Page 1 of Light Locked
Chapter 1
The Silver Saint
CLEA HAD TRAINED all her life for death. Through all the cuts and bruises, she’d been told time and time again how glorious it was to die for the cause of humanity.
There was no glory here, only a haunting sense of futility.
The monster was toying with her.
Scorched trees split the night sky like a canopy of shattered glass. Views of the forest repeated themselves in dark, endless loops. There was no sense of time, only the repetitive pounding of her leather boots through the snow.
The air stung, every breath yanked away as quickly as she gulped it down. Suffocating. She couldn’t outrun the intrusive thought that she hadn’t chosen this life.
A frozen branch snapped like a bone under her foot and she stumbled.
Blood dotted the snow, jostled loose from the claw marks carved down her right arm. She pivoted in a moonlit clearing, her fear painting the disfigured trees with illusive shapes and shadows.
Silence asserted itself with a sense of impending danger.
In the woods, hunting was a game that every beast played. They were loyal servants of the moon, gloating in fullaudience tonight. Stars glittered in masse behind it, as numerous as the lives lost under its light.
Clea whirled around to find the reaping shade crouched at the tree line nearby. Smoldering black smoke veiled it in darkness, but glowing red eyes betrayed it. Void of pupils, they settled on her like hot coals.
It crawled on all fours, joints cracking as the bones rolled and rotated under pallid skin. Dipping and lunging, it grabbed at her with arms like mangled tree branches.
Clea clamped onto its throat as its nails gored her shoulders. The two of them crashed into the snow and rolled, the beast’s teeth snapping at her face.
She channeled a surge of hot energy through her palms as she tumbled on top of it, shouting through the pain as the reaping shade exploded into ash with a blast of light.
Her ghostly breaths dissipated into the cold night air, and she choked on the residual smoke that cloaked the reaper’s body. With every exhalation, she felt like a bit of her soul left her. The world shifted as she hoisted herself up. Blessings could only be cast from one’s own life force, and Clea was too weak to channel another.
Now only darkness remained, illuminated by an audience of pupilless eyes.
There was no glory in dying this way, eaten in the snow without any last rites.
Veilin were praised as heroes because of the energy in their blood. Light was meant to be shared, blood meant to be spilled, and yet here she was, wanting to live more than she’d wanted anything else. Blood painted hot lines from her wounded shoulders down the cold skin of her back. Her right arm was dark and slippery, trailing drops like oil in the snow.
A reaping shade slid through the shadows to her left, and she noticed a faint glimmer of light whispering through the trees behind it. A campfire. Life.
Clea broke into a sprint after it. The forest grabbed at her, a root snaring her foot, a branch blocking one path and then another. She battled forward, the last of the branches snapping against her arms as she rolled and crumpled at the foot of the fire.
The clearing was empty.
Clea’s mind spun with vertigo, circling unconsciousness until she couldn’t resist it any longer.
†††
Ryson watched the girl from his perch as the reaping shade skulked toward her from the cover of the woods. One of his booted legs hung from the branch, his other knee folded into his arm.
This is why we shouldn’t light fires, a dark voice chided in his head.We could have had a perfectly quiet night, but you always like to have your little fires.
Ryson resisted the urge to argue back.
The reaper hissed possessively, lashing out at the deserted clearing and the competition that hid beyond. A proud grin stretched its face into two rows of jagged black teeth, glimmering with drool.
Ryson wasn’t eager to watch a reaper feast. They were sloppy and brutish, eager to fill the silence of the forest with the haphazard jig of snapping bones and ripping flesh. They rarely killed their prey first, so there was also quite a lot of screaming. It was noise with no melody, first sharp and then guttural, panicked and then dazed. Reaping shades simply played the human instrument all wrong.
The shade’s spidery fingers rested on the girl’s ankle, and Ryson slipped from the tree and plunged a dagger through its back. The reaper spun, flinging a rain of black blood across the snow.
