Lead Demon

A Feast of Beasts

Gray and black...and red. Too much red.

If he didn’t hurry, that red would damn them all.

His prey staggered. Fell. A moment later he dropped to its side, dagger in hand. He didn’t want to kill. He didn’t want his hands stained red again. But those wants didn’t stop him from slicing through its warm, heaving neck.

The buck twitched.

Seven kept a hand on the deer’s flank as its lifeblood throbbed between his fingers. It wouldn’t be right to look away, to let the poor creature die alone and cold.

Alone and cold, alone and cold, how many have died alone and cold?

The Sphere of Water raged within his gut. It wanted to revel in the blood. It wanted to drown in red. But he pushed the thoughts and the power away. Now wasn’t the time to give in, either to his own weakness or to that glorious strength. His stomach knotted when the deer’s rolling eye found his. He almost laughed from revulsion; years ago, he’d been a vegetarian.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered as the deer spasmed and fell still. Not that it mattered. Not that those apologies ever mattered—not to the dying, not to the dead. Apologies didn’t change the world he lived in, and it didn’t change the deeds he’d done.

“Shit.” Christal stopped beside him. “That’s a lot of blood.”

Seven glanced up to her and Mustapha. Their breath came out in clouds, their forms bare shadows in the gloom. He opened his mouth, but the words got caught in his throat.

Three years of killing, three years of bloodshed, and it still turned his stomach. He swallowed and looked away, washing the blood off in a puddle before sliding his dagger back in his boot. Three years of blood on his hands. Three years...

“I thought you said you were a clean shot,” Christal said, turning back to Mustapha.

Seven stood. The Sphere of Water still raged, still begged for control. He pushed it farther down. The longer he refused its call, the worse it got.

Mustapha stepped forward, his shoulders hunched and a bow held loose in hand. He was built like a linebacker, but right then, he looked like a puppy caught pissing on a Persian rug. Five arrows jutted from the deer’s hide, and another half dozen were scattered throughout the field.

“I am,” Mustapha said. His words didn’t hold much conviction as he gestured to his throat. “Usually. It’s just been a while since I had to shoot without magic.”

Christal ignored him. There wasn’t time for apologies. She pulled a set of nylon cords from her backpack and handed one to Seven.

She wrapped one cord around the buck’s neck while Seven tied its hindquarters. Her movements were smooth, well-practiced—her hands were used to dealing with the dead. Like Seven, she was eighteen. Unlike Seven, she didn’t seem bothered by the buck’s sightless glare.

She nudged him. “You okay?”

He nodded, but his nerves were on edge, and the Sphere of Water pulsed in his stomach like a wound. One that desperately wanted to be touched, inflamed. Over a week had passed since he’d been allowed to open to that energy center, that source of pain and power, and like a neglected child, it sat there and wept and begged to be noticed. But they had their orders: no magic. Not until the enemy army arrived.

They needed that tenuous element of surprise.

“We need to hurry,” he said. “They’re going to smell the blood.” He turned to Mustapha. “And if that happens, it’s all on your head.”

Had they met before the Resurrection, Mustapha probably would have shoved Seven’s head into the school toilet just for making eye contact. The guy was a nineteen-year-old tank, with broad shoulders and short brown hair and tattoos from eye to shin. His face was a plane of white scars and black ink. Seven, on the other hand, was tall and lithe—years of using Water had crafted him a swimmer’s build rather than the hulking muscle granted by Earth. He hadn’t been at all athletic before being attuned. He’d been a nerd at best, and Mustapha was clearly used to being respected.

But now, when Seven spoke, Mustapha didn’t refute. To Mustapha, at least, Seven was a superior. The Resurrection had changed almost everything for the worse; this little leveling of the playing field was about the only perk.

Together, they dragged the deer toward the highway. Seven kept his eyes trained on the fields. He didn’t want to see the way the deer’s head lolled to one side, its tongue curled out and its eyes wide with static fear.

“We should be okay,” Mustapha said, his voice cutting through the rain like rumbling thunder. “I mean, rain dilutes blood, right? And there’s no way anything could hear it through the storm.”

“Just shut up and keep your eyes open,” Christal replied.

The Resurrection taught him that all those stories were full of s**t.

Real battle wasn’t pretty. You trained to block and parry and dodge, yes, but you didn’t think about it, didn’t focus on long dancing combinations. You swung. You screamed a lot. You killed as fast as you could and didn’t think about anything but the feel of flesh giving way under your hands. And if you were even a hairbreadth too slow, if today just wasn’t your day, you were never, ever heard from again.

He gritted his teeth and prayed today wasn’t that day.

Seven lunged forward, meeting a kraven midleap and slicing its body right through the gut. Cold, black blood sprayed out, but Seven was already slashing another monster before the first corpse fell. Mustapha was just out of sight beside him, grunting and yelling, the skull-shattering cracks of his mace echoing across the fields like thunder.

But more monsters were coming. The field was thick with beasts, the air alive and hellish with their screams. A shadow darted behind him. He turned just in time to parry the s***h of a cleaver. He barely registered his opponent—male, shirtless, whiter than snow and drenched in blood—before counter attacking. The man’s head fell to the ground with a wet smack.

“Bloodlings!” Seven yelled, but even though he screamed it at the top of his lungs, he knew his companions hadn’t heard. The world was a living, grinding thing of scarred flesh and teeth and talons, and everywhere he turned he was slashing, dodging, trying to stay alive as the gray tide overtook him. His breath was fire as he fought, as he hacked and screamed his way through the melee. Seconds felt like an eternity, and the damage done to him and his foes was immense. A thousand cuts burned across his skin. A thousand moments he was too slow. A thousand instances he could have died, and a thousand reasons he still might.

A yell broke through the din—masculine, enraged and in pain. Then Mustapha’s voice cut short in a gurgle. Seven spared a glance over but he couldn’t see anything through the kravens scrambling over corpses. Christal screamed as well, but whether from rage or pain, he wasn’t certain.

That’s when he realized, in the far-off corner of his mind, that he was going to die. They all were.