Blood Tempered: Book 1 of the Sword Monk Saga

Blood Tempered: Part 36

In the dungeons of Thunderhead, Stench walked to the cell that held the broken corpse of Olvera. He opened the grill on the cell door and cast a glance at the dead courtier. The witch had not been gentle. Olvera's limbs sprawled at unnatural angles. His face was black and bloated, and his gray tongue poked out between protruding lips.

"You can stop pretending now," Stench said.

After a moment the body shuddered, and then with many a wet popping sound, smashed limbs and digits drew themselves back into their proper places. Olvera staggered to his feet, and the marks of strangulation slowly faded from his skin.

"Open the door, would you?" he panted. "I'm stiff and tired."

Stench shrugged, put a hand around one of the bars in the door's grill, and pulled the entire door off its hinges and flung it to the floor. "You'll need a new skin suit," he told the thing that had called itself Olvera for years. "That one's had it, in more ways than one."

The skin walker that wore Olvera nodded. "Plenty outside to choose from, I'd imagine."

"You'd imagine right." There were thousands of bodies to choose from, living and dead. And the spell they were currently under was keeping them obligingly passive.

"What about you, then? Will you be leaving as well?"

The thing that wore the skin of Heirus, of Stench, shook its head. "I'm not finished here. You know that."

"Dangerous," the other responded. Stench shrugged. Danger was nothing new, and mattered little. Not when weighed against the Design.