Ebb of Three E-Book

Dixon Reuel

• Herausgeber: Thunderloft Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Vampire angst in a zombie apocalypse! The Blood Brute Series grapples with grief, survival, and the painful journey towards a found family.

Once a vampire, Rise was then zombie-bitten and transformed into a blood brute—a creature that nature itself despises. After finally escaping the evil Warwolves, he hides with his human lover, Cypriot. They live in simple and peaceful squalor, scavenging what they need from abandoned villages, hamlets, and farms long-abandoned after the zombie apocalypse.

Cypriot is convinced this is how the both of them will live out their lives: together, in quiet peace.

But Rise sees the truth: their survival rests on the luck of their scavenging. They cannot live this life forever. When Cypriot’s health begins to fail, a familiar face walks out of the very forest to greet Rise, after so long apart. Then Rise must decide: Can he lie to Cypriot in order to re-enter society and seek medical help?

Author’s Note: Be prepared! These supernatural dark fantasies for adults might begin with a slow-burn gay romance, but the series has a soul-crushing love triangle among fated mates! It has morally gray characters, post-apocalyptic and ominous vibes. If you like brooding Dark Fantasy Horror with gay MM romance and occult elements, you can expect that, and a lot more, during this eerie zombie apocalypse adventure!
This is Book 3 in a 6-book series and ends in a cliffhanger.

Leseprobe

First published by Thunderloft Press 2021

www.ThunderloftPress.com

Copyright © 2021 by Dixon Reuel

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,

scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the

publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or

distribute it by any other means without permission.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters

and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s

imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or

dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Dixon Reuel asserts the moral right to be identified as the

author of this work.

Dixon Reuel has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet

Websites referred to in this publication and does not

guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will

remain, accurate or appropriate.

First edition

ISBN: 978-1-8380233-9-3

This book is also dedicated to 2021.

“The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions.”

-Frank Herbert, Dune

Contents

PART 1 - AUTUMN

Chapter 1Dawn Death

Chapter 2Led & Said

Chapter 3The Woodshed

Chapter 4Digestion

Chapter 5Even More Purpose

Chapter 6The House of Home

Chapter 7Food & Firelight

PART 2 - WINTER

Chapter 8The Blood Does Sweeten

Chapter 9The Hanging Tree

Chapter 10Spiderweb Rangers

Chapter 11Among the Tempers

Chapter 12Just So

Chapter 13Scraps

Chapter 14The Wild Nest

PART 3 - SPRING

Chapter 15Scald

Chapter 16The End

Chapter 17

Chapter 18Bitten Children

Chapter 19Blood Brute, Blood Brute, Blood Brute

Chapter 20The Lost Taste

Chapter 21The Brazen Brute

PART 1 - AUTUMN

“I knew it was going to happen. I could not bring myself to admit it, to either of us.”

-The Blood Brute, The Chronicle of Owl Court (Addendum).

Chapter 1

Dawn Death

Deep in the nighttime forest, the mouse’s ears twitched. It turned its tiny head. Shadows flurried just in front of its nose, and it dashed forward to escape, only to be caught by strong hands. A final squeak as its little neck twisted.

“I hate this.” Rise tossed the fat brown mouse into the hessian sack that bulged from the night’s hunt. He got to his feet and stood straighter than what felt comfortable. His months of imprisonment at Basilica X had given him a terrible stoop. He didn’t like how it rounded his shoulders, as if he were an old man.

“What do you hate?” Cypriot didn’t turn his head. He poked at a clutch of mushrooms on the forest floor. His sole weapon, a slim iron pipe, lay at his feet. Cypriot didn’t wait for Rise’s answer. “I want to return to this patch tomorrow, or the day after, pick these mushrooms then.” He glanced up at the forest canopy, to remember these exact trees, as he produced a shoelace from his pocket. Moving slowly and with great care, Cypriot tied the shoelace at head-height around the most prominent trunk.

“Sighting into the animals as they die, I don’t like it. Creeps me out. I should get better at breaking from their gaze before they’re snuffed.” Rise hesitated as he answered. Cypriot’s shirt had tightened across his back as he’d hunched over the mushrooms, showing the sharp lines of his ribs even through the fabric. Escape from a prison was one thing, thriving under the yoke of freedom was another. “Dawn is on the way, but it’s still quite dark. I can describe the mushrooms if you’d like?” Rise offered. An odd and frustrating tension twanged between them ever since Pigeon Man.

