Chapter 42) The Dark Lady. Or, once more with feeling.

Ah… As the dead guy who owned the house failed to reply, the Princess looked at me and tilted her head as if she getting angry at the mere sight of me, and began to raise her hand.

So… Like Matt said, someone making any decision was better than no one making a decision.

“We have been watching you.”

She froze in place and her eyes went wide in surprise before her face went carefully blank. “And who would ‘we’ be?”

Ah… “The accountants. You have accumulated a dept.”

The woman’s face remained blank for a second, then twisted into a look of rage. “To whom? The Great Hero?” She sneered. “It was my father’s plan to kill him, all I did was play the whore after the hero’s arrival and fake being excited about the plan to be married to him as his ‘reward’. I didn’t even know about the plan to kill the fool until moments before he was bound.”

She stomped over at me and leaned forward as she glared up to where I hovered above her. I barely kept myself from backing away from the look on her face, or her screeching voice.

“One hundred and thirty seven years I’ve been stuck in this city, freezing cold and never, never, being able to sleep. The only time I get to feel warm or dream is when I can drink the life’s blood from some poor helpless sacrifice when they appear in the bitch goddess’s temple.”

She stomped her foot. “Haven’t I suffered enough for my father’s crime? All I did was keep quiet until after they met and the guard dragged the hero off to his execution… and alright, I did spit in the hero’s face and proclaim I never felt anything for him at all. But that was just a way of protecting myself so that having been ‘the Hero’s Promised’ didn’t get me killed right along with him.”

The now ranting woman, looking like she had been little more than a teenager when she had died, began pacing back and forth, throwing her hands up in the air, and tugging on her clothing now and then since her rapid movements meant the scraps of black cloth she barely had on wasn’t staying in place on her as much as they did in her slow hip swaying amble up the street.

“But did he ever forgive me? Even when I begged? On my knees? Noooooo… I have to suffer with him, sharing his curse. ‘United in death as we could not be in life’, along with everyone else who knew of my father’s plan.” She stopped and pointed up at the dead man watching the show as he leaned on the railing of the balcony above.

“Poor Benor was filled in on the plan since he was my father’s confidant, and agreed to support his king, but all he told his ten year old daughter was that something bad was to happen when the hero returned and that's why she had to stay home instead of watching the parade. And for that, she's nearly as cursed as the rest of us. What does she owe? What do any of us owe?”

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She came to a stop, hands on her hips and giving me an enraged look.

I slowly dropped down a bit to line myself up with the upper half of the open doorway to the kitchen.

“I’m thinking… A head start?”

Then I flew toward the door at my best speed, bouncing off the wall on the other side of the doorway as I failed to make the sharp turn and then racing out towards the back exit.

Behind me, a screech shook the house. Seriously, dust was being knocked loose from the rafters in the ceiling as her scream went on far longer than a living person could sustain with a single set of lungs full of air.

“I think I may have upset the young… old woman.”

We had seen that out back behind the mansion was once an ornate garden ending in that back at a stone railing overlooking a narrow winding walkway a few steps down from the rear balcony. The pathway ran along behind several mansions with a dry stone rimmed creek bed beside it, all of it now overgrown of course.

The three men that should have been clearing out of the area, instead stood at the bottom of the stairs, with Matt turning to look up at me, while Josh had one arm over Drew’s shoulder and was talking quietly to the panting younger man.

And all around us, up either side of the winding path, on the grounds of the mansions on the other side of the creek bed, and marching around the edges of the house behind me…

Elite armored skeletons. Hundreds of them.

I slowly rose up a little and could see that it was only the ones up front that were in armor and fully armed, but hundreds of skeletons that must have come from the streets and buildings all around us were still trialing in to make an impassible barrier to keep the three men trapped here.

And the birds circling up above meant I wasn’t going anywhere either.

Dropping down by Matt, I whispered. “You got any more of those executive decisions?”

He shook his head. “De Nana. And I already checked for a sewer grate. But it sounds like you made some lady a little upset in there.”

I bobbed up and down slightly. “Yeah, been doing a lot of that lately.”

The angry girl came tearing out of the house, her disheveled hair gone wild as it hung half loosed around from some fancy braids, and her face twisted up into something inhuman with a mouth full of doubled up fangs, in both her top and bottom jaw. With slits in the side of her face, like they were there to let her open up her mouth wider than a living human being could.

As she locked eyes on me, she took a moment to adjust her displaced gown, although nothing that had been exposed was anything I wanted to see on her, and then she began to saunter in our direction with a deep hissing chuckling sound coming from her that made Drew whimper.

Matt stepped up behind him as he choked his hand upon his spear to just below the blade for a close up thrust into his upper back.

A skeleton dressed in fancier armor than the rest of them, like one of the ones that had been standing on the steps of the palace, moved up in between her and us with his halberd, this one with a coating of worn out gold plating on the metal part, held up crosswise in front of her.

“Our lord had ordered everyone to stand down until his arrival!”

The birds all began to settle onto the roofs and half dead tree branches around us, and the girl's skin began to blacken and smoke until she cursed and scampered over to a tree with enough dead birds in it to block out the sun.

Called it, although I had hoped that all that hair of hers would have gone up in flames.

It would have made a heck of a distraction.

A moment later I could see the skeleton in the ornate black robes on his throne held up above the other undead on a fancy platform held up by four larger then normal skeletons, four of them on each corner, holding the thing up by one of the four poles sticking out. They must have been what you would call big boned in life since in death they still stood well over seven feet tall, and four feet wide at the shoulders.

The crowd of dead men parted to let the one on the throne get carried over and set down in an open patch behind the house we had been in.

The dead guy, the Liche I was guessing, leaned forward and rested his chin in one hand.

"Alright, someone wants to explain to me why there are living people in my city, and why one of them has skin as dark as a Moor?”

A Moor? Must be one of those Lords of the Rings races. Like that one elf guy they had a black guy playing in that show my brother was complaining about.