Page 124 of Grave Revelations

She moved toward it, stepping over gnarled, twisted tree branches until she reached a lone tree, still alive in this otherwise dreary place.

Several feet away, she stopped just as a woman resting at the base of the tree looked up, and their eyes met.

Rebecca inhaled sharply. “You must be Adalaide.”

Chapter 80

Rebecca

Adalaide stood, dusting her skirts, and eyed Rebecca warily. “You must be Rebecca.”

“How do you know who I am?”

“Sophia has told me a great deal about you.”

Rebecca winced, the memory of her friend a sharp reminder of all she had lost today. “I hadn’t expected to meet you. That is, I mean, I thought once my soul—yoursoul—was placed into this new body, you would be gone. Like I was all those other times.”

Adalaide pursed her lips in a gesture that reminded Rebecca of the faces she made in the mirror when she was tweezing her eyebrows.

“I am a piece of Gabriel’s soul. Trapped here.” Adalaide said his name with a sigh, and Rebecca felt that love in her very marrow. “You must have noticed your magic weakened.” She bit her lip. “But how could you? You never experienced the might of our gift.” She seemed to be speaking to herself, and Rebecca got the impression that she did that a lot.

“But you’re here now, and we can finally put it right,” Adalaide continued. “Free me, and with our power whole once more, we can finally stop her.”

“We can’t. I mean…” Rebecca crossed her arms over her chest. “Adalaide, I’m dead. Truly dead this time. And Az—Gabriel is gone, too.” She stifled a small sob as she said it, squeezing her arms around herself.

Adalaide’s hand came to her mouth as she shook her head. “But he can’t. He’s an angel. They are immortal.”

Rebecca swallowed. Where could she even begin to explain? Should she tell her he was no longer seraph? Would she understand converging realms? She’d seen it all in his mind when he returned from Primoria, andshehardly understood it herself.

“Samael—the Devil has torn a rift between realms. When immortals die now, there their death is eternal.”

“But, how could he open a rift in Alaxia?”

Rebecca bit her lip, remembering Azazel’s teeth sinking into the still-tender flesh that morning as he had tasted her blood, and shivered. “He can’t. He opened a door between Earth and Primoria.”

Adalaide’s brow furrowed, her eyes clouding as she puzzled over the words. “Rebecca, who is Az?”

Chapter 81

Sophia

Sophia landed in the river and grimaced. It was transformed, as Elizabeth had promised it would be. When the line between Primoria and Earth blurred, Sheol was similarly affected. She hadn’t been sure where she would end up when her maker was destroyed, but there were certainly worse places than Sheol. Still, she’d never found her sisters here, and now that she was trapped forever, she feared she would never see them again.

This time, as Sophia gazed around the transformed landscape, she noticednoother souls. No souls sloshed into the water; no guards patrolled the banks. It was empty.

Marching toward the tree she’d gone to every day since finding Adalaide, she halted beside the single blossom on the magnolia she had come to think of as her sign of hope.

“Adalaide?”

A deep, throaty chuckle came from behind her, and she spun to face the red-haired witch. “Sanura.”

Sanura smiled, darting forward with preternatural grace, and closed her fingers around Sophia’s biceps. “Thank you for coming, pet. I need you for this next part.”

Sophia wriggled in her grasp, but her grip was like iron, and her nails lengthened, cutting into Sophia’s ashen skin. She had assumed she couldn’t be harmed in Sheol—where her soul only manifested a form to encompass it—but blood trickled from her wound, and she watched in fascination as it ran down her arm.

Was this some manifestation of her imagination, too? Could she stop it? Sophia focused her energy on believing she was a soul, not a body, and could not be harmed, but even as she ground her teeth in concentration, the blood continued to fall freely.

“Nice try, but I hold dominion here,” Sanura said. “If I will it, you bleed.”

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