Cypriot shrugged. He brushed his knees in a slow, careful fashion, freeing them of autumn leaves. Then he picked up his metal rod, an old golf club minus its head. “I want to compare these mushrooms with the pictures in our foraging book first, lest I poison us both, or pick or prepare them wrong, or something.”

Thankfully, they’d found several books on their travels, discarded along roadsides or in abandoned buildings. Some books were useless—what good were car repair manuals in a ruined world?—but others had once belonged to people trying to eke out a life, books that instructed on wilderness foraging, survival prep, and the like … all of which Cypriot devoured. Insisting on coming along during these nighttime hunts, Rise couldn’t help but compare Cypriot to a wandering elf on these trips, picking through all that the forest had to offer.

Their conversation spent, Rise gestured with his bag of mice, voles, even a weasel. Cypriot closed his eyes, listened to the trees—a world quieter, wilder since civilization fell—and eventually nodded. Safe to return home.

“Who would’ve thought your hearing would be better than mine?” Rise offered with a light smile as he turned towards home: a small but glimmering boundary in his mind.

Cypriot fiddled with another shoelace as he walked, lapsing further and further behind Rise. “Your eyesight is still better,” he pointed out.

“That’s … true,” Rise had to agree. “In the dark.”

“Yes.”

Rise slowed when the distance between them grew too far. Cypriot kept to his methodical plodding, catching up with Rise without apology or thanks. Rise tried again as they continued through the trees. “It’s nearly dawn, though.”

“Yes.” Then, a sigh—at their awkward conversation or from exertion, Rise couldn’t tell.

“I was thinking of the future, Cypriot,” Rise eventually had to broach. So many weeks melted together while they’d gotten on their feet, found a suitable hideaway, settled a wee garden. A new boundary incanted to hide their home from the world.

“Oh, yes?” Cypriot asked without much interest, as if Rise pointed out a moth.

“It’ll be winter soon. If we’re to hunker down and stay where we are, we’re going to have to make a few decisions about shelter, food, and Yarrow. Or we could think about leaving, looking further afield, try to find-”

“Oh look, the sun!” Cypriot gasped. He dashed past Rise through the last line of trees. An embankment rose before him, its overgrown grass yellowed since the summer. As he ran, Cypriot discarded his iron pipe and the pouch of forest herbs and mushrooms he’d gathered. Then his shoes—once dragged from the feet of a desiccated brute and boiled back to cleanliness. He threw off his shirt and trousers, even the shoelace as well until, fully naked, Cypriot scrambled up the steep embankment. His ribs striped his sides, once-long hair now cut into a flat line brushing his bony shoulders.

Rise let him off, paused, and scanned the forest and grasses for any foe that might lay in wait. He could sight into animals now, big and small, even into their horse, Yarrow. Nothing untoward awaited Cypriot upon the embankment. Rise dutifully picked up the discarded herb bag, the metal pipe, and clothes, as he followed the dark line of dew out of the forest left in Cypriot’s wake. An arduous climb for Rise, especially after a night of hunting and keeping his senses alert. Along with zombie brutes still wandering the countryside, wild animal populations had also swelled in humanity’s absence. From a distance, he and Cypriot sometimes heard the chatter of passing people, either in the forest or when they ventured into the ruined town by the river.

They were just over six weeks free from Basilica X. Neither had recuperated to full health.

Upon the rise, Cypriot stood straight, arms thrown wide. He faced east. Trees in the distance stood as black, scraggly outlines against a pink-peach sky. A gap in their trunks would soon let through the first shaft of sunlight to herald a new day.

“Come on … Come on …” Cypriot whispered, eyes closed, fingers tensed. “You know, sometimes, I feel like I’m the last human alive. The one man left awake.”

“It’s dangerous to linger out here,” Rise warned, even if he agreed with Cypriot’s sentiment. “We should get back inside with what we’ve gathered.”

When no response came, Rise cleared his throat.

“Shhh!”

