Tale of the Necromancer (Memento Mori Book 3) by Kathryn Ann Kingsley

Author:Kathryn Ann Kingsley [Kingsley, Kathryn Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kathryn Ann Kingsley
Published: 2021-09-06T23:00:00+00:00

14

Marguerite awoke naked and covered in blood.

Smoke stung her eyes the moment she blinked them open. She rolled onto her side and coughed, trying to clear the taste of soot from her mouth.

And found herself staring into the gaping, empty, bloody eye sockets of Tomaz. They were nothing but gory pits where his eyes should have been. When she screamed, she choked on the smoke in the air and instead could only scramble back away from him, heart pounding in her ears in terror.

Her hand fell into something thick, ropey, and viscous as she frantically tried to escape what was before her. Looking down to see what she had touched, she found her fingers pressed deep into…intestines.

Oskar lay beside her, or what remained of him. His stomach was torn open, nothing remaining of the skin that should have held his organs in place. His face was caught in a silent scream. Unlike Tomaz, he had known he was dying. His eyes were locked wide in terror, staring sightlessly at the starry sky overhead.

For a moment, it seemed Fritz was missing. But then she saw a hand lying by her foot. A hand it did not seem the other men were missing. The stump of a leg sat in the grass a few feet away. It was as though a giant cat had caught and dismembered a mouse.

She could only sit there, frozen in shock. She was covered in blood. Their blood.

Turning, she retched into the straw, unable to stop herself. Only water exited her, thankfully, as she had nothing in her stomach to surrender. When she was finished, she found herself unable to do anything but simply stare at the bodies around her.

It was after several moments of her mind simply failing to grasp what was happening before she realized she could see clearly. The straw pile she had been placed upon was no longer obscured in the darkness of the night. But neither was it daytime.

Another coughing fit caused by smoke catching in her lungs jarred her out of her frozen state. Everything around her was illuminated in a flickering, orange glow. As she turned her head, she realized why.

The village was on fire.

All of it.

Climbing out of the gore, she desperately tried to find her dress, or at least her underthings. But her hopes fell as she saw they were soaked through with the viscera left behind by the three mercenaries who she had been about to…

She shook her head, forcing the thought from her mind. They were dead. Very dead. And there was nothing she could do to save them. Something had attacked them, and she was lucky to be alive. She needed to escape, naked or not! Perhaps she could find something in the charred remains of the village when it burned itself out, if she could just find somewhere to hide long enough to wait it out, and—

A sound set her teeth on edge and tore every thought from her mind without warning. But it was not a true sound.

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