Page 38 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 1

While I cleaned the dishes from my breakfast in the shallows of the river, Gabriel packed up the campsite. The rain had cleared up overnight, but it had left the ground muddy and slick, especially so close to the river. We picked our way carefully along the path, making us a lot slower than I would have liked. Still, we’d made good time the day before, and it only took us a little over two hours before we started seeing the crumbling shapes of small stone huts peeking between the trees.

“The Umbral Village,” I murmured. Steep hills surrounded the village on three sides. The low stone buildings were set halfway into the rise of the hills behind them. They all faced into the center of the clearing, where a small well had been dug. The houses were half-collapsed, and whatever had been used as roofs had rotted away a long time ago. In what remained of the houses, strange shadows were cast against the walls. They were human, or at least human-shaped, frozen in the middle of going about their daily lives. In one, two shadows were sitting together. Whatever had preserved their images hadn’t kept the impressions of any of the furniture, so they were hovering oddly over the space where the chairs should have been. In another house, it looked like someone had been frozen in the middle of sweeping the floor, bent over a nonexistent broom.

In one of the houses, a tall shadow was hoisting up a much smaller one, with another little one at its feet. The unsettling sight was especially jarring in contrast to the bushes of little yellow flowers that filled the entire clearing, sprouting up between fallen stones, and stretching up the hills.

“This isn’t a good place,” Gabriel said quietly. “The ambient magic here is a mess. Something very, very dark happened here.”

I nodded grimly. “There’s a reason why the only people who come here are researchers. Even the dumb teenagers trying to impress their friends know better. Most of them, anyway.”

“We should start searching for the piece of the ascendancy array,” Gabriel said.

“Yeah, the sooner we can get out of here, the better,” I agreed. “Can you sense anything that feels like it’s out of place?”

He shook his head. “The dark magic here is too overwhelming. It’s like trying to pick out a tune someone’s humming while a dozen people are screaming at you.”

“That’s… unsettlingly specific,” I muttered.

Suddenly, Gabriel tensed and whipped his head toward one of the buildings, his pupils going wide like my cat’s did when he’d spotted a particularly exciting bird. He glanced at me, holding a finger up to his lips, and I nodded. He pointed to the far end of the clearing, where a mound of rue bushes grew.

“There’s something moving in there,” he whispered, leaning in close without taking his eyes off the plants.

We crept toward whatever he’d heard. I started channeling power into an attack spell, holding it ready in my hand just in case. As we neared, I realized another building’s ruins were under the plants. It was larger than the others but set deeper into the hill. The old stones were barely visible between the pale blue-green leaves.

A patch of rue hung down more limply than the plants next to it, and there was darkness between its branches.

“Doorway?” I mouthed, and Gabriel nodded.

“On three,” he mouthed back, then raised three fingers in the air and dropped them one by one. When he dropped the last finger, he tore back the curtain of rue, and we charged into the building.

The space we charged into was in surprisingly good shape. It had a tall, peaked ceiling, and went back deep into the hill. The remains of a long stone fire pit, lined with half-rotted wooden benches, cut through the middle of the room. The remains of tattered banners and weavings hung on the walls. In the back of the room, a large door led deeper into the hill, but a shimmering wall of warding magic blocked it off.

Two large, tall, broad vampires sprawled in front of the door, passing a bottle back and forth. They froze when we burst into the room, and I fired a blast of magic into one of them, sending him skidding backward into the magical ward. Gabriel pounced on the second vampire, who was quicker to recover from the surprise than his friend. He threw himself out of the way at the last second, raking his claw-like nails down Gabriel’s arm.

The vampire dug his nails in and yanked hard, pulling Gabriel off-balance. They were too close to each other for me to aim a hex properly, and I swore under my breath. The vampire I’d hit before was clambering to his feet, clutching his ribs. He snarled, showing his fangs, then lurched toward me.

I grinned.

I twisted a thick rope of magic from the empty air and held it taut just in front of the vampire’s legs. He stumbled over it, crashing to the ground, and I twisted my hand, making the strands of the spell twist tightly around his ankles. I fired another blast right at his chest, and he went limp.

Gabriel had pinned the other vampire to the ground, and he hadn’t even broken a sweat. The vampire was unconscious, his head lolling to the side.

“Want me to bind them together?” I asked. “I’ve gotten pretty good at the magic rope trick.”

Gabriel looked at me over his shoulder, and his eyes went wide. Before either of us could react, a sudden wave of blinding pain hit me. I felt as though my breath had been punched out of my body. I staggered backward and hit the solid form of someone standing there. I tried to focus enough to summon up a spell, but before I could, there was a blur of movement, and a sickening, wet tearing sound.

Gabriel had thrown the third vampire away from me and charged after him. When he stepped back, his hand was dripping with gore. The vampire, who had been shoved against the wall, crumpled to the ground. His chest was a mangled, ruined mess where Gabriel had punched into it. He tossed something down next to the dead vampire, and it landed with a squelch.

It was his heart.

I swayed on my feet. The pain was still brutal, and when I tried to move my shoulder to look at the injury, my vision blurred, and I nearly threw up. The blade was still sticking out of me, buried halfway into my left shoulder. Crap. I recognized the dagger. A small flint knife, with a carved bone blade, etched with runes. I swore loudly and with feeling, and Gabriel was at my side in an instant. Any impulse to slow himself down to look more human had clearly gone by the wayside.

“How bad is it?” I asked. “I can’t get a proper look at it.”

“Not nearly as bad as it could have been.” He was digging urgently through the bottomless tote before he pulled out my medical kit and one of the canteens of water. He sloshed the water over his blood-covered hand, washing away the gore. “You should sit,” he commanded.

“Do you know anything about taking care of injuries that aren’t on animals?” I asked. I was pretty sure I knew the answer, but I was holding out hope that I was wrong.

“I do not,” Gabriel said.

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