The Dead Who Walk Behind

The dead are not hunting the living. They are going back to work.Wounded, hungry, and months removed from the bloodshed that nearly killed him, wandering swordsman Shōsei Mutō wants only a meal, a repaired carrying strap, and enough road behind him to reach Yunomine.Then he finds a laborer trapped beneath a bridge.The man should be dead.His wounds do not heal. His blood does not behave like a living man’s. And when Shōsei follows the trail into the mountain settlements, he discovers something worse than a corpse that can walk: the dead here are still useful.They carry timber. They repeat old tasks. They obey instructions they should no longer remember.And someone has learned how to keep them working.A vampire has been feeding nearby, but the obvious explanation begins to fall apart. One body was already dead before the bite. Another remembers an old command but loses a new one. A witness saw the aftermath of a killing, not the killing itself. And beneath the burial ground lies something no sword can cut and no prayer can easily explain.To uncover what happened, Shōsei must separate murder from monstrosity, mercy from convenience, and care from control.Because every answer costs time.Every mistake costs labor.And the longer the dead keep walking, the harder it becomes to decide who has the right to make them stop.THE DEAD WHO WALK BEHIND is a dark historical horror mystery of wounded samurai, returning corpses, human greed, and the terrible usefulness of the dead.Book III of THE HOUSES OF BLOOD.