but through the rain and the haze all he could see was shifting gray.
The scream was distant. Maybe, if they were lucky...
Michael lowered the cart handle to the ground, slowly, gently, making sure not a sound was made. His mace was in hand the moment he stood. Tenn looked over to Katherine, who had her katanas unsheathed.
“Stay very, very still,” Tenn whispered, his knuckles white on his staff. “Maybe they’ll pass us by.”
“Not likely,” Michael muttered, but he held his position.
Seconds passed in silence. Each raindrop froze into his skin, each heartbeat promised devastation.
There was a chance—a small chance—that it was a single kraven. Just one lowly, lonely monster seeking out its next meal. And there was a small chance that the kraven had found the deer’s head, taken the bait and was on the run for fear its brothers would discover the bounty.
It was a small chance. Delusional at best.
Silence stretched across Tenn’s nerves like a noose. Blood pooled against his gums from a fresh-bitten wound in his cheek. He tried to relax his jaw, tried to breathe slow and deep. In and out. In and out. The silence grew heavier. At least thirty seconds had passed. They would have known if they were spotted by now. He took another deep breath and started to relax his grip.
A second howl split the world, closer this time. And this one wasn’t alone. Another voice picked it up, as high and piercing as shattering glass and nails on a chalkboard. He knew the scream of a kraven as well as his own voice, but that didn’t mean there weren’t other types of Howls out there. The quiet ones were often the deadliest. Without magic or a clear line of sight, he also had no way to estimate how many there were. Could be dozens. Hundreds, even.
It didn’t matter. Without magic, even a handful of kravens could be deadly.
Blood thundered in his ears, louder than the rain. He counted his heartbeats in the back of his mind, wondering how many more he had left before his blood stilled. The Sphere of Water roiled in his gut. It could sense the upcoming battle, could feel it in the pulse of the rain—so much blood was about to be shed, and his Sphere yearned to be a part of it.
His Sphere wanted to cause it.
“We’re going to die,” Katherine said. Her voice was too calm for comfort. Like him, she had faced death a hundred times, and each time had probably felt as final as this. Unlike him, she seemed okay with it. “There are too many.”
“You know the orders,” Tenn said. No magic. Even if the orders get us killed. His eyes flickered to his right arm, to the tattoo he could practically feel burning against his skin. The Hunter’s mark—the tattoo that first bound him to Water and, more recently, to Earth. The mark that let him use the Spheres.
Katherine didn’t say anything in reply, but he could imagine her nodding her head and accepting her own approaching demise. He wasn’t willing to give up so easily. There were still too many lost souls on his conscience to avenge. Somehow, he was going to make it out of this alive. He owed the dead that much.
The first kraven broke through the field with a banshee’s scream, and all thoughts vanished in the heat of survival.
Like all the variations of Howls, the kraven had been human once, though the resemblance was minimal—two legs, two arms, a torso and head. The conversion process twisted the host into something beyond a nightmare. Bones jutted like talons from rotting gray flesh, its spine curved and twisted. Its eyes were bloodshot, red as meat, and its jaw had snapped and reformed like the maw of a piranha in a bulbous human head. The very sight should have been enough to send a sane man running. If not, the dozen others that appeared close behind it would have.
Before the first kraven even reached the road, Katherine ran forward, her blades a whirl of silver. Metal met flesh, and all the fear and anticipation from before washed away.
When he was younger, Tenn had immersed himself in books and movies of heroic battles. The tales were always gorgeous in a way—heart-pumping and engaging, filled with quick moves and dancing blows. Heroes dashed between villains with ease, always golden, always immortal. Always confident and brave and beautiful.
The Resurrection taught him that all those stories were full of shit.
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.
Tenn lunged forward, meeting a kraven midleap and slicing its body right through the gut. Cold, black blood sprayed out, but Tenn was already slashing another monster before the first corpse fell. Michael 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 slash of a cleaver. He barely registered his opponent—male, shirtless, whiter than snow and drenched in blood—before counterattacking. The man’s head fell to the ground with a wet smack.
“Bloodlings!” Tenn 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 Michael’s voice cut short in a gurgle. Tenn spared a glance over but he couldn’t see anything through the kravens scrambling over corpses. Katherine 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.
His arm went numb from a kraven’s bite. His hands were drenched red. And still, the monsters came.
Derrick’s voice drifted through his mind as he fell to his knees. Don’t use magic, not under any circumstances. Don’t give yourselves away.
Water and blood seeped through Tenn’s jeans, his numb arm limp. He could only stare at the blood and wonder at how quickly this had come, his end. At how easy it was to die. Pain seared across his back as a Howl ripped through his flesh. Blood was everywhere—black blood, red blood, red rain. The Sphere of Water screamed inside of him as his own life spilled forth. Memories rode the current—flashes of his mother and father, the few friends he’d made and lost, his mother’s voice and a lullaby he couldn’t place. His eyes fluttered. His working hand dropped his staff.
This is how it feels to die, and I will be eaten before they find my corpse.
As another kraven lunged for the kill, mouth wide and broken teeth bared, the Sphere of Water opened unbidden in Tenn’s stomach.
Power
