Less than a minute later, the ghoul was at the vehicle door, his melted face peering eerily through the bulletproof glass. Terry slid across the bench and hesitated at the door.

Unlike the ghouls that made up the bulk of the palace guard, the draugr caste were reclusive, only emerging from the catacombs under direct orders. Terry had only seen them at a distance, and in broad daylight. Coming face-to-face with a draugr in this supernatural fog was the stuff of horror sims.

And yet, it was the people of his family’s city being terrorized by this draugr—at his grandfather’s orders to boot. As much as he wanted to walk away, let someone else deal with the problem, he knew—just knew—that every innocent death from this point on would be on his head.

Still, he was thirteen. He was allowed to take a few steadying breaths before facing an undead killing machine, wasn’t he?

His hand reached out to the door handle, resting there for a moment. Scenarios flashed in his mind.

The draugr whipping past Crunch and the other ghouls to cut Terry down before he could announce his presence.

Even worse, the draugr recognized him and still cut him down.

Or maybe it ignored him as it raced after the fleeing people, bypassing Terry like he was an inconsequential pebble in the path of a bulldozer.

He wasn’t sure how long he was poised to head out into the fog. How long Crunch stared back at him through the glass. His mind was telling his hand to pull the handle, but his body wasn’t listening.

A tactful cough sounded from the side, startling Terry from his tumultuous thoughts.

“Begging your pardon, my prince, but…you got this.”

He turned to see Dalton watching him in the rear-view mirror, a steady look in his eye. The driver gave Terry an encouraging nod, prompting him forward, and the boy couldn’t help but be buoyed. Here was a man personally employed by Terry’s mother, giving him encouragement only days after her death. If he didn’t examine the circumstances too closely, it might even feel like fate.

He steeled himself, letting out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

“Thank you, Dalton. I’ll return shortly,” he replied confidently. There was a phrase his mother had repeated over and over again, to the point that he had rolled his eyes every single time he’d heard the phrase.

Fake it till you make it…

Now, he understood the sentiment.

The door opened with a click and Crunch was there with a helping hand. Climbing out of the vehicle with the hazmat suit was a chore and all of the false bluster he had been building up took a backseat to the realities of maneuvering his body out of the narrow doorway.

Once he was out, with a heartfelt—if embarrassed—thank you to Crunch, he surveyed the street.

It was deserted but for the caravan and the abandoned cars blocking their passage. The fog cloyed to the ground, making it nearly impossible to spot where the road ended and the sidewalks began. But at head height, the fog was slightly less dense, allowing him to see a bit past the lead truck in front of his vehicle.

Around him, Crunch, Bloodstain, and Burg had formed a triangular press with their bodies, shielding him so thoroughly that he could barely move without bumping into one of them.

“Guys,” Terry said in exasperation. “Can you give me a few feet of wiggle room? This is ridiculous, even for you lot.”

Bloodstain and Burg looked to Crunch, and Terry realized that something about their recent interactions had elevated Crunch in status when it came to his guard retinue. It made sense, as Crunch had been his shadow for years. But it was also odd, in that the ghoul had been moments from being ‘recycled’ before he had intervened. As far as he knew, ghouls existed in a hierarchy of duty and strength. The two usually coincided, in that the strongest received the most important duties and were therefore highest in the hierarchy. But in Crunch’s case, he was clearly physically impaired, yet Terry’s attachment had elevated the ghoul in his peer’s eyes.

He had no doubt the other ghouls in the caravan would similarly defer to Bloodstain and Burg if Crunch were not nearby.

Speaking of the other ghouls, they materialized from the fog, forming a second, wider ring around Terry and his three shadows. Their shapes were mostly obscured, bare silhouettes appearing and disappearing in the fog as Terry scanned around him. He counted ten, maybe twelve, ghouls, realizing that he actually didn’t know how many guards had joined their caravan. He’d been so consumed—and annoyed—with getting fitted into his hazmat suit, he hadn’t even considered how many of the undead creatures were required for this expedition.

He also realized that he was using this line of thought to stall—again.

“Let’s go,” he said out loud, though it was more to force his own feet than announce anything to the nearby ghouls.

As he started down the street, the two concentric circles of ghouls shifted with him, like the outer lines of a bullseye with him at the center. The imagery didn’t help his already anxious state, so he focused on scanning the nearby road.

