Every head around the campfire turned toward the shout.
And they saw it.
The walker stood directly behind Amy, close enough to touch her. Its jaw hung open as it lunged forward.
"No!"
Andrea was on her feet before she'd even finished the word, but she was too far away.
Rick and Shane drew simultaneously, but the angle was wrong. Amy was directly between them and the thing. A shot would hit her.
There was no time.
Amy's body locked up. Every muscle seized at once, and her mind went completely blank. She couldn't move. The teeth were only inches away.
Whoosh.
The sound was quiet, like a card being flicked through the air.
A steel spike tore cleanly through the walker's temple. For a split second, it didn't even seem to realize it was dead. Its momentum carried it forward, jaws snapping shut on empty air, before its legs finally gave out. It collapsed onto Amy, pinning her to the ground.
The camp went silent.
Glenn was the first one to process what had happened. He'd seen Lucien do something like this before, back in Atlanta, and even he needed a second to get his brain working again. He looked around at the stunned faces and made a call.
"Hey! I know everyone's having a moment right now, but there's probably more of those things coming, so maybe we should—"
"Yeah, yeah." Merle cut him off. He raised his pistol without looking and put a round clean through the skull of a walker stumbling out of the tree line. The thing dropped to the ground. "I'd hurry up if I were you. Looks like they're lining up out there for takeout."
That seemed to shake people loose.
Amy was gasping, the dead weight of the walker crushing her legs. She could feel its cold, rigid body pressing down on her and smell the rot rolling off it in waves, but the pain she had been bracing for never came. There was no bite.
The scream hit her a few seconds later.
"Ahhh!"
It tore out of her with enough force to make her whole body convulse. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and her hands shook so badly she couldn't push the corpse off her.
"Amy!"
Andrea was there. She kicked the walker's body off her sister with a vicious stomp, then dropped to her knees and pulled Amy into her arms, holding her so tight it probably hurt.
Neither of them cared.
Amy's scream faded into ragged, hitching sobs. Andrea just held on, one hand cradling the back of her sister's head.
And that scream was like a bell being rung.
The trees moved.
The treeline at the edge of the camp seemed to shift, like a curtain being pulled back. From behind it came the walkers. At first, they emerged in ones and twos, stumbling out of the darkness. Then they came in clusters, drawn by the firelight, the noise, and the smell of the living.
"It's a herd!" Rick was already moving, pulling rounds from the bag near the fire and tossing them to anyone who needed them. "Listen to me! Stay calm!"
He pointed. "Morales, Morgan, get your families to the RVs. Women and kids, move now. Dale, Glenn, get up on the roof, eyes on everything."
He turned. "Merle, Daryl, left flank. T-Dog, Jim, right side. Shane and I have the front."
Shane didn't need telling twice. He raised his pistol and fired twice into the darkness, each shot tearing through a walker's skull in a spray of dark blood.
"Wake up, all of you!" he shouted. "Pick up your goddamn weapons, or you're going to die out here!"
The camp transformed in seconds.
It wasn't pretty. There was no drill, rehearsal, or coordinated military response. It was terrified people scrambling for whatever they could grab and throwing themselves between the walkers and the people they were trying to protect.
But it worked.
Morgan and Morales laid down covering fire, their shots cracking through the night as they shepherded the families toward the RVs. Miranda clutched her children to her chest, while Carol ran with Sophia's hand locked in a death grip.
Rick and Shane fell into position as if they had done this a thousand times before. They stood back to back, shoulders nearly touching, firing in an alternating rhythm. Rick's shots were precise, each round placed exactly where it needed to be. Shane's came faster, driven by something close to fury. Between them, nothing got within twenty feet.
The Dixon brothers were something else.
Merle emptied his pistol into the first wave with a savage grin on his face, dropping four walkers in rapid succession. When the magazine clicked empty, he didn't even slow down. He tossed the gun aside, grabbed his fire axe, and charged straight into the horde like he'd been waiting for this his whole life.
The axe connected with the first walker's skull and kept going, the force of the swing caving in one side of its head before Merle ripped it free and swung again. He was laughing. It was a wild, unhinged sound that was somehow more terrifying than the walkers themselves.
Beside him, Daryl was the opposite. Where Merle embodied chaos, Daryl was control. He moved constantly, never standing still for more than a second, with the crossbow held like an extension of his arm. Bolts flew one after another. Each found its mark in a skull, an eye socket, or the base of the neck. He reloaded on the move, and fired again before the last bolt had finished its arc.