Rise sighed. He set down their goods on a thick tree root jutting out of the dew’s reach. Rise carefully folded Cypriot’s tattered trousers. As he sat upon the root, he remembered to pinch his shoulder blades together, so his prisoner-stoop disappeared. So close to home, they weren’t in that much danger, he reasoned, not really, and besides, Cypriot’s naked body was a sight he usually relished. Now, though, with bruises and old bitemarks upon that once-perfect skin, it pained Rise to look at him. He claimed to eat his fill at every meal, but after six—nearly seven—weeks, Cypriot still remained scarily underweight. As he awaited the dawn, his sharp collar and hip bones moved ever so slightly as he breathed. The splash-scars of old candlewax on his spine didn’t seem to want to leave.

The sight of his naked lover should have flourished all sorts of longings in Rise: for their passions, for his blood, but he just wasn’t hungry in either case. They’d reverted to their usual weekly feed, never commenting that it was the same feeding routine as at Owl Court. Rise liked to think it reminded them of home.

The first sunlight touched the earth.

“Oh!” The whimper bubbled from of Cypriot’s chapped lips, even though he tended to them as best he could with fats and oils rendered from their kills.

Rise forgot about folding clothes as dawn enveloped Cypriot, rendering him a golden god-child, a herald of the morn. Eyes closed, mouth slightly parted, Cypriot held his arms wide to embrace the sun.

Rise braced to feel the sunlight, too, but his training at Basilica X had served him well: he could endure the daylight star as never before, as if he were a normal, human person walking in the world unshaded, and not a former vampire at all. His stripes pulsed across his skin, but no pain, not any more.

“Yes …” Cypriot whispered. A relieved smile spread at the sun’s warmth.

Rise had no choice but to smile, too. Love unfurled in his heart, as heady as the autumnal sun claiming the new day. In these stolen moments—every time Cypriot could greet sunrise this way—Rise felt true hope. That everything would be okay. That they would survive this mess, somehow. Return home. Find the rest of their coven.

He touched his sight to Cypriot’s, seeing the sun through his lover’s eyes. Rise didn’t do this often; it felt like a violation of privacy to see the world as a human. In these golden moments, however, Rise relished the sun as much as Cypriot. A thrill ran through him to greet the dawn framed by those long, dark eyelashes.

He braced then for those blood brute voices. However, no cracks split his bones to let such voices through, not since leaving Basilica X. Whether that was a consequence of helping to deliver Scorper’s baby, or just a natural progression as his powers returned, Rise had no idea. He picked at a patch of grey bark on the upthrust root. There were times when, with heavy regret for even thinking this way, Rise wished he were back in that tower, that he and Cypriot’s survival wasn’t entirely his problem to bear.

Since their escape, the green dream that had enveloped them, where no one hunted or pursued them was, of course, everything Rise could ask for. But still … he hadn’t destroyed Basilica X as he’d once sworn. Tseng told him that he’d freed the humans from the Warwolf yard, but couldn’t the Warwolves just round them all up again? Rise shifted where he sat, thoughts weighing on him that even the sight of Cypriot’s naked body couldn’t dispel. They’d deliberately kept away from people. Rise didn’t want to meet them, know them, although he felt the hour approaching when he and Cypriot would need society again.

So much unfinished business. No revenge. Only a grudging carrying-on of daily life towards an unknown end.

Cypriot inhaled deeply, pushing out his stomach, his bellybutton still bearing old teeth marks. Rise shrugged off memories of Basilica X. Imprisonment had, of course, been awful. His rescue of Cypriot an imperative. Cowed by his returning beauty, as the sun warmed him back to the Cypriot that once commanded all of Owl Court, Rise just drank in his love welcoming the new day.

They heard the brute at the same time. It shambled from the trees on the far side, along the embankment’s crest towards them. Rise stood and took up Cypriot’s metal pole as the zombie-creature neared.

“It’s fine,” Cypriot said abruptly in a solid and clear voice, eyes open as he stood in the sun-bleached grasses. His dawn wonder and worship entirely gone. He watched the intruder to his little performance. He reached for his weapon.

“I’ve got it. I’ll get him.” Rise started to walk past, to destroy the approaching brute.

Cypriot grabbed his elbow, bony fingers digging in. “I said, it’s fine,” he whispered firmly, a pained smile grimacing his lips.

Rise didn’t trust that smile at all, but he relented.

“Please remember that you’re still recuperating,” he warned as Cypriot took the metal pipe, slapping it hungrily against his palms. He shushed naked through the grasses.

