Geoffrey let out a loud shout, raising his rifle to point right at Charlie.

Charlie stepped back, bumping into Em. Both went down in a tangle as Geoffrey fired and missed. The soldier standing nearest to Em didn’t bother trying to shoot in close quarters. He drew a long knife and stabbed down at her, but she curled up, taking the strike on her arm instead of her head. The blade gashed her, but failed to penetrate deeply.

The remaining two men tried to tackle Reshid and Lonnie, but Lonnie moved incredibly fast. A moment later, he was standing behind his attacker with his arm wrapped around the other’s neck. Reshid managed to jump out of the way of the other man, but knew he wouldn’t be able to fight trained soldiers—he was unarmed, basically untrained, and his power was useless in a fight. But he couldn’t escape, either.

He didn’t realize that he’d forgotten about Geoffrey until he felt something hit the back of his leg, followed by what had to be a knee in the back of his neck, pinning him to the ground. Flailing in panic, his hand found the man’s ankle. Without thinking, he poured his essence into the man’s foot alongside his fear, anger, and desperation.

It did nothing. He felt Geoffrey flinch slightly, then the pressure on his neck redoubled. The world blurred.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched as a man rammed a knife into Lonnie’s gut. The water elementalist grunted, then grabbed the man’s neck with one hand and clamped the other over the man’s mouth. Eyes wide, the soldier convulsed once before Lonnie pulled his hand away and he crumpled, gore seeping from his nose, mouth, and eyes.

For the first time, Reshid regretted not having a power suited for violence.

In the distance, a horn began to sound an alarm. Reshid heard shouting in the near distance, and Lonnie moved out of his field of vision. Suddenly the weight on his neck was gone. Screams, growls, and less identifiable noises filled the air, and Reshid smelled smoke.

Sucking in a breath, he sat up, disoriented. Only seconds had gone by since he and his new friends met the patrol, and now all hell had broken loose. The other soldiers were gone, and no one was looking at him. The man who had been attacking Em was on the ground, grappling with a ghoul. Others ran down the street, climbing through windows or tearing down doors to reach the occupants. They each looked unique, but ghouls were easy to recognize—all of them looked wrong. They had odd numbers of inconsistently shaped limbs, horns, and other weird-looking features, as if their bodies had been put together by combining random bits of multiple people and animals. Of course, that wasn’t that far from the truth.

Reshid shuddered in revulsion, then flinched as a hand landed on his shoulder.

“Quick, over here,” Charlie said, pulling him up and into the alleyway that they’d come out of earlier.

“Are you hurt? It looked like that guy was trying to break your neck.” Reshid shook his head and waved him off, still catching his breath. Em was there waiting, hand pressed to her wound as Lonnie leaned around the corner ahead looking for more trouble. He jerked his head back, ducking down.

A moment later a ghoul stepped into the alley. It had been a woman once, but it wasn’t easy to tell now. Its legs ended in hooves, one cloven and the other rounded. Its face combined the features of several different people, and featured long boar-like tusks that jutted from its lower jaw. Most disturbingly, she had what appeared to be a child’s arm growing from her shoulder immediately above her full-sized left arm. The little hand strained in one direction, then another as if it had a mind of its own.

Lonnie leapt up, lunging at it with his knife. The ghoul, surprisingly quick, caught his arm and dodged before throwing him past her into the street. But, before it could follow, Charlie was there. Unarmed, he tackled the creature to the ground, holding it down and wrapping an arm around its neck. Brownish light flickered once, twice as he struck at it with the other. Then the ghoul flexed, throwing him off and into a wall. He sagged to the ground, stunned, but the ghoul didn’t follow.

Instead, it was scrabbling at its midsection with its claws, wailing with fear and rage.

“What? Itches. Hurts. No. No. Bad. BAD!”

As they watched, the howling became more and more frantic, the ghoul scratching first at its belly, then at its arms. A few seconds later, the scratching intensified, long nails gashing into the creature’s skin, though it didn’t seem to notice. The blood oozed red, then darkened to a sickening brown color. Then it collapsed, gasped for a few seconds and stopped moving.

For a moment, everyone just stared as the corpse continued to shrivel and liquefy malodorously. Charlie grimaced as he stood up and shook out his hand, then wiped it against his pants as if to clean it.

“Wow. Um, that’s… a lot more disgusting than I expected.”

Em wheezed out a laugh, more with relief than actual amusement. Neither she nor Reshid had moved—they were unarmed, and didn’t know how to fight properly besides. Reshid had no intention of facing down a crazy ghoul. What was he going to do, heal it to death?

She stepped forward and leaned to the side a bit, trying to get a better look out into the street. “Gods, Charlie. When it threw you, I thought we were dead. Is Lonnie alright?”

Em was short enough that Reshid, following right behind her, could easily see right over her head.

