Page 65 of A Touch of Poison
25
Bastian
We rode hard.
The Horrors didn’t follow.
But I could still feel that place hounding my heels.
Tattered blankets lie in the street where they’ve been dropped by sleepy children. The silent but leaden footsteps of their parents, aunts, uncles, neighbours as they all file along.
Then and now flickered, overlaying each other and shuffling through my mind.
But one image kept coming back.
Bones piled up in the place where we’d led those people.
I try to stop it, but my beloved grabs my shoulder. Jaw solid, he shakes his head. “They will kill you,” he mutters. “We will stop this, but not here, not now. Give me time and I’ll save us both.”
I squeezed the reins. This was real. This. Now. The breath in my lungs. The sun above. Kat riding at my side.
She watched me, smeared with soot and ash, but I could tell from her crumpled brow that I looked far worse.
Haggard. Exhausted. Gripped by darkness I just couldn’t shake.
I should’ve stayed behind and let those monsters feed on me the same way I’d let them feed on the people of that town.
They struggle when we first bundle them into the pens, but the Horrors hold fast. One by one, the people fall, and the Horrors discard them in neat piles, their magic sucked up, bodies dried out to husks.
Bile rose in my throat.
My shadows curled around my hands, soothing, stroking, a reminder of where I was and when I was… andwhoI was.
They were not my memories.
I wasn’t even born when Innesol fell.
I clung to that fact as guilt and shame gnawed at me.
Kat steered closer. “Do you want to talk about what happened back there?”
“No.”
I didn’t look directly at her, but I heard the sharp breath in and the even sharper one out. Shedidask.
By the time the thin crescent moon rose, we’d passed the cave, and our stags had slowed to a walk.
Kat’s stumbled, and she gripped the saddle’s pommel to stay on. “Bastian? I think we need to stop. They can’t keep going.” She cast her eye over me. “And from the look of it, neither can you.”
I wanted to put many more miles between me and that place, but she was right.
Besides, with those bloodshot eyes, she looked exhausted too.
We set up camp beneath a rocky outcrop. My feet dragged as I set the wards. They would keep us safe from most things. A Horror could break through, given time, but we’d have a warning.
When I returned, Kat was tending the fire, hunched over, face still sooty.
I shouldn’t have brought her here. I should have sent someone else. But I’d been so confident—it was only the edge of Horror territory, after all. We could sneak in, sneak out, and never even have to see one of the creatures. Quicker and quieter than a large group.
