Page 4 of Cursed Evermore
Frantically, I looked up at the moon, now panting, each breath feeling more labored than the one before it.
What did I do wrong?
I checked the spell to make sure I said the words correctly, and then the herbs and the crow again. Then I lifted my hand to check my wound. Perhaps my cut wasn’t deep enough?
I touched my wounded hand to my heart, and more drops of blood fell onto the crow’s breast. Almost immediately, a crackleof white light speckled over the crow’s body. I gasped, grasping on to renewed hope.
Until the crow started to breathe.
My lungs locked, my body turning to steel.
The crow’s chest shuddered and its beak wrenched open in a silent scream. The thing that should not be alive was…breathing.
Breathing.As in not dead anymore.
Its feathers rustled with jerky, unnatural movements, like puppet strings being pulled by unseen hands. Then it took a deep wet breath that made a rattling sound no living creature should make. Its eyes snapped open, glowing with an unholy amber light as its claws scraped against the earth with a sound like nails on stone.
Before my next thought could form, shadows moved around me, gathering into a mass. It looked exactly like the thing that took my father.
Maybe this was how the spell worked.
Darkness took Father. Maybe darkness would release him.
An unnatural silence fell over the clearing, as if the very air had been stolen away. The temperature plunged further, bringing with it the putrid smell of ancient decay. The air around the mass distorted like heat waves over parched earth, but these ripples brought a bitter wintry cold.
The undead crow flapped its wings and squawked as it bounced toward me. I bolted upright and away from it, not wanting it to touch me.
The darkness thickened then rose and spread, swallowing the crow before it could squawk again. Then the darkness took shape with horrible slowness, rising higher and higher and higher until it loomed over me, haunting and deadly.
The air vanished from my lungs as I realized what I was looking at. The thing before me, black, shifting, death itself, was a wraith.
A wraith.
The soulless demons Grandmother told me about who could destroy you by sucking the essence from your life.
Shit. What had I done?
Grandmother believed it was wraiths who’d wiped out our army when they went in search for Father and never returned.
Until now, I may have believed they were just stories. Monsters whispered about to scare children. But here was the reality hovering before me.
Frozen in place like a stone sculpture, all I could do was stare at the hideous creature. Where it should have had eyes, there were only swirling voids. And its mouth... its mouth was a gaping hollow of nothingness.
“I found you,” it whispered in a voice that sounded like gravel and waves crashing against jagged rocks. “My Lord will be pleased.”
The wraith’s void-black form surged forward, lunging for me. Only then did I move. But I was too late.
It grabbed my arm with long smoky talons, infusing the cold touch of death into my skin. The chill rushed over me, lacing through the fibers of my nerves like shadows devouring the last rays of light.
The coldness penetrated deeper than flesh, seeping into my very essence. The air warped and twisted around us, reality bending like a reflection in unsettled waters. Each movement of the wraith’s touch filled my head with a sound like wind rushing through the ancient catacombs.
I felt my soul stretching, pulling away from my body like thread being slowly unspooled. I tried to move. Tried to get away. Tried to do something besides stand here and be utterly paralyzed with the terror streaking through me.
Every thought that came to my mind was snuffed away like smoke in a storm. Then I felt it. A tug deep, deep, deep inside me, lifting from my core, ripping at the threads of my soul.
Everything I’d ever heard about wraiths crystallized in one terrifying moment. Especially how they kill.
With horrifying clarity, I realized this monstrous creature was trying to rip my soul from my body.