“You know what I think?” Cypriot barked into the new day. The brute turned towards his voice, an oversized business jacket of navy pinstripe hanging off its decaying shoulders. Maybe it once wore glasses, but they lodged in its rotting collarbone.

“You know what I think, Rise?” Cypriot repeated. “If it wasn’t for these disgusting things … we’d still be safe.” Smile stretching back like a hideous gargoyle, Cypriot slammed the rod against the brute’s skull. The creature shuddered but didn’t drop, only flailed for Cypriot’s human flesh, all sun-warmed and pulsing with life. He raised his pole, slammed it down again and again in time with his words: “We’d still be inside. We’d still have Owl Court. I’d still have Tom cat and Salter and Ogrim. We wouldn’t have had those hikers. We wouldn’t have had Maxine. Or Elaine. Or her crazy mother. And no. Fucking. Pidgeon. Man!”

On and on he beat the creature, eyeglasses crunching against metal, until the brute was no more than a rotten smear of their old life upon the winter-hungry grasses.

Rise let him have his tantrum. He scanned about for anything else that might approach, but the embankment and the rolling fields that led home remained clear. When he finally stopped, Cypriot trembled. Blackened brute blood splashed across his naked body, dripping from his elbows. Still, he lifted the metal rod and brought it down on the brute’s remains one more time, hitting nothing but dirt.

“I think it’s dead,” Rise had to eventually murmur, lest Cypriot become lost to anger and revenge, to the exhaustion of his frail body.

“It was already dead,” Cypriot spat on what was left and brushed past Rise, grabbing his clothes from the tree root. “I feel like I am, too.”

“I’m sorry that it interrupted your dawn-”

“Oh, stop,” Cypriot sighed, mouth downturned as he dressed.

“Wait, don’t get your clothes soiled with its blood.” Rise reached for the water canteen slung about his hip and worked open its stopper. “Get out one of your handkerchiefs and …” he trailed off as Cypriot ignored him and finished dressing. Rise doused one of his own handkerchiefs with water. “For your face?” he offered, knowing Cypriot would at least want that clean.

“I’ll take a bath when I get home.”

With the dripping handkerchief still in his hand, Rise thought of their ‘bath’: a tin tub set before the hearth like the good old days of Owl Court. A pain to boil enough water for, and an even bigger pain to drag into the yard to tip into the drains afterwards. He would do it for Cypriot, though.

“Alright,” Rise kept patience in his voice as best he could. Still a lot of healing to do. Everything couldn’t just be a-okay when they rode Yarrow off into the sunset. Things needed time to wind out of their systems, to heal. He wiped his own face, thankful for the touch of water. He’d been sweating, hairline and temples soaked. He hadn’t realized.

They headed towards home. After five or six paces, Cypriot silently took the handkerchief from Rise and wiped the blood splatters from his face, a glance of apologetic shame in his brown eyes. Rise let out a long, low breath of relief at that unspoken apology, and then another relieved breath when Cypriot grasped a handful of grass to play and fiddle with as they walked.

Soon came the familiar shadow of a crooked oak tree. By its thick trunk ran the remains of a low wall, stones tightly packed and cemented from a more civilized time. When Rise pressed his hand against the dilapidated wall and whispered the invocation, their home’s boundary shone into life, revealing an entrance to a vegetable garden beneath the largest branch. They both bent and hurried inside. Then the entrance veiled once more.

“Home sweet home,” Cypriot handed back Rise’s handkerchief and crouched by the nearest garden bed to inspect its plants. He cultivated nettles and dandelions now—for teas—as if they were prized crops. He pressed his fistful of grass into the base of these plants, as if returning with a treat after being away.

Home now was no Owl Court, but neither was it the prison of Basilica X. They’d settled in a small but solid house; its one-story boxy shape and bright yellow paint looked like something from a video game. However, its interior was structurally sound and easy enough to heat, situated not too far from a stream in the mountain hills behind, overlooking a forested valley. Rise ambled to the separate garage that they used as Yarrow’s stable. The horse pricked his ears at their return. Rise checked that he hadn’t gotten into mischief during the night while they were hunting. He promised Yarrow a long trek soon in the great outdoors beyond the boundary.

