The beast roared again, clearer now that Sinadim had stumbled closer. Drawn in by the sound that had once been a signal for attack.
It wasn’t until he stood at the mouth of the den—sweat a thin, damp film laying heavy on his brow—that Sinadim saw the hard, unavoidable truth. That he understood what Giaus meant.
They cannot be saved.
Balkazarcould not be saved.
Hemmed in on three sides by hybrid soldiers with spears, Balkazar was cornered. Micha stood before the fallen war chief, all broad shoulders and hard lines. “To the river,” he snarled, tight and commanding. “Force him into the river!”
It was a command Balkazar himself had issued more than once. A tactic that would see a single, roaming infected slaughtered through disadvantage alone—but would be utterly meaningless against the weight of an entire horde.
A horde whose approach could not be felt above the ground.
Muscles writhing beneath his skin, Balkazar lashed out. Slow and lumbering, he swung the arm that had become a veritable club and missed. Throwing himself off balance with a howl of frustration that became an agonized wail when Keever darted in close and scored first blood.
“Don’t let him touch you,” Konjo warned, mirroring his twin as he too struck out and tried to force the war chief to take another step toward his doom.
Balkazar whirled toward the voice…
… and vomit scalded the back of Sinadim’s throat.
An abomination stood below him. Wearing the skin of his fallen war chief—and wearing itbadly. Twitching, grotesque, any hint of glorious Anhur beauty was gone. Swallowed by a living horror. Blue eyes bulged from their sockets, twice the size of anything that might have been considered normal. Pupils alternating between a blank, dead stare lost in some distant void, only to shrink into tiny pinpricks of intense focus an instant later. Reacting to movement, as if he was little more than a hungry mouth on a dull, vicious predator.
Revolted, Sinadim retreated a step—his back bumping against a wall of muscle and rippling testosterone.
“Easy,” the king cautioned. His voice calm. Rich and soothing, no matter the way it was laced with an eager lust for blood.
Sinadim couldn’t so much as blink. Couldn’t tear his eyes from the thing Balkazar had become in so short a time.
Fetid slime had soaked his chest with ropey strings of drool that dropped all the way to the top of his belt, swinging and shivering with his every erratic movement. And with every lurching twitch of muscle that bulged and shrank from one second to the next, he seemed to shimmer. A hulking monstrosity that existed in the gray, where life had not quite given way to death.
As he watched, Balkazar’s head tipped back and to the left. Jaws hanging slack, the beast drew in a breath. Oblivious to the gore spilling down his thigh from the twin wounds, his misshapen head rolled on a neck far too brittle to support so lopsided a weight. His skull deformed where bone had grown out of control. Where skin was stretched too thin and swollen, all at once.
A thick, wormy tongue flicked back, painting the roof of his mouth, and Balkazar moaned in an eerie dual tone that sent alarm bristling through Sinadim’s blood. And with an audiblecrack, Balkazar’s neck snapped back.Up.Pupils dilating and constricting in an uneven pulse, his eyes wild, he searched for only a moment. Just long enough to scan the clearing before he found Sinadim where he stood before the king.
And then three things happened all at once.
Balkazar fell to his knees with a sound that might have been jubilant, his mouth working around a string of garbled nonsense. “’Mpiiince! Ahworrd!”
As one, all three hybrid males reeled back, spears poised to fall. To put him out of his misery, and grant the infected war chief this one final mercy.
And from the trees, the voice of a legion. Groaning, the army of the lost began to burst through the trees. A trickle that would become a flood.
It was then, as Sinadim watched a dozen bodies become a score, that Balkazar’s jumbled words condensed, his meaning as obvious as it was poetic. Full circle.
“My prince!” he’d said. “A horde.”
9
They came through the trees.
Slowed by the trunks large enough to forbid great speed, the infected trickled onto the battlefield. One by one. Some lumbering under the weight of ghastly mutations, others newly infected. Smaller, weaker, but much faster.
The first wave, Giaus knew.
One of many.
Shouts of alarm rose from Sinadim’s hybrids, and the twins fell back, behind the largest male whose dark hide was covered in thick, raised scars. Their names irrelevant to the king watching them retreat as a cohesive unit, as they backed toward the cave with spears at the ready. Utterly outnumbered.
