She shouted then, with all her might. But the rodents, contrary to their cowardly stereotypes, didn’t flee. Cara stared at the coffin, refusing to look away. They were right behind it. She got up onto it, warily—

Skitterskitterskitter.

From behind her. Cara whirled about and caught eight. They froze. And before they scattered behind the coffins she saw.

Their eyes were glowing. But not just from her flashlight. Their eyes burned in their sockets. Dancing, magical flames. Because the mice?

The mice were dead. Their heads smashed in, their backs broken. One scuttled low to the floor, rotten flesh hanging on bone. They swarmed behind a coffin as Cara stared.

“Oh god. Oh no—Dalius? Dalius, get back here!”

She shouted. But the [Knight] was gone, making a torch. Cara whirled, shining her light around. And she realized—

She was surrounded. Little, scurrying forms were moving from coffin to coffin. Not away, but coming towards her, avoiding the light, but coming nonetheless.

“How? Wh—”

Undead mice. Cara remembered what Ser Dalius had said. Undead rose from any corpse. Humans, other species—why not mice? But why so many? Why—

The coffin full of mice bones.

Cara’s grip slipped on her iPhone and she barely caught it to bring it up. A stream of glowing eyes moved behind the coffin. She remembered Ser Dalius showing her all the mice he’d killed over ‘three hundred years’. Had—had Ser Dalius closed the lid properly? She couldn’t remember.

Skitter—

Cara whirled about. Mice fled the light, at least thirty creeping up on her from behind.

“Dalius! Dalius, get back here! The mice are alive! Undead!”

The young Irish woman screamed. But no one came.

“Our father who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name. By kingdom come, your will be done…”

Her voice faltered in the darkness. The prayer was foul with hypocrisy on her lips. And the undead mice swarmed close, held at bay only by the light.

Their eyes glowed in the darkness—ghostly fire in their hollowed eye sockets. Of different colors. Mostly yellow, but some red, or blue, or…

It was beautiful. Terrifying. Cara whispered. She tried to call water, or sparks. Or light. If she could not pray—at least a song. And one sprang to mind.

Fire.

“Confiteor Deo Omnipotenti, Beatae Mariae semper Virgini—”

Latin words of prayer, turned into music. A shining orb of light rose on Cara’s left shoulder and she inhaled. A glowing orb of pure white. The mice hesitated, shying away from the radius of light. Fire, sparks of it, flickered into life in the air.

“Beato Michaeli archangelo—”

Another orb of light rose as Cara’s voice swelled. She inhaled and began to sing. For the undead, she would call hellfire—

The light illuminated the undead mice. Shining, glorious. They backed away until they were twenty feet away. And then—as Cara swept her iPhone’s light around—they stopped. The bright light surrounding Cara grew stronger.