War (The Four Horsemen #2) - Laura Thalassa Page 0,127
tents that ring the clearing.
Zara. Mamoon.
I feel the blood drain from my face.
“War—” I was wrong, I’m willing to beg. “War, please, stop this.”
He ignores me, his eyes focused on the fight.
I stride towards him, my hands beginning to shake. My friend, her nephew; I couldn’t live with their deaths on my conscience.
“War!”
My guards block my way. I try to shove past them, and they grab me, holding me back.
“Damnit, War, look at me.”
“No,” the horseman says, not bothering to speak in tongues; the screams drown out most of his words. “Now is when you look, wife. They fall because you dared to try to kill me.”
I jerk against the zombies’ hold, but they don’t release me. They turn me around and hold me in place as War’s horde is slaughtered.
I’m forced to watch the entire thing, and this time, it takes much longer for the living to die than in Mansoura. They lay in bloody piles on the ground, and I guess it’s a small blessing that the dead stay dead.
I thought I had lived and seen it all—the loss of my family, the loss of my home, the loss of so many people. I thought that the pain was some sort of armor; if the worst happens to you, eventually, there will be nothing left to hurt you.
Maybe that’s true. But this hollowness has its own frightening ache.
Eventually, the screams die off and the chaos gives way to stillness. Eventually, my guards release my arms, and I take a staggering step forward.
The zombies fall to the ground in the next instant. Their task completed, they can rest once more.
My eyes sweep over the clearing, with its piles of bloody, broken bodies. In one sick wave, the entire settlement is gone.
That hollow ache is still there. It throbs along my skin and sits like a lump in my stomach.
It’s quiet. So, unnaturally quiet. The canvas tents flap in the breeze, but there are no sounds of life.
Zara. Mamoon.
I take a sharp breath, and their deaths hit me like a physical blow. My entire body trembles from adrenaline and terror and guilt.
I put a hand to my mouth. I won’t cry. Not in front of this beast.
I can sense War behind me, his vengeance settling around us like ash drifting to ground. How I hate him. How I’ve never hated anything so deeply in my entire life.
My heart squeezes.
I’ve never cared for anything so deeply either. If he intended to break my heart as I have his, then between Mansoura’s destruction and this, he’s succeeded.
Under my feet, the earth begins to shake once more.
I cast War a wild-eyed gaze. Is it my turn to die now?
One by one the dead around me rise, animated once more. But whatever brought that spark of life to their eyes, it’s now absent. That woman will never smoke another cigarette and that man will never play cards with his buddies. The people who drank and danced in this very clearing only last night are well and truly gone—either to heaven or hell or someplace else altogether.
“I’m never going to stop,” War says.
My gaze moves to him. I’m so remote I feel as if I’m made of stone. “Neither am I.”
I turn from the horseman when I hear it. Somewhere in the distance comes a child’s cry. Everything in me stills.
But he killed everyone.
I wait to hear the sound again, and sure enough, I do, only now, there are several more cries that join in. I don’t want to believe it. This must be another part of my punishment, making his creatures sound like the living.
The zombies suddenly begin to move, separating enough to make an aisle from the edge of the clearing to the dais.
Beyond them, I see movement, and now there’s more crying and a few shouts. Several dozen zombies stride forward, looking grisly from their recent deaths. They move down the aisle, coming right up to where my guards and I stand. With them, the human noises get louder.
I’m holding my breath as they step away from the aisle, slipping into the crowd of dead, leaving behind a line of very confused, very frightened, very living people. At the head of the line is Zara and Mamoon.
I choke on a sob, nearly falling to my knees.
Behind me, I hear War rise. Then, the ominous sound of his footfalls. He comes right up to me, and he presses his lips to my ear.