“Home sweet home,” Rise muttered as he and Cypriot eventually entered the house together, passing by tufts of wild mint planted by the door, laying out their kills and gathered bounty upon the battered kitchen table. The house was long-raided before they ever settled here. Cypriot brought their sorry collection of found knives and cutlery to the table, too. Then he hopped onto his tiptoes and kissed Rise’s cheek.

“Home sweet home, Rise.”

Rise smiled at that kiss. His cheek tingled as he went to their fireplace and ripped pages from an old phone book to tinder the hearth. He set a small fire with kindling, then banked it with scavenged banisters, table and chair legs. When satisfied with the flames, Rise got to his feet. His stomach turned at the forest critters that Cypriot butchered on the kitchen table. The little mouse from earlier lay open, its innards shiny and slippery. Cypriot deftly added it to their pot of stew, its broth claiming the mouse’s meagre meat.

A heavy breakfast.

Rise’s sight reached for the mouse, just as he’d done before capturing it earlier that night, but the mouse’s gaze was long-quenched.

Chapter 2

Led & Said 

“Let’s read from the chronicle,” Cypriot insisted a few days later, when the rain came heavy and there would be no hunting that evening.

“The chronicle …” Rise hid his grimace; that book haunted him. He tensed as he sat in their only chair: an overstuffed and long-faded armchair that also doubled as Cypriot’s bed.

Cypriot crouched before their makeshift bookshelf: concrete blocks and broken palette wood housing their meagre library. It also neared the time for Rise to feed. At Owl Court, he’d often had sour thoughts over waiting a whole week between blood-drinkings. Now, taking in Cypriot’s frailness, Rise regretted that he needed to drink at all.

“I want to read that bit again, from back during World War One, when you and I first took Owl Court and Ogrim and Salter arrived during the night to save us-” Cypriot plopped the book into Rise’s lap and wedged into the seat beside him and the armrest.

Rise stopped listening. He hated these old stories and everything about this blasted book. Over the past few weeks, he longed to rip out every page, use them for kindling, until the chronicle was no more.

“How about a different story?” Rise thumbed through the book’s middle. “It’s sad hearing again about how we won our home, hm? We then went and lost it.”

“We do have this home, though,” Cypriot looked into Rise’s face. “This can be our new smallholding, our new Owl Court, no? And, I was thinking, you’re bound to come across wild birds soon, find their eggs, oh I don’t know like … someone’s chickens that got loose during the zombie outbreak? I have full confidence something like that happened. There are chickens out there, I know it. A few of those ladies clucking around our yard, it’d help.” He swallowed, a shine of nervousness across his face. “It’d really, really help.”

“Help your diet? Yes, fresh eggs surely would,” Rise agreed. He chose a chapter at random, opening the chronicle across both of their laps.

There could never be another Owl Court. He never bothered correcting Cypriot. Let him have his little fantasies. Rise would focus on hunting. Deer returned to the forest in the valley below. Determination set within him to have a whole carcass over there in the corner, of returning in triumph with a deer across Yarrow’s saddle.

“Rise? Are you listening?”

“Hm?” Rise blinked out of his daydream.

Worry wrinkles knitted Cypriot’s brow. “Are you okay? I know you’re devastated about losing Owl Court. I am, too … but we have this place. It needs a name, I mean, shouldn’t we name our new home?”

Rise didn’t want to get into that old argument again, that they may not be able to stay here throughout winter. As if reading his mind, the wind turned, whipping heavy rain against their boarded-up windows. Already, there wasn’t any replacement if those boards gave out. That would mean another trip with Yarrow—probably with Cypriot, too, so there’d be a second pair of hands—to the abandoned town. With its salted boundary, he could shield this house from the eyes of the outside world, but he couldn’t keep out the weather. That would be like trying to defy the stars themselves.

“I thought you wanted a story?” Rise gestured to the chronicle, ignoring the burn of blood-hunger in his throat. He would have to wait a few more hours. They hadn’t lit a fire for breakfast that morning, so he dragged their sole blanket over them from the back of the armchair. It smelled of old and forgotten things.

“I do want a story,” Cypriot answered, glancing down to where Rise had opened the chronicle. He silently read a few sentences. “Salter kept to the shadows.” Cypriot stated of those happier days.

“Because of how her dark skin reacted to sunlight, yes. She did.”

