Dead of Winter (The Arcana Chronicles #3)(53)

Like watching a train wreck in slow motion, I followed the blood’s course as it ran and ran. It met the stream, swept away by the current, as if the plague sensed new victims downriver.

How many more humans could we lose?

The sick raised their contorted arms toward me. Wordlessly begging, they offered their hands—fingers splayed wide, bent at odd angles.

Like twigs.

The men made no move to attack, just beseeched with bleeding eyes, yelling between spasms. They wanted me to end their suffering.

Could I? Could I curb the spread? My glyphs stirred—as if my powers had been awaiting a purpose like this.

Tears welled as realization hit me. Power is your burden. This was what Matthew had meant.

These men would die in agony, or they would die now. Either way, they were as good as gone. As I had with Tad, I could make them sleep, never to wake.

A peaceful death.

The wind blew in my favor.

Jack and Aric had made the ridge. They’d both asked me not to do this, had agreed it was a bad idea.

“Evie, come on!” Jack called.

Some tiny, vanishing part of me needed to keep the peace with them. To not rock the boat. To fall in line with what the boys wanted and expected of me.

Then I remembered that the Empress of all Arcana wore a crown for a reason.

The red witch whispered, Demeter withholds viciously—and gives lavishly. GIVE.

I spurred the mare, forcing my way past this crowd. They wailed when they believed that I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—help them. Some crawled after my horse. The sound reached a tumult.

I removed a glove. I rolled up my sleeve, uncovering my golden glyphs. The last time I’d pulled from my spore glyph, I’d only intended to make soldiers sleep.

Now I filled my hand with my most lethal poison. Tears spilling, I held up my flat palm and aimed it back.

Pursing my lips, I blew over my hand.

Blowing a kiss.

I turned away when the closest men’s lids grew heavy. Staring straight ahead, silently crying, I rode on. Behind me, my poison spread outward like the wave of a detonation.

The din ebbed until I could hear bodies collapse. A last echo of their moans. A stray whimper here and there.

Then silence. In my wake, I’d left a mass of bodies. Power was my burden.

It weighed as much as a crown of stars.

When I reached the ridge, Jack’s brows drew together; Aric’s gleaming eyes narrowed. But I didn’t care if they were angry.

Jack surprised me by saying, “Now that it’s done, I’m glad. You cauterized a wound and saved countless more.”

I pulled my glove back on. “All right, let’s hear it, Aric.”

“As the mortal said, it’s done. Empress, you delivered many from a short, wretched fate.” His tone was full of pride. “Sometimes a reaper is welcome.”

Jack frowned at him, as if he couldn’t reconcile this man with the indiscriminate murderer he imagined the knight to be.

Aric held his gaze. “Never deny the power of Death.”





27


DAY 376 A.F.

“This doan feel right,” Jack said from ahead, his bow at the ready. He was taking point along a rutted track inside another a narrow canyon. Aric rode beside me.

Since the colony yesterday, I’d spoken little to either of them. Last night, we’d sheltered in an old gas station, and I’d passed out the second I put my head down.

Despite the fact that we’d been threading the needle through a cluster of cannibal mines.

Now the three of us surveyed our surroundings. Or tried to. After endless miles on the road, the fog had thickened until we had to slow our pace. Jack rode just a dozen or so feet ahead, but I could barely make him out.

“All right, Reaper, you sensing anything?” Jack waited for us to catch up, then fell in on my other side.

Aric cocked his helmeted head. “A threat around the next corner.”

“You want to backtrack, you?”

“Once you’ve seen me in a real combat, you’ll know never to ask me that again.”

And the cutthroat competition continued!

“I said I’d sensed a threat, not an army,” Aric added, lowering his visor. “But if you’re anxious . . .”

“Just try to keep up, you.”

As we made our way around the corner, I peered into the murk. Something large loomed ahead. Had a tanker toppled over?

Electric spotlights flooded on, spearing the fog, paining my eyes. When my vision adjusted, I saw a bus parked across the road, sheet metal covering its sides. The words HUMAN TOLL were painted in red along the length of it. Atop it? A homemade gun turret. Someone had taken half of an old satellite dish, then carved out a slot for a really big gun.

Was that what Selena had called a fifty-cal? If one of those could eat into a mountain, it could cut us in two.

“Black hat chokepoint,” Jack muttered. “Fuckin’ slavers.”

A trio of them manned the top, one behind the turret and two more popping up their heads from behind a shield of corrugated steel. I couldn’t see the turret guy, but the others resembled each other with their freckled faces and long red hair sticking out from their caps. Had to be brothers.

The bus didn’t stretch all the way to the sides of the ravine, so the slavers had strung rows of razor wire, coiled as high as my shoulders. Escape-proofing their chokepoint.