Page 101 of Tales of a Deadly Devotion
The remaining curtain scraps tore free from the windows as if they’d been tugged. Bright moonlight spilling through the spaces between the boards that covered them. Illuminating the room and the rotting wooden floor beneath our feet.
Dark runes burnt into the floor.
I stumbled away from it as Alma recoiled with a chatter of sharp teeth. Coiling for attack as her sharp scales rippled down her spine.
‘That’s the mark of cruvor,’ Gideon said, something distant and cold in his voice.
Cruvor.The dark’s manifestation of malice.
Emrys began to scan the corners of the room. As if we were being watched.
‘Kat. How did your father kill him?’ Gideon moved closer. There was a calmness to his voice but it didn’t reach the wild panic in his eyes.
My heart was pounding too strongly in my chest. My magic searing my veins in a strange vicious victory. As if taunting whatever rested here.
Grief and rage could fuel the dark. Could feed things that should never have been made.
I’d brought that magic back here.
‘Saever,’ I whispered, watching Gideon’s eyes widen with the ruthlessness of it.
A barbaric sacred punishment in Kysillian law for those deemed worthy of it. Hanging, drawing and quartering with the flame. Relentless in the fact that sometimes they were partially put back together. Forced to take a healing tonic before it began again.
I’d never known if the story was true. Only now I did, as a horrid roar came from the darkness of the hallway.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Kat
Emrys seized my arm and dragged me back against the wall, an echoing screech tearing through the hallway. Something hunting us. The shadows in the corner of the room rushed for Emrys, gathering beneath his boots like servants awaiting a master’s command. His eyes nothing but pools of darkness as that pale demon fire illuminated his fingertips.
The knocking came again. Three sharp blows but further away.
Alma growled in answer, tails thrashing behind her, belly low to the ground ready for her hunt.
‘Tell it to fuck off,’ Gideon ordered with a quiet hiss from where he’d pressed himself to the other side of the shadowed doorway.
‘It’s not afiend, Gideon,’ Emrys replied. ‘It’s a manifestation.’
Despite Emrys’s command over darkness, I doubted it would stretch to manifestations. Especially one left to corrupt for this long. It would have had nothing to feed off. It would also have become so feral that I doubted the power that formed it remembered anything beyond its own hunger.
The hinges of the door next to us gave a worried squeak. Almost pleading not to be left alone.
‘We’ll use the portal stones.’ Gideon reached into his pocket.
‘It’ll latch on. We can’t let it into the manor,’ Emrys protested, more of that darkness spreading up the side ofhis jaw as if his magic was willing him to become a shadow himself.
‘Fuck,’ Gideon fired back.
Then came a different sound. A feral screech and the cracking of wood. A horrid laugh. Too much to come from one being. A clattering as if dice were being rolled against the wooden floor.
Gideon darted to the window, looking between the boards before he turned those enraged blue eyes on me. ‘It’s broughtfriendswith it.’
I moved to his side, peering through the gaps only to find those skeletal remains missing. Nothing but rope swinging in the breeze.
Beware the places where cursed bones hang. For they never rest.
They’d been summoned. They weren’t just remains; they weredavror. Cursed bones.
