Gharek couldn’t hear their conversation and Siora didn’t dare speak and risk being heard, but he understood both her and Skavol’s hand gestures, nodding once. When Skavol let go of her hand, he faded from Gharek’s sight but not hers. She held Gharek’s arm in preparation of giving the signal for when to run. Her father walked through the stall’s fabric wall as if it wasn’t there and for a moment the creature continued its inexorable approach to their hiding place.
It suddenly spun on its thin, skeletal legs, making a triumphant chittering sound so reminiscent of what she’d heard in the abandoned barn’s provender room that every last hair on Siora’s body stood straight up. She spotted her father’s shade flitting quicksilver through the labyrinth of streets. The faceless predator spotted him too and bolted toward him in a ground-eating stride.
Gharek didn’t wait for her signal. Instead, he shackled her wrist in a bone-cracking grip and nearly lifted her off her feet as he burst out of the stall at a dead run. The gate wasn’t far but seemed a continent away. Terror gave her a deer’s swiftness and she easily kept up with him as they fled for the gate; an enraged, inhuman cry behind them splitting the quiet.
Gharek’s sudden epithet and his order that followed put wings on her heels. “Fuck! There’s two of them! Run!”
The chittering screeches had changed to howls, one set directly behind them and another to their left.Oh gods, oh gods.The chant clanged in her head, a half-crafted prayer raised from despair, fueled by fear and the primal urge to survive.
She and Gharek leapt through the gate. The strange vertigo didn’t plague her this time, but a new, even greater threat faced them. Entering a gate to the Maesor at one place didn’t always mean you exited in the same spot. The street they hurtled onto bore no resemblance to one in Domora, nor did the blasted ruins around it.
Their sprint slowed to a jog, and the tightening of Gharek’s already hard grip on her wrist told her he was as confused as she was, but only for a moment.
“Gods damn it,” he said, not in fury but in despair, and the hopelessness in his voice sent her stomach plummeting to her feet. “We’re in Midrigar.”
As if saying the cursed city’s name out loud conjured more of the repulsive, faceless hunters, a series of feral calls sounded all around them, some closer, some distant, a blood-hungry sound of anticipation as cold as the silvery moonlight plating the remains of the city’s towers.
Gharek didn’t need to tell her again to run, and this time they raced for another gate, one not created by sorcery but by human hands long dead and then destroyed by an army and its battle mages.
She stumbled when Gharek suddenly gasped and his pace slowed, though he strained to reach the gate. Siora recognized his expression. He’d worn it as Midrigar or whatever was imprisoned inside it cast a sorcerous net over him. She felt it as well, though not as strong, an insistent tugging on her spine and limbs as if some viperous vine tried to coil around her body.
She fought off the sensation, and now it was she who clamped an unyielding grip on Gharek and dragged him with her, fighting his weight and the bewitchment of a malice whose whisper in the mind coiled into her ears and slithered along her backbone.
“Come, meat. I hunger.”
Triumphant howling bore down on them, and from the corner of her eye she spotted a pale, faceless hunter sprinting toward them.
Gharek tried to twist out of her grip. “Let go, you stupid girl, and run!” he ordered in a voice slurred as if the ability to speak took monumental effort.
“No!” She pulled even harder, and with a renewed burst of strength, hauled them both through the shattered gate to the other side of the walls.
She slammed hard into an immovable barrier, crushed between it and Gharek, who did the same. They both fell; Siora onto him before she rolled away onto her back. She didn’t stay that way, levering herself up on her elbows and squinting as the glow of a raised lamp blinded her for a moment. The enraged screaming ofthe faceless hunters still cut the night but they remained trapped behind the walls and drew no closer. The eerie pull on her spine lingered, annoying, skin-crawling but no longer so insistent or with the strength of a command as it was for Gharek. Even now he tried to crawl back to the gate but was held down by someone’s knee in his back and someone else’s grip on his legs.
She blinked until her eyes adjusted to the greater light. Several silhouettes surrounded her and Gharek, their regard focused hard on them. A face came into clear view, lit by the lamp. A familiar face, a human one that hid so much more, and one she never thought she’d see again.
“Malachus?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Come, meat. I summon you.”
The command boomed inside Gharek’s head, and his limbs convulsed with the compulsion to obey. To crawl, to lurch, to sprint back through the gates into the heart of Midrigar, where a dark god, served by pale demons, waited to feast upon him.
He and others had named this entity the eater of ghosts, yet the force of its enchantment on him, the idea of some drooling, ravenous monstrosity eager to snack on him body and soul, made the name a lie. This was an eater of the living as well.
He squirmed in the dirt, pressed down hard by a sharp knee in his back and heavy weights on his shoulders and legs. The far-off sound of voices speaking teased his ears, but deafened as he was by the sonorous command in his head, they were mere unintelligible murmurings.
His jaw locked as the pressure came off his back and he was jerked to his feet. He tried to speak, to beg for help from whoever held him. Tried to say Siora’s name and confirm she was uninjured during their race to the gate. Only gibberish squeezed through his clenched teeth, and he twisted in a desperate bid to gain his freedom and race toward his own death.
His captors fought to hold him, and Siora’s petite features,limned in lamplight, filled his vision. Her round eyes were wide, soft with a terrible sympathy. Horror too. She said something to him, but he couldn’t hear it; his head throbbing from the bewitchment’s order beating hard enough to crack his skull.
Some small part of him wondered if she might wield another stick and knock him senseless. He prayed she would. He’d beg her to do so if he could only speak.
The gods were a fickle lot who visited strife and blessings on humanity with unpredictable and puzzling choice. They chose to answer Gharek’s prayer in that moment in an ironic manner with a dark-eyed enemy possessing the form and face of a man, but the spirit of a draga.
Malachus stared at him, and it was his voice, flat with dislike, that finally broke through the entity’s cacophony. “We meet again, cat’s-paw.”
A thudding pain struck his chin, snapping his head back. A second punch stopped the entity’s voice entirely, and Gharek welcomed the silence and the blackness rushing toward him.