Page 36 of Blood Red Woes

“What do you mean? Rey, we made it this far. We can’t turn back now. You must go in.” He sounds like a nagging uncle or something, and I wish he was here physically so I could slap some sense into him.

“Something’s wrong,” I say, feeling it in my bones. I don’t know how I know, but I know. It’s like I have an internal radar for shit, and it’s going bonkers right now. I want to get the fuck out of here.

“Rey. Calm down. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing—”

The sky cracks, thunder coming from nowhere. The wind picks up at speeds that hurt my skin, whipping my hair around. The blue sky turns gray, clouding over, and the air grows thick with a choking storm.

The scourge. It’s here.

“Shadowstorm,” Rune mutters. “It would seem your intuition was correct.”

I shield my eyes from the whipping wind, my mouth dry, all the moisture sucked out of it. The wind is so strong it nearly knocks me over, but I manage to hold my ground, half expecting a dragon to pop up and attack me.

Hey, that’s what happened last time. Can you blame me for being worried?

I’m paralyzed with indecision, knowing the only way I’ll be able to find shelter is to get inside the castle’s gates and hope nothing worse waits for me there. I don’t move. I stand there,frozen, needing someone who’s smarter than me to tell me what to do.

And, luckily for me, I have Rune. He yells at me, scolding me at the same time: “Snap out of it! Get yourself together and get through the gate. We need to get out of this storm.”

He’s right. He’s right, of course.

With urgency in my veins, I turn around and sprint to the castle’s doors. I push on them to no avail. They don’t budge. They’re stuck or something. I’m seconds from body-slamming the damned gate when I hear a howl behind me.

At least, I think it’s a howl. It sounds unnatural.

I glance behind me and see, through the thick storm, a dozen sets of glowing eyes looking at me. Some float in the air while others are near the ground. Twenty feet away, maybe? They’re the only things I can see, and it looks as though they’re inching closer.

“Shit,” I whisper as I return my attention back to the door. I run against it, using my body strength to try to budge it. The damned thing doesn’t move. Whatever those things are, they keep pushing forward, and I know they won’t hesitate to tear me apart if I let them get to me.

“Rey, use magic!” Rune instructs.

Fucking duh.

I steady myself, aim at the crack between the two doors that make up the large gate, and blast a force of magic right at it. The tattoo on my wrist comes to life, glowing white as I summon the golden magic. The force of it is enough to jiggle open whatever was stopping me from opening it before, and the right side flies open.

I instantly see the inside is free of the storm, and I dart inside and hurry to push the door closed once more. It’s one heavy motherfucker, but after I struggle a bit, I get it moving. The last thing I see are those glowing eyes, watching me from theshadowstorm, beasts of the scourge. I don’t know what they are, and I don’t want to find out.

I find a thick metal latch and pull it down behind the right side of the door, bolstering it so those things can’t just push it open after me.

“What the hell were those things?” I ask, breathless. “And where did they come from?” I stare at the gate, waiting to hear them try to get inside, but they don’t. Maybe they don’t try because the storm doesn’t run over the high stone wall. It remains outside of the castle’s walls, strangely.

“I don’t know. Perhaps they were summoned with the storm?” Rune offers.

“And why—” I turn my chin up to the sky as I take a few steps back from the giant doors. “—why isn’t the storm here, too?” From where I am, a beautiful blue sky sits over my head. That same sky is cut by the color gray just behind the wall. Not once in my life have I ever seen a natural storm respect borders.

Shit. There’s no way the empress summoned that storm, did she? Did she summon it to get me to come inside?

“I don’t know. It is rather peculiar, isn’t it?” Rune sounds thoughtful when he asks, “You could feel the storm before it came?”

I turn away from the gate. “Yeah. That had to be why it felt wrong.”

“Well, regardless, we’re here now, so let’s venture to the castle.”

I thought I was in the castle now, but it looks like an entire village sits just beyond the wall, tiny stone houses tucked together, side by side, many on the same cobbled streets sharing a roofline. Two or three stories tall, some have small balconies with planters that still bloom, even after all this time.

And yet, as I walk along, I don’t see a living soul.

This place is a giant village, and in the distance, rising higher above the rest, sits the actual castle, a pillar of what these people used to look up to. I walk through the streets, feeling odd and out of place here. The emptiness is disconcerting.

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