Page 38 of Alpha Exile

Kieran is looking for spirits, just like the ones that I see, only his aren't dead. Mine are, and they're gathering around me now, tugging at my clothes and sinking their fingers into my hair.

I shiver with cold, looking away from them as they hiss secrets and warnings into my ears.

This is where we died. The magic killed us.

It tore my throat out.The spirit in front of me, a woman with glassy blue eyes, motions towards the red, raw meat of her neck.I used to sing spells, but the magic didn't like that, so it stole my voice from me. And my life as well.

It collapsed a tunnel on me.

Take heed!Kieran says something, motioning towards the lefthand tunnel, but I can't hear him over the whispers in my ears.The magic will kill you too. All of you.

"Bastian?"

Delilah's voice calls my name, and something about it pushes through the haze of spirits all around me. They fade away, disappearing into nothing or stepping back resentfully, and my ears are finally my own again.

"Bastian, are you okay?" Her brows crease, and she approaches me, carefully taking my hands in hers and squeezing them gently. "You don't look so good."

"I'm fine," I tell her, but I can feel the others' eyes on me. So I quickly explain, "It's just the spirits. There are more of them down here. They're drawn... to the magic."

One of the ghosts hisses in disdain.Liar!

"This place is getting to him," Lance says, his deep voice rumbling with disapproval. "We can't stay much longer. I know you want to find Roarke, Delilah, but we can't put our lives in danger chasing him."

"He'll lose his soul," she whispers, her voice low and frightened. "I can't let that happen. Not to him."

Squeezing her hands, I reassure her, "None of us will let it happen. I'm okay—we can keep going."

I can feel Lance's eyes on me, assessing whether or not I reallyamokay, so I buck up and do my best to look fine. Eventually I start to feel fine, even as we walk deeper and deeper through the tunnels, the mountain's depths crushing all around us.

What's happening to this friend of yours?One of the spirits walks with us, a young man who's maybe eighteen or nineteen at most. Unlike the others, he doesn't wear obvious injuries on his spectral form, and he seems upbeat instead of half-mad.Whatever it is, maybe one of us can help. We've seen everything there is to see down here.

I hesitate, considering whether or not it's wise to speak to the spirits. Lance is looking over at me, his dark brown gaze assessing, so I decide to talk to the dead by speaking aloud to the living.

"What do we know about the Spirit Eyes?" I ask Delilah, pitching my voice for her to hear from her spot at the front of our group. "I know that's what your Aunt Kerry called them, and I know they somehow gave the vampires the ability to control me while they were inside me, but I don't know much more about them. It seems we should find out as much as we can, since Delphine might be using them on Roarke."

The spirit grins at this, looking at me sideways.Oh, clever. You don't want to speak to me so you're speaking to her instead.

"All she was really able to tell me is that they have ancient, powerful spirits inside them." Delilah sounds worried for Roarke, and she starts walking faster, transitioning us into a loping jog as fast as a human's run. "The spirits were put into the gems in a similar way to the one we put our Elders into the gems that are in their statues, only the Spirit Eyes were trapped instead of venerated. I'm not sure why."

"Do you think Delphine was telling the truth when she said that the stones would erase our souls and takeover our bodies completely?" I look towards the spirit as I say this, and he tilts his head in consideration. "Or was that just a lie?"

"I'm not sure," Delilah says, sounding frustrated. "Let's just get to Roarke before the answer to that question matters."

My heart squeezes for her, and I feel the same fear: that we'll be too late, and Roarke's body won't be his own anymore, his soul lost for eternity. Which is why I'm grateful when the spirit speaks up, his voice threaded through with authority.

There aren't many things I know about magic, but I do know about souls,he tells me, taking advantage of the lapse in the conversation.They can't be erased easily. Not as long as the physical body is still around. If this Delphine is somehow trying to take your friend's soul and put another in its place, she'll have a fight ahead of her. The body often remembers what we want it to forget.

Lance is a bit ahead of me now, so I pitch my voice low to ask the spirit, "How do you know so much? Is it because you're dead?"

No, it's because of what I did while I was alive.He shoots me a toothy grin.I was a necromancer. Spirits were all I dealt with. Until the day I came here seeking unlimited power, and found my own death instead.

Well, that's quite the answer. I don't have anything to say to that. The spirit seems content enough, though, because after a long moment he adds,I'm Jason, by the way. Nice to meet you.

I nod my head at him, letting him know it's nice to meet him as well. This seems to fill him with glee—right up until the moment we take a sharp turn in the tunnel, and he stops, blanching whiter than I thought possible for the dead to blanch.

Count me out–I'm not going any further.Stopping beside him, I watch the others go up ahead towards a dark spot in the tunnel. Jason hisses and adds,You should tell your friends not to go further, either. Nothing good is on the other side of that bridge.

Bridge? He doesn't offer an explanation—just floats away, hurrying back the direction we came. Frowning, I jog forward to find Delilah and the others standing on one side of a deep crevasse, which is spanned by only a thin suspension bridge made of rope and old wood.

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