Chapter 64 #2
I ran.
My feet carried me down streets that had once been as familiar as my own heartbeat, through the broken remains of the village I'd called home.
Twice our path ended abruptly beneath mountains of rubble, forcing us to double back and cut through narrow alleys my feet somehow still remembered. Every detour cost us precious moments.
The oppressive weight of magic hung in the air like a foul stench, following us wherever we ran.
The town square opened before us.
The slaughter here dwarfed everything we'd passed. Bodies lay strewn in heaps, sprawled over one another where people had fallen in their haste to escape, the sun shrivelling the corpses to withered husks. Eyes and tongues were missing, ripped away by the Infected.
The humans had run here, falling back from the failing walls in the hope that the citadel might still protect them. Judging by the bodies blanketing the square, it hadn't.
The old village well stood at its center.
"There," I breathed, though Rìan had already spotted it.
He picked his way over the bodies and reached the rim just ahead of me.
A fetid odor billowed from the depths. He looked down only briefly before jerking back.
"Gods." He buried his nose in the crook of his elbow, then threw out an arm to stop me. "Don't look, Eidra."
I pushed past him anyway and leaned over the stone, one hand pressed over my nose and mouth.
Three bodies lay half-submerged in the black water, tangled together in unnatural stillness.
One bloated face broke the surface, turned up toward the pale circle of sky overhead.
A woman, long strands of filthy hair drifting like weeds around her floating corpse.
I stared down at them, unable to tear my eyes away.
They hadn't fallen.
When the Infected had overrun the square, the well had become their last refuge.
I swallowed against the bile rising in my throat.
"The knife," Rìan said urgently. "Hurry."
My fingers fumbled at my belt, slick with sweat as the rotten water waited below. I forced myself not to look at the bodies again as I wrenched the bone-hilted knife from its sheath. I cut my palm and passed him the blade. He did the same, then clasped my bleeding hand.
Even before our blood began to fall, I knew.
This wasn't the third Gate.
Still we waited, listening to our blood patter against the swollen flesh below.
Nothing answered.
Rìan swore loudly and tore his hand from mine, the cut across his palm already knitting itself closed.
"The next one." His eyes burned, silver flashing with an urgency that bordered on menace.
I was moving before he'd finished speaking.
We raced through Midland, cutting through alleys and scrambling over fallen stone. Faintly, another scream carried on the wind before falling silent.
Three.
I forced my burning legs to move faster.
A stitch pulled at my side with every breath, but I didn’t slow.
My father’s house flashed past as we ran.
Somehow, the crooked little cottage still stood, though the front door had long since been ripped from its hinges.
I tore my eyes away and kept running, ignoring the crushing ache in my chest.
The alley opened into a small square I hadn’t visited in years. Grass grew thick and untrampled between the stones. To one side stood a squat stone well, its rim crumbling with age.
"It dried up years ago," I explained between panting breaths. "Nobody ever used it.”
Rìan peered into the shaft. The bottom lay exposed, nothing but cracked earth and loose stone. He looked up at me, his face grim.
"Do you feel a difference here?"
I knew what he was asking. Closing my eyes for the briefest moment, I reached for the dark magic that had smothered the village ever since we'd entered.
It felt... farther away.
I opened my eyes. "It's not as heavy here."
Rìan ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek, his gaze sweeping over the little square. "The other wells all bore an eight-pointed star. Do you remember ever seeing one in Midland?"
I frowned, then shook my head. "No. I would've remembered."
The star carved into the knife had been the first eight-pointed star I'd ever seen.
He let out a frustrated grunt, then held out his hand. "The knife."
My palm still bled freely, my magic making no effort to close the wound. I handed him the blade, watched him reopen his cut without hesitation, then stepped beside him as our fingers intertwined once more above the dry well.
Blood dripped into the empty shaft.
We waited.
Again, nothing.
Rìan growled low in his throat and pulled away, quickly unlacing his fingers from mine. "How many more?"
I swallowed. "One." I turned in that direction, my voice catching. "Near..."
Laurie's tavern.
"Go," he said.
My steps slowed as the familiar ramshackle building came into view.
For one impossible moment, it looked exactly as I remembered. The crooked roof. The weathered shutters with their flaking blue paint. The old sign still swaying above the entrance, its faded, unreadable lettering a relic from old Tanner Wharton's days.
