<h2>Chapter 1</h2>


    I could taste the fear in the air.


    It was bitter. Like the shell of a pecan.


    I wiped my nose with the back of my glove. The brisk winter air wasn’t helping to calm anyone’s nerves either. The warm smell of urine told me that someone had succumbed to fear. It wasn’t unexpected, we were about to enter a zombie nest after all.


    This wasn’t my first time out hunting, I was apprenticed to Master Bran, one of the most respected Bokor in the Kingdom. By my master’s side, I had helped dispatch dozens of zombies, and their more sentient cousins, the Touched. Zombies were mindless savages, reanimated by the Touched plague, they roamed the barren lands outside the city walls looking for any hint of magic that they could devour. To the untrained person, they were terrifying. To a hunter, they were only a problem in large numbers.


    The Touched were a different story. Unlike their zombie brethren, the Touched still had their wits. Worse, the plague, buried deep within them, that would turn them into zombies once they died, gave them access to magic while they were alive. I had only met a few of them in my sixteen years of life, and they were not something that I would like to meet without my master.


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    One of the townsfolk stirred nearby. My master had to forbid them from coming, but they had insisted. At best a few of them were going to get infected, the lucky ones would get killed outright.


    Any of the citizens who got infected would become one of the Touched. My master couldn’t leave anyone alive that would begin infecting others. The hunters were sworn to destroy the Touched plague and reclaim land outside the walls for normal humans. As one of the few groups that were trained to fight the blight, it was our job to protect the rest of the humans.


    We were just outside of their city. A few days ago, zombies had broken through the outer wall and killed a few guards. It wouldn’t have been too devastating, but the mayor had insisted it was urgent. Urgent meant more money, which the hunters would never turn down.


    The zombies had fled the field as soon as we arrived. That meant there was a Touched nearby, one strong enough to direct the zombies to get away from danger.


    The nest was in a cave about a mile away from the outer wall. It had been easy to find. Zombies had destroyed everything living outside of the city walls. It didn’t take long to find a cave that had seen recent traffic. It also hadn’t been difficult for some glory seekers from the city to follow us, which is how we had come to this situation.


    “Boy!” Master Bran’s stern voice rode the silence, leaving it undisturbed.


    I nodded. There was no need for me to answer. We were about to start hunting.