Read The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One for Free Online Page A

drew his sword. “I would notch an arrow, if I were you. Something is very wrong here.”
    “Is that so, Mr. Scholar?” Mercer cocked an eyebrow and took her in with a side glance; sarcasm had been Nina’s language of choice, her acerbic wit never failing to make him laugh. Mercer smiled.
    They walked cautiously into Young Poe’s Keep, which was but a collection of clapboard huts, freestanding or adjoined to preexisting, ruinous houses. The buildings gathered closer together as they moved further along 23, as if conspiring in silent, unseen gestures over what to do with these nighttime nomads.
    While the small streetlights kept the path ahead lit, it consequentially blinded them from seeing into the shops and ruins surrounding it. It made Mercer especially nervous. He hadn’t expected there to be so many old houses still standing. Though most of their roofs had caved in and the roots of trees snaked deep into their foundations, the homes had not been razed by vandals or armies passing through as many of those in the Borderlands had been. These were peaceful lands, Mercer had to remind himself, hardly touched by warfare. So it didn’t seem right that things were so quiet, and that the homes were so dark. What had happened here? He didn’t have to ask himself; he knew. All the evidence was there but he didn’t want to believe it. Dead men weren’t supposed to come north of the Axe Man, but since when had the world worked as he had wanted it to?
    They came to a shop that was attached to an older building by plywood boards and metal siding. Its wood door was covered in chipped red paint and bent at an angle on its hinges. A piece of rusted iron hung outside with crude letters painted on it. It said blaksmith .
    “This is Darnell’s shop. He’s a metal worker and a good friend of my brother. I hope...” Brook didn’t finish her thought, but Mercer answered her as if she did.
    “I hope he’s okay too. Come on, let’s give it a look.” Brook nodded. She reached out to Leo through their mind link, told him to keep watch outside. Satisfied that he had listened, Brook turned to see Mercer trying the handle of the red door, which clicked open effortlessly. They walked into the room, which was ten shades of pitch darker than the outside. Jai Lin caught the little light there was and glowed like a beacon in the gloom.
    “Darnell?” Brook’s sotto voice hung in the darkness like a sheet on an updraft of hot, stuffy air. From out of the heavy silence came a terrible moan, and then the crash of a table of glasses and iron tools falling to the floor. The dead man was upon Mercer before he could see him.
    “Brook, get out of here!” Mercer yelled as the dead man’s momentum pushed him over and into another table of tools. Mercer dropped his sword, while a heavy wrench from the upended table found the windowpane behind it, shattering it into jagged pieces. A larger shard found the head of the dead man trying to get its rotted teeth into Mercer’s skin. A river of rank blood started pouring from the wound the glass made in the dead man’s head. It was making Mercer’s hands start to slip from the already slick, rubbery flesh around the corpse’s neck. He didn’t think he could hold him much longer.
    There was a muffled thunk, and the writhing of the dead man ceased. Mercer found himself holding aloft nothing more than a motionless, albeit very heavy, bundle of putrid meat. He blinked a few times, and saw Brook’s silhouette standing above him. She had found a long awl and stuck its spike through the dead man’s skull. Sticking a blade through a dead man’s brain was the surest way to kill one, some said the only way, and he was glad that Brook knew this.
    “Are you alright?” Brook asked him as he pushed the corpse off.
    “Yeah, never better.” He was soaked with the stale blood of the dead man and saw that his hands were shaking. He hadn’t been taken by surprise by a dead man in some time, but as he looked