Page 5 of Tales of a Deadly Devotion
Gideon’s mouth was open from whatever insult he was about to throw back at Thean. He swallowed it, sharp eyes confused as they met my own.
‘The useless remains of what’s supposed to be a scale from the shadow drake. The closest thing we could find to the ravhorn.’ His answer was hesitant. ‘One of the suggested cures for shadow sickness.’
Ravhorn. I’d heard of that. Heard of it in one of Kat’s boring fucking lessons when I had better things to do. A dark remedy. Poison from the shadows of the world.
Liar.That voice hissed in my memory. No, I’d heard of that dark beast long before Kat had fed me the story.
I rolled my wrist, feeling the tightness of the scarring there, the shift from scales to fur.
If you know it you can become it.How the Keeper had repeated that most of all. Beat it into my very bones. Whispered like a gentle caress, pressed the words against my tear-stained cheek with his dry, tobacco-stained lips as fragments of creatures were forced against my bloody palm.
I was consumed by the memories I begged to forget. The scratch of the scales. The patches of fur still attached to bloody skin, the bitterness of the venom, the endless dusty pages that made my nose burn. The drag of my finger over the dry paper, feeling the creases and the skin it had been made from.
What crumbs of those creatures could remain? What little was left for my magic to feast on? The dry dusty stench of his collection.
Pathetic, useless beast.
No. I’d allowed myself to be useless. Hidden so carefully, like a rat in its nest.
‘That could bring her back?’ I demanded, taking another step towards Gideon, feeling the cold bite of Blackthorn’s magic, the deadly focus of it suddenly solely on me from where he remained in the shadows.
‘If the writings are accurate,’ Gideon offered, sending a cautious glance in his brother’s direction.
A chill shot down my spine in warning. The beastly instincts in me too close to the surface. Like my ear twitching with the barest whisper of a new sound. I turned towards the study doorway just as William appeared. Deathly pale with that book clutched to his chest like a shield.
‘Gideon.’ He swallowed, eyes shimmering with tears. ‘H-her tremors have started again.’
‘Fuck,’ Gideon cursed, turning to his desk and rooting through his things. That cold demeanour slipping away as the sharp determination of a healer took over. ‘We’re almost out of Longwood herb.’ He ran a hand through his golden hair before he remembered William.
He reached for the boy and spoke softly to him in comfort as William blinked tears from his eyes, fingers trembling where they held the book.
I should have gone to him, should have gone back to her, but something rooted me in place. The sharp bite of my magic against my palm where I held that vial. Telling me what I already knew. There were no answers in that bedroom. They lay here. Right before me.
‘I can look in the east fields,’ Thean offered without hesitation, all the voyav’s cruelness slipping away, their expression open and cautious as they looked at William, pale and lost.
‘No,’ I commanded, turning to Emrys, that poison still curled in my fist. I crossed the room to stand before him. Refusing to focus on the red marks my claws had made on his already scarred face and throat. The blooming bruises there, and how he hadn’t properly healed them.
Almost as if he hadn’t felt it. Or simply because he wished for the punishment of that pain. A horrid broken coldness lingering in the darkness of his eyes.
I swallowed down my shame. ‘Kat made that doorway take her to those woods. To Paxton fields. Can it go anywhere?’
Pain cut into the sternness of his face.
‘Within reason,’ he answered carefully, his focus moving to William. Then to the hallway behind him as if he could move for it at any moment. To her. How the shadow of that darkness still rippled beneath his skin.
‘I know where there could be samples.’ I held the vial under his chin, something about my desperation making him look back to me. ‘Like this.’
‘The underground traders don’t have—’ he began but I was already shaking my head, dark curls falling around my face.
‘Not the traders.’ I grimaced, an agitation taking hold of my body with the urge to move. To hunt. ‘The docklands of the west. The bone markets.’
Something in the room shifted at my words, the strange warm presence of Thean Page at my back, but I wouldn’t look at them.Couldn’t. Not to see the suspicion in their eyes. A rebel would know that place, but not the secrets I’d buried there. Beneath the ash and bone fragments.
Gideon frowned. ‘How would you know the bone markets? They—’.
‘A merchant worked out of the water cellars there. He dealt in dead matter. In things others couldn’t find. My—’ I wouldn’t say keeper. Wouldn’t give him the power of being remembered.
‘The town was levelled.’ Emrys’s words were guarded, but not with the tone of a challenge – with a sense of protection against a hope I was offering. One even I was too afraid to cling to. ‘They say a dark storm took it. A Verr summoning at the end of the war.’