Then the illusion unraveled.
The front door hung askew from a single hinge, its slow swing accompanied by a soft, rusty creak like a hoarse cry.
Deep claw marks scarred its surface, each gouged so violently that splinters curled outward along the edges.
I reached out before I could stop myself, my fingertips tracing the monstrous grooves.
Somewhere far away, another scream pierced the silence, so faint it could have been my imagination.
Four.
"Eidra." Rìan's voice was firm, insistent. "We need to move."
I drew one slow, trembling breath that snagged in my chest before I pushed the door wider. It answered with a broken groan as I stepped into the dimness.
It still smelled vaguely of spilled ale and must.
Tables lay overturned, their legs splintered. Chairs had been smashed apart, scattered across the floor in heaps. Shattered mugs and plates crunched beneath my boots as I picked my way through the room.
No bodies.
Thank the gods.
But there was blood. Lots of it. Dried brown blood mingled with the black blood of the Infected, arcing across the walls, spattering the upturned furniture, and streaking the floor. As if Laurie's inn had been where the people of Midland made their last stand.
Near the shelves behind the bar, glittering fragments of emerald glass caught what little light filtered through the doorway.
Laurie's whiskey.
The precious green bottles he'd guarded like treasure, saving them for celebrations and impossible occasions—or just for Father and me—lay smashed across the floor, many broken clean in half, their jagged edges stained with black blood.
Yes, the people had fought here.
Chair legs torn free. Firewood scattered across the floor, several logs stained black at one end.
A knife buried halfway into a support beam.
The heavy iron poker from the hearth bent nearly double.
A cast-iron skillet lying in a pool of gore gone dark with age.
Every ordinary thing in the tavern had become a weapon.
My eyes found the empty space beside the fireplace.
The heavy wooden bat Laurie always kept leaning against the hearth was gone.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
He'd used it. Of course he had. He would've stood between those monsters and every soul inside this tavern until the very end.
My heart lodged in my throat, I circled the bar.
The old cellar hatch was closed, the same scarred planks Laurie had lifted time and again when the horns blared and the Infected attacked the walls, ushering beneath them the children, the women, the elderly, and those maimed by my judgment and Father’s hand.
Now the wood was raked with more claw marks, the iron ring nearly torn away.
If I lifted it…
No. I couldn't bear to know. I couldn't bear to see more bodies slumped inside the cellar.
I stepped over the hatch, and that was when I saw it.
A great, terrible pool of blood stained the floorboards behind the bar, so much of it that they’d warped beneath it. Wide smears stretched away from its edges, as though something heavy had been dragged away.
They ended at the toes of my boots.
A choked sound escaped me, and I clapped a trembling hand over my mouth.
Only one person ever stood behind this bar.
Only one.
This… this was all that remained of Laurie.
Something inside me gave way, like a cliff tumbling into a sea.
Laurie was gone.
The only person who’d ever looked at me and seen more than a witch or a curse. The only person who’d chosen me simply because he wanted me. Who had offered me love—and the hope of a better future, of any future at all—in a world that promised neither.
A good man.
A man who’d never stopped giving, even when he had nothing left to spare.
Now a dark stain crusted into old floorboards, smear marks leading away into the unknown.
"Eidra." Rìan's voice came behind me, edged with an urgency that barely reached me through the roaring in my ears.
My throat worked around a knot that refused to move.
"I..." I swallowed hard, blinking through the tears clouding my vision. "I was supposed to marry this man. The one who ran this tavern."
I didn't have to look to sense Rìan's sudden, preternatural stillness.
"Another mate?" he asked at last. I heard the strain.
I gave a small, weak shake of my head.
"No. Just... a good man." My voice cracked. "A man who loved me, once."
I was freefalling through the darkness.
Rìan let out a slow breath that sounded almost broken. "Eidra..."
His hand brushed mine.
I recoiled from him so violently my shoulder struck the shelves behind the bar, sending shards of glass tinkling to the floor.
"Don't touch me, Rìan." My voice shook, thick with sorrow but edged with venom. "Don't ever touch me—not unless we're bleeding into that last fucking well."
I didn't give him the chance to answer.
I turned on my heel and walked away before he could speak, my grief hardening into something colder, something angrier that left no room for comfort.