A hundred feet passed and he didn’t see a single soul. The nearby sidewalk had street lights every twenty feet, but they were fighting a losing battle against the fog. Past the sidewalks stood businesses, though Terry noted closed signs and even boarded up windows during what should have been a bustling time. The only sounds of a once vibrant city were the rushing water of the Arkansas River a few blocks over—and his own ragged breathing.

A city that had been thriving only a week earlier now felt like a literal ghost town.

“How could my grandfather leave the city in this condition?” he muttered.

Though he knew the ghouls' supernatural hearing would have picked up the question, their aura recognition would have made the rhetorical nature of the question apparent.

Even still, Terry wished someone—anyone—would speak, if only to break the unnatural silence of the sound-dampening fog.

After a few moments, the shape of the outer wall became vaguely visible through the pools of white cast by the flood lights. The cars abandoned in the middle of the street were no longer politely parked in a straight line, but rather, were crashed into other cars, into the facades of the buildings, or simply left to idle on the sidewalks.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

As they neared the wall, a mound began to materialize in the street. Then another. And another, until there were dozens of ankle-height mounds protruding from the heavy fog like the moguls of a ski run. Terry squinted, struggling to identify what he was seeing as he neared the gates.

Something snagged his foot, causing him to stumble. With an undignified yelp, he whipped his head down to see what had grabbed him. Buried in the heavy fog was the clear outline of a person. Crunch responded instantly, kicking the person away so hard they they slid fifteen feet along the ground before rolling to a stop.

“Crunch!” Terry cried. “That’s a person.”

“Yes, my prince.” He replied with no inflection, his head swiveling about as if expecting Savage to come leaping out of the fog any moment.

“They need help. See if they’re okay. Please!”

“They’re all dead, my prince,” Burg replied softly.

Terry turned to look at the ghoul. “All? What do you…” He trailed off as horror dawned on him.

With new eyes, he examined the mounds dotting the street. His heart clenched as he counted ten, fifteen, nearly twenty bodies dotting the road. And that was only what he could see.

“It has to be stopped,” he whispered, afraid that it was listening.

The frontline of his ghoul entourage suddenly rippled, their stances lowering as they sounded a warning in their native tongue.

Crunch was at his side in an instant, his body slightly forward and in front so as to intercept an attack.

Terry tensed, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling. A cold sweat dripped down his shirt and he hunched in, as if expecting something to fly out of the night fog straight for his head.

Instead, a silhouette appeared ahead. It was large, as wide as three ghouls, and was shaped like figure wearing a flowing cloak. The edges of its silhouette were frayed, defying reality as the shadows warped and shifted to his eye.

It marched forward—not fast, but with an aura of inexorability, as if it would not be stopped. When it reached the outer ring of ghouls, they parted with halting, reluctant steps. Whether a result of social strata or metaphysical power, the draugr would not be impeded by the lower rung of ghouls.

The same could not be said for Crunch and his trio. They met the draugr halfway, bodily blocking it as it neared.

Terry hardly noticed what happened next. An aura of rime began to coat his clothes, filling his blood with ice. The tingling at the back of his neck from before had escalated into full-blown needles stabbing into his skin. A wave of rot-smell drifted toward him, evoking an image of a beast splayed open and decaying in a frozen tundra. It didn’t matter that an icy landscape would preserve a dead animal—logic had no place in the face of this being.

It wasn’t rational, he realized. The feeling creeping up his back and filling his nose with the smell of death wasn’t real. It was the creature’s aura, lashing out like a vengeful viper, infecting the living and unliving with its hate and fear and loneliness—so, so lonely…

He was snapped out of its aura’s hold by the hissing sibilance of its voice.

“No…passage…”

Though the draugr was twenty feet away, blocked by his three ghoul bodyguards, and surrounded by another dozen on high alert, Terry felt like he was one wrong word—one wrong movement—from death’s cold embrace.

But he was a Fairway! His family were the masters of the unliving, not the other way around. They bowed to him. They feared him.

Okay, maybe they didn’t fear me. But there was no reason for me to be afraid.

And yet, he had to fight down the shiver that tried to worm its way up his back.

“Honored draugr—” he started, but immediately cut off as the vague shape whirled toward him. The intensity of its aura tripled and the breath was sucked from his lungs. He tried to force air in through his nose, but the effect was crippling. His lungs were being squeezed. His legs trembled. Hopelessness and self-loathing speared his mind.

Images flashed across his eyes. Savage, Scourge, Sol, Siren…his mother.

They died because of you.

