Adelaide awoke to silence.

  It was the kind of silence that did not belong in the infirmary. Even on its quietest days, the hum of life always existed within those halls. She drifted between sleep and wakefulness, her thoughts sluggish, unwilling to cohere. A nightmare? No. The darkness pressed against her too heavily. Reality. But something was missing. The noise. The life. The groans of the sick, the soft murmurs of prayer. There was only silence. No hurried footsteps, no whispered prayers to gods long since deaf to their pleas. Only the distant buzz of lanternlight, the steady drip of water from some unseen crack in the ceiling, and the slow, shallow sound of her own breath.

  The last time she had walked these halls.... before this disaster had begun. How much time had passed? She remembered the nurse who had hesitated, Sister Elenna, had been at the far cot, pressing a damp cloth to a fevered brow. The scent of herbs, of life, had still clung to the air. Now, the only scent was rot.

  Surprisingly, she realized then, she wasn’t dead.

  Her body was cold, but not with the chill of the grave. Pain radiated from her skull, pulsing behind her eyes. She could feel the stickiness of her drying blood beneath her as she moved her right arm up to her head, her fingers prodding the still damp black hair that had flattened itself over the crack along her skull.

  And then—

  Her arm.

  The memory returned in a rush. The patient. The impossible rise. The attack. His teeth, sinking deep, tearing flesh, her blood pooling beneath her.

  Adelaide bolted upright, gasping. Her left arm screamed in protest. She clutched it, expecting to find the raw ruin of her flesh, the marks of the bite that should have doomed her. She remembered the bone-chilling sound of her own flesh being torn and consumed. She felt her stomach clench and bile rise to her mouth. But as her fingers skimmed the skin, she froze.

  The wound was gone.

  Her sleeve was still torn, a gaping hole where his teeth had ripped free. Her skin was bare beneath it, smooth save for the faintest discoloration, like a bruise long since faded. There was no blood. No stitches. No pain.

  No evidence of the violence committed.

  She exhaled sharply, hands shaking as she forced herself to breathe. This wasn’t possible. Her body had always healed quickly, mostly due to the Veilcraft magic she was trained to wield, but this… this was beyond reason.

  She reached for her tablet, fingers fumbling to find the smooth edge of the glyph on the side. It activated with the faintest pulse, its surface flickering to life, the magic powering it now waning. Time had clearly passed. Hours? A day? She had no way to know. But the reports...

  Her breath caught in her throat.

  The infirmary was abandoned. Never before had the infirmary been emptied, had hope been so lost that orders had come to leave the sick behind. In times of war, in times of occupation, the wardens remained true, upholding their promise and treating the sick and injured in these halls. But the reports were clear, and as Adelaide began to take in her surroundings, she saw it was all true.

  There were no nurses tending to the sick, no apothecaries preparing elixirs. Only overturned carts, shattered vials staining the floor with potions no one had been left to administer. The bodies she expected to see, that she remembered helping to pile in corners as they continued to die, faster and faster, were gone.

  They were all gone.

  She pushed herself to her feet, swaying for a moment before steadying, her hand reaching out for the wall for support, fingers sliding over the cool tiles. Her muscles felt foreign, as if they belonged to someone else entirely, her limbs stiff yet tinged with something unfamiliar. Something crawling beneath her skin.

  Adelaide felt her years of training return to her. While she was alone, this was clearly not a safe place to remain, and she forced her body to return to her control. Spitting the bile from her mouth, she breathed deeply to calm her racing heart, doing her best to ignore the retched smells surrounding her. If this was the state of the infirmary, she knew the city beyond would only be worse, but she needed to investigate, to find out what had happened, and to find the wardens.

  As she began to parse out a plan, she heard the faintest of sounds coming from behind her, at the end of the hallway she was standing in. She turned sharply, facing the double doors that marked the entrance into the infirmary. The sound was too quiet, too deliberate.

  A shadow shifted near the entrance.

  She was not alone. With all that had happened, doubt flooded her, the unfortunate conclusion forming that this was not likely someone she wanted to encounter. The combat training all wardens received returned to her and, while her muscles still seemed to fight her, she crouched low to the ground, taking up a stance in the shadows that would hopefully give her time to surprise and outmaneuver whatever was about to enter the building. Her hand rest on the hilt of the dagger at her waist. She did not enjoy killing. While it was a skill she had practiced, her heart belonged to healing, helping.

  Adelaide pressed herself further against the wall, straining her senses to pick up anything beyond the steady thrum of her own pulse, her breathing becoming more rapid. The sound was too controlled, too deliberate. Each step placed with intention, without the telltale stagger of the sick or the panicked urgency of a healer rushing to save a life. This was something else. A presence that moved with purpose, the kind that only belonged to those trained to track, to hunt.

  She forced herself to breathe evenly, forcing back the creeping tension that coiled in her limbs. If this had been an infected, one of the risen, she figured the precision and training would be lost, overcome by the animalistic instincts she had seen in the man who had attacked her. But there was none of that. Just the soft padding of boots, silent yet assured, betraying the presence of someone disciplined in their movements.

  Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  A hunter’s tread.

  She exhaled, steadying herself. Her fingers loosened around the dagger at her waist as a sliver of logic broke through the haze of fear. Whoever was out there, they were not stumbling blindly in search of prey. They were not mindless, ravenous things. They were moving with awareness, with precision.

  They were trained.

  They were deliberate.

  And if they were deliberate, then they were one of her own.

  A Veilwarden.

  She knew before she even saw the silver-trimmed cloak as the figure stepped through the front doors, the glint of a warded dagger, just like her own, at their hip. A mask concealed the lower half of their face, but she knew the voice before they spoke. She let out a sigh of relief.

  “Adelaide.”

