Chapter 7

A pretty girl with long honey-brown hair. With large eyes twinkling like stars. And with a cruel smile which had overturned everything inside the necromancer. As if someone had ripped his stomach open, tearing out his bowels with a jagged knife.

Her face transformed. Now there was a pale man who had grown grey before his time. He was quite young but had wrinkles under his dark green eyes. The man glared hatred and contempt at Reive, and it was this glare that moved Reive to murder.

The necromancer raised his eyes, driving the delusions away and trying to return to reality. But completely unexpectedly, the nightmare became reality. The grey-headed man didn’t disappear. He was sitting on the brushwood beside Angelina with a ghastly smile. The girl didn’t notice him.

“What, you didn’t expect to meet an old friend of yours?” Ulfricus said calmly, his dead green eyes burning into Reive.

“I killed you,” the necromancer answered scarcely audibly, clenching his teeth.

The ghost grinned repulsively.

“What’s wrong?” the girl asked, frowning. Reive wasn’t looking at her. All his attention was fixed on his enemy, on his old friend sitting alongside.

“You’re dead,” Reive pronounced this with only his lips.

“You too, but does that matter?” Ulfricus said, savoring each word and grinning.

Reive shuddered. But the next moment, he lowered his head sharply. The girl’s small hand lay on his clenched fist. It was white, contrasting with his dark skin. Burning hot.

A pulse throbbed in his temples.

The necromancer looked again at his grey-haired enemy, but he had vanished into thin air, as if he imagined the whole thing.

“Are you all right?” Angelina asked quietly, looking at him with wide-open eyes.

She was so close to him that he felt her breath. Faintly. But suddenly, he wanted terribly to feel it more.

The faint sweet odor of the girl began to seep somewhere deep into him. To excite something dark and hungry inside him, awakening the wild animal. Painting vague images in his mind and throwing out all his morose thoughts quickly and easily.

Little one...

Her soft, half-open lips, over which he so much wanted to run his tongue. To penetrate inside them. And to tip the girl over onto her back. To feel her hot languishing body under him. To roar, biting her vulgar wet mouth while she pressed her legs over his thighs and moaned his name in a low voice.

Reive seized the girl’s wrist and pulled her sharply towards him. Angelina screamed and fell onto him, for one short moment finding herself on top of him.

“What are you?” she only managed to say.

She didn’t have time to say anything more.

Reive hadn’t had a woman for so many years.

Angelina

He’d began acting weird, as if his sight had suddenly unfocused. Then, his face reflected deep despair. I wanted to touch it and run my finger over the slightly down-turned corners of his eyes until his confident mocking expression returned, with the light predatory gleam in its very depth.

I didn’t know what came over me but I raised my hand and touched his palm. It was so smooth and hot... For just a moment, an unjustified irrational anxiety exploded in my breast. Then, through the nerves on the tips of my fingers, little lightning bolts began to spark. The longer I didn’t pulling my hand away, the stronger this strange sparkling tension grew between us.

Nevertheless, I could be satisfied with my action. The confusion and the oppressive misunderstanding disappeared from the man’s eyes. Now, his eyes were flaming. He was looking only at me. It seemed that it was about to burn me to ashes.

No one had ever looked at me like that before. And that’s why something was spiraling in my stomach, becoming a scalding hot coil.

“Are you all right?” I asked, feeling an intolerable desire to run somewhere far away. Or the opposite.

I didn’t understand what was going on. And he was silent. Only his chocolate-dark eyes were going darker and darker.

The next moment, he suddenly grabbed my wrist and pulled me onto himself.

A second passed – and I was lying on top of him, afraid to breathe. Afraid to move once again because I felt him with every millimeter of my skin.

Another second passed – and he grasped my hands over my head and toppled me onto my back.

“What are you?” the question died in my throat.

Reive bent over my face. Quite near.

I felt his chest rise heavy and fast. I felt the suppressed tension in his muscles, as if he’d been about to jump.

Inside me, a searing heat responded. Blood pulsed in my temples, my head ached, and it seemed to me that I was running out of air. I breathed through a half-opened mouth. Like a fish on hot sand.

The next moment, Reive bent closer and nuzzled my nose. Carefully. As if he was teasing me. Inhaling deeper.

“Take yourself in hand, necromancer...” I said hardly audibly. Faintly and weakly.

My glance fell on his lips, the corners of which were lifted so playfully. He inclined his head to one side, almost touching me with his lips.

“This doesn’t look like resistance,” he breathed. His voice was broken and hoarse. It made my head swim.

His lips. I was about to feel how soft they were...

At that moment, out of the corner of my eye I saw a movement by the entrance to our shelter. I looked there abstractedly and froze. The blood rushed to my head. I couldn’t hold back a scream.

It seemed to me I’d never in my life felt such a thrill of horror. At the entrance, a zombie was standing. He was swaying slightly. The sun was shining through his dirty kinky hair. The zombie looked at Reive, and a look of pleasure distorting the dead skin came to his face.

I cried out so loud that my ears popped and terror made me nauseous.

We didn’t meet the undead in Ihordarrine. Protection totems stood around the perimeters of the entire city. Around each cemetery, the barriers were under a spell. The dead were either burned or buried exclusively in steel coffins, depending on the deceased family’s resources.

All these measures helped avoid a wild outburst of the undead in the capital of the kingdom. However, they say, it was different on the outskirts. I tried not to think about that. In the province of Arc where I came from, my mother-duchess also ordered the installation of all possible protection devices. So that in childhood, I never happened to learn about the hunger and the malice of the undead.

Thanks to mum for everything. May she have hiccups during sex for the rest of her life!

Anyway, I learnt about ghouls, strygas and other creatures of twilight magic only from lessons in the Academy. Only in theory. I had to admit, I was expecting to remain a necromancer without once meeting a zombie.

That was why the zombie at the entrance to the lair unnerved me. But Reive smiled broadly and, depriving me of what self-control I had left, said, “By the Twilight, you’re always on the ball!”

He laughed.

I wanted to faint and never ever open my eyes again, or better not open them until this ghastly zombie had disappeared.

I took a deep breath, trying to calm down, catching Reive’s strange carefreeness and absorbing it with my skin.

He wasn’t afraid. He was pleased.

“What does this mean?” I shifted my gaze to the zombie’s palms. He was holding a cauldron filled with water in his dry grey fingers.

“I have delicious fried meat. And there’ll soon be something to wash it down...”

“You... you...” all these words stuck on the tip of my tongue.

This just couldn’t really be happening.

“You raised up this zombie?” I gasped, feeling a complete idiot, Well, it just couldn’t be. Even Masters can’t do that.