“She … held me so tight that day …”

Rise watched Cypriot, finding pinched lines at the corner of his lips that hadn’t been there before. “Which day?”

Cypriot pointed to the passage that lay open in Rise’s lap. He gave a short, sharp sigh. “That day when the hikers arrived. When she and I stood beneath that little wooden awning-thing that you’d constructed over the ladder, so that she could stand on the wall and look out-”

“In the shade, I know.” Rise finished.

“She … held me ever so tight that day, when the hikers discovered our home,” Cypriot spoke in a low voice, as if he were one of the mice from their stew. He turned a page. The events in the woodshed—when Rise had first tasted the blood of the hiker, Iskar. With his mouth in a hard line, Cypriot turned the pages past that part. He’d caught them in the woodshed. Rise recalled the flutter of Cypriot’s heart, his hard little collarbone against his forearm as he’d pinned him to the nearest wall to keep him from fleeing before Rise could explain.

Cypriot flipped more and more pages, and the story of Owl Court became grimmer with each passing chapter. Then he sighed and closed the book. Warm tears plopped onto its leather cover.

“Everything changed when those hikers arrived,” he sniffled and wiped the chronicle with his sleeve.

“Everything changed when the zombie plague swept over the world,” Rise gently clarified.

“You just allowed them all in, that day, the hikers.” Cypriot’s lips remained in their flat line. He stared at their book.

Rise had been accused of that before, when first interviewed at Basilica X. “Yes,” he finally admitted to Cypriot out loud. “I let the three hikers in when they came to our walls. I defied you. I defied Salter. Neither of you wanted the hikers let inside of Owl Court and yet … I did just that. If I hadn’t, though,” Rise went on, slightly raising his voice when Cypriot tried to speak. “If I hadn’t let Iskar and Annette inside, they would’ve met the same fate as their fellow hiker, Greg. He didn’t even step foot inside our walls before the Warwolves got him, remember?”

After a time, Cypriot nodded.

“But I do need to apologize to you, for defying your wishes that day.” Rise hoped that, by admitting such foibles, Cypriot would soften and become more amenable to what they should do about winter. “I thought that allowing the hikers inside would be the most humane thing to do, even after Elaine and her mother, even after Maxine. But I gave no thought to what if the hikers brought the zombie-disease with them. They could’ve infected you. You’d be gone. Some coven-head that’d make me, right? For that, Cypriot, I am deeply sorry.”

Cypriot neither answered nor made any indication that he’d heard. He seemed to stew over Rise’s words as he returned to flipping through the chronicle’s pages. When the writing ran out, he cleared his throat, deliberately moving on to another topic:

“I don’t want a record of what happened to us back there …” he eventually said.

“What happened to us at Basilica X? No, I wouldn’t dream of committing any of that to paper,” Rise insisted, searching Cypriot’s face for any sign of forgiveness. When no ‘I forgive you’ came, Rise’s fingers touched the fat stack of new, white paper that was slotted into the back of the chronicle. Let someone else continue their tale. He still hadn’t read that new part, nor allowed Cypriot to, either. Screw Ab and his machinations. “We don’t have to do anything at all right now, only recuperate,” Rise went on as he slotted his hands over Cypriot’s, the lean tendons of his knuckles hard against Rise’s palms. They cuddled in silence for long minutes, before Rise had to bring up again: “Do you remember what I started saying to you recently? About winter?”

“Oh, Rise!” Cypriot snapped and flounced from their chair. In the old days, he would’ve stomped across their grand kitchen and slammed a few cabinet doors, possibly the oven’s door, too, scattering their tomcat in fright. Now, he slowed by the little kitchen table that they’d salvaged and, slow step by slow step, he eventually crouched again and returned the chronicle to the bookshelf.

“I wanted to look up those mushrooms …” he muttered, his back to Rise as he took up the foraging book and opened it before the light of their only unbroken, unboarded window. Rain slapped the glass—single pane, wooden frame—warning of a blustery afternoon and evening. Possibly no let-up until nightfall.

Missing Cypriot’s heat from his lap, Rise’s anger at that latest outburst drained away. What good would anger do? It wouldn’t help the healing that they both had to go through. Rise rose from the armchair, drew back his shoulders, and tasted the mixed-meat stew they always seemed to have on hand. Human food still didn’t hold much sway with him, but it did temper his growing blood hunger. It couldn’t hurt.

