Page 146 of Ballad of Nightmares

A thunderous clap cracked the sky and splintered the clouds.

Men surrounding them seemed to lose their footing. Ana didn’t stop her quiet song, not even as a few of the reapers around her held their hands over their bleeding ears and began to fall to their knees.

“What are you—“ Jay did a double-take in her direction and pulled a knife from his boot. He grabbed Ana up by the hair, exposing her neck, but Ana just laughed.

She laughed and laughed, and when the sinister noise echoed in the trees, she couldn’t wipe the delirium off her face and started singing again.

“Stop!” Jay shouted. He shoved the knife in her face, just beneath her nose. “I’ll cut out your tongue, you little bitch.”

Ana licked the sharp edge of the blade, the blood trickling down her mouth when she dragged it over her top lip. “Don’t be a tease. Call me a bitch again and cut my face like you mean it,” she toyed. “Get me wet, little Iron boy.”

Jay shouted like he was about to hurt her, but—

A deathhound jumped into the middle of the camp.

Men shouted, pulling guns from their holsters and shooting at the great beast. Jay staggered back, screaming at the legion around him while Rolfe howled like he was enjoying the spray.

His teeth bared, and he lunged at a soldier just as motorcycles roared into the clearing. Jumping through trees and flying in on one wheel. More gunfire sounded as people on the backs of bikes pulled two at a time and aimed for everything.

Chaos of blood and screaming bullets, only secondary to the screams, filled the air.

Ana watched the demons that had ridden in, the ones with the horns and those with forked tongues, the ones with burned limbs and yellow eyes, shifters and reapers and all manner of creatures thought to have been eradicated from their world five centuries earlier.

All of them.

Hiding in Shadowmyer.

Necks of Firemoor soldiers cracked, heads breaking as demons bit them off.

But even with the fear rippling through the camp, nothing compared to the way the air chilled and stiffened when the black fog came rolling over the now blood-stained ground. Clouds covered the sun as Death took back his territory. Lightning cracked into the tree behind her, sparking fire off the limbs.

Death appeared from within a shadowed cloud like he was greeting an old enemy.

Grand wings, tattered black, and missing feathers, broken on the left, rose high at his back. These were not the faint images of them she’d seen in flashes of lightning. These were the real things. Wings he’d not used since he was nearly stripped of them.

Eyes glowing scarlet, his stature seeming to be taller than he usually was… the fight parted for him as he stalked into the battlefield. She squinted, noticing something different about his face, and she realized parts of his skin were missing like the deathhound that had arrived moments earlier. The right edge of his mouth, exposing straight white teeth and muscle, curved upward like a smile. A patch on the left by his now red eyes. Beneath the collar of his jacket, she noticed more exposed skeleton and muscle, like his flesh had once been ripped off by savage fangs, and she remembered the skeleton makeup he’d been wearing that first night at the festival.

Someone turned their gun on him, one bullet striking his chest. Sam turned his head slowly in the man’s direction, and with the next shot, shadows grabbed the bullet before it could hit him. His hands hadn’t moved from his pockets, but the man with the gun was suddenly in the air. Heads turned in the direction as Sam lifted the man up and up, struggling body writhing against the bindings.

And ever so slowly… the shadows began to peel away his skin. People around cowered away, shrinking behind trees and some falling to their knees. Others couldn’t look away, horrified by the display of an angered god bringing his wrath upon people who had taken something he loved.

Sam stood in the middle of the field and slowly stretched in a circle, his eyes pouring over every opposing being. “Now that I have your attention…” He pulled his hands from his pockets and started removing his gloves, one finger at a time, exposing long talons with the movement.

“Where is my Queen?”

The affirmation of him calling her his Queen rocked her. Not his plaything. Not just her name.

His Queen.

His voice rattled bones and whispered like the night on fire. As if his tone could break apart the earth and shatter it beneath the stars. It ripped and vibrated the thunderous swirling clouds in the sky. Death’s broken wings flickered upwards at his back, a warning and threat that no mortal being not taking their last breath had seen in centuries. One man fell to his knees and began to beg into his clasped hands, and Sam moved to tower over him as the man prayed to the gods for salvation.

His thundering laughter splintered over the wheezing wind. “There are no gods here—“ Shadows swept beneath the man and circled his throat, lifting him off the ground so that he was eye-level as the expression on Sam’s face moved from vile amusement to eager evil. Sam wrapped those long fingers beneath the man’s jaw, and breath ceased as he said in a violent whisper—

“Only Death.”

Lightning cracked with the soldier’s neck, and Death took his next victims without ever hearing their final pleas.

Ana could only watch, could only try to understand and keep up with the carnage flying around her. The vulture had come down from the air and shifted. She fought alongside Rolfe’s deathhound form. Ana tried to call out to Sam as he stripped soldiers of their lives with not only his shadows but his own bare hands.