Snarling, Drust reached out to catch himself on the wall as he stumbled. Finding no purchase, he thumped down near the remnants of the stray corpse.
	Elayra’s gaze barely flicked to Ghent as the other teen moved to her side, her attention locked on Drust. She pushed from the wall as the Knight swiftly turned to get back to his feet. She angled herself between him and Ghent.
	“Don’t lose to it, Dru—!”  she started, ignoring Ghent’s first order. But, instead of using her as a shield as she’d expected, Ghent grabbed her arm, his last demand echoing in the alleyway as he tugged at her.
	She lurched after him, momentarily too surprised to resist. Heat radiated in her chest. Anger fully drowned out her fear, a new kind of disgust filling the space of her revulsion of the town. It was [i]his[/i] mess she was cleaning up.
	She clenched her teeth, got her footing, and yanked her arm from him. “Then leave!”
	She moved to shove Ghent’s back, but a familiar hand clamped around her mouth from behind and pulled her away. With his other, Drust snatched at Ghent’s hood again to wrench the teen back and silence him as he’d done with Elayra.
	Elayra stumbled back into Drust, trapped against his chest. Trying to not inhale the now foul odor clinging to his glove, she reached for the hand to pry it off and slip out beneath his hold.
	“Quiet!” he snapped, the word a gravely hush near her ear. A glance at Drust’s face—closer to her in his half-crouch—stilled her.
	Drust’s pupils fought for more real estate in the black-veined red of his irises. But, more importantly, he wasn’t focused on his charges. Instead, he stared, hard, at the alley’s opening. 
	She stiffened and eyes widened as she heard what the Knight had caught well before her: conversing voices.
	Or, rather, a poor simulation of a conversation. First two voices, then three, then four. They echoed around the trio, their exact direction impossible for Elayra to pinpoint. Each of them was not quite right for a human voice, yet still undeniably human. Their ‘words’ jerked about in snippets, general sounds shoved together into a near incomprehensible mush.
	The broken language of broken minds.
	They had drawn the attention of the Cursed.