Page 77 of Reap & Sow

A fiend had its teeth buried in his calf.

Horror crashed over her like a wave. Eda was momentarily pinned beneath the crushing weight of it. Blood flowed between the fiend’s teeth.

“Lawrie!” She lunged for him. He was jerked away. In her peripheral vision, she saw Ben and the Blades pause in shock. Even Tenelle was struck dumb with horror.

Eda threw herself again at Lawrie. She clung to his shoulders, roared in the creature’s face, “Let him go!”

The fiend’s wrinkled snout smoothed as it unlatched its jaw. She saw her own reflection in its bulging black eyes. It snarled, coppery and rotten.

Ben’s sword came whooshing down. The fiend yowled. Claws scraped stone as it twisted and swiped at him.

“Be gone!” Standing upon the templehouse gates, Fane clutched his vial of colloidal silver. His voice echoed like a crack of thunder across the street. “Be gone, fetid creature of darkness, in the name of the Lordfather! I command it!”

Eda tried to pull Lawrie to his feet, but Ben was already there. Together they got him standing. His trouser leg was soaked with blood.

The fiend snarled. With visible reluctance, it turned and loped away, pale haunches undulating as it raced up the side of the nearest building and over the roof.

Hoofbeats pounded the street. Kit skidded to a halt between them and the templehouse. They boosted Lawrie across his back.

“Orders, Commander,” a Blade called. They hesitated at the templehouse gates, eyeing Kit’s bared fangs—nightmarish and unnatural. Tenelle stood rooted in place, dark eyes cycling rapidly between their bizarre group. Her hand flexed around her sword hilt.

She glanced back at Fane.

The bishop’s cheeks were bloodless as he glared at them, and Eda suddenly understood.

Fane had made a mistake. Perhaps he’d forgotten Ben’s and Lawrie’s faces, or he hadn’t even realized it was them. Either way, he’d unthinkingly set a fiend upon them to stop their escape. If Eda really controlled the vile creatures, she would never attack the same family she tried to save. Tenelle knew it.

Mantle or no, Fane saw Eda now. She nearly smirked at him.

Ben hauled himself onto Kit’s back and held out his hand. “Eda, quick!”

But there wasn’t room for three. She said to Kit, “Get them to Robin. Don’t look for me until they’re safe.”

“What are you—” It was all Ben could do to hold on to Lawrie as Kit took off with uncanny speed. He called her name, but the stallion didn’t slow. They tore down the street in a blur of black and red.

Tenelle snapped out of her stupor. “Get riders now! Follow them!” She pointed her sword at Eda. “Do not make me chase you again, girl.”

Her heart pounded like a drum. “You’ll have to find me first.”

Eda had hidden in plain sight all her life. Clutching the mantle about her shoulders, she took off the way Kit had gone, praying her luck would hold a little longer.

Twenty-one

She made it halfway down the Embel before Kit found her again.

Eda was bone-tired and frozen when he landed in a flurry of black smoke. Well past sundown, the country road was dark and sparsely traveled. Spectral fog clung to the grass, eddying about her aching feet. Cloud-veiled moonlight was her only guide.

Her chest burned. Her mouth was dry as sand. But the sight of Kit’s luminous eyes in the dark struck Eda like a spark of lightning, rousing her to life. “Lawrie,” she gasped by way of greeting, “is he—”

“Robin is tending him.”

“He’s all right? He lost so much blood.”

“I don’t know. He was bitten by a fiend. That’s no common wound.”

His flat tone unnerved her. He stood motionless, a black wraith in the dark. The scant yards between them felt like a mile.

“But…they’re out. We did it. We got them out.”