Page 40 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 1

From the inside of the spell, it was easy to find the threads of the magic that had been woven together to make it and ease them apart. “I’ll make a temporary opening for you to use, but I’m going to leave the wards up,” I told Gabriel. “If these guys are spending resources on guarding this place, I don’t want them to figure out that what they’re after is already gone.”

“They might have some idea we’ve been here,” Gabriel said dryly, gesturing at the vampires sprawled on the ground.

I chewed on my lip and met his eyes. “Look, um, I know these are your people, but?—”

Gabriel held up a hand to stop me. “I saw what was in their minds. The things that they’ve done. The things that they would have done to us if they’d had the chance. These are not my people. I’m a firm believer in second chances, but not when it comes to people who are quite that eager to kill me.”

He reached into his silly jacket—ruined now, covered in blood, and torn to shreds down one sleeve—and drew out a glossy spike made of dark wood. It was maybe a foot long from end to end, with a leather-wrapped handle, and a point that shone in the shifting light of the wards.

I looked away as he drove the spike into the chest of first one unconscious vampire, then the other. It wasn’t out of a particular sense of squeamishness—I’d seen more blood than I would’ve liked, and in my line of work I saw plenty of death. It was more that I wanted to give Gabriel as much privacy as I could.

He hefted the bodies up and carried them to the fire pit that ran the length of the room. I offered to help, but he just raised an eyebrow that managed to remind me of both his vampiric strength and my injured shoulder. Gabriel murmured a few words over the bodies, too quiet for me to hear.

“I don’t suppose I could trouble you for a bit of fire magic?” he asked me, holding out a branch wrapped in the shredded fabric of his sleeve. I closed my hand around the end of the makeshift torch, and when I let it go, it was burning brightly. Gabriel touched the torch to each of the three bodies, and they caught immediately, burning unnaturally bright and fast. Within minutes, they were just ash.

I held open a gap in the warding spell long enough for Gabriel to pass through, then let it drop down behind him again. His face was carefully neutral, but the line of his shoulders was tight, and his hands were clenched. I put a hand on his arm, and he turned to me, surprised.

For a moment, I almost asked him if he was all right, but I didn’t want him to lie to me. “You ready?” I asked instead.

Gabriel’s eyes softened very slightly. “I’m ready.”

The door in front of us was at least ten feet tall, made of wood so old it had gone black. It was covered in intricate, twisting carvings. Decorations and runes curled together in dizzying patterns until I couldn’t tell where spells ended and embellishments began. Hell, maybe it was all spell work.

Even though it looked ancient, the door swung open easily under Gabriel’s hand without so much as a creak from the hinges. The passage behind it was pitch black. When I lit up a small orb of glowing magic, it illuminated a stone corridor angling sharply down into the earth. The air was damp and musty, and the smell only got stronger the farther down we went.

Eventually, the corridor leveled out. The rough stone walls were replaced with carved murals of angular, abstracted people and animals. Their exaggerated limbs overlapped and folded around each other until it was impossible to tell which figure was which. The corridor curved, spiraling in on itself more and more tightly, until we finally found ourselves in a small round room at what must have been the center.

Statues carved in the same style of the murals lined the walls. Each one held a chain, and each of the chains was attached to a ball in the middle of the room. It was large enough that I could’ve fit inside it if I curled up, and it glowed with a warm golden light. I snuffed out my own magic light and stepped closer to inspect it.

The ball had a band of silver metal around the middle, parallel to the ground, and the chains were anchored to that, hanging slightly slack. It was floating about two feet above the ground. This close, I could see tiny patterns etched into the surface of the ball. I reached out a hand to trace one, but before I could even make contact, the ball rumbled and began to change.

The top half of it began to lift apart in segments, opening like a flower. As it opened, the power it was enchanted to hide rushed out, along with a swirling cloud of fog. It was so strong, I staggered backward, overwhelmed.

The orb’s petals folded down, falling neatly between the chains. I found Gabriel’s hand and squeezed it, and after a moment of hesitation, he squeezed back. The fog cleared, and I saw the first piece of the ascendancy array.

It was a piece of twisting gold filigree, shaped like a teardrop that had been sliced in half from top to bottom. The impossibly fragile lines of it met and parted in geometric patterns that were as precise as they were confusing.

I picked it up. It was warm to the touch, and far heavier than I expected. I could feel its magic reacting to mine, all that ancient energy exploring me curiously. It was like nothing I’d ever felt before, pouring into me, through me, twisting in the air around me. I knew immediately this was ancient magic, honed and focused over centuries, the sort of thing most witches could never dream of learning. It was the sort of magic that could create mountains, drain oceans, and build or destroy cities in the blink of an eye.

“We need to get the other pieces as fast as we can,” I managed. “We can’t let this fall into the wrong hands. It’s…” I struggled to find a word to describe the power I was feeling, how dizzying it was. And it wasn’t just the raw power, it was the sheer, unmistakable oldness of it. I felt like I’d reached into the bones of the earth itself.

The orb let out a low, ominous creaking sound. Its petals slammed shut. The light flickered off abruptly, leaving us in total darkness.

Then the floor fell out from under us, and we began to plummet downward.

14

GABRIEL

We plummeted through the pitch blackness, falling faster and faster. The wind whistled in my ears. My only anchor was Evangeline’s hand, clasped tightly in mine. I pulled her closer, unwilling and unable to consider the idea of losing contact and leaving her to fall through the void by herself.

I tried to twist through the air until I was stretched out flat with Evangeline above me. Maybe it would slow us down just enough, and with my body to cushion her fall, Evangeline might survive.

A strange sound came from above me, so wildly out of place that it took me a moment to figure out what it was. Evangeline was laughing, and the sound of it was being whipped away by the wind as we fell. Perplexed, I stared into the darkness. Had she lost her mind in the face of our likely demise?

There was a crash of noise below us, and weak, blue-gray light shone up from beneath our falling forms. It illuminated the space just enough for me to see Evangeline wink at me, grin widely, and then the light got brighter and brighter.

The next thing I knew, I crashed down onto something soft. Evangeline landed on top of me, driving the air from my lungs. She wheezed out a slightly manic giggle. My arm was still slung around the small of her back, and when she laughed, her breath brushed against the tender skin of my neck.

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