Chapter 66 #2
Slowly, he raised one hand. My gaze dropped to his palm. To the place where black lines had twisted only moments before. They were gone. Not a single trace remained.
The bargain was complete.
His fingers curled over empty skin. Silver flooded his eyes, brilliant even at this distance, burning with magic finally restored.
Run, Eidra.
His power slipped through my mind, squeezing just hard enough to send pain splintering through my skull. Then it withdrew.
The first wave of Infected hit.
They spilled over the shattered wall in a frenzy of limbs, clawing across the broken stones as they rushed toward him. Rìan whirled, eyes blazing.
The creatures collapsed midstride. His magic swept through them, severing the Infection’s hold on the last spark of life within their minds. More poured through the breach, scrambling over the ruins, only to crumple before they reached him.
Rìan never broke stride. He climbed through the wall and passed beyond the boundary of Midland.
I watched in horror as the horde closed around him.
And still he walked.
The horde collapsed before him. Great swaths of Infected dropped like stones, hundreds falling at once. With every step, a path opened through the sea of dead, widening toward the treeline as the corpses piled along either side. Silver blazed from his eyes like a star amid the endless gray.
Then, all at once, they stopped.
Every Infected went still. Their shrieks cut off as one. The silence that followed was deafening.
Something emerged beneath the trees.
Tall and impossibly thin, it stepped into view on long, pale legs, black veins webbing beneath colorless skin.
Its arms hung almost to its knees, ending in skeletal hands tipped with curved claws.
Where a nose should have been were only two vertical slits, its mouth cut too wide across a face stretched taut over bone. A nightmare come to life.
Tharnyx the Bone-Wrought.
I swallowed a silent scream.
Rìan started toward him. Every head in the horde turned as one to follow his passage.
Terror tore through me.
No!
He stopped before Tharnyx.
The difference in their height was grotesque. The Bone-Wrought loomed over him, his terrible face angled downward as Rìan lifted his own in defiance. Rìan spoke. Tharnyx listened without interruption, those fathomless black eyes never leaving his face.
I gripped the edge of the battlement until the stone bit into my slashed palm.
What could Rìan possibly have to say to such a monster? What language could exist between the Dark Prince and the thing that possessed the bodies of the dead?
Tharnyx’s mouth began to stretch. Slowly, horribly, the skin pulled taut across his skull until the full length of his teeth was exposed.
A smile.
Tharnyx stepped aside.
Rìan hesitated. Then he looked back at me.
I had never needed the bond more than I did then, never wanted so desperately to reach inside him and know what he was feeling. But there was only his face across the distance, beautiful and unreadable, and the terrible silence inside me.
He turned away.
Tharnyx followed him into the trees, and together they disappeared into the forest.
“No…”
Something inside me reached after him. Nothing reached back.
As one, the heads of thousands of Infected turned. The motion rippled through the horde like wind across a field of grain until every ruined face was fixed upon me.
I tore myself from the parapet and ran.
Every stride jarred through me, the battlements pitching beneath my feet as I stumbled toward the stairs. My legs barely seemed to belong to me. I caught myself against the stone and kept going.
Rìan had gone with Tharnyx.
I had to find him.
The thought consumed everything else—the horde, the screams, the terrible emptiness inside my chest. I had to get to him. Had to stop him. Had to bring him back.
I had to save him.
I raced toward the wall, leaping over the Infected I’d shot with the arrow. My boot landed in a pool of its blood, red splashing up my leg.
Something slammed into me from behind. I hit the ground hard, an Infected crashing down on top of me.
Its weight crushed me against the earth, knocking the breath from my lungs as its hands clawed for my shoulders.
I twisted beneath it, dragging one knee between us before kicking hard with the other leg.
My heel caught it square in the face. Bone gave way with a wet crunch, and the creature rolled off me with a muffled grunt.
I reached for the knife at my belt.
Another Infected struck first. A fist slammed into my stomach, folding me around the impact.
Air tore from my lungs, and before I could pull in another breath, hands closed around both my arms. Two creatures hauled me backward through the dirt as I kicked and thrashed, my heels gouging useless furrows into the ground.
They dragged me through an overgrown courtyard and past the blackened circle of an empty firepit. I knew where they were taking me the instant they hauled me across the threshold.
The tavern.
I fought harder, broken glass scraping beneath my boots as they shoved me toward the open trapdoor to the cellar.
“No!”
I hit the cellar floor on my side. Pain exploded through my hip and shoulder, and before I could push myself up, the trapdoor slammed shut overhead, plunging me into darkness. Metal scraped against metal, followed by the heavy clunk of a bolt sliding into place.
A sound came from somewhere nearby. The soft scuff of a boot against packed earth.
Fear shot through me. I jerked upright and scrambled backward through the pitch black, my hand closing around the hilt of the bone knife. Heat seared into my palm. I gasped and dropped it.
A flint struck. The spark flared and died.
It struck again, and a small flame caught the wick of a candle.
Weak golden light spread through the cellar.
Three figures emerged from the darkness.
Infected.
They stood motionless before me, dead faces mottled with black blood and decay, clothes torn and stiff with filth and gore. The one in the center held a wooden bat, darkened from handle to tip, its edge glistening wet.
I drew in a breath to scream—and stopped.
Sweat. Unwashed bodies. Tobacco smoke.
They didn’t smell of death.
The one holding the bat stepped closer.
One blood-smeared hand rose to its face, fingers hooking beneath the loose flesh at its jaw. Slowly, it peeled the dead skin away.
And beneath it was… beneath it…
His face was leaner than I remembered, the softness pared away until his cheekbones stood starkly beneath tanned skin.
His hair had grown long enough to brush his shoulders, swept back from his forehead and held there by a strip of faded cloth, the freckles scattered across his nose and cheeks faint beneath sun and grime.
I knew those freckles.
I knew the shape of that mouth despite the scrub of beard around it, though the familiar softness was gone now, hardened by something I couldn’t name.
But it was his eyes that made the cellar fall away.
Warm brown, once so open that every thought had seemed to move through them before he spoke, now shadowed by a wildness I didn’t recognize. Something fierce lived behind them now, something that had been forced awake and would never sleep again.
They traced the contours of my face, widening slowly with stunned disbelief.
The other figures began peeling the stolen Infected faces from their own, but I didn’t look at them. I couldn’t look anywhere but into the eyes of a ghost.
The ghost of the man I was supposed to marry.
A whimper escaped me, torn from the shredded remains of my broken heart, from the cavernous emptiness where my bond had been ripped away, from the desecrated hollow where the other half of my soul had been, now gone forever.
"Laurie?"