In the middle of the courtyard was an old water well, but it was what surrounded it which drove terror into me, pinning my legs to the ground. Seven hooded figures stood around the well. All lean and various heights, their faces were hidden under their hoods and shadowed by the night. Their bony hands held various weapons, like a bardiche, lucerne hammer, and a war scythe. Sharp edges gleamed in the moonlight.
I had seen their likeness before in picture books where humans got the inspiration for the image of death.
The seven stood there, but I could make out more boney figures deep in the shadows, waiting for a command.
I knew in my gut what they were.
“Oh, may a wheelbarrow of small monkeys fuck it.” My voice barely hit above a whisper.
Necromancers.
Chapter
Twenty-Six
Air hiccupped in my lungs, fear plugging up my veins, my gaze rolling over the figures. Warwick was right in saying no living person lived on this land, but not everything here was dead.
Necromancers lived in the in-between.
The gray.
The gray . . . just like you.
They were stuck between life and death, feeding on what was left of a person’s essence. Necromancers lived off the souls of the deceased, then used their skeletons to do their bidding. There was no emotion or conscience in them anymore, only bones.
That was what I saw in the shadows. An army of bones ready to fight and protect their masters.
My gut knotted with a realization my mind was not willing to hear yet. Dread knocked around inside my body, making my head swim, like I wasn’t fully attached to myself. This was all secondary to the magnetic pull I felt, a power inside the well, inside me, that I could not fight.
It called to me as if it was part of me. Singing the song of a siren.
Absently, my feet stepped toward the source.
Almost all the necromancers moved in a blink, their menacing weapons primed to gut me, triggering the group around me to respond in kind.
I could feel Warwick’s presence expand, the wolf and the legend dousing the space with power, the promise of death.
The problem was, this group didn’t fear death.
They fed off of it.
A smaller figure stood in front of the group, with long, stringy dark hair falling out of the hood. I was pretty sure it was a woman. She held up her slim hand, the gray skin so paper-thin it was almost translucent.The necromancers around her eased back. I had no doubt she was their leader.
She didn’t speak or offer any encouragement, but for some reason, I took it as such, stepping forward again.
“Kovacs...” Warwick’s voice skirted up the back of my neck, his gun still cocked and pointed at them. “What are you doing?”
I had no fucking idea.
Reaching the well, the pull became agonizing, a cry bounding up my throat, desperate to retrieve whatever it was.
Tugging on the rope, I yanked the bucket up. The necromancers shifted. The sense that they wanted to cut me down, keep me away from it, crawled over me like ants. Their leader put up her hand again, halting them.
An old wooden bucket broke through the impregnable blackness at the bottom of the well, revealing a metal box sitting inside the pail. Reaching for it, I sensed potent magic rattling against the container—a caged animal desperate to get out. Through its confines, power oozed out, stabbing at my skin like a thousand needles.
A crack of lightning danced across the cloudless night sky, the air rolling thick with magic.
“Kovacs...”Warwick’s shadow growled in my ear. He could feel it too. The weight in my stomach warning me all day was screaming now, but stopping was no longer an option. My fate was set; the events leading me here were already in motion.
