The Serpent Bride
DarkGlass Mountain: Book One
Chapter OneMargalit, the Outlands
The eight-year-old girl crouched by the stone column in the atrium of her parents' house. Clad only in a stained linen shift, she hugged her thin arms tightly about herself, her eyes wide and darting under her bedraggled and grimy fair hair.
The house was cold and still, and the girl's breath frosted as she hyperventilated.
The foul liquid of rotting cadavers streaked her face and arms. For many days now the girl had crept about the house, seeking out the bodies of her parents (almost unrecognizable, four weeks after their death), rubbing the stinking, viscous liquid that had leaked from their flesh over her body, sucking it from her fingers.
All she wanted was to die, too.
It had been a bad month. Four weeks ago everyone in the house—save the little girl—had died within a day of the first person falling sick. Thirty-four people—not just the girl's parents and siblings, but her three aunts, their husbands, their children, her grandmother, and the household ... read full excerpt from Serpent Bride, The ebook