Others provided covering fire. Their aim was not as good, but they kept the pressure up. They kept the pressure on, prevented the walkers from flanking, and held the line.
"I can help!" Lucien was already moving toward the fight when a hand slammed down on his shoulder and hauled him backward.
"You stay put!" Morales shoved him toward the RV. "Get up on the roof! This isn't your fight, kid!"
"Lucien! Up here, quick!" Dale was leaning over the edge of the RV roof, waving frantically.
For a second, Lucien considered arguing. The spike was right there in his hand. He could... But Morales was already pushing him, and Glenn had appeared from somewhere to help, and between the two of them they basically lifted him bodily onto the RV's ladder.
"You already saved Amy's life tonight," Glenn said. "Let the rest of us handle this one."
Lucien climbed. He wasn't going to pretend he was upset about it, not really. The nursing home had cost him more magic than he'd planned, and the spike throw had taken another chunk. His reserves were running low. Charging into a horde right now would be stupid.
But there was a small, bitter part of him that wished he could do more. He imagined a proper wizard's battle, with wand in hand and spells flying, the kind of thing he had read about in books back at Hogwarts. He pictured Dumbledore holding off a dozen enemies without breaking a sweat.
But he wasn't there yet. Not even close.
"Thank you, Lucien! You saved Amy's life!"
"You've done enough! Leave the rest to us!"
The gratitude from the people around him was genuine.
"Can I borrow your binoculars?" Lucien asked Dale.
"Sure thing."
Lucien took them, lay flat on his stomach near the edge of the roof, and started scanning the battlefield. The binoculars helped with distance, but they weren't what he was really relying on.
He closed his eyes for a moment and let his awareness expand outward.
Ever since he discovered that he seemed to possess some kind of magical affinity for living creatures, he had been experimenting with using magic to sense nearby life.
Back at the hospital, he had felt Paul's vitality. It had seemed to flicker like a dying candle, yet beneath that fragility was something unexpectedly strong. At the time, he had assumed it was simply a side effect of practicing Episkey. Now, thinking back on it, he realized it was probably part of his innate talent.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them devoted a whole chapter to magical creature affinity: witches and wizards who could instinctively sense, communicate with, or even influence living creatures. The trait was rare enough that Hagrid remained one of the most famous examples in recent history.
Lucien was not Hagrid. He could not talk to animals or befriend dragons. But when he focused hard enough, he could feel the life inside them. And, as it turned out, humans counted as animals too.
He'd been experimenting quietly ever since, testing the edges of what he could do.
The living burned bright. They were warm, flickering flames of varying intensity. Some burned strong and steady, while others wavered under the strain of fear and exhaustion. Rick was a steady blaze. Shane burned hot. Merle was almost blinding.
The walkers were the opposite.
They were not flames at all. What he was seeing were absences, places where the world simply fell away.
It reminded him of something.
The realization came slowly, piecing itself together from half-remembered passages in old textbooks.
Dementors.
The comparison clicked into place. It was not exact. Walkers were mindless, driven by hunger rather than malice. Still, the sensation was close enough to make the hair on the back of his neck rise. Both were creatures that stood in opposition to life itself.
Which raised an interesting question. If walkers triggered the same instinctive dread as Dementors, then theoretically...
Could a Patronus Charm drive them off?
It was a fascinating thought. One he filed away for later, when he wasn't lying on a rooftop in the middle of a horde attack with his magic running on fumes.
He refocused on the battlefield.
He swept the binoculars slowly across the left flank, letting his awareness guide his aim. Most of the walkers were concentrated at the front, where Rick and Shane were holding them back. The flanks were thinner, but Merle and Daryl were more than handling their side.
Then he felt a cold spot. It was behind the bushes on the left side of the camp, maybe forty yards out from the main line.
He swung the binoculars.
There. A single walker, half hidden by scrub brush, creeping through the undergrowth. It was angling around the defensive line, staying out of the firelight, and heading for a gap in the perimeter where Jim was posted.
Jim was reloading. He'd dropped his magazine and was fumbling with a fresh one, his hands shaking as his attention stayed locked on the walkers in front of him. His back was completely exposed.
The walker was fifteen yards away and closing the distance.
"Jim! Watch out behind you!"