Page 54 of Shadow Fall: Part Two

I shoved off the hard ground, shaky and so cold that I shook, my breath pluming in the air because—because we were surrounded by ghosts. Walden’s broad hand grasped my arm and hauled me, dazed, through the press of reaching, hungry ghosts. They wanted our life, our warmth, wanted every bit of energy and magic in our bodies, as if it might animate them in death. It wouldn’t. Dead was dead.

“This way,” Walden urged. “What else do you have in that bag of yours?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, my voice slow, dragging. My shoe hit a rock and I stumbled but the palace guard kept me upright. “You could leave me to die, you know. No one would even know.”

“I’m not leaving you to die,” he replied angrily. I realised his sword was in his hand when he swung it in front of us, cutting through the astral bodies and scattering them into mist that quickly reformed into bodies.

“I threatened you into coming here. Fuck knows why you’d help me now.”

“I’m not leaving a kid alone in a mob of ghosts,” he replied firmly. “That’s not the kind of person I am.”

No wonder he didn’t have a sense of humour; he had a firm moral compass. He probably saw right and wrong in black and white, and that mentality tended to repel humour like oil and water.

Instead of replying—I had no idea what to say—I dug through my bag again, gritting my teeth against the icy hands trailing over my shoulders, my back, and plunging into my chest. A sharp breath whistled through my teeth when a shard of ice grazed my heart, but I grabbed a massive, ornate key from the bag.

“Stay back!” Walden barked at a spirit edging closer.

When the ghost laughed in a way none of the others had, low and foreboding, I froze. Chills of a different kind swept through me, and I backed up until my side pressed to Walden’s. I didn’t know this guard, but anything and anyone was better than the psychopath staring at me with a twisted little smile on his silvery, transparent face.

“Hello, again,” the ghost purred at me.

Walden startled at the voice, the speech. Most ghosts didn’t have the power to speak. He snapped a look down at me, and I swallowed.

“You know this ghost?”

I shook my head. “He attacked us before. He’s a creep.”

The creep smiled wider, taking a floating step that raised every hair on my body. The key felt heavier in my grasp, like even being this close to the spirit was draining me.

The disgusting bastard licked his ghostly lips as he leered at me, and a disconcerting rumble came from Walden’s chest.

“I see,” he said tightly, angling himself in front of me.

I glanced quickly at the key, making sure I wasn’t about to drop it, and inhaled sharply when I saw it wasn’t metal at all. It was pure black, not shadow or night, more like the absence of light, like a black hole. A cornea of white light throbbed and flickered around it. What the hell had Wynvail given me?

It became rapidly heavy in my hand, a force dragging my hand down. I gritted my teeth and fought it as the psycho ghost floated closer, eyes glittering behind his glasses. The key pulled and pulled, as heavy as an anchor. I swore colourfully when I was dragged to my knees on the cold ground, the key taking over, driving itself into the stone below me and—

“Holy shit,” I breathed, shivering excitement in my veins despite how scared I was of the spirits. There was a keyhole in the ground that hadn’t been there before, and the key fitted itself to it perfectly.

“Walden, grab Dave.”

“Dave?”

“The horse!”

A force had hold of me; my wrist turned the key in the lock against my will, like the key had possessed me.

“Get ready,” I warned, the heaviness extending to my arms, my chest. My other hand moved without my permission, gripping the edge of a trapdoor that hadn’t been there a second ago. Butterflies rioted in my stomach. My breath caught.

“Walden,” I warned. “You better be ready.”

“I’m a little busy,” he bit out.

I threw a panicked glance over my shoulder and jolted at the sight of the psycho ghost’s hands around Walden’s solid neck, strangling the life out of him. Anger struck a match against my magic, and sunlight pooled in my palm, spilling around the key onto the ground.

Kill the spirit, kill the spirit, I chanted in my head, picturing my magic the way Harvey had taught me, sinking deep into the pool of it and not shying from it like I had in the beginning. The magic belonged to me, not the other way around. I pictured a cresting wave made of rich, buttery sunlight, and surprise tugged my mouth into a smile when it formed in front of me, not as big as I imagined but tall enough to swallow the ghost.

“Do you really think—” the spirit began, laughing.

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