Excerpt



They had just reached the edge of the forest when something swept through the shadows behind them. They noticed it not by sight, but by their senses of hearing and smell. Immediately Nathan Bruce whirled about-face and thrust his lighted staff out in front of him.

Misty trees and grass and fog. Nothing else.

Heart racing, Angela squinted through the fog and the trees and the shadows on either side of her. All she could see was a frugal blackness, and everything was silent. She turned around to face Nathan Bruce and his light, but to her horror and despair he was gone! His staff lay on the ground, its yellow light blinking and twitching on and off.

Angela gulped and almost swallowed her tongue. What was she going to do now? She tried to think of a plan, but the pounding of her heart was so loud that she couldn’t get her mind off the hopelessness of the situation: She was alone in a forest full of prowling, hungry moribundi. The staff lying there did not belong to her, and even if it did belong to her, its light was flickering; and when that had last happened, Nathan Bruce had said it was broken. The stench of the beast had even vanished, so Angela knew Nathan Bruce could be anywhere in the forest by now. He was probably already half dead. Right where she stood, Angela sank to the ground and sobbed.

She was so frightened that her whole body shook instead of trembled. Her tears came out in giant spills that numbed her face, and every time she breathed in she choked on them. Before long, she was so occupied with the incessant crying and choking that she wasn’t paying—or couldn’t pay—any attention to anything else around her. Granted, nothing much had changed—except that the fog had shifted a tiny bit and the light on the staff had flickered out completely—but as Angela wept over her danger, the danger began to close in tightly around her.

Literally.

When Angela noticed the stench, it was already too late. With swollen, red eyes, a stuffy nose that delayed her detection of smell, and a red numb face, she looked up from the ground and into the fog, only to see the cloaked figures of two moribundi staring straight at her with eyes that had no pupils.

Her heart began to pound fast again, seeming to her to almost jolt out of her chest, but she herself could not jolt away from them. Fear had glued her hands and feet to the ground. But she had her head.

Of course, Angela was too panicked to think, and everything seemed so loud due to the pounding of her heart, but something instinctively within her clicked. Slowly, almost without even knowing it, she turned her head away from the moribundi. She wanted to be prepared with some sense of direction in case fear unglued her feet. But when Angela did turn her head, she only saw more of those hideous creatures gathered together in a circle around her.

None of them moved, but Angela knew it was only a matter of time. Exhausted and hopeless, because the wizard’s staff was on the outside of the ring (it was still broken anyway), Angela lay down again. She closed her eyes, unable to cry, trying to make herself believe this wasn’t happening. . .

All of a sudden she could hear the moribundi moving. Carefully she opened an eye and squinted over her arm. They were backing away from her, whispering to one another in some other language. Some of them whispered fervently, walking forward again toward the girl, but then others would whisper pleadingly and pull the fervent ones back. They thought she was already half dead. She was confusing them. Now she was even more afraid to move. But why weren’t they trying to suck out the “other half” of her life?

A very tall and very curious moribundus moved very close to her. Angela cringed at the smell and the sight of his ugly feet. Not a second later and she was staring at an eye with no pupil.

Heart leaping, Angela shut her eye so fast that her head hurt. But still it was too late. The moribundus was already shouting to the others, and by the sounds of all the running and clutter of voices (not to mention by the smell), Angela guessed quite correctly that the moribundi were coming back.

Then everything got quiet, and the moribundus who had ruined her disguise began to speak. Of course, Angela couldn’t tell what he was saying, so it was all just a bunch of mumbling to her, but due to the number of angry-sounding voices that broke out at the end of his speech, he had apparently said something very insulting to them.

Suddenly someone grabbed her arm, which was covering her face. So close to her nose, the stench was so sickening that she wanted to puke. The moribundus was trying to drag her away, but Angela didn’t dare open her eyes.

Then someone screamed and pried the moribundus’s hand off Angela’s arm. The moribundi who had dragged Angela began to mumble hurriedly and angrily at the other one, who mumbled back; and then Angela could hear a bunch of footsteps and closer voices. The voices all turned into yells, and from there everything went chaotic. Angela could hear them punching and clawing at each other, throwing each other to the ground, and crying out in pain. She waited until she thought the chaos had migrated away from her a little, and until the moribundi sounded much occupied with it all. Then she opened her eyes, looked, snatched up Nathan Bruce’s staff, and ran.