Hunter of the Dead Read Online Free PDF

but with his mouth sealed couldn’t make it happen.
    “Shh, shh, little one,” she whispered, running her hand through his mop of sandy hair.
    With some difficulty (and not without cutting some huge gashes in his arms and legs), she leaned him back on his knees so that his hands and feet were still behind his back, but he was upright. One hand steady on his shoulder to keep him upright, she used her fingernail to rip open the stitches over his mouth.
    “I hurt,” he whispered.
    She wrapped her arms around him, not caring as she got entangled in the wire and her own clothes and hands were torn to shreds.
    “Yes, I know.”
    “I want my mommy.”
    “She’s not here, I’m afraid. You must get used to that idea.”
    “Will you be my new mommy?”
    “I’m sorry, little one,” she said, placing a finger on his lips, “but you must be brave. Give me a kiss now.”
    She pressed her lips to the child’s mouth. A loud, sickening crunch resounded through the air and she tore her head back from his face, moaning orgiastically as she chewed the child’s tongue. Part of his essence, his energy drained into her, and she felt it powering her, like turning over a motor, even as it cooled the burning hot ember of desire in her belly.
    The child was trying to cry again but she bit down around his nose, chewing deep through the nasal cavity and lapping at the blood as it pooled. At that point the boy was hemorrhaging blood. She cursed herself. The patriarch had taught her to start with the extremities, but, of course, in the heat of her lust, she had forgotten and gone straight for the head.
    She hoped the boy would not bleed out and turned to begin to suckle the flesh from his fingers, leaving cleaned bone and tendon jutting from his still unruined hands. Like a bowl of rice congealing and growing cold, she could taste the boy’s flesh growing more and more unappetizing as his blood pressure dropped and his heartbeat fluttered on the edge of stopping.
    Frantically she gobbled down great gulps of his arms and legs, and even snatched a handful of offal, but by the time she shoved it in her mouth the child had died. She spat the intestines and liver matter back out. Even still warm, it was no good to her with the boy dead. It was the life, the life itself that sustained her.
    “There was a time,” a voice dripping like molasses with pure malevolence intoned, “when our kind was not relegated to the shadows.”
    Her eyes turned upward and flitted around the ceiling. She staggered backwards, shocked to see her patriarch standing with his feet flat on the ceiling.
    “How long have you been there, Father Cicatrice?” she asked.
    “And there will be again.”
    In a smooth motion, Cicatrice fell, his feet tumbling over his head as he dropped, and he landed flat on the hard, oaken surface with an impact that would have shattered a mere mortal’s legs. He reached down and picked up the dripping ruin of the five-year-old’s corpse. To the young girl’s nose, it already stank of uselessness and decay. He tossed the carcass into a corner and gestured for her to stand and ring a large bronze bell which hung on the wall.
    She rang the bell and a small doorway to the kitchen and servants’ quarters opened. A grotesque, dun-skinned creature emerged. Cicatrice called such things “ghouls” and though she had not learned their full background, she understood that they were failed immortals. She shuddered at the thought that had Topan been less skilled, or she less strong, she might have ended up one of those degenerate things, useful only as a mobile midden heap.
    The ghoul delighted in its task, devouring the already dead flesh of the child, cracking bones and sucking the marrow from them, and noisily devouring every scrap. It howled over the razor wire, struggling to untangle its meal. It seemed the easy healing which was part of the Long Gift was not imparted to such base creatures.
    “Who was he?” she whispered.
    “The child of