Free Crisped + Sere (Immemorial Year Book 2) by TJ Klune

whatever happened next.
    Until then, though.
    Pivoting on his heel, he brought the bow and arrow up. Pulled on the string. His line of sight followed down the arrow’s shaft. Four steps and he was in Grangeville. Four more and he was pressed against the side of a house. Took a breath. Stepped out.
    He followed the footprints. The trails of frozen blood. He could see the story in them. Of doors barricaded to keep the monsters out. Of doors smashed in as the monsters swarmed. Pieces of clothing caught in the wood as people were dragged from their homes. Bullet holes. Windows shattered. An axe in the middle of a dried blood splatter, the handle splintered in half.
    No bodies. No people. No voices. No screams.
    That sickly sweet smell in the air.
    The black smoke rising over the rooftops.
    No one walked the planks atop the walls.
    No one moved inside the houses.
    No one called out to him as he moved quietly through the town.
    No one tried to kill him as the sun disappeared behind the clouds.
    He stopped, blocks away from the center of Grangeville where the smoke rose to the sky. The snow at his feet was all red now, a mixture of slush and gristle. Cavalo was sure he saw a tongue mixed in with the dirt. A finger. A clump of hair.
    Blood , Bad Dog muttered. Blood, blood, blood, blood. His whiskers dripped with it, his legs a rusty red.
    Cavalo knew what burned ahead. Knew what he’d find.
    Run, run, run , the bees chanted.
    The air was so thick. So sticky sweet. Like meat cooking on a fire.
    He picked a house at random. One close to the center of Grangeville. The door had been torn off its hinges. The furniture on the lower level had been overturned. Bad Dog’s toenails clicked on the wooden floors. They passed the kitchen. Dishes broken on the floor. Blood on the cabinets. He found the stairs and went up. Passed a child’s room with drawings on the walls, the bedsheets strewn about the room.
    The hallway toward the back of the house was covered in debris. On the wall to the left, red words dripping in obscene streaks: I LIKE IT WHEN THEY RUN and THESE ARE SOME GOOD EATS.
    There was a photograph hanging on the wall at the end of the bloody graffito. A man and woman. A child. Cavalo couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a recent photo. Cameras were rare. A nail had been hammered into the man’s head. The glass had cracked. A human eye hung from the edge of the nail. It was small. The iris was blue, fading to gray. Cavalo wondered which of the people it’d come from.
    Blood , Bad Dog whispered. There’s only blood here. MasterBossLord, there is so much blood.
    “I know,” Cavalo croaked out.
    They reached the far room. It was mostly undisturbed. The covers on the bed had been thrown to the side, as if someone or someones had been awoken in the middle of the night to the sounds of the crashes from below or screams from the child’s room down the hall. How many of them had there been? How many other houses looked this same way? He wondered if he’d known the people who lived here. He wondered what it meant when someone such as him couldn’t stop shaking.
    He approached a broken window that overlooked the town center, shards of glass on the floor below. He told himself he knew what was out that window. What he’d see. What to expect. What it would mean.
    But when he saw the hundreds of bodies piled up in the snow, the hundreds of bodies of men and woman and children thrown atop each other as if they were garbage, he found he wasn’t prepared for it. Their faces. Their open mouths. Their silent screams. Their arms and fingers. Feet that stuck out into the air. Little faces that had seen things no little face should ever have seen.
    And they were all on fire.
    The dead had been piled high into the air and lit on fire. The sweet smell of burning flesh clung to the air. The smoke from the blackened skin rose toward the gray sky.
    Dead. The town was dead.
    Grangeville had never stood a chance. Not in the middle of the