Searching for Death by Rick Wood

Author:Rick Wood [Wood, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blood Splatter Press
Published: 2025-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

As the empty night lurked around the town, and the residents of Moonvale shivered beneath their bedsheets, one woman stood at her window, watching over the baron streets below the old B&B.

Shadows flickered but revealed nothing. The noises were present, but they came from afar. Even the wind seemed too afraid to blow the leaves off bushes and trees with too much ferocity. It was an ominous absence that felt full of menace.

Raven waited. She’d go out tomorrow night, if not tonight. She needed to be patient. She didn’t want to be surrounded; she wanted to face a handful of them, not a hoard. She’d wait until she found the right group of them, then leave her room. Until then, patience was the most vital weapon she could yield.

This changed the moment she saw a distressed figure edging through the baron streets.

He huddled his arms around himself, a quivering wreck, glancing around with a heightened terror in his hunch.

What was a human doing out at night?

This town knew well enough not to go out after dark. Was he locked out? Chased? Didn’t make it back in time?

The residents of the town weren’t this foolish. Something drastic must have happened for this man to find himself in such a perilous situation. Whatever his reason may be, she couldn’t let it go; a terrified, unskilled victim such as this would not survive the night.

The noises grew in volume. The shadows flickered that bit harder. The man put his collar up, as if this would disguise the trepidation in his grimace. His fear was clear in the way he ambled forward, meandering slowly and aimlessly. He was the perfect target for a predator looking for prey.

Then she saw one of them. Only briefly. It dashed across the road, too fast and too dark for the man to notice. But he looked up. He knew he wasn’t alone. She could tell by how he kept looking around, searching black windows for help, he knew he was in peril.

Raven turned to the stakes she’d been carving, laid out on the floor beside the bed. She took one, tucked it into her sock, then another, and tucked it in the back of her belt.

She opened the window.

A gush of cold air pushed its way inside. She couldn’t leave downstairs – the doors would be locked and bolted, and the noise it would take to free herself from them would attract desperate pleas from Amaris not to open the doors. They knew these creatures could not enter a home uninvited, but this did not mean they took risks – her knowledge of their mythology was based on hearsay and stories, and she could only trust the two pieces of knowledge she’d made sure of – they only came out at night, and a stake through the heart killed them. Though she wondered if killing was the right word for something that was already dead.

She could use the drainpipe against the brick wall to the left of her window.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.