“Don’t let them escape!” the Necromancer shrieked.
The Weevils took after the pair with their lamps. “We sees you!” they taunted, as they hopped over stumps and ducked under branches. “We sees you!” They were so close their lanterns lit the way.
“Run faster,” Hans panted. “They kill in packs.” Fear spurred them on. Hans and Angela gained ground, but as they did the lamplight faded and they stumbled. The Weevils caught up.
“Pray God they tire,” Angela gasped as they ran down a hillock.
“Pray, indeed,” Hans said, for now, as well as the taunts of Weevils, the air was alive with the crow calls of the Necromancer.
In a flash, the night was a flapping of wings. The birds were everywhere—and everywhere invisible in the shadows, save for their cold, red eyes glinting in the lamplight. The Necromancer cawed again. The crows attacked with beak and claw.
“Shield your eyes!” Hans hollered. He drew his monk’s hood tight; Angela pressed her helmet into her collar.
They tripped and tumbled forward. The crows landed on their backs, dug their talons into their shoulders. One pulled at Angela’s hair, fallen from under her helmet; another pecked over her collar for her neck. Angela screamed.
The Weevils were nearly upon them. Hans and Angela struggled to their feet. Hans spotted a campfire through the trees ahead. “Help us!” he hollered to the clearing. “Help us.” In a mad dash, he and Angela burst into the camp.
It was abandoned—emptied by some nightmare. Piles of bones circled the campsite, some old, some dripping blood and sinew.
“What hell is this?” Angela cried. “Is this where we’re to die?”
The crows attacked again. They pecked and battered the pair to the ground. Hans and Angela curled into balls. The Weevils leaped on their backs. “We has you!”
The Necromancer’s hollow laugh floated out of the forest. “Well done, my pets.” He entered the clearing, spirited there by the grace of his crook and the second sight that lit his brain like the Evening Star. The crows flew to his feet. He tossed them a fistful of maggots.
“Treats for us, too, Master?” the Weevils begged.
“As many as you like, and shinies, too,” the Necromancer said. “First, stake our prey to the ground.” He turned to the warmth of the fire pit. “We seem to have scared off a band of poachers. Their flames will heat my blade.”
Hans and Angela gripped their hands together. The Necromancer knelt between them. He pulled off Hans’ hood and Angela’s helmet and stroked their hair. “Be of good cheer. Your memory will live on. Your skins shall become the archduke’s pillowcase and footstool, your insides stored in my pickling jars for spells.”
“There is justice eternal for such as you,” said Hans, as steadily as he could.
“Indeed,” Angela said. “Even in tragedy, villains end badly. Ask anyone.”
“I write my own story, little one,” the Necromancer said. “At the moment, we’re on the page where you die.”
From beyond the clearing, a wolf howled. A second. A third. A fourth. The Weevils looked up. Heavy paws bounded through the forest around them. Fur flashed between the trees. A wolf pack emerged at the edges of the campsite: a pack as large as it was lean.
The crows flew into the branches. A Weevil tugged on the Necromancer’s shroud. “What shall we do, Master?”
“Wolves fear fire; they’ll stay at bay,” the Necromancer said. “When we’re done, we’ll toss them a few limbs from our little friends.”
Unearthly roars shook the night beyond the thicket of bushes past the fire pit: roars so strange and mutant they could only come from monsters of myth and legend. The Weevils squealed.
“Strangers, begone!” a voice boomed.
The Necromancer smiled. “We are on business of His Royal Highness Arnulf, Archduke of Waldland. You and your fellows would be wise to flee, on peril of your lives.”
“We are no ‘fellows,’ nor take we orders from mortals,” the voice roared. “Know ye that I am the Wolf King. Behold my monster horde.”
Monstrous heads of fang and fur reared above the tallest bushes. Their eyes gleamed fire. Thunder rumbled the cloudless night.
The terrified Weevils leaped off Hans and Angela and pressed themselves at the Necromancer’s feet. Hans and Angela jumped up, but escape was impossible. Wolves circled all round and monsters howled beyond the thicket.
The Necromancer cocked his head. He could hear the animals and the thunder, smell the fur and blood, and knew that the creatures were taller than carnival freaks. Yet something was not as it seemed.
He sniffed through his bony noseholes and flicked the air with his lizard tongue. “I, too, can conjure thunder from thin air, Wolf King,” he said. “Yea, and have creatures to do my bidding. Before we speak further, I should like my crows to investigate your monsters.” He craned his neck and cawed three times.
The crows flew from their branches. They circled the campsite twice and swooped toward the Wolf King’s bushes. Yet before they could cross the clearing, they were pierced by a wave of blazing arrows. Their feathers burst into flame; they shrieked to the ground in fiery spirals.
The wolves went wild at the smell of blood. They tore into the circle to rip at the fallen birds. As the pack charged, the Weevils screamed off into the forest.
“Come back,” the Necromancer commanded. “I order you back!” But they were gone.
Hans grabbed Angela’s hand. “Time for us to go, too.”
“No! Not now!”
The Necromancer spun to their voices. He flailed his crook on the ground around them. “You, boy. You, girl. Do you think to escape me?” But the night was so thick with sounds, smells, tastes, and dangers—his senses so flooded—that he was all but truly blind. He reached into his shroud and held aloft a bag of powder.
“Apprentice! Countess! We’ll meet again!” he cried. “As for you, Wolf King: I’ll see you and your monster horde in Hell!”
He threw the powder into the fire pit. There was a huge explosion. A billow of smoke. And in that smoke, the Necromancer vanished into the night.