Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(100)

But what came at them wasn’t an enemy or a threat. Neither was it one of the wild beasts that prowled this landscape and that Zanaya cherished with all her heart. The wild should be left to be wild; she’d kill no animal if all it was doing was protecting its young or its territory.

“Alexander.” Her voice came out a ragged whisper, horror a saw rubbing on her every nerve ending to produce a jangling and manic melody. “Do you see this?”

“Lift off,” he said, his voice clipped. “Rise above so they can’t touch you.”

Zanaya wasn’t one to take orders, but this one she’d needed. Her shock and refusal to countenance that this could be had threatened to freeze her in place.

Snapping out her wings, she made a rapid vertical takeoff.

Alexander, his own sword in hand, waited until she was aloft before rising himself.

Now that she was in the air, she could see the full horror of it. A gleaming white skull on which clung dusty tufts of hair, arms and legs that had all but skeletonized, the skin gone a strange inhuman shade of greenish dark from decay or another process she didn’t understand.

Dirt covered the whiteness of bone where the moonlight glinted on it.

The creature had stopped crawling when she lifted off, now twitched its head up to stare at her through a blank eye socket . . . and that was just the one who’d been the closest to her. Others crawled through the grasslands, all of them in a similar—or worse—shape. Some were missing limbs, as if the bones had fallen away, but each and every one had a head that was yet attached to their neck.

Mouth dry and stomach a churn of nausea, Zanaya said, “Reborn? They look nothing akin to the ones I’ve seen previously, not even the most recent reborn in Titus’s lands.”

“I’ve never seen the like,” Alexander said, the silver of his eyes unearthly in the moonlight and his wings a blaze of metallic light that was the moon’s reflection. “But I think they are reborn. They were either missed in Titus’s sweep of this territory, or . . .”

“Or?” Even as she waited for his answer, the creatures below attempted to rise up and reach for her, but they were too weak, kept collapsing in a rattle of bones.

“There was a time when the reborn in this land hauled the dead from their graves and fed on them,” Alexander told her. “Those dead then rose as reborn. It may be that some dead who were so mauled didn’t rise at the time.”

Zanaya’s gorge threatened to erupt. “Are you saying—” She halted, unable to think of the right words. That these wretched beings might be the buried dead whose slumber had been broken just made the entire thing even more obscene. “These creatures,” she finally managed to say, “are they risen from their graves?”





54


“Titus ordered his people to dig up and cremate their freshly dead.” Grim words. “But the reborn wiped out entire settlements—easy for the squadrons to miss a desecrated graveyard or two, especially with the chaos of what was taking place at the time.”

Zanaya heard a faraway and wretched scream in the back of her head as the creature she’d first seen, the one who seemed the strongest of all those below, tried to rise toward her once again, its face bearing just enough skin to reveal a paroxysm of pain.

Unable to bear it, she used her power to scrape the area in a pinpoint strike. There were no more skeletal reborn after she was done, nothing but dust where they’d once crawled. The grasslands fell silent. Suffocated by the weight of that silence, she and Alexander flew a meticulous and sprawling grid to ensure no more hid within the grasses.

I’ve found the graveyard, Zani. Alexander’s voice in her mind. Tucked into a corner of the forest we saw as we walked—it lies adjacent to the remains of an abandoned hamlet, and is difficult to see from an aerial scan. I only did so because of a token left behind in a grave—it glinted in the moonlight.

I’ll come.

There’s no need. I can tell you that every grave is empty, and that trails of dirt lead away from each. This is from whence the reborn appeared. The dead must’ve been partially dug up, then abandoned—after the living who looked after them were all already dead or reborn themselves. A pause. Let me protect you this once, my heart.

Bile scalding her throat, Zanaya swallowed. And allowed herself the respite—and Alexander the need to protect. I see no signs of any other reborn. Let us meet again on the plain.

When she landed, she did so in a patch of grass untouched by the risen dead. “They were coming toward me,” she said to Alexander when he landed beside her. “It was obvious from an aerial perspective.”

Turning before he could answer, she strode through the grass, then came back, the grass prickles against her wings where before the blades had been caressing fingers. Her entire body felt as if it had been beset by tiny insects. “That fucking blackhearted bitch.” She spat out the words. “She infected me.”

Alexander grabbed her hand when she would’ve swiveled away again. “Zani, no. Think.” He squeezed her wrist. “The infected were slave to her will—you are slave to no one. Do you feel any compulsion to serve a master?”

Unable to shake off the sense of violation, she tore away her hand and strode through the grass. This time, she walked until she was far from the memory of the crawling reborn, her mind cooling with each step that passed.