said. “I’m fine with that. If this all ends up looking super boring when it’s written down, that’s fine with me.”

Shizuka spat. “I don’t mate with cowards,” she said. “I’ll go join the scouts.”

I shrugged. Fine by me.

#

A small arrow whizzed through the air and struck a tree, a few feet from Gren’s head. Gren raised her bow, but another arrow had already been fired in response. A second later Gren tracked the body of a three-and-a-half foot green humanoid as it tumbled from the trees, She was ready to put another arrow in it if need be.

There was no need. Lysandra was nearly as good a shot as Gren herself.

They had found a few goblins outside the forest, and one had gotten away. They’d charged into the woods after them, only to run into an ambush. Find the newest release on noⅴelfire.net

Gren was used to having a big advantage in the woods, but Xyla had warned her that her powers were not as great as usual, and the goblins, even if they were recent arrivals, knew where the cover was. She signaled to her left and to her right, gesturing for everyone to break off the pursuit. That one goblin had gotten away, and that was all there was to it. And he’d almost certainly seen the zombie army approaching. The job of Gren’s band of archers was to scout, not to get involved in a pitched battle. These woods might not be home to the goblins, but they knew them better than Gren did.

Another goblin arrow came from the trees, and Gren heard a yelp.

“Lysandra!” Gren muttered under her breath. Fuck. She wanted to run to the woman she regarded as her sister, even if Lysandra wasn’t, and never could be married to Abby. That was just a technicality as far as Gren was concerned. But before she could go to check on the elf, she needed to take care of the threat. She saw movement in the trees, and raised her bow. The damned green things were so hard to see in the leaves.

Then there was a flash of orange, leaping from one tree to the next. A moment later, a goblin fell from the trees. It didn’t blend in so well anymore, thanks to the slash of red across its throat.

Gren took a half second to scan for more enemies, but saw no one. Abby had told them Shizuka was on her way, and she could put two and two together.

She found Lysandra holding her left shoulder, a little arrow sticking out of it. A patch of red had formed on her pale green jacket.

“I think it’s poisoned,” Lysandra said.

“Well,” Gren told her. “Then there’s no time to waste.” She grabbed Lysandra’s shoulder with one hand, and yanked the arrow out with the other.

Lysandra screamed.

“Hush, you,” Gren said. “We don’t want to tell the goblins where we are.” A regular arrow, with no venom on it, she would have tried to ease out. But if blood flowed out, it would take some of the poison with it. Gren bent down to suck as much out as possible.

“I’ll take care of that,” said a suave, male voice.

She turned. “What?”

“The forest provides adequate protection from the sunlight, at least in places, so Abby had us fly here at the end of the night,” said Varney the vampire. “Although we have to pick our spots. Anyway, I’m very good at sucking. I was practically made for it.”

The pink demon-turned-vampire knelt next to Lysandra, and took over.

“Actually,” Lysandra said, “Gren’s very good at sucking, too.”

Gren suppressed a smile. If Lysandra could make jokes, that was a good sign. “If you get carried away and take too much, I’m going to stake you,” she told Varney.

Varney nodded as he slurped.

Gren looked around, trying to spot flashes of green that weren’t leaves in the trees, ready to shoot. She was uneasy, but as long as she saw the enemy she didn’t doubt she could kill it.

Varney unlatched. Lysandra looked pale, even more so than usual, but she was breathing okay and she had a weak smile on her face. “Thank you,” Lysandra said.

“Everbody does their share,” Varney said. “Jill taught me a little song about that. Besides, the poison won’t affect me. Does make the blood taste funny, but I think I got most of it.”

“It’s so good to be controlled by Abby, isn’t it?” Lysandra said to Varney.

Gren rolled her eyes. “Can you move, or do I have to carry you?” she said. “We need to pull back.”

Lysandra got to her feet. “I can move,” she said.

“Good. Let’s go. Varney, I guess you have to stay in the forest.”

“It is true,” Varney said. “Away from the rays of the insidious day star. But before you go, you should let our Mistress know that the goblins are spread out, moving in groups of a hundred or two, and Drac and I think we’ve found at least eight separate groups.”

“So sixteen hundred. But we have a thousand or more, counting zombies, orcs, and trolls. And we’re twice as big.”

Varney nodded. “I anticipate a slaughter,” he said with a toothy smile.

“Right,” Gren said. “Let’s go, Lysandra.”

They trudged out of the forest. In the plains, the goblins had none of the advantages of concealment, and they weren’t going to find out much more than the vampires had.

Once outside, Gren radioed Abby, and reported.

“I ran into Varney, and he thinks there are somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hundred to sixteen hundred of them. The odds are in our favor. But they are probably aware of what’s approaching at this point,” Gren said. “We couldn’t get all their scouts.”

“Good,” Abby said.

“Good?”

“Good? Don’t we want to hit them with a smashing surprise?”

“Even if they saw the zombies, they can’t know about all our real soldiers, who are screened behind them. So we still have tricks up our sleeves. But I want them to know that overwhelming force is headed their way. You stay smart out there. I don’t want anyone getting hurt trying to be a hero. Heroine?”

Jill cut in. “Hero, Abby. Gendered nouns are fine in their place, but that one comes with baggage.”

“Well, fine. Don’t be one of those.”

“Roger,” Gren said. “Lysandra had a close call. She’s injured.”

“I’ll send Valeria to you on a bike.”

“Perfect.”

Gren’s scouts didn’t have to be told to fan out, but outside the woods there were plenty of clear sightlines, and their compound bows had much better range than the tiny weapons of the goblins.

Shizuka came striding out, still naked.

“The fight,” she said, pointing to the woods with a bloody finger, “is that way.”

“Good,” Gren said. “We’re letting the army catch up. Any intelligence we gather now will be out of date in an hour. We’ll be going back in there shortly.”

“I don’t like waiting,” she said.

Gren shrugged. “Tough. Nice work back there, though. Trust me, Abby’s colossal cock is worth it.”

Shizuka frowned. “We’re waiting for how long?”

“I don’t know. An hour at most, I think.”

For a moment, Gren thought that Shizuka was going to charge back into the woods. But she sat down, stretched, and then rolled onto her side.

In two minutes she was snoring.

The cat girl was still asleep when Valeria arrived, armored and perched on an ebike, to heal Lysandra.

“Thank you, Valeria,” Lysandra said. “Good as new, in time for the battle, hmm.”

“Hmm. Yes. Although there may be some lingering effects from the poison. I’ll stick close to you.”

Gren shook her head. “You clank,” she said.

“And how do you think Abby would feel if one of you got hurt and I wasn’t there to heal you?” Valeria asked. “Especially as it already happened once.”

Gren gritted her teeth. “We need to be quiet and get the drop on them. I love you, Val, but you’d be the reason we got hurt in the first place.”

“I love you, too, Gren,” Valeria said.

Gren noticed she didn’t address the main point.

“Love, love, love,” Shizuka said, stretching and opening her eyes. “Such a happy family. Meanwhile, my people may be dying.”

Valeria pointed to the south, where a mass of bodies were cresting the horizon. “The horde is almost here,” she said. “And they’ll need to know which way to go. I’ll be here, in case you need me.”

Gren grinned over at Shizuka. “That’s our job. But the goblins will know about us now. They’ll be ready. So be careful.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Shizuka said. “I usually land on my feet.”