Lonnie was sitting up, apparently unhurt but disoriented. To the left, toward the center of the village, a group of revenants were fighting a mob of ghouls. One of the creatures went down messily, and Reshid saw Hasan and several of his revenant guards through the gap. They were outnumbered, but the ghouls were losing badly. Hasan moved far too quickly for someone who was partly made of stone, pulping another ghoul’s head with a fist as others were incinerated, torn to pieces, or crushed.

In moments, the fight was over. Hasan barked a few orders, and they split into smaller groups to root out the remaining attackers. Then they saw Idrin, waving at Lonnie and heading their way with the ram-revenant, whose name was Yannick. As it turned out, what looked like a bitter rivalry between the two was also a kind of friendship. They liked to pit their teams against one another and argued constantly about the respective benefits of elemental or bestial essences, but at the end of the day they spent so much time together.

Reshid and the others stepped out of the alley, waving back. Just as he was about to call out, Idrin and Yannick stopped in their tracks, eyes wide. Hesitating, Reshid looked around.

Someone was standing over Lonnie, one hand resting on top of his head. It wasn’t a ghoul—at least not like the others. Tall, bald, and pale white, with red eyes that stood out against its wan skin. It was wearing a fancy robe, which seemed jarringly inappropriate for someone attacking a village.

Lonnie’s eyes were rolled up into his head, and he convulsed as purple light flickered out of him and into the creature. Definitely some kind of ghoul, then. Lonnie sank to the ground, unconscious. He was a water revenant, but the creature had drawn more than just water essence out of him. Having your own native essence drawn out and consumed wasn’t fatal any more than drawing the essence out of a tree was, but it wasn’t exactly safe or painless.

With a bellow, Yannick charged. Reshid and the others flinched back a step. They had once seen the ram-revenant demolish a stone wall in a demonstration, and they weren’t eager to be anywhere near what he was going to hit now.

The creature bared its teeth and caught Yannick by the horns. At the same time, a ball of fire from Idrin caught him in the face. Its head jerked back, but it didn’t let go. Yannick’s bellow turned into a bleat as the creature wrenched at him, breaking one of the horns off and then bringing it down on his head once, twice. As he fell bonelessly to the ground, another fireball struck it in the chest, setting its robes on fire. It shrieked and moved in a blur of motion toward Idrin.

With a sound of impact, the fire elementalist crumpled to the ground. The creature tore off the burning robe, revealing a pale and thin body with burns on its arms, chest, and head.

Revenants didn’t look like corpses, in general, but they didn’t really look alive, either. Most had discolored or leathery skin and some didn’t breathe or move normally anymore. All of them had mutations—some visible indication of their attuned essence. Ghoul mutations were more severe, out of control because they consumed so many different and often conflicting essences.

This creature didn’t look human, and it didn’t look like a ghoul. Its mutations weren’t random. Its body was symmetrical and the proportions made sense.

Ignoring them completely and unconcerned with its own nakedness, it stalked back toward Lonnie. As it did, the burns closed up and healed, crusty blisters falling off to reveal new, pink skin.

Something was very wrong here. What was it?

As Reshid and Em shrank back into the alley. Charlie had other ideas. He moved forward to intercept the creature. The idiot was going to die, Reshid was sure of it. As it approached, he struck at it, essence flickering around his fist just as it had with the ghoul.

It didn’t even slow down, dodging the blow and bringing the horn down on his wrist in the same motion. It broke with a sickening snap, and Charlie reeled back, clutching at his arm. Ignoring him, it casually tossed the improvised weapon back at Yannick, who was lying in a heap, and picked up Lonnie’s unmoving form. Then it simply left, walking down the road toward the forest at a fast but not overly hurried pace.

“What the hell is it doing?” Reshid asked.

Em looked at him, then at the street.

“It’s taking him. Probably to drain him as soon as he recovers. I heard ghouls do that sort of thing sometimes. Like livestock.” She shuddered. “We need to follow it!”

Reshid didn’t want to leave Lonnie in the clutches of some kind of super-ghoul, but he wasn’t about to go chasing after it, either.

Charlie was tucking Lonnie’s knife into his belt and shaking out his hand, wrist apparently already healed. The others were still unconscious, or worse.

He called over to them.

“Em and I can try to follow at a distance. It’s not exactly hiding. You need to get those two back on their feet, and report to Hasan. Maybe we can figure out where it’s going.

Some of his skepticism must have been showing on his face. Em nodded and clapped Reshid on the shoulder.

“We’ll get back as soon as we can.”

They had seen the same thing he had. If they waited, they might never find it, and Lonnie would pay the price. Sighing to himself, pulled out his crystal and went to check on Yannick and Idrin. If he hurried, maybe the stronger revenants could catch up and keep his friends from getting captured as well.