Damn it—why does the wind carry the scent of your blood? Silas demands through the bond, sounding strained. Far away in the battle, I see crimson flashes of his unmistakable magic.
We have a bigger problem,I tell him and the others. My stomach clenches with dread as I feel wraith nearing by the second.Gideon is coming.
Their chorus of swears in my head is drowned out by Douglas’s shout when I quickly break his arms. I stand and land a savage kick to precisely the right spot on his thigh, snapping his femur for good measure.
He swears so creatively that I’m almost impressed.
“Stay down, or he'll target you,” I instruct.
“Who? And why the hell aren’t you finishing me off?” he demands, gritting his teeth in pain. “You did this last time, too. What are you, some kind of fucking sadist?”
I ignore him, scrambling to find all my matches in the ongoing bloodbath surrounding me. We need to transport out of here as fast as fucking possible before?—
Dark shadows slither across the snow, flinging fresh corpses to the side. Some tendrils wrap around bounty hunters who shout in alarm just before they go pale and drop like flies, paralyzed with horror, their eyes stuck open wide. Douglas inhales sharply when one of his nearby friends is abruptly beheaded by a blade of darkness. The disembodied head is flung hard to crack against the skull of another terrified hunter.
A shadowy figure rises out of the gathering snakelike shadows like a cold, dripping oil—a faceless, looming, all-too-familiar presence wreathed in unnatural darkness.
“Finders keepers, losers Reaper’s,”Gideon whispers with glee.
“What the…” Asher Douglas trails off, going pale as death.
“Maven!”
Everett’s voice comes from somewhere nearby. Fear clogs my throat, so I can only reach them through the bond.
Run. RUN.
And then, even though I feel like a fucking coward, I do the same.
Screams ascend behind me, cutting off abruptly as the wraith’s ability to wield fear either leaves them frozen in terror or altogether dead. Shadows snake after me as that chilling laugh dances on the wind—the same laugh I've heard every time he's broken me in the past.
I push myself hard, my boots digging into the snow. Cold stings my face and lungs, but the hot moisture from my head injury continues to drip, my vision swaying.
I barely leave the outskirts of the dying battle when Crypt appears, running beside me.
“No, stay in Limbo!” I shout at him. “It's safer there!”
“If it is, then?—”
He reaches for me to pull me into his plane of dreams. But before we make contact, shadows explode between us, flinging me down into the snow.
I can't see Crypt, but his hoarse scream cuts through the polar night.
Baelfire and Everett are shouting nearby. I want to tell them torun the fuck away, but before I can speak or even move, a massive centipede-like shadow curls over my body. Its dozens of tiny legs leave needle-like punctures in my skin wherever it roams, but when I try to shove it off, it’s like my hands pass through smoke. As it nears my head, I panic and struggle.
I can't let him fuck with my head again. I can't.
But it’s useless as his essence coalesces around me like a putrid, inky syrup. The dark shadow circles around my head,lengthening to smother my mouth, pricking my lips and jaw. The other end slides down to crawl into my ear, slinking into my head.
My vision whites out for a moment, and then I'm naked, covered in pale, wriggling maggots. A scream lodges in my burning throat as I try to brush them off—but they're not just on my skin.
They're inside it.
Hatching. Feasting. Multiplying.
They start to crawl out of my nose and mouth—burrowing out of my rotting flesh. I'm nothing but a withering corpse riddled with death and worms.
“Dead yet so afraid of what death brings,”Gideon's voice mocks.“But a corpse needs a grave.”
