“You fucking lit up, little lamb.” Kek huffed through her nose, her eyes wider than normal. “Like a bolt of lightning.”
My gaze met Warwick’s. He told me the same thing when I faced off with the ghost in the Bone Church.
Ash noticed our look between each other.
“That happened before?”
“Yeah.” Warwick nodded. “At the Bone Church.”
Ash’s head bobbed. “O-kay, we’re gonna come back around to that at a later time.” He blew out in bewilderment. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah.” I wiped the sweat beading my brow. “We better get moving.”
“Get this done, so we can get out of here.” Kek shivered. “This place is even too horrible for me, and I’m a demon. I like horrible.”
“Fuck, I second that.” Ash breathed out. “I never thought I’d come back here.”
“Lead the way, princess.” Warwick motioned for me to go. “This is your show.”
Nipping my lip, I started the climb up the hill. I had no real plan. I was just following my father’s message and my gut instinct. The fact that he used that song as his code made me feel he was speaking to me, leaving it for me to figure out. As if he knew someday, my choices would lead me here.
“Okay, Dad, show me...” I muttered to myself.
Scaling the hill, the stone steps eroded, we hiked our way up to the castle. Luk struggled the most, but he didn’t complain, while Kek made up for it.
“Dammit, little lamb, if I’d known there’d be exercise involved, I would have stayed in the boat,” she grumbled. “Not my preferred workout choice.”
“Have no stamina, demon?” Ash jabbed back.
“Want to test my stamina, fairy?” she coyly countered. I heard Luk growl, but it could have been from the pain.
Ignoring their conversation, my feet moved faster until I reached the base of the High Castle, standing at the arched gate. My stomach rolled with something I couldn’t explain, electricity zinging my skin, tingles at the back of my neck.
This place felt so familiar to me, though I knew I had never been here exactly. The battle took place in an open field behind the castle grounds. I hadn’t even known a castle existed here, except, oddly, I did. I couldn’t explain it, but the utter realization this place was known to me, as if I belonged here, thumped fear into my heart.
My pulse grew louder in my ears as my feet instinctively moved through the dilapidated ruins. The shell of the fortress remained, but most of the roof was now gone, allowing the moonlight to break through some of the darkness.
The pounding in my ears echoed my heartbeat, almost sounding like it was calling my name. I felt it everywhere. Death.
But these were not the same as spirits I encountered earlier. Oddly, I didn’t feel any ghost within the castle. There was an emptiness. Void of that energy that comes from a soul.
I zigzagged and moved through the castle’s pathways. The sense that things were watching us from the shadows raked across every vertebra. Just out of my peripheral, but when I looked, nothing was there, urging me to move quicker.
“Kovacs.” I heard Warwick call my name, but I no longer felt I was in control of my body. I started to run, curving through an archway until I hit a small courtyard overlooking the Danube.
My feet came to a shuddering stop. A scream cracked across my ribs, dying on my tongue, terror trapping it in my throat.
“Holy fuck.” Ash stopped next to me.
Warwick halted on my other side, Kek and Luk flanking them.
In the middle of the courtyard was an old water well, but it was what surrounded it which drove terror into me, pinning my legs to the ground. Seven hooded figures stood around the well. All lean and various heights, their faces were hidden under their hoods and shadowed by the night. Their bony hands held various weapons, like a bardiche, lucerne hammer, and a war scythe. Sharp edges gleamed in the moonlight.
I had seen their likeness before in picture books where humans got the inspiration for the image of death.
The seven stood there, but I could make out more boney figures deep in the shadows, waiting for a command.
I knew in my gut what they were.
“Oh, may a wheelbarrow of small monkeys fuck it.” My voice barely hit above a whisper.
Necromancers.
Chapter 26
Air hiccupped in my lungs, fear plugging up my veins, my gaze rolling over the figures. Warwick was right in saying no living person lived on this land, but not everything here was dead.
Necromancers lived in the in-between.
The gray.
The gray... just like you.
They were stuck between life and death, feeding on what was left of a person’s essence. Necromancers lived off the souls of the deceased, then used their skeletons to do their bidding. There was no emotion or conscience in them anymore, only bones.
That was what I saw in the shadows. An army of bones ready to fight and protect their masters.
My gut knotted with a realization my mind was not willing to hear yet. Dread knocked around inside my body, making my head swim, like I wasn’t fully attached to myself. This was all secondary to the magnetic pull I felt, a power inside the well, inside me, that I could not fight.
It called to me as if it was part of me. Singing the song of a siren.
Absently, my feet stepped toward the source.
Almost all the necromancers moved in a blink, their menacing weapons primed to gut me, triggering the group around me to respond in kind.
I could feel Warwick’s presence expand, the wolf and the legend dousing the space with power, the promise of death.
The problem was, this group didn’t fear death.
They fed off of it.
A smaller figure stood in front of the group, with long, stringy dark hair falling out of the hood. I was pretty sure it was a woman. She held up her slim hand, the gray skin so paper-thin it was almost translucent. The necromancers around her eased back. I had no doubt she was their leader.
She didn’t speak or offer any encouragement, but for some reason, I took it as such, stepping forward again.
“Kovacs...” Warwick’s voice skirted up the back of my neck, his gun still cocked and pointed at them. “What are you doing?”
I had no fucking idea.
Reaching the well, the pull became agonizing, a cry bounding up my throat, desperate to retrieve whatever it was.
Tugging on the rope, I yanked the bucket up. The necromancers shifted. The sense that they wanted to cut me down, keep me away from it, crawled over me like ants. Their leader put up her hand again, halting them.
An old wooden bucket broke through the impregnable blackness at the bottom of the well, revealing a metal box sitting inside the pail. Reaching for it, I sensed potent magic rattling against the container—a caged animal desperate to get out. Through its confines, power oozed out, stabbing at my skin like a thousand needles.
A crack of lightning danced across the cloudless night sky, the air rolling thick with magic.
“Kovacs...” Warwick’s shadow growled in my ear. He could feel it too. The weight in my stomach warning me all day was screaming now, but stopping was no longer an option. My fate was set; the events leading me here were already in motion.
My hands wrapped around the box, letting the bucket rope go. Energy zapped through the night and down my muscles. Emotion I couldn’t explain wheezed in my chest.