Out of habit, as if to touch someone’s shoulder while walking past, Rise blinked into Cypriot’s vision, blinking away just as quickly as Cypriot studied the spines of their meagre library.

“Do you do it often?” Cypriot asked, his voice small and low.

Rise froze. “Do what?”

A glance over his narrow shoulder. “Put your eyesight into mine?”

“You can sense when I do?” At Basilica X, no one noticed him hopping from gaze to gaze. A wash of sweat swept over Rise. The thrill of seeing through another’s eyes, that’d been his secret since the power came to him in that prison-tower. Rise’s lone foil against the world. Now Cypriot knew when he visited?

“Not ‘sense’ you, no. It just feels like … oh, like …” Cypriot looked down at his wrist and prominent blue veins, pockmarked with Rise’s fresh bite from last week and the older, more malignant bites that didn’t seem to want to fade. “Like you’re in my pulse,” he tried to explain. “My veins tighten sometimes. I think it’s when you jump your sight to mine. You did it just now, didn’t you?”

Rise let out a breath and, guiltily, nodded. Ogrim, after being zombie-bitten and turning into a blood brute, had drunk from Cypriot without any ill effect to the succor. With no one else to hand, they’d both agreed that it was okay for a ‘turned’ blood brute Rise to drink from Cypriot. Thankfully, some luck was on their side, and they’d won that gamble.

“It could all be part of me becoming a blood brute. That, by drinking from you, a part of me is left behind, echoed—perhaps—when I look through your eyes. Cypriot, I’m very careful not to pry-”

“No, I know,” Cypriot interrupted, managing a smile. “I know that you respect my privacy. I can feel it. I must, um, I must remember to go back and check out those mushrooms that I saw the other night …”

The memory of Pidgeon Man hung between them. A Halloween decoration that would never be stored away.

He wanted to broach the topic of their winter preparations again but, studying the tense hunch in Cypriot’s shoulders and how his mouth moved in furious silence as he read from their survival guide, Rise thought it best to leave him alone. He didn’t want resistance to grow within Cypriot. Rise would pick his battles.

“Unfinished business …” he muttered. Blood hunger again, annoying him.

“Huh?” Cypriot perked up from his book.

“Nothing. I’m going to see if Yarrow’s hooves need trimming,” Rise muttered as he took up the curved blade from amid their makeshift bucket of tools. This particular blade was stranger than most, and neither Rise nor Cypriot knew what it was for, until Yarrow’s hoofs began to grow beyond his iron shoes. With no forge or anvil nor blacksmithing knowledge, they had to just to pry off Yarrow’s shoes—just like Cypriot pried off his fake fingernails during their first night free of Pigeon Man—and pare back Yarrow’s hooves as needed. And ensure he got plenty of trekking over stony terrain to keep his feet healthy.

“Do you think they ever talk about us?” Cypriot asked out of nowhere, right as Rise opened the door to leave.

“Sorry?” He almost hadn’t heard him over the rain.

“At that place. Them and their bird messages and stuff. I wonder if they ever talk about us?”

“I certainly don’t wonder that at all,” Rise tried to keep the snarl out of his voice as he stepped into the yard and shut the door. He hunched against the sky, rain trickling beneath his shirt collar.

Yarrow pricked his ears as Rise approached his garage-stable. Rise greeted the horse warmly, smiling as he scratched that velvet nose.

In truth, Yarrow’s feet were fine. Cypriot probably knew that, too. Still, Rise dallied out here with the animal, running his hands throughout his mane. As he relaxed into the gentle warmth of Yarrow’s company, Rise rolled back his shoulders, straightening his posture. Raindrops pattered against the plywood and sheet metal that they’d carted here to fix the holes in the garage’s roof.

Still, none of this was enough to survive a winter. Owl Court taught Rise that he needed to open up and talk about problems the moment they surfaced. Not to idle and waste days upon days for fear of upsetting his current company. He’d just have to go ahead and upset his Cypriot with talk of the oncoming winter.

When the rain stopped and even Yarrow grew tired of him, Rise finally returned inside. He found Cypriot asleep in their chair, the chronicle open across his lap. Rise didn’t check what page he was on as he closed the book. Placing it back on their ridiculous bookshelf, the thought came: What would their lives be like if the tale of Owl Court was never written?

