Enough.
Now that the ghost was separating from its body, it was vulnerable. A cloud of bonedust was all it took to have the revenant reeling and screeching in pain. Wren ignored the earsplitting racket and shoved Julian aside. She planted the sole of her boot square into the revenant’s now spirit-less chest cavity, cracking the brittle bones and sending the corpse flying to the ground.
In response to this assault to its physical body, the ghost separated even further, rising in a tide that Wren slashed clean through with her bone blades.
The wisps began to dissipate, so she turned back to Julian to make sure he was okay. But she’d barely laid eyes on him when he shouted, “Look out!”
She turned. The ghost’s pieces—which should have returned to the ether by now—were swirling and ebbing, reshaping before her very eyes.
Impossible.
Before she could do more than think the word, the ghost dove straight for Wren’s face.
Unable to react in time, she felt something hit her shoulder, hard—something living—and the next thing she knew, she and Julian were sprawled on the ground. Above, the ghost had given its final assault; its form disappeared in a cloud of green-tinged smoke.
Wren turned to Julian, her relief at avoiding a collision with the ghost freezing in her lungs when she saw him hunched over his left hand, staring down at the gloved appendage, his face bone-white.
Apparently, they had not both gotten away unscathed. The ghost must have hit his hand when he saved Wren. It had been mere vapor… Did that mean the deathrot would be less potent? Wren didn’t know.
She didn’t know, and the other revenants were coming their way.
“Julian,” she said firmly, and he turned an anguished face toward her. “On your feet. Now.”
He obeyed at once, clearly in shock, his staff held loosely in his uninjured hand.
“Remember what I told you before?” she asked, sheathing one of her swords and keeping her other blade raised between them and the undead. “Forget it.”
“What?” he said distractedly, clutching his hand to his chest.
The row of undead flared brightly, ready to attack at long last.
Wren sheathed her second sword and grabbed Julian’s shoulder instead, dragging him with her—turning her back, lowering her guard, and breaking every rule of her training.
“Run!”
NINETEEN
They ran at full tilt between the trees, moving dangerously fast in the darkness, stumbling through the underbrush and narrowly avoiding losing an eye to wildly swinging branches. Wren’s ankle throbbed, and she was certain Julian was feeling his own wounds, but they couldn’t slow down.
While she kept one hand on him, urging him forward, she dipped her other hand into the bonedust at her belt.
The revenants were behind them, pursuing with a sluggish but steady tread. It was the only reason running was a viable option—their corpses slowed them down.
Fearing what else might decide to pop up, however, she cast handfuls of bonedust in sweeping arcs that painted the trees white and powdered their clothes, but there was no sign of any undead except those that followed them.
If Wren were alone, she’d just run until the sun came up or she cleared the trees—whichever came first—and hope that the undead didn’t pursue in the daylight, preferring to remain in the shelter of the forest.
But she wasn’t alone. She was with Julian, and not only was he injured from the kidnapping at the fort, but the way he grimaced and clutched his hand told her he had definitely been touched by a ghost, which meant deathrot. He needed to be treated immediately. But where? How?
As she continued to run in a panic, the trees began to thin somewhat, and a spindly structure rose before them. It was like a tower on stilts, with a rickety ladder dangling from a trapdoor in the floor above.
It must have been a watchtower—that explained the height at least—and Wren did a cursory scan with her senses before deciding it was safe and shoving Julian ahead of her, up the moldering rope ladder.
The instant Wren reached the top, she peered back down to see the undead ranged below, their necks craned unnaturally to look up at her.
Fear pierced her gut.
Those hollow faces, those empty eyes… Wren knew the human skeleton inside and out and had seen it in varying levels of decay since she took her first anatomy lesson at eight years old. But it was one thing to see it on a table for study or to find it buried in the ground, and something else entirely when it walked like the living—but decidedly unlike any living person she had ever seen. Everything about them was wrong, and the way their ghost glowed from within… It was both like a prisoner desperate to be free and like a supernatural puppeteer pulling strings, and it made her skin crawl.
When one of them put a bony hand on the bottommost rung, the fear in her stomach twisted. Ghosts couldn’t leave the ground… but maybe ghosts with a body could. She withdrew a knife, hacking at the ladder until the rope snapped and fell away.
The undead watched it drop onto the ground before them, then looked up again. Wren glanced around—would they try to climb some other way? She had known the undead to be single-minded and determined when provoked. She had been chased by ghosts before, pursued to the edges of their range or until something easier came along. But she had never known the undead to be capable of problem-solving or strategizing—then again, she had been proven wrong more than once in the past couple of days, so what was one more thing?
When they didn’t make a move, just simply stood and stared, Wren expelled a shaky breath. Their ghosts were irritated, but while they could detach from their bodies and pose new and dangerous threats, they couldn’t fly.
But as she stared down at their unnaturally still bodies, a new worry took hold.
How long could they stand there without moving? Hours, surely—maybe even days?—but before the thought could overwhelm her, the cluster of undead dispersed, all walking in the same direction at the exact same time, as if summoned by an unheard call.
This… group think… it was unnatural. Dangerous. She had not been trained for this.
Wren thought of that rumor Julian had mentioned. A Corpse Queen enslaving the undead. Was it she who called them now?
She quickly shook it aside. She had enough to worry about without scary bedtime stories factoring into the mix.
Whatever might come, she and Julian appeared to be safe—for now.
Turning from the hatch, she found him in the shadows of the small, round tower. He was hunched against the wall, eyes lidded and breath uneven, his staff tossed carelessly onto the floor.
“They’re gone,” she said, hoping to ease that particular worry as she moved closer to him. Her eyes were adjusting to the gloom after the intensity of the ghostlight, and she could now make out the way his mouth was pulled down in the corners in a grimace.
“Let me—” she began, but he cut her off.
“What the hell were you doing back there?” he demanded.
“I… What do you mean?”
“You,” he said, gasping, “attacked them. You wanted a fight… kept edging closer…”
“No, that’s not—they weren’t behaving right. I only wanted to understand—”
“Of course they’re not behaving right,” he said harshly, forcing the words out. “There’s nothing right about them. They’re undead. They’re wrong, and you… you shouldn’t have…”