Page 143 of Of Blood and Banes
“Now’s not the time for your indecisiveness. Choose.”
With a shaky breath, I lower the ring into the coffin’s groove, and after it snaps in, I turn it to the right. Invisible cracks burst from the lid before glowing with a pulsing blue light.
We all shuffle away from the lid, our splayed hands held in front of us as the stone lid scrapes sideways off the coffin, as if pulled by a pair of giant invisible hands. It tips over and slams onto the ground. The flickering flames in the torches surrounding us almost completely fizzle out before they flare back to life again.
We all exchange a wide-eyed gaze before we inch forward, peering into the coffin together.
My skin crawls at the vision before me.
Cobwebs are strewn across the eye sockets of a skeleton, its teeth completely missing and its bony arms crossed over a black book held to its chest. A rich, lavender dress trimmed with gold drapes over the body.
Herbody.
Splashes of dark stains spread across the light fabric like a sinister ink, followed by one deep, angry gash slicing from her chest down to her hips, with her spine and ribs peeking through the tattered dress.
Mutilated.
She had beenmutilated.
King Aaric killed her. Murdered her. Just to take the throne.
“So then…I suppose it’s a merciful thing she’s dead, right?” Archie murmurs softly. “If Vue was still alive before Kat freed him, she would have been stuck in this coffin. Alone for…well over a hundred years?”
“Which means the bond between them must have been broken. Yes,” Marge answers quietly.
Cole leans over the coffin, squinting as he tips his head to the side to peer down at the black book. “Something’s written on it. It must be her journal, right?”
Sethan slides in next to him, craning his neck to get a better view.
It feels incredibly wrong to be bursting into someone’s tomb and plucking their belongings from their cold, dead fingers. But there it is, staring me in the face as bright as a sun.
Vue told me.
Mymothertold me.
Something deep within told me, like a flicker of a distant lifetime.
Secrets never die, they’re just buried in a grave.
We need to read that book. This was what they all wanted—what they all tried to tell me.
Archie leans forward on the side of the coffin, he plucks the book out from the skeleton’s rigid fingers.
Marge smacks him on the back of his thigh with her staff. “Foolish boy! What are you doing?”
He almost drops it back into the coffin, catching it midair, before whispering down into the coffin. “Sorry, Your Majesty!” Then he turns and holds it out to me until I take it. “Is this not what we came for? Are we not running out of time? With no disrespect, I imagine we may need it more than she does.”
As I crack open the midnight black cover, a shot of energy ripples through my hand, down my body to my toes, and out across the room in an invisible wave.
“What was that?” Melaina asks, scanning the room.
Sethan withdraws his sword at his side, following his daughter’s suspicious eyes surveying the room. “I’m not sure, but?—”
A tremble quakes the ground and walls, shaking dust free from the ceiling above us.
Archie swallows, unsheathing his daggers. “That can’t be good.”
Cole follows suit by silently drawing his blade and shifting closer to me, his eyes set on the entrance toward the hatching grounds.
