AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The worst part of it all was the fear that Elyse had something to do with it.
He had to breathe. He had to calm down. He had to stop losing his gods’ damned mind.
He forced his breaths from shallow, heaving pants to slower, more controlled inhales and exhales. The barrage in his mind was still frantic, but it quieted some, enough that he could try and think rationally. He was a former soldier, trained to handle a myriad of situations, and though he had never expected to see anything so monstrous, so vile as this, he could still use that training. He rolled off his knees and sat on the ground, forcing his chest to expand with air as he tried to make sense of it all.
What had he seen? What was he still seeing all around him?
He started with the fire, how nearly every building in town was scorched, but none of them had burned to the ground. That meant numerous small fires. There were no strange odors, and from what he had seen of the burn patterns, it didn’t appear that any sort of accelerant had been used.
Setting that many fires in such a short span of time would take at least a dozen people. What motivation would they have shared? Or was it possible one person had created this whole devastation on their own?
Killian’s heart seized.
The orange glow.
That’s what he had seen on the map. His senses had been too overwhelmed for his brain to piece it together until that moment.
He still had a hundred questions, but he was able to grasp at a theory. As he sat there, thinking through everything logically, a numbness enveloped him—a sort of compartmentalization that allowed him to distance himself from the deaths. It felt inhuman, but it was a necessary coping mechanism that kept him from fleeing the scene.
He stood and went to lean against the sole remaining wall of a nearby home as his mind wandered toward the victims. Soot stained his clothes, flaking away into dust on the breeze, but his thoughts were centered on one thing. He had seen fires and burned corpses before—nothing close to this level, of course—but it wasn’t just the scale of the destruction that seemed off. Something was different here.
In the Guard, he had been sent to investigate several fires, and the victims usually fell into the same pattern. Often they slouched on the floor near a barricaded door or window, like they had been trying to escape to their last breath. Or they huddled together, hands and bodies permanently entwined from the intense heat, as they accepted their fate. Occasionally, a body would be found among the remnants of their bed, having slept through the fire and died of suffocation.
His mind flickered to the half-charred bodies strewn about him, heaped along the street. Why had they simply stopped in the middle of the town? How did the fire even reach them out here? And what were so many people doing out of their homes at night?
Even the bodies inside were scattered, almost none in beds or near exits or clinging to their loved ones. Pandemonium had clearly roused the entire town from whatever sleep it had been enjoying. It was as if the citizens had been running about, panicked, and then just… dropped dead.
His stomach recoiled more at the thought, but he forced himself to stay calm. This was bad. Epically bad. Genocide on a supernatural level.
Killian shook his head. He had left home fully believing that Elyse was behind everything, but now that he had seen firsthand the horrors cast on the town… He balled his hands into fists as he tried to remind himself that she was ruthless, a liar, and a murderer, and yet he just couldn’t bring himself to believe that she was capable of something this utterly evil.
But if not Elyse, then who?
A crunching of boots on gravel forced Killian from his thoughts. It was fully daylight now, and he scoured the streets but saw no one. Dread seized his chest, the footsteps haunting in a city full of the dead.
A woman’s figure emerged into the intersection, not fifty yards away. She stopped, her countenance still aside from the satchel she grasped in one hand, which swayed by her knees. Her green cloak was too vibrant around so much death, as was the bright, silvery hair that spilled from her hood.
At first, Killian thought he was imagining her, that by thinking of the witch he had somehow tricked his mind into hallucinating her. Because that seemed the only reasonable explanation for why Elyse stood before him.
Her skin was so pale, stark white against her dark eyes, which took in the town with confusion, perhaps even abhorrence. Her breaths were shallow, a rapid rise and fall of her cloaked shoulders.
Killian stood still, watching her, his hands trembling with rage. He watched as she took one slow, careful step, then another. He watched as those obsidian eyes scanned the buildings, the corpses, and finally landed on him.
Her entire body tensed. The air went taut between them as Killian planned his move. Even the plumes of dark smoke seemed to cease their billowing, instead watching the chaos about to unfurl. For a moment, the whole world hung by a string—a string of tangled feelings frayed by deceit.
And then she ran.
Chapter 11
- Elyse -
Before Elyse knew what she was doing, her feet were carrying her down the abandoned street, kicking up gravel in their wake. She didn’t understand why she had run—why she was still running, instead of magicking herself away. She felt the weight of the transportation potion in her pocket as she pumped her arms wildly, propelling her down the road, but it was as if her hands refused to obey, not letting her reach into her pocket and grab the simple potion.
She had been so overwhelmed by the corpses, by the smell of seared flesh, by the utter stillness of the town, that she had been completely caught off guard to see someone slouched against a building. It had taken her a moment to realize she was looking at another living person, and then the true depth of realization had hit her as she saw the umber skin, broad shoulders, and that unforgettable scowl. There had been nothing but cold hatred in his eyes.
It had been torturous to find that she was too late, that Sera’s visions had come true mere hours before. But to run into Killian, here of all places… It was ludicrous. Her panic tripled as she sprinted through the streets, and she dropped her satchel to run faster.
She could hear him chasing after her. “Stop!” he bellowed. A single warning before a zooming white light blew past her—a stunning spell.
