Page 10 of A Blade of Lies and Spirits

And, it worked. Our soft touches. Our bodies pressed together. The whispers and the ghosts faded away until it was just us. Our even breath. Sleep washing over us.

A rush of wings awakened me—owls, more than a dozen, gathered in the trees around our little camp. They stared down at us. All but one of them were tiny, perhaps the size of a sparrow. The last was perhaps a yard tall, dwarfing them. Grey plumage blended with the deepening dusk.

Walker’s arm tightened around me when I shifted, ready to sit up. “We should wait until it’s fully dark. Transitions are dangerous. Nothing dangerous should be done at dawn or dusk unless we have no other choice,” he breathed the old belief into my ear like the superstition mattered to me.

Hard, tense muscles rested firmly around my shoulders, the pressure comforting. Relaxing against him, I reached out. My mental touch passed through the owls, their minds inaccessible.

Unblinking eyes, round and fixed on us—in the twilight dimness I saw that each owl had a faint glow around it.

“They aren’t animals,” I murmured.

A thread of a laugh by my ear answered me. “What was your first clue?”

The large owl fluttered to the ground. Mid-flight, the feathers fluffed and faded, and the body twisted from bird to woman. She was a copy of the female heir, except for the eyes. They held a depth of sadness you could drown in rather than the cold, strangeness of Mara’s eyes. Instantly, I knew that this owl, this woman, was the ghost of Mara’s twin. But why? Why hadn’t she been put to rest? She’d died as an infant, and yet now she stood as a woman. As a ghost.

Even more small owls, flying from the direction of the cave, joined her. There had to be more than twenty of the tiny owls. My stomach lurched as my mind connected the slaughtered babies to the tiny owls. Except I understood how babies slaughtered in sacrifice to a demon might linger, unable to leave this place. Only, it seemed, over the years their ghosts had grown stronger.

And yet, they still wanted something from us.

I shrugged off Walker’s arm and stood naked in the chilly air. The heat of rage was more than enough to warm me. I needed to hear the truth, to know without a doubt what happened here. “Who did this? Why?”

“My sire, Malcolm Williams, and he did this for ambition. He fed the demon with the sacrifice of his children. Me, then my sister’s children… babies he sired, forcing himself upon her, while she was still a child herself. And then, there were others.”

My gut turned. So, his infant daughter hadn’t just died, he’d killed her? And Mara, his living daughter, had been raped by her own father and had those babies taken away too? All to feed a demon who promised him power? It was sick, but it made sense.

And yet, not all my questions had been answered. “Who killed him?”

“She gave us her body and through Mara we finally destroyed him,” the ghost replied. “But the demon passed to her through his blood.”

Walker inhaled, the sound loud in the unnatural stillness, but I didn’t blame him. So… the demon had occupied the father, likely for many years, and now it was in his daughter? Damn it. Hadn’t she been hurt enough?

“Do you want her dead, too?” he asked. The question was somehow harsh but gentle, not a trick I could manage.

And not a question I would have thought to answer. These ghosts were vengeful, so they were here for blood. But after all Mara had been through, after her own father had slaughtered her infants, the woman didn’t deserve death. She deserved kindness. Yet if the demon had passed into her, the ghosts might want her dead.

The silence was deafening as I waited for the ghost’s answer.

Her voice was gentle when she finally spoke. “I want her free. She loved them, and a part of her died with each one of them. They want to go home with their mother.”

Free and with her children. In this sense, it might mean dead, but I would not be the one to do it. If it could be helped. We couldn’t allow a demon to remain in this world, yet that wasn’t enough to make me cause the woman any more pain.

She turned to me. “Will you go into the house, and open the doors to us?”

“I cannot harm those or that which belong to the Guild. I cannot kill, except in self-defense. Will you harm any officials or the land if you and the ghost babes go into the house?” I recited the overall restrictions of the geas’ restrictions. I know it will judge the truth of her words better than me.

The blur of feathers blinded my eyes as they all took flight and landed on me. Their talons were tiny razors, their voices those of babes, a wild cry.

Fear for Dmitri grabbed my throat. I knew the Dumonts were decent people, but the fear baked into the ground sent my mind reeling. What if they did something like this?

She leaned forward, her eyes round and golden as an owl’s. Long fingers ending in talons cupped my face.No. We will free her.Her voice echoed in my mind. Sincerity rang like a bell through my body.

They took flight. Walker stood by me, and a cold midnight glow surrounded his hands. Power, ready and willing to do harm, if needed. It dissipated as I stared at him.

“What would you have done?” I asked.

“Driven them off. Defended you if they tried to carry you away.” He tilted his head, glancing at me from head to foot. “You naked is a glorious sight, but the blood is off-putting.”

“It’s fine.” I reached for my clothes, hell-bent on opening the representative's home to the ghosts.

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