Page 326 of Blade of the Nightking

The tavern.

I fought harder, broken glass scraping beneath my boots as they shoved me toward the open trapdoor to the cellar.

“No!”

I hit the cellar floor on my side. Pain exploded through my hip and shoulder, and before I could push myself up, the trapdoor slammed shut overhead, plunging me into darkness. Metal scraped against metal, followed by the heavy clunk of a bolt sliding into place.

A sound came from somewhere nearby. The soft scuff of a boot against packed earth.

Fear shot through me. I jerked upright and scrambled backward through the pitch black, my hand closing around the hilt of the bone knife. Heat seared into my palm. I gasped and dropped it.

A flint struck. The spark flared and died.

It struck again, and a small flame caught the wick of a candle.

Weak golden light spread through the cellar.

Three figures emerged from the darkness.

Infected.

They stood motionless before me, dead faces mottled with black blood and decay, clothes torn and stiff with filth and gore. The one in the center held a wooden bat, darkened from handle to tip, its edge glistening wet.

I drew in a breath to scream—and stopped.

Sweat. Unwashed bodies. Tobacco smoke.

They didn’t smell of death.

The one holding the bat stepped closer.

One blood-smeared hand rose to its face, fingers hooking beneath the loose flesh at its jaw. Slowly, it peeled the dead skin away.

And beneath it was… beneath it…

His face was leaner than I remembered, the softness pared away until his cheekbones stood starkly beneath tanned skin. His hair had grown long enough to brush his shoulders, swept back from his forehead and held there by a strip of faded cloth, the freckles scattered across his nose and cheeks faint beneath sun and grime.

I knew those freckles.

I knew the shape of that mouth despite the scrub of beard around it, though the familiar softness was gone now, hardened by something I couldn’t name.

But it was his eyes that made the cellar fall away.

Warm brown, once so open that every thought had seemed to move through them before he spoke, now shadowed by a wildness I didn’t recognize. Something fierce lived behind them now, something that had been forced awake and would never sleep again.

They traced the contours of my face, widening slowly with stunned disbelief.

The other figures began peeling the stolen Infected faces from their own, but I didn’t look at them. I couldn’t look anywhere but into the eyes of a ghost.

The ghost of the man I was supposed to marry.

A whimper escaped me, torn from the shredded remains of my broken heart, from the cavernous emptiness where my bond had been ripped away, from the desecrated hollow where the other half of my soul had been, now gone forever.

"Laurie?"