Page 31 of Ruin of Revenants

By the time we arrived in Blackshore, heavy clouds shrouded the stars, and exhaustion clung to me like a heavy blanket. After the night’s revelations and training, all I wanted was to curl up in bed with Onyx again and sleep the hours away.

But the weariness began to slough away, tension creeping into its place, as our carriage rolled along the main road and an eerie stillness greeted us. At first, I’d hoped that maybe the town was simply sleeping, until I realized the windows were barred with boards, the doors themselves secured too. They were hiding.

As our carriage creaked to a stop, shouts carried to us. My mouth soured.

“The graveyard,” Owen muttered, sounding tired and sad, as if this was routine for them. The boarded-up towns. The suffering citizens. The fae finding their dead rising back up to kill them.

How many times had they been out here, trying to save their people? And how could King Wystan be so monstrous as to turn his back on them?

“Stay close to me,” Archer murmured to me as he pushed open the carriage door and we leapt out, one by one. He slipped me a dagger with an ornately bejeweled hilt. My hand shook as I unsheathed it, clinging to it like it was a lifeline. If I was attacked, I couldn’t use my fire magic without revealing myself. This was my only defense.

Cliff leapt down from the driver’s seat, unhitching Gorgeous and Fluffy, who walked obediently at his sides as he drew a sword. Together, we trod carefully through the deserted streets of the town toward the graveyard on its edge. It wasn’t large, making it easy to see the forms struggling in the darkness. The bodies of the dead, some clearly long dead and hardly more than skeletons, rising up to attack the living.

My stomach swirled with disgust. “The ones who’ve been dead longer—their souls should have departed into the afterlife long ago. I don’t think I can heal something without a soul,” I warned Archer.

“We’ll bring you one of the recently dead,” he’d said.

My companions drew their weapons. Cliff made the earth ripple and shift beneath us as his jaguars charged toward the nearest undead creature. Unlike fae, they didn’t seem perturbed by the magic the revenant hurled at them. The creature must have used earth magic in life, because it sent tangling vines and a wall of earth toward them, but they leapt them easily, working together to fell the revenant and tear into its throat. I glanced away in disgust.

Owen summoned a ribbon of water that swirled around his free hand, ready to follow his commands, while he lifted his blade in the other. Lily hadn’t told me what her magic was, and she didn’t call on anything that made it obvious as we pressed past the first of the graves. The disturbed dirt indicating its occupant had recently joined the group of attacking revenants. Nearby, a female crouched behind another gravestone.

“Your Highness!” Her eyes were wide with the horrors of what she’d witnessed, her face smeared with dirt and blood. “We weren’t able to burn our bodies quickly enough. They’ve claimed more and they’re swiftly outnumbering us. We can’t—” Her voice broke. “We can’t resist their magic.”

Archer’s expression hardened. A revenant tore toward him, and I sucked in a breath, holding my position near him and tightening my grasp on my dagger.

But it didn’t run toward him. It ran past him, like he didn’t exist at all.

My eyes widened as Owen lashed out, his blade pausing midair as a wall of swirling shadows rose to meet it. His water fell harmlessly to the ground, and suddenly, the shadows formed tendrils that lifted him into the air. He grunted in pain, struggling against the revenant’s awful magic.

With strangled cries, Lily and Cliff were engulfed by more churning shadows.

But Archer and I were untouched. He marched forward, swinging his blade in a clean arc, removing the revenant’s head from its body. It flew deeper into the graveyard, rolling somewhere into the shadows, and its body teetered and fell.

Abruptly, Owen collapsed to the earth in his puddle of water, barely catching himself in time to land on his feet. “Thanks,” he grunted. “Maybe a little faster next time?”

I shot Archer a glance, confused and slightly in awe.

“They won’t notice me as long as my magic is strong.”

“You can influence them when they’re dead?”

More screams punctuated the night as villagers on either side of us, trying to bar the revenants from pushing into the town, were swallowed in shadows.

“I can’t influence their emotions or actions, but for the more recently deceased, I can manipulate how they see me—or rather, make myself invisible to them. Their souls are still trapped in their bodies. That’s what you need to try to reach and heal—if there’s some part of them still alive,” Archer said.

My mind buzzed with thoughts. If I could heal that part of their souls, would I bring them back from the brink of death? Or were they too far gone?

Archer was already charging into the graveyard, so I shook off my thoughts and fears and raced to keep pace with him, scanning the grounds for wounded fae. As Archer leapt between a revenant charging toward a male swinging his blade toward a living shadow, I caught sight of a female leaning against a grave, blood smearing the stone behind her.

“It’s all right,” I murmured as shadows swirled over us like storm clouds, not sure if anything would ever be right again. My hands trembled as I reached for the bloody gash in her chest. Her chestnut eyes were already glassy as they met mine, and though her complexion was naturally dark, there was an ashen sheen to it and a pale tint to her lips. No no no, I thought, my healing magic rising to find her wound and stitch it back together. She’d already lost a lot of blood.

“I’m Isoria. What’s your name?” I asked the female, mostly to keep her distracted, to give her something to focus on.

“Cassia,” she gasped.

“Hold on, Cassia; I’m going to heal you,” I said with more confidence than I felt.

The battle was a blur around us, and I wasn’t sure if the prince was still nearby to offer us safety, or if he’d been shoved deeper into the fray. All I could do was focus on what I knew. Mend. Heal. Save. I breathed deeply to steady myself and focus, willing every ounce of strength into this female.