Dead of Knight (The Gryphonpike Chronicles Book 4) by Annie Bellet

Author:Annie Bellet
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: NEW
Publisher: Doomed Muse Press
Published: 2013-03-09T08:00:00+00:00

* * *

My muscles were exhausted, my shirt itchy beneath my armor, and I could hear from the increasingly ragged breathing of my two companions that I wasn’t the only one hitting their limits. Fortunately, the young boy hadn’t covered his trail at all and didn’t have much of a start on us. Broken and bent grasses showed his path and Fade had no trouble leading us in the growing twilight.

It was still dangerously close to dusk when we caught up to him. The idiot human started running when he saw Fade, but the mist-lynx caught him and had carefully shoved him to the dirt, putting a paw, claws sheathed, on the child’s back until we caught up. His brother was not so gentle.

“You knucklebrained idjeet,” Alew yelled as he yanked Enil to his feet.

“I gotta bury Da or he’ll turn into one of them burning dead!” Enil’s face was stubborn beneath the tearstains and streaks of dirt.

“Argue later, boys,” Drake muttered, eying the hills around us.

Fade’s low, continuous growl convinced them both. We turned back toward the village, running as quickly as we could, even Enil’s tired legs keeping a speed born of shame and terror as the last rays of daylight sank away beyond the now dark hills.

We almost made it. The windmill reared up against a starry sky and the huddled lumps of houses marked how close we were when the first of the Saliidruin dead attacked. It was a sign of my extreme exhaustion that I broke one of the fundamental rules of adventuring.

Always. Look. Up.

The hrafen descended upon us from above. The huge bird, its body the size of a warhorse and its wings thrice that span, dropped down and snatched up both Drake and Enil in its foul claws before I could react. My dulled senses barely registered the foul wave reeking from its inky feathers. Drake’s yell and Enil’s scream turned me back in time to see the huge undead bird change course and start to pump its wings for altitude.

Alew swung at it with his axe but its huge beak, as big as the boy’s torso, knocked him into the grass, batting the axe from his hands as though it were a toy.

Fade crouched beside me, hissing, but seemingly unwilling to spring on this new monster. I let an arrow fly and had another pulled before the first stuck just above the claw holding Drake’s squirming, yelling form. He was stabbing the scaly claw over and over with a dagger, but it was my arrow that caused the fiendish creature to drop him. My second arrow sank out of sight into one of the wings.

The hrafen gained more altitude as Drake tumbled to the ground and lay still. Enil’s screams were cut short as I was knocked from my feet by a final powerful buffet of its wings, the choking stench of rotting meat and sun-bloated bodies turning my stomach, blinding me to anything but my own nausea and fear for too long a moment.

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