“Cemetery. Now. BlackFen Edge needs the slayer.”
There are no dramatics, just a simple statement that Nyssa accepts, and despite being practically dead on her feet—pardon the pun—she shoves her feet back into her shoes and checks she has her blade.
“What are we looking at?” she asks, all business.
“Undead. A lot of them. The old ones.”
Nyssa raises an eyebrow. “From the original plot? They’ve been undisturbed so far.”
“Probably because they can’t be arsed rising and moaning,” Dastian pipes up.
He’s not far wrong.
“How far back are we going?” I ask.
“Around seven hundred years,” Tabitha says, which predates even us.
“Shit,” I mutter as Nyssa yanks the door open. “Who woke them?”
“Who cares?” Nyssa barks. “Let’s go.”
She runs headlong into the night, and we follow because where she goes, we do too.
Nyssa runs past the usual gate to the cemetery and heads around the back under the clusters of old oaks. I reach out with my power to track the undead, to figure out what we are dealing with, but they hiss and snarl against the divine power, spitting like I’ve set their bones on fire with salt and holy water.
“Ouch,” I mutter. “They are pissed off.”
“At us?” Dastian asks.
“At everything,” I reply and hurry to catch up with Nyssa.
“Is it her Wraith Queen power?” Dastian asks as we round an oak to see Nyssa already in combat with a skeleton that appears to be at least seven feet tall.
I shake my head. “I don’t think so. They shouldn’t be fighting her.”
“Then that leaves only one being,” Dreven says, throwing a net of shadows over a wraith headed our way. “And they are answering to their original leader.”
“Yep,” I say and throw out a coil of magic that slaps a skeleton in the face, knocking his skull off.
But it gets up and carries on, skull-less.
“Oh, that is not creepy!” Nyssa calls out. “At least pick your head up!”
As expected, the skeleton ignores her. Somehow, the Devourer, former Wraith King, has tapped into these ancient souls to get them to attack BlackFen Edge. To attack Nyssa. Distraction? Or does he simply hope they will kill her?
“He’s testing her,” I growl, crushing a rotting hand that bursts from the earth to grab my ankle. I grind the bones into the mud without breaking stride. “He wants to see if the new Queen breaks.”
Nyssa spins, her blade severing the spine of the skull-less wonder, but two more drag themselves out of the peat to take its place.
“A little help?” Nyssa shouts, ducking under a rusted claymore that whistles past her ear.
“Working on it,” Dastian yells, flinging a bolt of chaotic energy into a cluster of them. Instead of exploding, the skeletons start doing a frantic jig.
“Oh, come on,” Nyssa growls.
Dastian just shrugs, but I can see his perturbed expression.
That wasn’t meant to happen.
