I chewed on that. “So, when one of them spoke to me ...”
Damon nodded. “Maybe it recognized something. Maybe you reminded it of what it used to be, or what it needs to find.”
“That’s not at all comforting.”
“No,” he agreed. “It’s not.”
Chapter 24
Vareck
The Nameless didn’t bleed, which meant they didn’t die. Not really.
You could hack them to pieces, set their corpses on fire, watch them crumble into ash, but they’d always come back, reeking of death and ruin. They weren’t alive. Not in any way that mattered.
But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t enjoy killing them.
The surrounding canyon was scorched by the midday suns, heatwaves rising off the stone like steam from a forge. Red rock stretched high overhead, cracked and jagged. The air tasted like dust and sweat.
I rolled my shoulders and readjusted the grip on both swords. My fingers twitched with anticipation.
Sadie wiped her forehead with the back of her hand and smirked. Her twin axes gleamed—one darker from old blood, the other freshly cleaned and itching for a stain.
“I count twenty coming in,” I said quietly.
“All right,” she said, nudging my elbow. “First to ten wins.”
I gave her a sideways glance. “And the prize?”
“Bragging rights and a crisp high five.”
I snorted. “That’s not much of an incentive.”
“Spoken like a sore loser.”
Movement caught my eye against the cliff wall. The Nameless came crawling down the stone like roaches, limbs cracking at odd angles, spines bowed and eyes hollow.
“On your mark,” I said, spinning both blades once.
Sadie grinned. “Get set.”
“Go!” we said in unison.
The first dropped between us with a hiss of displaced air. I ducked under its swipe and drove my sword straight up through its sternum. It gurgled, body jerking as ichor sprayed from its mouth.
“One.”
Sadie rolled her eyes, then took three steps forward and slammed her axe into the neck of another as it leapt at her. The blade hit with a sickening crunch. She kicked the twitching corpse off the axe, spraying black everywhere.
“One,” she repeated.
More emerged, crawling from cracks in the canyon floor, scuttling from behind boulders, rising out of the sand like summoned nightmares.
A Nameless lunged at me from the right. I pivoted on instinct, brought both swords across in an X, and sliced through its chest. It hit the ground twitching, and I finished it with a boot to the skull.
“Two.”
Sadie was already in motion, a spinning force of steel and fury. One axe caught a Nameless in the shoulder, the other swept its legs out from under it. She kicked it in the head before it could rise.
