The Strength of Mortals: Book Four of The Nightfall Wars by Jacob Peppers

Author:Jacob Peppers [Peppers, Jacob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-04-01T22:00:00+00:00

***

Carlen wasn’t doing well. Not well at all. In fact, he was fairly sure he was dying, had been, he supposed, for the last couple of days. Or maybe for my entire life, he thought, the idea bringing the ghost of a smile to his face. After all, wasn’t everyone?

Still, it had to be said that his dying had a certain immediacy to it that those he passed in the street—all laughing and smiling and strutting in their brightly colored clothes—seemed to lack. Namely, he was bleeding out. Oh, his bandages had been replaced, and he didn’t doubt the poultices the old healer had put on his wounds were helping, but though he wasn’t a healer himself, Carlen had an idea that running through the streets—well, shambling, mostly—was frowned on when a man was trying to recover from life-threatening wounds. The problem, of course, was he didn’t have any choice.

No one else had approached him since he’d left the gatehouse in his guard uniform, and that was good. What wasn’t so good was that Carlen was possessed of the inexplicable feeling that many of those in the crowd were marking his progress, watching him make his laborious way down the city street. It could have been no more than his imagination—after all, if anything would make a man paranoid, he thought surely it would be having someone try to murder him. But he didn’t think so.

Every time he felt as if someone was watching him, he’d turn to look. Mostly, he found nothing, just people going about their tasks, laughing and shouting and probably not considering murder. Every once in a while though, he’d find someone looking at him, a man or a woman who turned away when he met their eyes. Perhaps it was nothing, after all, people had to look somewhere, didn’t they? But as much as he might have liked to believe it, he did not. Too interested, those eyes, too thoughtful the expressions on their faces. And not just thoughtful. Most had an almost hungry look to them, a look that was gone in a second when he glanced at them but there long enough for him to know he hadn’t imagined it.

He felt like he supposed a rabbit must feel, alone, watching the vague movements in the tall grass that might have just been another rabbit or nothing but the wind but knowing it was not, knowing that it was a predator, one slowly closing in. The rabbit, though, had the advantage of being fast and small and, probably most importantly, not bleeding out from deep wounds on its chest and stomach. The lucky bastard.

Carlen felt eyes on him again and turned. The man stood in the street behind him, no more than twenty feet away, glimpsed for a moment as the crowd moved around him. He was studying Carlen with unnerving intensity, but once he saw the caravan guard look at him, he turned quickly away, beginning to admire the jewelry at one of the merchant stalls.

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