Sometimes Cypriot would have nightmares of flocks of pigeons pecking him to death. Other times, he slept for many hours, as if curled up dead like a buried bog body. Rise had once made peace with the fact that he might never get to destroy Basilica X, nor the Warwolves, nor whatever maniacal plans that they had for conquering and power. The peace with Cypriot frayed within Rise, like a rope chafing against the new metal of the world.

He went to the one drawer in the whole ravaged house and tucked their only bag of salt under his arm.

“Shush, easy now,” Rise breathed into Yarrow’s ear as he led him from the garage, fully tacked-up and ready for adventure. It was normal for Rise to take their horse out, beyond the boundary. The animal needed exercise, grazing time. You couldn’t keep him in the garage every day. You couldn’t.

Yarrow’s ears twitched back as Rise took a pinch of salt and smudged each muscular shoulder and hindquarters. A murmur of something ancient beneath his breath and the glow of a new boundary formed in Rise’s mind. Now he could ride Yarrow out in the fallen world, unseen by zombie brute, human, or Warwolf alike. Carefully storing the bag of salt just inside the garage-stable, Rise paused. He touched his sight to Cypriot: still asleep. He hungered for him, but pushed all of that aside.

“Let’s see what’s out there, hm?” Rise whispered as he led Yarrow past the meagre vegetable plots to the branch of the oak tree. Another purr of Old Language, a gentle tug on Yarrow’s bridle to duck him under, and Rise stepped beyond the boundary. Guilt momentarily caught in his throat: he should let Cypriot know that he was leaving. Rise held the branch-boundary open as he eyed the door of home, then he left.

The wind in his hair and gallop of hooves beneath soon shed any guilt from Rise. He let Yarrow have his head and they raced, salt-shielded, across the countryside down into the valley. Startled creatures squeaked in puzzlement to hear hooves and feel the earth tremble. Rise did not hunt for dinner-meat, did not snatch-up those creatures. He’d taken too many on his night-hunts with Cypriot. He set his sights far away from home, to where the forest met wider, rolling plains. There lived larger prey: herds of deer. His dream of a triumphant return, with a big kill that’d last for weeks, shone in Rise’s mind.

Yarrow finally slowed, his great sides heaving, having worked off excess energy from too long in the garage. Rise cautiously dropped from the saddle and loosened its girth. While he remained in contact with the horse, the boundary shielded him. Rise touched Yarrow’s shoulder and the fine spot of salt there, smiling to be free in the rain-soaked world, for the tall grasses to drench his clothes. For that verdant smell of earth to fill his lungs. No sun yet shone from the heavy cloud cover. His stripes asleep beneath his skin.

Upon escape from Basilica X, although the General Otrano had given them two large saddlebags of provisions, no gun or weapon accompanied the supplies. Hunting deer, taking one down, would mean that Rise would have to entirely succumb to his blood brute nature and draw on his vampiric talents: speed, sliding into shade, literal brute force. He didn’t know if he could overpower a whole deer and … what? Twist its neck? Bite its throat?

As he wandered along, with Yarrow snatching up grass and chomping it nosily, Rise winced at the thought of deer blood in his mouth. Before turning into what he was, Cypriot’s blood used to be deep velvet, a fine love-wine that slaked Rise’s hunger. Although, nowadays it tasted muted, Rise still longed for the return of that taste—he didn’t look forward to tasting deer. Lost in thought, they broke out onto a high shelf of rubble and scree, washed down from the mountains that lay far behind. Below lay a road unfamiliar to Rise. Something about that dark snake of asphalt made him hesitate. It hummed to him.

“What are they up to?” Rise murmured to Yarrow as he led the horse down the shifting stones, until he could crouch by the roadside. He didn’t even need to touch it. He recognized its aura.

“Salt …”

Rise straightened, looking far down the road one way until it curved back into forest. The other way led into the mountains and, undoubtedly, back to Basilica X. Scorper hadn’t known about the use of salt to seal a boundary until Rise came along. It’d nearly cost her life and that of her unborn child.

“Maybe she put two-and-two together, though.” Rise studied the road. He’d created a salt boundary around Basilica X’s TNT shed and, although he didn’t tend it anymore with protective invocations in the Old Language, perhaps the Warwolves had noticed its salted perimeter?