Read Online The Graveyard Shift by Brandon Meyers, Bryan Pedas - Free Book Online

the road, I catch glance of the woman who’d flagged me down. She looks like a rabbit, quivering timidly, just waiting to bolt off. But she knows better.
    “I… What I said was true,” she explains, nearly tripping over her own feet as she backs up in the tall grasses. “Well, I don’t have a child, but the Rohkai, they did ambush me. And they demanded I trick you, or, or…” She’s beginning to hyperventilate. “Or they were going to rape and kill me. Please. I swear it.”
    I believe her, and though I’m still angry (mostly at myself for not seeing this coming), I want to use this to my advantage, so I tell her, “Go back to Fairhaven, then, and tell Jarl Strolf and Voss of Aleria that Robb was ambushed and killed alongside the road. Can you do this for me?”
    “Yes, but…” She chokes briefly on her tears. “Are you Robb?”
    She winces at the sound of something heavy striking the ground, and behind me, the Rohkai that just scooped his dirty entrails back into his body lays dead.
    “Just deliver that message exactly as I told you, and do it quickly.”
    I toss her the half-empty bag of gold coins that Voss had given me, and quickly mount my horse. I haven’t much time to get off the road and find a good hiding spot before Voss’s spies send word to Fort Highlock that I’m dead. And when they do, and they sleep comfortably, carelessly—that’s when I strike, and that’s when I rescue Mary. I can’t explain it, but I know somehow that she’s being held in that fort.
    I just know she is.
     
    *
     
    My axe looks and sounds like a miner’s pickaxe when I’m immersed in darkness, and it makes it that much easier to sneak into Highlock Mine.
    ‘Clink clink clink.’
    My axe digs into the side of a rock, carving away little more than a few sprinkles of rock, but it sounds like I’m mining ore and allows me to draw closer to the guard, who can’t see my armor in the torchlight.
    ‘Clink clink clink.’
    He thinks nothing as I pretend I’m walking toward a wheelbarrow, but then I circle behind him, raise my axe, and part his skull in half down to his neck. The body flops to the ground, but not before his ejected brains paint the rock wall. Considering this man was a full foot taller than me, this is no small achievement.
    Beside me, a miner in tattered rags is staring with his mouth agape, and the pickaxe falls out of his hands, landing beside the shackles that restrict the movement of his feet.
    “You’re free,” I tell him, “so long as you get out of here right this instant and don’t make a peep.”
    He’s about to say yes, but reconsiders it and turns on his heel to flee as fast as his shackles will allow.
    As Voss had said, the mine leads straight into the fortress, which I discover to be true as I continue through the mineshaft and reach a pair of double doors leading into the fortress’s wine cellar. There are two headless bodies lying behind me, and ahead of me I hear the idle chatter of two more bodies that do not yet know they’re dead.
    I take a celebratory swig of their alcohol after I spray the walls in blood, wine, and broken glass. It tastes like grape juice mixed with paint thinner, but it dulls my senses a bit and makes me forget the coagulating blood that’s covered my trembling hands.
    “Everything alright down there?” I hear from the stone steps leading up. “It sounds like a damn ruckus! You two drunken idiots knocked something over again, didn’t you?”
    “You’d better come check this out!” I yell in a muffled tone.
    “Bloody hell,” I hear, and after the thumps down the stairs get loud enough, I round the corner and deliver the axe’s blade straight into the Rohkai’s neck. The pain is so great that he bites down hard on his own tongue and a mixture of blood—from his tongue, and from the geyser in his neck—bubbles up out from his lips. It stains his red beard even redder, and I grab his staggering form and toss him back into the wooden chairs behind