The Raven's Chronicles. Rage of the Wraith

Chapter 13. The Undead

"It doesn't make any sense," Lord Kedmon shook his head firmly, his fist clenching on the handle of his sword. "If the healeress had gotten out of the cave, she would have left a trace. Have you ever seen a dead body crawling around? I haven't."

"Ravin, a wraith? Like the one Raimont told me about?" Jules hurried after his master. The hunter circled around the cave's mouth, bent in half, his eyes combing the litter leaf after leaf.

The boy looked around; the forest was full of shadows, gusts of cold winds that came from nowhere and sunlight seeping through the dense tree crowns. In the silence, voices whispered, their words too quiet to understand their humming.

"What's the boy is talking about?" the Lord demanded. "Have you fought a wraith before?"

"Long ago," the hunter straightened to give his apprentice a warning gaze. He put his pointing finger to his lips, a gesture that the Lord didn't notice, then motioned at the forest ahead of him. "She went this way. Went, on two legs, not crawled."

Jules looked in the indicated direction. There were no footprints he could notice, no tracks he would be able to follow. Something else occupied his mind - a memory he'd almost forgotten, one that resurfaced as he heard what Melissa had changed herself into.

It was a story Raimont had told him a few years ago, to scare him - which he had succeeded at. It was a story of an undead monster, a witch that had been burned on a stake and returned in a form of the two-headed beast to take revenge on the village. It had happened long ago - as Raimont claimed - when Ravin had still been Pritchard's apprentice.

"She had two heads, each of them with three eyes, and two sets of arms," Jules could remember Raimont telling the story as they had lain on hay, left in a barn, while Ravin had been away fighting a Midnight Bride that haunted the town. "She grew them feeding on the bodies and blood of her victims. Ravin and Pritchard had twenty knights armed up to their teeth, and she killed them all. Pritchard barely survived, but his and Ravin's wounds didn't scar for months. Then she, the wraith, slaughtered the whole village, not sparing a single life, and disappeared. Are you scared, Juli?"

Jules gritted his teeth. He'd often wondered how many of the scars that marked Ravin's body were a reminder of that fight, but then, as time passed and new stories were told, he had forgotten about the wraith.

"Jules," Ravin's voice woke him from his memories. "Are you listening to me? I told you to get the horses. We'll follow the trace."

"Yeah, sure," the boy muttered absent-mindedly.

He ran down the hill, where their steeds waited, cropping at the blade of grass that had fought their way through the thick layer of old leaves. Clicking his tongue at Opal, he took the white mare and Grumbler's rein and led the horses toward the two adults that had already followed the trace.

"Just to be sure," Lord Kedmon took the mare's reins from Jules. He strapped the axe to the saddle."Once we find this wraith, we'll kill her and it all will be over?"

Ravin stopped and turned around to face his old friend. His dark eyes sparkled brightly with gold magic, turning his irises almost honey - a shade Jules had never seen them assuming before.

"You can't kill an undead, Kedmon," the hunter shook his head. The long, metallic reila's handle rapped against the ground as he walked. "It's not how it works. You have to destroy both its body and spirit. And no, I don't have the means to destroy them now, but finding the wraith's den will be a good first step."

The magnate nodded slowly, visibly uneasy with the change of the hunter's eyes. They were like eyes of a predator, a wolf or an owl, barely human.