AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Suddenly, his back goes stiff. He turns toward the sandbags. Toward me.
Oh skies.
“Laia!” Rehmat whispers in my ear. “Let me in—”
I ignore her and stand, dagger high. The last time I saw him, he was not exactly reasonable, but not murderous either. “Hail, Meherya,” I say. “You have something I want.”
Distantly, a building crumbles, and the jinn fire roars closer. Smoke curls through the air, stinging my eyes, my throat.
“Come to watch a city burn, Laia?” he says. “I did not think you had such a taste for blood. Or punishment.”
Though his presence has always twisted the air around him, the Nightbringer’s shadow seems to drag with some new weight. The hatred in his flame eyes is bottomless. He unsheathes the scythe with a flick of his smoky hand and holds it to my throat.
Rehmat manifests beside him.
“Meherya,” she says. “Stop this. This is not who you are—”
“You.” He turns his wrath upon her, but the malice drains out of him, and there is only pain. “Traitor to your own—”
“No—never—”
“Do you remember nothing?” he cries. “Who we were, what we lost, what we suffered—”
Laia. She speaks in my mind.Let me in. Please. He is lost. He will kill you.
But he does not kill me. Instead he lowers the scythe, and I back away, astonished. Waiting for some new cruelty. But he ignores me completely.
“Come back to me,” he says to Rehmat, sheathing the weapon. “Help me remake this world for our kin. You were a warrior, Rehmat. You fought and burned and died for our people. For our—our children—”
“You dare invoke our children?” Rehmat’s voice is raw and terrible. As she speaks, I shift toward the scythe, readying my dagger. “When you murder other children at will? I will never join you, Meherya. I am not who I was. As you are not who you were.”
“Do you not understand why?” he pleads with her. “I do this because I love. Because I—”
I lunge for his back, slicing through the straps of the scythe. As he turns, as his fiery hands rise up to snatch it back, I call out, but not to Rehmat.
“Elias!”
Almost instantly, a voice screams out from behind the Nightbringer.
It is Maro, a Serric steel blade coated in salt at his neck. Behind him, hood pulled low, stands Elias.
The Soul Catcher’s gaze shifts to me briefly.I can’t help, he’d said. And yet when I called, he was there. As if he catches my thought, he shrugs and jerks his head toward the stairwell.Get out of here.
Scythe in hand, I go.
XLIII:The Soul Catcher
Maro does not put up much of a fight. His skill is limited to soul stealing. The Nightbringer would not keep him so close, otherwise. The touch of my salted dagger elicits a cringe.
To my relief, Laia is gone. When she screamed my name, I had not a whisper of hesitation. It doesn’t matter that I said I wouldn’t help. It doesn’t matter that I need to interrogate Maro to figure out what the hells he’s doing with the ghosts. When she called out, all that mattered was her.
But now she’s gone, and the Nightbringer turns toward me. I drag Maro back a few steps. The soul-stealing jinn wears his shadow form, and he is narrow-shouldered and slender, almost emaciated. When he opens his mouth, I dig in my blade, and he gasps, huffing in pain.
“You’ve been stealing ghosts, Maro.” I fix my gaze on the Nightbringer. “Tell me how to get them back.”
“You cannot get them back,” the Nightbringer says. “They are gone.”
“What have you done with them?”
