The Zombies

These are actually terrifying, something out of a nightmare.

They appear in the book as the villains who somehow capture Jessica and tie her down in a very, very bad place. She wakes up captured, and it is how she gets her wings, so it is a pretty critical scene. There is an open question how she gets them, it is hinted at later, but there are two sides here trying to control her and shape her.

The zombies? Clearly on the side of War, although one wonders if the herald of Death did not have a hand in creating these monsters. The horseman Death's allegiances are murky, and even in the end battle, Death provides another powerful opponent for the forces of good to fight. That is intended, I wanted that figure to be strange, almost alien in his motivations - trying to hurt her one minute, help her the next, and you can never really figure Death out at all.

The zombies though...no eyes, black flies crawling out of their skin, howling, gray-fleshed minions of the undead. They can shoot guns and use weapons too, and I have no idea where this nightmare came from, only that it is terrifying to me. They have dogs too, and they are just as nasty.

She escapes on their first encounter, and learns something special about her wings when the dogs come for her. She figures out how to use them as weapons and protection, and that comes in handy later.

The undead hunters return later, this time surprisingly in the real world, and we learn a little after what happens when the ash comes down. They are there to pick off the survivors, and Jessica takes a turn towards the heroic side and fights back like a mother protecting her children. She lays waste to them in quite a dramatic fashion, and then has to escape and get a family to safety when more come at them.

She shows a dark side of herself here, and this continues to the rescue of Azrael where it nearly consumes her soul. She allows her rage and hatred to control her, and she quickly realizes what she has done, and her path to saving the world closes to her irreversibly. This crushes her, she almost goes cationic, but it is Azrael's safety and recovery that pulls her through this one, and Azrael drops the huge news on her.

She's responsible for all this. The end of the world. Everything that happened to her - everything.

She goes even deeper into darkness with this news. More on that later.

But the zombies, animated dead that provide evil with an army of lost souls to conquer the world, they were fun to write for, extremely spooky, and a classic villain for her to fight. They play a big role in the story, and they are something worthy of the nightmare the four horsemen are trying to bring upon the world.