“Not your friends,” he says. “Your enemy.”
His eyes glitter at me as he steps toward the cottage’s open door. “Your heart yearns for a cage to place me in. A cage as dark as the one you survived. The trouble is, my Veda, I don’t have a soul.”
With that, he steps inside the cottage, his imposing figure filling the opening for a moment before the shadows within the cottage’s lower level engulf him.
He disappears so completely that I’m suddenly alarmed.
I tell myself he must have simply stepped to the left or the right and out of view, but even Anarchy is craning her neck, looking as intently for him as I am.
Before I know it, I’ve taken a step closer to the cottage.
Anarchy’s hand wraps around my arm before I can get too close to the building. “Even if what Emil says is true—that the soul catcher is of your own making—you can’t risk going inside.”
I understand her warning, but I can’t fight my sudden panic.
For the first time since I gave the keeper my heart’s power… I can’t feel it. Even when we were separated after my first fight with Halle, I didn’t have such an empty feeling within my chest.
“Emil!” I shout, unable to keep the panic from my voice.
My only answer is silence, and my blood rushes loudly in my ears.
I latch on to the only challenge I can think of that might compel him to obey me. “If you don’t have a soul, come out and prove it!”
Emil appears in the doorway again, but this time, his footsteps are slower.
“As you like,” he says, and I’m confused to hear a sigh in his voice. It doesn’t sound like an exasperated sigh, more of a tired one, his voice low and surprisingly bleak.
He steps right up to the outer edge of the doorway, his front foot meeting it, and then?—
He stops.
A furrow appears in his brow as he raises his hand toward the space within the doorway. His palm appears to hit an invisible barrier right at the outer edge of the doorway.
“What?” His soft exclamation sounds bewildered. “This can’t be.”
He presses both of his palms flat against the air in front of him, the tension in his muscles telling me how hard he’s pushing against it.
My eyes are wide. He said he doesn’t have a soul, and I absolutely believe him and yet…
With a roar, he turns his shoulder and rams himself against the invisible barrier.
Thethudhis body makes as he hits the barrier is so loud that I instinctively take a step back.
“I don’t have a soul!” he roars, his shout directed at me.
The corners of his mouth turn down and his chest heaves as his green-eyed gaze burns me more deeply than his fiery dragon eyes ever could.
Then I’m struck by the dark rings beneath his eyes and the flash of pain across his face before he backs away into the shadows.
His voice fades as his form disappears into the dark. “I don’t have a soul.”
CHAPTER TEN
Ican’t move or speak.
My feet have taken root on the grass outside this cottage of my own making where the keeper is now trapped.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “I honestly don’t fucking understand anything right now.”
