Page 19 of Rory

Bodach whistled as he went over to reanimate the latest batch of corpses his revenants had exhumed, and saw some bits of blackened bone scattered among the dead weeds. Clagden, a fear-eating changeling, had been the one to bring him to the old prison cemetery. He’d confessed to killing many of the inmates while posing as an orderly, and had intended to take Bodach’s power before murdering him. At the time using red crystal to drain the life from Clagden had given him a great deal of satisfaction, but now he wished he had kept him alive. Of all his recent mortal servants the changeling had been the most resourceful.

To amuse himself, he picked up several of the bone fragments and beckoned to Frank. “Open your mouth.” When the revenant did he stuffed the remains instead and had him swallow. “Let’s see if Clagden can be summoned back from the dead, too.”

The spell he cast over the revenant was essentially harmless, more of a parlor trick than true magic. His mother had often used it to torture prisoners whose comrades had fallen in battle.

“Speak to me as Clagden,” Bodach commanded. “Tell me how you enjoyed your defeat at my hands.”

The revenant’s eyes glittered with dark light that made streaks appear in the red glow, and when he opened his mouth the voice that came out sounded exactly like the changeling’s.

“I expected to murder you in this place,” Frank said, his tone rising higher with each word. “When you fed me to your crystals, I suffered enormous agony.”

“For the ten seconds it took them to kill you, I imagine you did,” Bodach said, nodding. “That’s what you get for trying to betray me.”

Frank made a strange sound that might have been a laugh. “In those moments I endured all the terror and pain that I inflicted on my mortal victims.”

“Oh, please, it couldn’t do that. Or does it hurt that much to have one’s life sucked away so quickly? Maybe it did. Serves you right for trying to betray me.” Intrigued by the changeling’s revelation, he patted Frank’s cheek. “A pity you didn’t choose to serve me instead of yourself. I would have taken you with me, and rewarded you handsomely after I conquered Elphyne.”

The revenant batted away his hand.

“You shall never see Elphyne again, Goblin,” the dead man said in another, familiar voice. “You shall remain locked in torment for all time.”

“What did you say?” Bodach peered into his eyes. “Who are you?”

Frank grinned back at him, displaying teeth covered with green moss. “Soon you will be brought to a reckoning for all you have done in the mortal realm. Those whose lives you’ve stolen, the souls you’ve corrupted, the evil you’ve wrought, all demand a price. You shall pay in kind a thousandfold.”

“Is that you, Aosda? No, you’d never stoop to possess a dead mortal.” He walked around the revenant. “Chlíodhna, have you possessed my dead friend? Why would you even bother to warn me? You should be making popcorn and gathering your tree hugger allies to watch my demise.”

“You shall never die,” Frank said, and his mossy teeth fell out of his mouth along with his jaw.

As Bodach staggered backward the hulking revenant began to come apart as if being dismembered, his huge hands separating from his arms to fall on the ground, his knees buckling, his legs collapsing. For a moment Frank’s head remained attached to his neck as his top lip curved over his empty gum sockets, and then it rolled off and fell into a nearby grave.

“Sneaky, vindictive bitch,” Bodach muttered as he watched a pool of moss spring up around and creep over Frank’s remains. “You’re damn right I’ll never die. After I take Elphyne, I will destroy this realm, everyone in it, and you and all your worthless kind.”

As he stalked off, the moss enveloped all of the ruined body, turned black, and then sank into the ground. A trill of vicious laughter seemed to bubble up from the pit of sludge it had left behind.

Knowing the attack on the stronghold would result in injured clansmen, and unwilling to depend on the time trap’s malfunctioning enchantment to heal them, Dr. Benedict Miller grabbed his medical case and headed out of the infirmary. Halfway to the great hall a shorter, fair-haired hunter came running toward him.

“I cannae find our woman,” Ulf said, his jaw locked and his eyes filled with panic. He held a dagger ready to use in his fist.

“Calm down, love.” He put his arm around his broad shoulders. “She agreed to meet us in the hall during the attacks, remember?”

“She agreed before she turned her back on us,” the hunter said, his tone sharp. “Now she may go anywhere. Even to him.”

“Don’t be such a worry wart,” he chided gently. He loved Ulf for his passion, but sometimes he could get a little crazy with jealousy. “She knows how much we’d be worried about her. She’s probably waiting for us there right now.”

As they walked together through the passages Ben kept his arm around him, hoping that would reassure him. He also noted some of the male vassals who passed them smirking or looking away, as most disapproved of them, so he began talking to keep his future husband from noticing.

“All of my herbal medicines reappeared just a few hours ago, so I started making every tincture and salve I could remember.” He lifted his bag. “I’m now fully stocked against everything that can possibly go wrong now.”

Ulf made a rude sound. “You didnae cook up a potion to heal the spell trap, or kill the MacBren.”

“Give me a little more time.” Ben couldn’t violate his physician’s oath by harming or killing someone, but the clan’s enemy wasn’t real.

The magic holding them imprisoned recreated Turo MacBren, who had been murdered with his wife in the twelfth century shortly before the clan’s castle had been sieged and then cursed. The construct of the enemy laird had been coming to the McKeran’s stronghold to demand that Tasgall marry his daughter for over nine centuries now. He was programmed to keep returning and doing everything just as he had during the year before the clan had been cursed.

“If we could somehow persuade the MacBren to give up trying to force the laird to marry Torra, then that could break the spell trap,” he said. “What do you think—Ulf?”

The hunter had stopped and glared ahead of them. “Facking bastart. He’s come to brace us.”