The body it held dangled like a broken doll, head lolling at an angle that made bile rise in my throat. The clothes were torn, and they too were stained with red, just like the hair and the face. Oh my God, the face. It could have been anyone. Ed. One of the others.
A scream ripped out of me before I could stop it, raw and piercing, giving voice to the horror in front of methat I had never expected to see, not even after our abduction by aliens.
The creature froze. Slowly, so impossibly slowly, it turned its head. The face that met mine was no face at all. It was a nightmare dredged from the oldest corners of human imagination. Skin too pale, almost translucent, stretched over a jutting skull. A maw filled with jagged, uneven teeth, slick with fresh blood. Its eyes—wide, luminous, and pitiless—glowed like the moons of some dead world.
It looked like a Morlock stepped out of an old movie and made real flesh.
Another scream tore free, louder this time, without giving my legs the command, they backed away on instinct, straight into something solid and burning hot.
Zaph.
His hand closed over my arm, steady as stone. His aura flared so bright it scorched the edges of my vision, red tearing through gold.
“Stay back,” he snarled, the sound more beast than man.
The thing hissed, its lips peeled back to bare those yellow teeth. Zaph’s black eyes blazed, every line of him bristling with fury. “Mmuhr’Rhong.”
The word rolled off his tongue like a curse, like the name of an enemy older than time itself. From out of nowhere, Zaph pulled a sword. Not steel, not anything I’d ever seen before, pure gold, blazing as if it had been forgedfrom his own aura. The light seared through the gloom as he brought it up in one fluid motion.
The creature—theMmuhr’Rhong,he’d called it—dropped the mangled body like it was nothing and raised its own weapon. A jagged blade, dark and wet, its edges gnawed as though it had been carved from bone.
Then they collided.
Metal shrieked against metal, sparks scattering into the air. Zaph moved with terrifying grace, each strike like a storm breaking, his body a blur of strength and fury. The Mmuhr’Rhong met him blow for blow, its pale skin stretched tight over corded muscle, its mouth split wide in a snarl that showed too many yellow teeth.
I stumbled back, my heart slamming against my ribs so hard it hurt.Run. My instincts screamed it.Run.
But where?
If these things were out here, waiting in the shadows, I was only safe withhim. Safe with the golden demon locked in battle before me.
And God help me, he was—beautiful. Powerful. Brutal. This was what the old stories of barbarians must have been like: men who fought not just to win, but to dominate, to consume. Every strike of his blade was poetry and savagery in one.
But then his aura—his beautiful, molten-gold aura—darkened. Red streaked through it first, then black, pulsing like veins of corruption. It crawled across his skin, his eyes flashing with that abyssal hunger, and the sightchilled me.
He wasn’t just fighting. He wasbecoming something else.
A hiss drew my gaze past him, and my stomach dropped. Two more of the creatures slipped from the ruins, their glowing eyes trained on us. Their hair was long and white, stringy, clinging to their hunched shoulders. Their pallid skin caught the faint light like chalk, their mouths pulling into grotesque grins as they advanced. Their eyes were glowing, reminding me again of the creatures in the classic movieThe Time Machine.
“Oh God—Zaph!” My voice cracked as I pointed, my hand shaking. “Watch it!”
He turned just in time, his blade arced up to deflect a second strike as the newcomers lunged. I pressed myself back against a shattered wall, shaking so hard my teeth chattered. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.
But the sound of steel clashing, the stink of blood, the glow of their monstrous eyes, it was all too much, too real. I didn’t know whether to pray that he killed them all or that he didn’t lose himself in the darkness, swallowing his light. Instinctively, I knew this was a very real possibility.
One by one, he cut them down. The first fell to a clean strike through the chest, Zaph's golden blade pierced the Mmuhr’Rhong's pale flesh with a crack of sizzling light. The creature let out a howl that curdled my blood before collapsing into the rubble, its glowing eyes going dark.
The second came at him with a jagged bone-sword, screeching, its long white hair whipping around its sunken face. Zaph spun, faster than my eyes could follow, andsevered its arm at the elbow. The thing shrieked, black ichor spraying across the stones, but Zaph didn’t pause; he drove his blade through its throat, silencing it forever.
The third tried to circle him, teeth snapping, fingers hooked into claws. For a moment, it looked like it might get behind him, might sink those claws into his back—my scream clawed up my throat—but Zaph whirled with inhuman speed. His aura flared black, the blade flashed gold, and in one brutal motion, he took its head clean off. The body collapsed, twitching, its hairless skull rolling to a stop at my feet.
I gagged, stumbling back, bile rising in my throat.
And then it was over.
The golden sword hung at his side, dripping dark blood that sizzled as it hit the ground. His chest rose and fell hard; his aura was still blazing in jagged pulses of gold shot through with black, a storm barely contained.
Slowly, terribly, he turned toward me.
