If I dared to reach out and pet it, I wonder if I’d have a new ‘soft as’ comparison.
Soft as towels. Soft as sheets. Soft as kisses. Soft as… rabbit fur?
Then it raises its head and I can only gasp.
“I know I’ve never seen a natural rabbit in person before,” I say, pointing carefully, “but that isn’t quite right, is it?”
The little rabbit has a nose that looks like it belongs to a piglet.
It snuffles at the air, its eyes bright, before its ears flop back over its features and it bounds away again.
From across the way, Lucian is also staring. “No, that isn’t right.”
“Still too cute,” Anarchy grumbles.
Her brothers sweep up the vegetables from the ground.
“Don’t worry. I can make a mean vegetable stew with these,” Rumble announces.
Strife side-eyes him. “You’ve never made vegetable stew in your life.”
“And I’m sure I’ll be great at it.”
They continue their verbal jabs as they carry the vegetables to the fountain to wash them.
An hour later, we’ve prepared, cooked, and eaten what was a decent meal, after all, and my stomach doesn’t feel quite so hollow as it did before.
Focusing on meal preparation and consumption has taken me away from my darker thoughts, but as silence settles around the campfire once more, there are things I need to face.
“Darkness?” Anarchy finally prompts me.
I pull my knees to my chest again. I’m still wearing my tunic and long pants and it isn’t cold here, but I feel as chilled as if I were standing at hell’s mouth.
“I readThe Book of Dark Magic,” I say. And then I quickly correct myself. “Or, rather, the book forced me to read its pages. As soon as I touched it, its spine unraveled into vines and pinned me down.”
Anarchy reaches for me; her forehead puckered with apparent concern. She and Riot have maintained their sentry positions on either side of me, while the others are spread out around the campfire, where I can easily see them and their equally worried reactions.
“But, Darkness,” Anarchy says. “That book…”
Anarchy once described the book to me as insidious and bloodthirsty.
Even among dark creatures, it’s considered a dangerous, unreliable object.
“I know,” I say. “It lies. It twists the truth. It serves only itself. I know this. But Emil didn’t dispute what I saw. Of all the things he could have deceived me about—” My voice chokes up. “He could have told me that what I saw wasn’t true, and I would have believed him. But… he didn’t.”
My pack is quiet for a long moment. I know they won’t entirely understand what I said without context.
Lucian breaks the silence with a quiet question. “Can you tell us what you saw in the book?”
He knows, more than anyone else around this campfire, how easily the book can destroy a supernatural’s heart and mind.
With a nod, I begin.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Irecount what the book showed me and how it started with moments of my life that I had already lived and knew to be the truth: my mother dying in my arms, after which her lifeless body was taken away by our jailer.
Then, how the vision had followed her. How our jailer had disposed of her body into the keeper’s realm, which was somehow connected to the veil prison.
