Page 27 of French Kiss

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Page 27 of French Kiss

In the rare instances I let myself think about that day, I had to relieve the deep, unbearable burn of humiliation that arrived when I’d finally accepted we’d been tricked. I had to remember the way Cabell had tried so hard not to cry as we carried our things back up into the attic. I swore to myself I’d never let any man make a fool of me again.

And yet there I was, standing in front of someone else who’d played me like a fiddle.

“You know what this means, right?” Emrys began, interrupting that unwelcome descent into memory.

“Oh, I can’t wait to hear this,” I muttered.

“You’ve never been inside the estate, have you?” he continued, as if to really rub it in.

“Didn’t we just establish that?” I snapped back. Wyrm’s personal home also served as the guild’s headquarters and library. We’d been banned from ever doing business there.

“Well, I have, and I think I know exactly where they keep the mirror.” There was an edge of triumph to his look. “So you’re not quite rid of me yet.”

My lips parted as I scrambled for an argument. The air around me grew colder with each second, as if to help trap me there. “You think we can’t figure it out ourselves?”

Even as I said it, my inner logic, rarely heard, whispered, This is for Cabell.

“There are only nine days left until the winter solstice,” he reminded me. “And you have no idea what Lord Death’s plans are. You’re—”

He broke off midthought, his head snapping back in alarm. The air spiked with a depth of cold I’d felt only once before, when the White Lady had appeared in the field of blinding snow. Instinct and terror collided, begging me to move, but the death mark flared with such acute pain it felt as though I’d been stabbed there, straight to the heart.

I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, even as the shadows behind me snarled.

Emrys reached out and grabbed me by the jacket, hauling me over the top of the desk to his side as the ghost materialized from the dust and darkness where I’d stood only a second before.

The sight nearly made my bones jump out of my skin.

The woman’s long ropes of hair drifted around her, glittering and translucent. Even the dim light seemed to shy away from her, flickering over her face but refusing to linger more than a moment on her hideous expression of hunger.

White, glowing eyes fixed on me with recognition, her lips silently forming the word. You.

“What … the hell … is that?” I breathed out.

The heat of Emrys’s body was the only relief from the iciness that filled the air.

“That would be the sorceress this vault belonged to,” Emrys said, drawing us back. “Enora, what’s gotten into you?”

Her features sharpened like a knife, more wraith than human. Dust, grime, loose parchment, scraps of fabric, and fragments of tile rose to form her like clay in a sculptor’s hand. They encased her in a hideous skin of filth and decay. Giving her a body.

A phantom wind blew through the basement, rattling the chains on the Immortalities and slamming the door at the top of the stairs. I jumped at the noise, gasping at the sudden stench of ash and a rancid sourness. Flecks of dead earth and wood splinters were still finding her, scratching at our own skin as they tore through the air.

The ghost opened her maw, revealing fangs of stone and tile shards.

Revenant, my mind screamed. She was becoming a revenant.

Her arms stretched out like twining vines, her talon-like nails raking through the air toward my chest.

One of Emrys’s hands released me, fumbling with the desk drawer to retrieve something—a clay talisman, with a sigil for protection against the dead.

“Noooooooo,” the creature wailed, turning the air rancid with her misery. She lunged toward us, but her hands dissipated as they reached the talisman, clumps of dirt and ash from the fireplace raining down on the desk.

“You knew this thing was down here?” I squeezed out.

“She’s a shade,” Emrys said, bewildered. “She’s just a shade …”

A shade was a soul that remained in the mortal world, refusing to pass on. It didn’t possess the kind of malice or corrupted pain that would produce a more terrifying specter like a wraith or White Lady. Shades were stubborn, not monstrous.

At least, they were supposed to be.


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