of the narrow tunnel came into view. A white-haired, dusky-skinned man with unlined features raised his head from the ripped-open belly of another man, whose eyes were glazing over in death.
My impact knocked the gore from the murderer’s mouth.
Our tight quarters meant my momentum slammed us both into the wall. The white-haired man cursed me in preclassical Greek as he tried to bite me with a mouth now stretched to impossibly large dimensions. I leapt back, avoiding his snapping jaws.
Not a demon or a vampire. Ghoul, to use the modern word. They normally ate the dead, but from the state of the four bodies strewn like rubbish in the tunnel, these victims had been eaten alive. And I’d arrived too late to save any of them.
“Murderer,” I spat in the same preclassical Greek dialect.
“Dead walker,” he replied in a hiss.
An ancient slur against vampires. Another hint that he was not from this era. “The world has no shortage of dead for your kind to feast on. You ate these people alive. Why?”
He smiled, showing that he still had chunks of viscera in his teeth. My stomach heaved. “The dead do not make beautiful music with their screams.”
Some of the souls that were released are very dark, my father had warned me about the people Dagon had trapped inside himself. No shit. This ghoul was cruel enough to be Dagon’s best friend, if he was one of the resurrected ones.
I had to find out.
“Did you wake up and find that the world had vastly changed since the last time you saw it?” I asked as I avoided his next attempt to grab me. With the tight confines of the tunnel, I had to bash into the walls to do it. The ghoul grinned, enjoying the sight of me in pain.
“Everything I know is gone.” Confusion and rage thrummed through his tone. “Now, metal horses bring strange-tongued invaders to gawk at my city’s bones, so I feast on theirs!”
He was one of the people I was looking for, all right, and he’d chosen to squander his second chance at life by eating innocent tourists. I couldn’t kill him fast enough, but I’d packed my satchel only with knives, and I needed a sword for ghouls. My car had a sword in it. Could I get it and return before the ghoul fled?
Ghouls couldn’t fly. I had a chance.
“Don’t go anywhere,” I said, and flew out of the tunnel.
Silver was growling when I got back to the car. He probably smelled the blood from my close contact with the flesh eater. I didn’t have time to reassure him. I grabbed the sword, slammed the door, and flew back toward the cistern.
The ghoul was emerging from the tunnel. His sneer changed into a frown when he saw my sword. That was something he recognized, despite missing the past several thousand years. Swords pre-dated even me.
“For the crime of murdering innocents, I sentence you to death,” I said, and flew at him.
Before I reached him, two large forms slammed into me from either side. Bones crunched and my head rang as I was smashed between them. The impact left me so dazed, it took me a few seconds to fly away. Those seconds cost me deep, agony-inducing tears into my shoulders and almost allowed the ghoul to pin me to the ground. I flew away just in time. Then, from the safety of my higher vantage point, I finally saw what had hit me.
“Oh, come on!” I said with a groan.
Two huge pale-gray lions paced near the ghoul beneath me. That would have been shocking enough as lions had long ago disappeared from Greece, but these lions were made out of stone. I could taste the magic that turned ordinary rock into the prowling, deadly cats, and it was so foul, I wanted to gag.
The oldest souls will be slowest to regenerate, my father had said. But when they do, the power they consumed from Dagon’s essence will make them formidable . . .
No shit again. How was I supposed to defend myself against creatures made of magic-infused stone?
Chapter 7
“I suppose asking you to reconsider the lions and fight fair is out of the question?” I said, more to give myself a chance to think than any belief that it would sway the ghoul.
“Fight fair?” he repeated, as if he’d never heard of the concept.
“Didn’t think so.” I sighed, eyeing the lions.
My sword wasn’t much defense against solid stone, and stone also didn’t contain water