With a force of will, he broke the aura’s hold over him, sucking in a heaving gasp of air. He took in three more steadying breaths before forcing himself upright.

“I am the grandson of Terrence Fairway, Emperor of the Long Night, and ruler of this land. I demand that you stand down.”

The words were all right, but his voice was thin, and his tone was weak and questioning rather than commanding.

The draugr seemed to agree, because its aura redoubled. A gut-punch hit him and he collapsed to one knee. It drifted forward, closing the gap. Terry glanced up to see the hunched silhouettes of his ghoul entourage. They had been cowed by the overwhelming might of the creature before them.

All but Crunch.

With shaking limbs, Terry’s lifelong shadow latched one powerful limb onto the approaching draugr. It did nothing to stop the creature’s approach, but it did snap the other ghouls out of their daze. They lifted their heads and looked around as if waking from a dream, only to spot themselves in the midst of a battle. Burg was the first to follow Crunch’s lead, launching himself like an undead missile at the draugr. Bloodstain followed a heartbeat later, wrapping his body around the thing’s legs.

Terry’s limbs were jelly and he was on the verge of hyperventilating. But he forced himself through the thick cloud of terror projecting from the draugr. His friends throwing themselves bodily at his attacker gave his legs the strength to stand.

More ghouls leaped atop the creature, landing on their brothers in an attempt to weigh the thing down. It tried to march through the hundreds of pounds of undead digging their bone-claws into its body, but was eventually slowed to a stop.

Terry could see the shift in its attention, like the ponderous weight of its regard required huge mental effort to redirect from its predestined target. Casually, it lifted one shrouded arm and shook it up and down, dislodging the attached ghouls with ballistic force. Then the other arm.

A handful of ghouls were launched across the road with bone-smashing impacts, ripping through the facades of the surrounding buildings or tearing up the asphalt with their passage. Some of them clambered to their feet and rejoined the fight.

Some did not.

Terry’s feet were glued in place, his thoughts boiled down to simple, digestible components that unfortunately did not involve a plan out of this slaughterhouse. But even if he did have the capacity to understand that he should be running for his life, he did not have the capacity to leave his friends to certain death.

So he did the only thing his aura-addled brain could picture in the face of an unyielding enemy.

He went on the attack.

Before his thoughts could catch up to his body, he was standing before the draugr. Five ghouls were tenaciously latched onto its limbs like wolves trying to take down a moose. But right in front of him, free of ghouls or any sort of impediment, was the draugr’s chest.

He reared his tiny fist back and threw a sloppy haymaker—the one he’d seen Kill-Punch throw in his Saturday morning cartoons—right at that open spot.

His wrist buckled on impact, his thumb—not clenched properly—was pulled from the glancing blow, bending backwards. Fire burned along his knuckles—a cold fire, like a brain freeze across his skin.

There was a term for that, he knew. What was that—

He was suddenly airborne, the wind blowing through his hair like he was one of the flying supers he had so idolized. He wished he could fly. This sort of counted, he supposed.

Then, his back smashed into something hard, sucking the air from his lungs for what felt like the millionth time. Sharp pain stabbed…everywhere. The sounds of the struggle suddenly became crystal clear—something he hadn’t realized had been dampened before. Bone on bone, the crunching of ghoul teeth as they coordinated their attacks, and the eerie howling of the draugr as it fought off his entire bodyguard unit.

Despite the mind-numbing pain, all he could think was: they sound like alley cats fighting off a possum.

“Whoa,” a voice said somewhere nearby. “Not every day you see that!”

Terry’s head wouldn’t turn, but the speaker came into view a moment later. He was tall, with long, straight silver hair pulled back into a bun. A thick beard covered his jaw, while a small mask covered his upper face.

And he was hovering off the ground, his boots three feet from the road.

Why was he floating?

The masked man glanced over at Terry with wide eyes. He let out an appreciative whistle that Terry thought didn’t quite match the urgency or tone of the moment. “You’re still alive? That’s impressive. Let me go deal with whatever that is and if you’re still breathing when I get back, I promise to call…” He glanced around, obviously noting the heavy, obscuring fog. “Well, someone,” he eventually said with a shrug.

Before Terry’s mind could process his anger or hope or surprise, the man floated toward the battle, cracking his knuckles as if he was considering a brawl with the supernatural creature.

Although, I guess that’s what I just did. Let’s hope this guy’s a bit more durable than a thirteen-year-old normie.