Shadows Return

little, clear and grey and calm.
    Micum was so startled he almost dropped him.
    “Ah, here you are,” Seregil whispered, and those cracked lips tilted slightly into the old grin. “Alec said you’d come.”
    “Alec?”
    “Oh Illior, he’s alive, too!” Thero pressed two fingers gently to Alec’s throat, then unslung his water skin and wet Alec’s parched lips as Micum did the same for Seregil. “But how? I saw his ghost!”
    Seregil swallowed a few drops from the water skin, then raised one finger slightly, pointing to the child. “He did it. Sebrahn.” His eyelids closed again, but he was still breathing. And smiling.
    Micum glanced up at the child again. It still looked like a girl to him, with all that hair. His eyes were closed and he hadn’t moved, but Micum could see the long tracks of dried tears on the boy’s pale dusty cheeks. Micum reached out to see if he was breathing, but Thero grabbed his hand. “Don’t! That’s no child. Can’t you see?”
    “See what?”
    The child opened his eyes and Micum saw that they were the color of steel. “What is it?”
    “I don’t know.” Thero was squinting now, as if the child was giving off a bright light that Micum couldn’t see. “It has human form, but there’s something else showing just around the edges—And magic! It’s like a storm in him, but muted.”
    Sebrahn, as it was called, whimpered and crawled slowly past Thero to stroke Alec’s hair. The wizard scuttled back away from it, wide-eyed.
    Micum didn’t doubt Thero was seeing something he wasn’t, but his heart went out to the child-like thing all the same. That was, until it lifted Alec’s left hand to his mouth and licked weakly at the dry blood there.
    “Bilairy’s Balls!”
    “It’s all right,” Seregil rasped as his eyes fluttered open again. “He’s starving. Eats…”
    “Blood,” Thero finished for him, looking appalled.
    “Alec’s. Just a little,” Seregil whispered as his eyes slid shut again and his voice failed. “Please, help him. Saved us. Save him…”
    “You can’t be serious,” gasped Thero.
    “You heard him,” Micum said. “He’s in no shape to explain.” He took out his knife and pulled Alec’s hand from Sebrahn’s grip. The child was surprisingly strong, but gave up with another pitiful little whimper when Micum gently insisted.
    “Look at that.” Micum showed the wizard the tips of Alec’s fingers, all stippled with small scabs. “I guess that’s how they do it.” He nicked the least damaged finger and Sebrahn lunged forward, grabbing Alec’s hand and sucking frantically on Alec’s finger.
    Micum watched in mixed wonder and revulsion. “I don’t suppose you could get word to Magyana to send us one of those translocations of hers? I don’t know what Seregil meant when he said this little mite saved them, but it can’t be much help to them anymore. We have to get them somewhere safe, and quickly.”
    “Translocations don’t work that way, and even if they did, the shock of the magic would surely kill Seregil, weak as he is, and probably Alec, as well.”
    Micum looked around, trying to ignore the loud sucking noises. “There’s no shelter in sight. We’ll have to make do with the tarp for tonight. Can you do more of that healing on them?”
    “I can, but I don’t know how much good it will do. They need a drysian.”
    “Do what you can. And give them more water. The child, too.”
    Micum left him to it and led the packhorses away from the carnage. Not far on he found a dry gully deep enough to hide the horses. He used the tarp they’d brought to make a small lean-to, spread the bedrolls, and rode back for the others.
    He found Thero still bent over their friends. The strange child hadn’t moved.
    Thero had their dirty coats open and was inspecting their chests. “Look here!” he exclaimed, pointing to what was obviously a freshly healed arrow wound on Alec’s chest. “Seregil claimed this happened yesterday.”
    “But that would have gone right through his heart, and a lung, too.”
    “I know. Seregil has a similar scar here under his shoulder, and one that went into the large artery in his thigh.”
    “We call that a ‘man killer.’ How in Bilairy’s name did they survive, half-starved as they are, much less heal?”
    “Seregil kept insisting that this—creature did it, though I can’t get enough sense out of him to know how, and it seems to be mute.”
    “Never mind. All that matters is getting them