  Priya.

  Relief warred with dread. Priya was the closest thing she had to family and Adelaide could not imagine the grief she would feel if Priya were to have been lost in this...mess. But the look in her eyes was familiar and heartbreaking. It stunned Adelaide to see this look in her friends' eyes, to see it directed at her. Adelaide had seen that look before. She knew it well, as it was one that she felt forming on her own face many times during her years as a warden. She had seen it on others, on battlefield medics forced to make decisions no one should have to. More recently on other wardens preparing to put down something no longer quite human.

  “Stay back,” Priya warned, voice tight. Her fingers twitched at her side, hovering near the dagger. “Don’t come any closer.”

  Adelaide swallowed hard, raising her hands, bringing them away from her own weapon. It pained her to hear the cold in her friend’s voice. “Priya, I don’t understand. I...I don’t remember. What happened?”

  “You were bitten,” Priya said. “You shouldn’t be standing. No one survives that, Adelaide.”

  “I remember that! I don’t remember anything after. And I know no one else survived. But clearly, I did.” She knew so little about what was going on.

  “Yes.” Priya’s grip tightened. “You did.”

  Something cold slid down Adelaide’s spine. This conversation was not going as expected. It was clear her friend did not feel the relief she had felt upon seeing a familiar face. “What does that mean?”

  “It means you’re either the cure, or you’re something worse.”

  Adelaide’s heart pounded. “You think I’m infected? Possessed?”

  Priya’s jaw clenched. “I think we don’t understand this disease. I think we’ve watched it consume hundreds, we know it’s consumed thousands across our lands, and now you stand here, unscathed, when you shouldn’t be standing at all. I watched him attack you, Adelaide! I watched as he...” Her voice caught in her throat and Priya dropped her eyes from hers.

  Adelaide stared at her, words failing. Her friend couldn’t even look at her.

  The voices whispered again then, clawing at her mind. She tried to block them out, to focus on Priya, but they swelled, overlapping, speaking in tongues she shouldn’t understand but did. Her skin burned. The sickness was inside her, becoming her.

  “The others are gone,” Priya continued, softer now. “All of the dead rose. It all happen so quickly after the first one who attacked you. They turned most of the others. We tried to stop them. We failed. The wardens had to...we had to abandon everyone. We had to abandon the infirmary.”

  Adelaide’s stomach twisted. The infirmary had been full. Dozens of patients, healers, nurses. Gone. Devoured or turned. She thought of the impossible way the man had moved, the way the sickness had twisted him from within. And she thought of her own arm, whole and unbroken, where there should have been ruin.

  “Then why am I alive?” she whispered.

  Priya hesitated. And that hesitation was answer enough. Priya was a warden. She had sworn the same oaths, to protect life and the living. Adelaide could fill in the silence in that moment, knowing exactly what Priya was planning to do.

  Adelaide’s gaze flickered to the door behind her. She could run, she needed to run. She knew the streets better than anyone. She could disappear into the underbelly of Duskmere, find someone who could tell her what had happened to her, find some way to help the others, to stop this from spreading even further.

  But Priya was faster, and they both knew it.

  The moment Adelaide shifted, what she had hoped to be an imperceivable movement of weight from one foot to the other, Priya moved. The dagger at her hip was now in her hand, silver gleaming in the lanternlight, its edge laced with warding runes. A Veilwarden’s treasured blade, made to sever curses. To end things that should not be. Something Adelaide never expected to be on the wrong end of.

  Adelaide barely had time to react before Priya lunged.

  The world exploded into motion. She twisted, instincts guiding her hands. She moved faster than she should have, faster than she ever had. Adelaide could hold her own in a fight, but this was far beyond what she knew she was capable of. She felt that unfamiliar feeling in her body again, and this time it was if it had taken control. She caught Priya’s wrist mid-strike. For a single, breathless moment, they were locked in place, strength against strength.

  And then Adelaide saw it, the flicker of fear in Priya’s eyes.

  Not for herself.

  For Adelaide.

  Because she wasn’t just fast. She was stronger. Faster. Something had changed inside her. Something she didn’t understand and that made her closest friend fear her.

  A rush of voices clawed at her mind, whispering in a language she had never known yet somehow understood. Words crawled beneath her skin, seeping into her bones. Everything was so unnatural about her. She embodied everything the Veilwarden’s swore to eradicate, sickness, death, the unnatural.

  Adelaide had spent her life believing that she had to stop the unnatural.

  But what if she was the unnatural now?

  She didn’t have time for the crisis that was building inside her.

  This distraction gave Priya the upper hand she needed and, with a final, desperate twist, Priya wrenched herself free. She staggered back, her blade catching only air. Adelaide didn’t wait.

  She ran.

  Out of the infirmary, into the streets of Duskmere. The air was thick with the stench of sickness, even more so than in the halls of the infirmary. Rot and despair settled deep in her lungs and refused to let go. Smoke from hastily burned bodies mingled with the damp, metallic tang of old blood, creating a fog that blurred the line between the living and the dead.

  Because here, in Duskmere, she realized the dead were not staying dead.

  Shadows stretched unnaturally between the broken lanterns and the abandoned stalls, cast long by the flickering light of torches left to burn in the hands of the desperate. Somewhere, just beyond sight, a low moan rose and was abruptly cut short. The silence that followed was worse.

  Adelaide paused, fingers curling into her sleeves as the weight of it all pressed in. The fevered whispers of survivors, the distant echo of steel against bone, the quiet horror that slithered through the alleyways like an unseen predator.

  She had fought, survived, stitched together wounds that should have been fatal. But standing there, wrapped in the decay of a city that no longer felt like her own, a terrible thought gnawed at the edges of her mind.

  She was no longer certain she belonged among the living.