Page 103 of A Heart Of Bitter Poison
We ascend two flights before we reach an empty black room with windows framing a tall set of double mahogany doors. The souls chained to the long iron handles start to pull them open when they see us.
Both of them look at me.Intome.
Leucosia of Anthemoessa, a whisper says in my mind.Weapon of sweet voice.
It’s coming from the soul on the right. A woman. I can tell, even though they are little more than nearly featureless, formless specters.
She was a witch. A witch from Brazil. Izabel. Izabel Sousa. Coven Tecoma. Crime of Sedition. Reaped by Nuri of House-
“Vampire,” Ashen says, but there’s no warmth or familiarity in his voice. It’s cold and distant, but confused. It’s only then that I realize I’ve been mumbling, rattling off the details of this soul I’ve never met before.
I blink up at Ashen and he looks thoroughly weirded out by whatever he sees. “Am I changing into a dog?”
A crease flickers between Ashen’s brows as he stares down at me. “No. But your eye color briefly changed.”
I’d be willing to take a guess it changed to the icy blue shade of an Alpha, which gives me a little hope that the spell I cast during my last breaths in the Living Realm, one to bind the werewolves and hybrids to me even beyond death, might just have worked.
I don’t wait for Ashen to pull me along before I stride ahead, trying not to look too long at the souls that haven’t taken their eyes from me.
The thick fog. The dim twilight. The gas lanterns. The black carriage that rolls to a stop at the end of the path before us, pulled by the necks of souls. Nothing has changed in the Shadow Realm, it seems.
We start to descend the steps of the building when a keening cry finds us from the depths of the fog. Another calls back to it. Yet another replies, and the three Reapers around me draw their blades.
I hear the distant slap of palms and bare feet on the road in the darkness. The sound of crawlers.
“A pack at this hour?” one of the soldiers says as Ashen’s arm comes out before me, pushing us all back. I glance up at him and I know by the look on his face that my eyes have changed again.
“They are drawn to her. Get back in the building.”
“No.”
“Vampire-”
I grab his arm and press my other palm to his forehead before he can wrap his hand around mine. I take hold of his thoughts with my mind, not enough to hurt him like I did with Leander, but enough to force him to step back.Let me do this, I whisper into his thoughts, and I let go before I can hear anything in return.
He looks at me, stunned and a little disoriented, and I use his distraction to step away. I walk down the steps toward the approaching wave of crawlers whose decaying bodies are still obscured by the fog.
I cling onto hope as I take one last, heavy step toward the mist. I hold to the image of something I remember from my first time here in the Shadow Realm. Something that’s stuck in my mind like a thorn from when we walked home fromBit Akalum. The moment the crawlers mounted their attack.
The soul looked at me.
But it came for Ashen.
I hear them. I hear their fractured, sorrowful thoughts in my mind.
I take a deep breath. It fills every crevice of my lungs.
The first notes of my song soar into the darkness just as the crawlers gallop up the path. I’ve chosen something just for them, these ancient, lost souls that are hunted and hated in the only realm that will take them. I sing them the Song of Seikilos. The song Seikilos had carved into the gravestone for his wife.
While you live, shine
Have no grief at all
Life exists only for a short while
And time demands its toll.
The crawlers lurch to a halt. Their eyes bore into me. Their fragmented thoughts ripple in my mind.
