Page 595 of Flirting with Darkness

Count Aslanov’s eyes were closed now, his face tilted towards the ceiling.

His aura swam with gold and silver light.

Ghost could see his aura slowly filling with color as he absorbed some strange substance from the burning blood. The circle of blood exuded a writhing, pale essence that turned dark red when it reached his father’s form. Whatever that essence was, it rose from the burning blood along with the wall of smoke and fire.

His father absorbed that writhing light eagerly, greedily.

He inhaled it like oxygen, like water gulped past dry, parched lips.

He appeared to be calling out longingly to that essence with his guttural words.

That substance, whatever it was, soon permeated the Count’s aura entirely. As it filled the space around him with blood-red light, it made the magician’s aura brighter too, turning it to a shocking, living flame. Complexities rose in those writhing and coiling patterns. Everything around him seemed to grow more structured, complex, mathematical.

Then Ghost noticed the smoke.

Those dark red and green flames sent out pitch-black clouds of it.

Ghost could now see those thick clouds disappearing into the Count’s form, just like what happened with the more subtle auric light. The Count absorbed the smoke through his very skin, without him taking a breath, without him doing anything to pull it towards him. He was like a living, magnetic force, the center that forms the eye of a terrible, dark storm.

He claimed all of it.

He stole all of it.

He pulled everything the blood and fire possessed inside himself.

He sucked it into his skin and aura and soul and mind and magick like the wind pulling air through an open window.

Something about all of it felt so corrupted… so sick and twisted and wrong in some way Ghost couldn’t fully articulate.

He knew the woman was right.

Whatever this was, it was as dark and broken and sick as the King of Hades.

It was evil.

Whatever his father’s goal with this, that could only be evil, too.

That’s when it really hit Ghost.

He couldn’t permit his father to finish.

Whatever this was, he had to end it before that happened.

He had to end it now.

Ghost reached behind his back, to the handmade scabbard he’d positioned there, right between his shoulder blades under the black wool coat.

He reached for the handle of the broadsword he’d placed inside, just a few hours earlier.

He’d brought the scabbard with him from England, packed it inside his suitcase with his clothes after Augustine made it for him, maybe six months previous.

Knowing he would be forced to leave his own sword behind in his room, the one inside the ivory tipped cane, Ghost found and hid the scabbard near the pull-chain toilet before the servants came in with his food. He hid it within a stack of towels, near the bottom so none of the servants would notice. When he excused himself to use relieve his bladder before heading downstairs, he’d quickly removed his jacket and donned the scabbard underneath.

He had luckily gotten it on and the leather straps arranged around his shoulders before the servants thought to come see what had delayed him.

They noticed nothing at all when he covered the scabbard over with his wool coat.

Later that night, after Ghost had joined the party downstairs, he’d pulled one of the Count’s own swords off the wall and placed it inside, making sure the handle remained reachable but not visible. He found several mirrors in that same corridor with the medieval swords, so he could look at himself from every angle until he was satisfied.

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