Every caravan had one—traders, hunters, and military alike.
A traveling bar and distillery was a source of comfort on a long journey. A place to gather after a long night’s ride. A sanctuary to drink to the fallen they’d lost along the way.
More importantly? It was a fucking bomb on wheels.
I found it about four wagons from the bridge entrance and slipped unseen underneath it. Waited. Each time another wagon moved onto the bridge and the line crept along, I crept right along with it.
And then, it was finally time. We were at the bridge, about to start the crossing, no chance for another traveler to pop in for a drink.
Just before the wheels started turning again, I slipped out from under the wagon and let myself in through the side door.
The occupant, a low-level crossroads demon, was busy rearranging liquor bottles, his back to me.
“Sorry, friend,” he said, not even turning around. Apparently, my foul stench marked me as one of their own, no visual confirmation needed. “We ain’t open. You’ll have to wait till we get across the—”
I punched a hole through his back and tore out his spine just as his horseman whistled to the mares. The wagon bumped onto the drawbridge, its wheels somehow managing to find every crack and divot in the old wood.
I waited until we reached the center of the bridge, then opened the side door and pitched his remains into the moat.
The guards never cared about shit like that, and most of the other travelers were too worried about their own business to notice. People were always falling off the wagon, so to speak, or getting thrown off, or—for those looking for theworstway to go—jumping.
It was an unexpected treat for the ghouls that dwelled there. I didn’t have to watch to know what was happening; the second the demon hit bottom, they converged, rending skin and muscle from bone, consuming it until there wasn’t so much as a drop of fucking blood left.
Then they dropped to their knees and wept, a sound so haunting it always made me want to wretch, cry, and punch something at the same fucking time.
They looked like rotting skeletons, the ghouls, draped in nothing more than a vaguely transparent layer of tattered skin suggesting the person they once were.
Such was the fate of the soldiers of Midnight.Keradoc’ssoldiers. Outside the city walls, all who died in battle were left to rot. What the beasts of Midnight didn’t pick clean eventually decomposed in the fields. After that, the poor bastards would rise again in Beggar’s Moat, cursed to forever guard the city that’d turned its back on them.
Demon attendant properly disposed of, I pulled out the liquor bottles and dumped them, dousing the interior of the wagon, no surface left dry.
Minutes later, we reached the end of the bridge and pulled to a stop at the gatehouse for the inspection, which was little more than a payoff.
One I wouldn’t be making tonight.
The guard didn’t knock. Just opened the side door and stepped in, probably already salivating for the cash—and the liquor—he’d been counting on.
What do you know—the uniforms really are blue now.
He caught my eye. Nodded, real friendly, like they always were when it came time to get their palms greased.
“Nice night for a barbecue,” I said. Then I flicked my Zippo to life, tossed it at the guard’s feet, and slipped out the other side in a vampire blur so fast, even the most reliable witness would’ve had trouble convincing a jury he’d seen anything other than a smudge in the night.
I was a safe distance away when the fucking thing exploded, undoubtedly sending the rest of the guards into a tizzy, no time to pay heed to any possible rumors of a stowaway.
Hey, I liked covering all the bases.
Pulling my hood up, I tucked in with the rest of the rabble in the street, my stink unnoticeable in the river of filth and shit that was Amaranth City.
One last glance over my shoulder, and I smiled.
I’d fucking made it.
That old guilt soup started boiling in my gut again, but this time, I didn’t ignore it. I welcomed it.
Used to be shit like this was easy. Pleasurable, even. But those days had died the night I left Midnight, vowing never to return.
Now that I had?
