My scalp prickled with a sense of watchful eyes. I turned again and the blood froze in my veins. Clad all in shadows from cowl to boots to the skeins of inky black flowing off his shoulders, a figure—a creature—stood over Kael’s vibrant form.
Tethered around his body was a thick, golden strand. Like the heavy ropes we used to lift the stuffed fishing nets onto the longships. The opposite end of the strand disappeared into the shadows, like a line to find his way through the darkness.
A vicious grin split from beneath his hood, followed by the slice of wicked copper eyes.
“Melder.” The voice was as cold as the fiercest frosts and sliced across my heart. A sound heard somewhere within, as though part of my soul. “At long last, you’re found.” The shadow made a sound, like it was drawing in a long breath. “Your soul is familiar. Why?”
“Who are you?”
The click, click of his tongue, his claws,something, scraped down my spine. “I am he, and we are we.”
“I-I-I want to save him.” My hand fell to the glow of Kael’s unmoving form. “Help me, please.”
“How is it you’ve come here?”
“I don’t know. I was handed a bone—”
Another laugh, deep and rough, rose from the phantom’s chest. “Come to steal the souls in the bones? Come to corrupt the fallen for your own greed?”
“I don’t want any of that. I want to save him.”
“You take a soul from its rest.” The shadow reached out a hand. Billows of smoky black rolled off his pointed finger. His attention was aimed at the new piece of bone I’d sewn into Kael’s body. “Then I will take one to fill its place. A soul for a soul.”
“Who are you?”
The spectral didn’t respond, merely pulled back its cloak of shadows, revealing a thrashing shape on the murky ground. Add flesh and it might’ve been a small man, curled and skeletal.
Screams rattled the darkness. Cries of pain from the convulsing creature filled my ears until I clapped my palms to the sides of my head, desperate to muffle the agony of the sounds.
The more Kael’s body melded with the new bone shard, the more the screeching figure broke apart, like embers in the wind. Golden ashes drifted over Kael’s body, falling into the ghostly light of his bone.
All at once, the agony ended.
The wretched figure was gone and absorbed into Kael’s heart.
In the silence, the shadow peered out from his misty cowl. The heat of its eyes like molten knives, reaching the marrow of my deepest fears, my dreariest thoughts.
“You destroy them”—a dark, wicked rasp scraped over my brain—“and they will destroy you.”
I had no time to even scream before the shadow rushed toward me and its horrid coldness slashed into my chest.
8
Roark
The melder flung backward, hertrance broken. Sprawled out on the blood-soaked floor, she blinked.
Murmurs of Stav filtered across the hall. Folk of Skalfirth fell under a harrowing silence, watching as the woman lifted her bloody fingers with a bit of stun.
There was little time and patience to deal with hysterics if her mind fell into panic.
I shifted a step nearer when she propped onto one elbow. Breath caught in my chest, and I cursed my feckless reaction when her eyes fell to me first. I’d anticipated frenzy and cries and confusion, but she pinned me in place, as though she were peeling back my skin and glimpsing the darker edges of my soul.
There was a discomfiting peace in those eyes, like returning home after a long frost.
I knew no other melder but Fadey. Being raised for half my life in the Stonegate fortress, I had witnessed firsthand the brutality of melder craft. The lust for more, the corruption.
Still, for a moment, my hatred for melders dulled when her gaze found mine.
