Guardians of Moonlight: A Reverse Harem Fantasy Romance (Guardians of the Fae Book 3) by Elizabeth Hartwell

Author:Elizabeth Hartwell [Hartwell, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Eve

“We’re what?” Kaelen asks as the masked men with the carts stop to collect more bodies.

“The Black Death,” I reiterate, pointing at one of the bodies with the distinctive black fingers caused by the plague. Even though I know from last time that I’m just inhabiting a shell, I still don’t want to touch a diseased body. “Do you know of it?”

“Barely,” Kaelen admits. “Most of my study of human history has been where it has intersected with the Fae in some way. Is this a result of war or violence?”

“Not quite,” I admit. “Come with me.”

We hurry in the opposite direction of the cart with its pile of bodies until we reach a large rectangular plaza. Even here, though, I can see the bodies lying in the street, the dead and dying that were just left here by desperate families so ignorant of the actual cause of the plague that they turned on anyone who showed any sign of illness.

“This isn’t England,” Kaelen fumes when I point out an open part of the plaza and lead him over, sitting down. “The few signs I saw looked . . . different.”

“German,” I murmur, looking around. I can smell . . . filth, mostly, but there’s water nearby. “I caught one of the words, not that there are too many. I’m no linguist, but I’d suspect we’re in what’ll become known as Germany.”

In a cathedral which somehow looks unfinished, bells start to toll out sonorously, and I look as frightened, scared people start to leave. Some are weeping, and others bear the shell-shocked look that seems to follow horror everywhere it goes. I saw that look too many times during the Para Wars, sometimes in my own mirror.

“How’d we end up here?” Kaelen asks, pissed off. “You were thinking of England, right?”

“Yes, but . . .” I reply, thinking back. Right there at the end, in the flash, I felt something different from last time. It was there and gone so quickly that I wasn’t sure what I felt. “I think something took over the trip. It felt like a push away from our goal.”

Kaelen stops, then looks at me. “I felt it too. I thought it was just part of the travel experience. So . . . what’s the Black Death?”

“The bubonic plague,” I reply, looking around. “It swept through Europe starting in the mid-thirteen hundreds, with smaller outbreaks for the next five hundred years or so. But the first one was the big one. I remember reading in school that it killed almost a hundred million people.”

Kaelen blinks, stunned as he looks around. “We’re in a plague zone?”

I nod. “It was spread by rats, or more specifically, the fleas that lived on the rats. They’d bite the humans and spread the disease, other fleas would bite the infected humans, and so on and so forth. While cleanliness might be next to godliness, they haven’t gotten the message at this point in time.”

Kaelen shivers, and I wonder if he’s a little bit of a germaphobe.

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