Mala’s blade wasn’t—and she was only a breath away. The revenant abruptly froze, its ragged ears flicking backward, as if the creature suddenly recognized the danger thundering closer.
Gathering her legs beneath her, Mala vaulted from the saddle. The revenant whipped around as she flew toward it, propelled by Shim’s speed. Teeth like daggers, the creature lunged. Grunting, she swung her blade with enough force to spin her body in mid-air, red cloak flaring open. Her weapon razed its emaciated neck, steel slicing through the gristle and slinging its stinking blood in a wide arc.
She landed hard halfway up the piled sacks of grain. Seeds spilled over her boots like sand. The revenant’s head rolled past her feet. Atop the stack, the youth stared down at her with the creature’s rancid blood splattered in a crimson path across his chest.
Mala leapt over the long-tooth’s headless corpse and scrambled up the pile. “Get down, boy!”
As if suddenly remembering the revenant stalking him from the cart, he paled and spun to face it, brandishing his small knife. Not getting down, as she’d told him to.
Curse it all. She snatched up a grain sack and flung it at the backs of his knees. His legs collapsed at the same moment the revenant pounced at his head. Mala braced her feet and greeted the creature, instead. Her blade rammed into its chest. Fetid breath gushed from its snapping mouth, only a handbreadth from her face. She ripped the steel through its heart.
With her foot, she shoved the creature’s convulsing body off her sword and stole a glance toward the cliffs. Shim had caught up to the revenant dragging the child. Most of the creatures still swarmed over the warrior and his horse—as if in the shrieking chaos of their numbers, they didn’t realize their opponent had already fallen. Mala didn’t know whether she had the rot in the revenants’ brains or the goddess Vela to thank for their confusion, but it meant that the caravan wasn’t yet overwhelmed by the creatures, and she could more easily cut down the handful of revenants attacking the travelers. When Shim returned, together they would slaughter the ravenous swarm, but the people within the barricade needed her help first.
On the ground, a gray-haired woman clutched a pitchfork in her wizened hands. Her shoulders butting up against the wagon’s side, the crone desperately held off a wulfen revenant, stabbing the tines at its slobbering jaws. Two shouting men clubbed a befouled spitting lizard, smashing the spines circling its leathery neck, though it was too late to save the woman pinned beneath its claws. Children screamed and scrambled and hid. A frantic horse pitched and bucked, striking a revenant in the throat, then a glancing blow to a fleeing woman’s hip, sending her sprawling to the ground. Everywhere Mala looked there was blood, and the air was filled with cries of terror and the stench of death.
No more. Gripping the hilt of her sword in two hands, she took a flying leap off the wagon and into the fray. A single blow cleaved the wulfen revenant’s spine. Rain pelted her face as she charged the next, meeting razored fangs with hard-edged steel, and the creature’s hot blood sprayed over her hands.
Each breath, each step, another swing of her blade. No slowing, no stopping. Too late, the revenants within the barricade understood that they’d pursued their individual prey too quickly, that they should have mobbed this new foe, but by the time the creatures began attacking her in twos and threes, they were the last—and two or three would never defeat her.
Sweat mingled with the rain and blood by the time she kicked away the final stinking corpse and faced the wagons nearest the cliffs. Around her, the travelers cried out in relief, but Mala could not join them. This wasn’t finished; the second wave of creatures should be coming. Yet no new revenants were storming over the barricade.
Did they still swarm over the fallen warrior? She couldn’t hear their shrieking now. Over the travelers’ din, all else was quiet.
Carefully, she slipped between two loaded wagons and glanced out. A revenant’s head flew past her shoulder and thunked against a buckboard. Astonishment pulled her up short.
The warrior still lived. Knee-deep in slaughtered revenants, his blade gory and his body soaked by the carnage. He chopped through the neck of the last and swung toward her, his face a mask of blood and the unseeing madness of battle still burning in his eyes.
And she was a stranger. Mala immediately spread her hands, the haft of her sword dangling from her loosened fingers, trying to present as little threat as possible.
“It is finished, warrior!”
Weapon raised, he stared at her, his body frozen in place but for the heaving of his broad chest. Studded leather bracers guarded his forearms, but the corded muscles of his upper arms were bare. The revenants’ claws had scored ragged furrows in his flesh.
Not just blinded by the frenzy of battle, she realized, but by pain. Viscous crimson matted his dark hair and lay thick over his clothes and skin. She couldn’t tell how much of the blood was his, but he hadn’t fought through the swarm of revenants and emerged unscathed.
Vela, help him. And Mala, too. She had defeated men of his size before—men who had been so certain of victory when they’d faced her, simply because of their great heights and the strength in their thickly muscled arms. She had defeated men more heavily armored than this one. But when battle-madness possessed warriors, it bestowed upon them a wholly different kind of strength, one that did not falter with injury. Pain fed the bloodlust and rage, and they couldn’t be stopped except by death.
The bloodlust had probably saved his life. Even Mala could not have survived so many revenants. Not alone—unless the madness of battle had possessed her, too. But if he came for her now, one of them would die by it.
Mala didn’t want to die. And she didn’t want to kill the man who had stood firm and risked everything to protect the people in the caravan. Such warriors were far too rare in these cursed lands.
“It is finished,” she repeated, more quietly this time. “Your sword has feasted on the flesh of every revenant at your feet, and those that made it over the barricade have been slain—”
“You have come.” His harsh interruption startled her to silence. “Finally come.”
He dropped his sword. Mala’s heart jumped against her ribs, and she started forward, thinking that she would have to catch him before he collapsed into the pile of corpses, but he began to wade through the carnage, instead.
Wading toward her—and the bloodlust in his eyes had been joined by fierce hunger.
“I waited for you, little dragon,” he said roughly. “Every night, I dreamed of you. And now I will have you.”
CHAPTER 2
No. Mala would not be had like this.
“Warrior, do not come closer,” she warned. “You’ve waited for nothing.”
“Nothing? No.” Triumphant laughter filled the warrior’s eyes and voice. “You have come and it is not the end.”
Easily Mala spun the haft in her palm and gripped her sword properly. “It will be.”
He grinned, his teeth white in that face of red. Bits of flesh and blood dripped in a trail behind him. “You know me, little dragon.”
Little dragon. He spoke the name as if to a loved one. Did he even see her, or did he see someone else? Was the madness putting a false vision behind his eyes?