What would she do now? Her immediate impulse to off herself hadn’t worked, and she couldn’t stay here, not with the body. Yasha looked back at it for a moment before quickly turning around again. She couldn’t even look at it without feeling horrible. She hadn’t even known the man’s name.
No, she needed to get out of here. Maybe she would return later to bury him, but right now, she needed to get away. She might run into some undead who wanted to eat her brains out if she was lucky. Despite the thought, Yasha didn’t want to get torn into pieces by a horde of zombies. She might be suicidal, but that seemed like a horrible way to go, and with her resistance to mundane weapons, it would probably take them hours, if not days, to gnaw away at her.
Yasha shuddered as she stood up to summon her wings. If not for her resistance, she might be dead now. Yasha didn’t know how to feel about that. Did she really want to die? No, not really, but if living meant killing people just to survive, Yasha wasn’t sure it was worth it. But surely there were things worth living for in this world if she could stay away from people. Her wings were one thing. She could freaking fly. How awesome was that?
Yasha flexed her now fully functioning wings, feeling how powerful they were. The bones had healed nicely, probably cause of the pleasant influx of power she had received. Her mood soured again as she remembered where that power had come from. It had been the best sex of her new and previous life, but now she felt sick. Would she be reminded of it every time she used her powers? There had to be a way for her to live peacefully. She knew that avoiding people would only delay the inevitable. Her lusts would grow, and her hunger with them until eventually she gave in to her needs. Taking a little off the top hadn’t worked as she had thought. Her inner slut had taken over as she had drained the man dry, and she had liked it, reveled in it. Maybe she could hunt bad people if she couldn’t hold herself back.
The thought stuck with her as she turned invisible and opened the door. It wasn’t a bad idea. She could become a bounty hunter and actually do some good. She couldn’t fight, but she wouldn’t have to. Yasha looked back into the room one last time before closing the door. She had had this guy wrapped around her little finger. He would have done anything for her, turned himself in, or fallen on his blade. She could have criminals lining up just for a glimpse of her before she had them arrested, but not before having a little fun. It would be a lonely life. No one would love her, not really, just like before. Maybe it was what she deserved.
The night air felt good in her lungs as Yasha soared above the treetops, invisible. They had really been going at it for a while, but she could still see perfectly well in the darkness. There was no sign of undead in the area, and she could get no sense of any nearby with her strange eromancy senses. They had left plenty of tracks she discovered as she landed in a clearing among the trees. Yasha had thought they would simply start milling around aimlessly or return to the church when they lost track of her, but that wasn’t the case. Would they just keep going forever? Hopefully, there wasn’t a town or a settlement nearby, but then where had the man come from? Yasha had a bad feeling about this. It was her fault that the undead had left the old church. If anyone else was hurt because of her, no, she didn’t want to think about that.
Yasha took off again in the direction of where the tracks led, and soon enough, there was light on the horizon and the sound of groaning zombies. The hoard had surrounded a small fort. The zombies mindlessly scratched at the wooden wall as skeletons methodically loosed arrows at anyone brave enough to peek over the fortifications. The few people she could see inside were hunkering down and not doing much to the undead outside their walls. The situation looked stable for now, but those people would run out of food if it continued like this. The dead could keep this up forever, but a regular person could not. If she could somehow deal with the skeletons, they wouldn’t have to worry about getting shot and could kill the zombies one after the other, safe atop their walls.
As Yasha watched, a couple of pale forms scrambled over the walls without anyone noticing until the doors started to open slowly, and a bunch of zombies swarmed in. There was a commotion and the sounds of fighting, but the guards seemed to get the situation under control as the gates closed a moment later. These people really were toast if she couldn’t find a way to help them. The zombies were bad enough, but those pale small things crawling on all fours looked pretty smart.
No one saw her as she quietly glided over the walls to land behind the gates. The feel of all those undead surrounding her on all sides was oppressive. Yasha struggled to shut out all that endless hunger and had to concentrate if she didn’t want to be constantly bombarded with it. Compared to that, the humans she could feel on this side were much more pleasant. Fear, anxiety, and stress that had set in long before the zombies had arrived were the most common things she could feel, but there was also pain. Things hadn’t gone as smoothly as they had appeared from the outside.
Dead zombies littered the ground. Among them stood four guards arguing over a downed man clutching his arm and bleeding profusely. They were dressed similarly to the man she had drained, with long daggers stuck through belts around their waists. They were arguing. Yasha couldn’t understand a word they were saying, of course, but from what she could gather from her senses, they couldn’t agree on what to do with him. Some wanted to kill him, borne out of a growing fear that would soon take over. If this were like your standard zombie movie, the guy would quickly turn into one of the walking dead. These people should know better than her, but others didn’t feel that fear. Who only felt loyalty to a friend and didn’t want to kill him. Whatever the truth was, things would turn to blows if something didn’t change. Yasha could help with that.
Dampening their fear was different from enflaming lust, but it still worked, although it took much more energy than she had expected. All the same, the two that wanted to kill the man finally huffed and stormed off as their fear subsided to continue guarding the fort leaving the others to help their friend into a tent by the far wall. Yasha followed. Inside was a middle-aged man sleeping on a cot. The two guards woke him up, and he blinked blearily up at them in the darkness before lighting a lantern to see them more clearly. The tent must have been some sort of field hospital, for it was filled with all kinds of empty bottles and various strange tools.
If this guy was what passed for a doctor in this world, she wanted to know where he had gotten his license. Even Yasha could see that the wound was infected. The skin around it was an angry red, and the bite leaked blood and a yellow puss. The guard had only been bitten a few moments ago, yet the wound was this bad. Yet all the doctor did was sniff it of all things. Then he sprinkled some herbs on it before he wrapped the arm in an off-colored bandage. The nut case shooed the three guards out of the tent and promptly returned to sleep. Yasha had to remind herself that this was another world. Maybe they just didn’t know any better. She was this close to going off on one on the so-called doctor, but perhaps there was a better way.
The guard who had been bitten was placed in his own tent with another guard posted just outside. In case he turned, Yasha supposed, that was very sensible, but she still slipped past the guard at the entrance without issue. The man inside was not doing well. He constantly shifted in his little cot, sweating profusely as if he couldn’t get comfortable. He had stripped off his clothes completely, only a thin sheet covering him. Still, sweat was pouring off of him. He was probably running a fever. The man’s state of undress had Yasha’s thoughts running in a completely different direction for a moment, but she steeled herself. The man was handsome enough, if a little young, but she was not here to feed.
Yasha wanted to help the man, not drain him, but what could she do? She first thought she could redress the wound while the man slept. She knew little about medicine but was sure she could do a better job than that incompetent doctor. At least she thought she could disinfect the bite, she had no disinfectant, but some booze would do in a pinch. However, with how fast the symptoms had appeared and how quickly the man had deteriorated, she doubted any normal thing she could try would work. She would have to turn to magic. Anything Illusion magic could accomplish wouldn’t be real. Eromancy, though, had potential. Wounds weren’t very sexy, and her wing had healed after all. Surely she could do that for someone else.
Eromancy was fueled by arousal, she could manipulate the man’s feelings and desires, but she needed more. This would be dicey, but Yasha would have to take risks if she were to help t risks. He gasped quietly as Yasha appeared before him. So far, so good. He wasn’t screaming or calling out, just staring at her. To be safe, she dampened his alarm and let his curiosity take the lead. She lit a small candle on a nightstand beside his bed. All the while, the man’s fevered eyes followed her. He asked her something in his language, but Yasha simply shushed him as she gestured toward his injured arm. The man understood what she wanted and let her unwrap the bandage.