“Got ya, pretty,” the man murmurs, a leer pulling up against his ulcerous gums. “What’s a little thing like you doing running ’round the woods anyway? Don’t you know the Woven can get ya? They’re just about the only things left alive, besides me.”
I scramble away from him as he guffaws lewdly. He grabs my bare ankle and yanks me back toward him. Fine. He chose his own death, then. Bare skin on bare skin is all I need. I begin to drain the charge right from his nerves, feeding myself on his life. His eyes widen as he drops to his knees, the muscles of his face twitching and twisting his face into an agonized grimace. Being drained is probably the most painful death there is, but this thing is not a man anymore. The only people left in this world are murderers and rapists. They are scavengers, like the Woven. Only the most vicious of the vicious survived, and like the Woven the only real defense I have against them is to suck the life out of them when either attacks me.
“Witch?” he groans, confused and in excruciating pain. “But all the witches died in their cities.”
He falls to the ground, convulsing. At least death comes relatively quickly this way.
“Not all,” I say, kicking the stiff claw of his hand off my ankle. I scan his body quickly for anything I might need. Knife. Crossbow. Net. I take them all. I notice he has no willstone. This is the fourth one I’ve killed and none of them wore willstones. It’s a puzzle I have yet to solve.
The deaths of men like this have helped keep me alive so far. There is no food left in this part of the world. To find food you’d have to live through a trek across the Woven Woods and far enough out into the interior of the continent to escape the fallout. A trip like that would be suicide. Either the Woven would get you, or starvation would. All the plants close to the cities have died in the never-ending winter. The surviving animals were made sterile or unable to produce healthy offspring by the blast and then, in a matter of months, were hunted until there were no more.
It didn’t take long for this area of the world to run out of food, and getting to another area would mean somehow getting past an army of Woven—whose number seem to have grown, not fallen, since the holocaust. They have thrived in the ashes of this world, hemming in the few survivors of the blast until they all starve to death. The only living things I’ve been able to find on this side of the Woven Woods are the Woven and the scum who hunt me. I can live on the body energy of both with no need to eat, but water I cannot do without.
There is a large group of them gathered at what used to be a heavily walled ranch outside the city of Salem. Ranches like this are rare and existed only to raise luxury meats for the wealthy who could afford meat that was born and not grown in the Stacks. We used to send petty criminals and poor citizens who could not find work to these ranches. Work camps, we called them. As if calling indentured servitude work would make it better. I did this or helped at least. As Lady of Salem and head of the Coven I had to cosign the papers for worker transport along with Danforth, who was head of the other branch of government, the Council.
I tried to change the law. I tried to get the men fair pay, but too many powerful people made too much money off the ranches. Eventually I gave in to the pressure, and now I’m paying for it. I justified sending them to the ranches by telling myself I was protecting society from criminals. Ironically, what I did ensured that criminals would be all that is left of humanity.