Page 36 of Heart of Thieves

As the cab trundles closer to my childhood home, hills dotted in trees going orange and gold roll past the window, pulling at something buried deep inside me. I haven’t returned in five years, and in spite of how much Aethera has grown in that time, Warthington seems not to have changed a bit.

The same stone cottages wear the same gray shutters and carry the same flower boxes overflowing with the same blooms. The same roads go bumpier as the smooth city streets give way to the gravel paths of my memories.

The little white church sits on a hill, its spire the tallest point in the town, its brass bell glinting, and I can almost see Nic climbing the steps with me to ring it before services. Can almost hear the songs we used to come up with, as crude and crass as twelve-year-old boys were wont to create, to accompany that shrieky toll.

The leaning cottage next door to the parish slumps into view.

“Could you stop here, please?” I ask, and the driver pulls over in front of the peeling picket fence. Usually, I might just vanish, leaving the cabby to drive back to Aethera without pay. But something about being here in front of the home where my father taught me to fear the gods makes me drop a handful of plats into the front seat. “Thank you,” I say distantly as I exit the vehicle.

It rumbles away, and I approach the front gate. A little girl in a frilly blue dress and a boy with holes in his trousers toss a ball back and forth in the yard, seemingly unaware of me.

In their laughter, I hear that of my brother and me. In the call of their mother inside, I hear that of our own before she died.

Shuddering, I drag myself away. This place does not belong to me anymore, and I am not sorry for leaving it. I set off up the hill, feet crunching in the gravel.

Movement in my peripheral vision catches my eye, and I glance over my shoulder. There stands the shop I once stole a diamond scale from—Gerard’s Gems and Jewelry. An older, wider, grayer Mr. Gerard darts a furtive look at me. Our eyes meet, and he flinches as though burned, disappearing inside his shop and slamming the door shut behind him. The curtains in the window yank down an instant later.

Perhaps I should have worn a disguise or at least gone noncorporeal. Anyone could report back to St. James, let him know I’m poking around places I haven’t in years. He could catch on to what I’m doing.

But so what if he does? It’s not like anything here could be traced back to my Tentacles. And, unlike my brother, I do not fear St. James. There is no prison that could hold me, no locked door I could not pass through. As long as those I care about never come here, it does not matter who sees me or whom they might tell.

So, holding my head high and nodding at passersby, I duck into the parish.

It’s just as I remember it. Wooden pews face a simple carved pulpit on a riser. Behind it, stained-glass depictions of several of the Gods Above filter light in hues of scarlet and gold. Books line the walls— dozens of copies of the Odelion, yes, but also ancient research texts and constellation maps. Most parishes have a library like this, typically much more expansive than the one here.

A figure shuffles toward me, clad in the exact same robes my father wore. Simple and fastened up the front with small wooden buttons, sleeves pooling wide like tents until they reach his hands, where they knot at the wrist.

When I glimpse his white-spun hair, his pale, weathered face, and his sunken gray eyes, all of the air whooshes out of my lungs. That’s Seren Plinth, the man who helped my father run this place. I stumble, catching myself on a pew as memories pull me into their violent current—memories of waking after the moonshard was gone, my body disintegrating into nothing as Nic walked free.

Not alive, for I could not feel, could not touch a soul, could not speak. Not dead, for I could not end it. Trapped a phantom forever-more, a yawning abyss stretching beyond me for eternity.

Hunger gnawed through me, and I clawed at people for the soul-light glowing inside their skin. But they passed through me as though I was nothing but smoke.

Eventually, my wandering ghost’s feet brought me here to Warthington and the little parish that had once been home. I dragged my fingertips through the hearts of the flames atop the candles at the front of the room, but the fire did not so much as flicker. I tried to pull books from the shelves, but they did not budge.

And then my eyes caught on the decorative voratium pieces draped along the back window hanging from tiny threads to look like stars. I reached for one, fully expecting my palm to pass right through.

But it didn’t.

The voratium moved wherever I took it, dulled by the shadow of my hand.

“What the devil?” a voice grunted behind me.

I turned and caught sight of Plinth. His silver brows knit as the voratium moved seemingly on its own.

That devouring hunger inside me roared wilder, and I moved on instinct, yanking the voratium until its string snapped and pressing it to the priest’s neck.

His life spilled forth. Filling me. Awakening me. For the first time in weeks, there was sadness, there was joy, there was air on my cheeks and clothing on my body and my heart thrashing in my chest. There was fatigue and there was rage and there was hope.

I cried out, tears filming over my vision as Plinth’s eyes widened, as his body flickered into nothing. I could still see him, faint as a wisp of air, but the worshippers in the pews cried out in shock as he dissipated into nothing and I rose from that nothing, full and whole and corporeal for the first time in weeks.

Plinth’s frail hand curled around mine, his eyes bulging, his mouth forming words no one could hear. Stop, he seemed to gasp.

But I didn’t stop. I sucked everything in through that voratium, let it fill me with light, with life.

His noncorporeal chest began to heave, air rasping in and out of his phantom lungs in short bursts.

The longer I pulled on his soullight, the more the terror of the past weeks filled me. Terror I should have felt but couldn’t because I had been nothing. Terror that would leave me with nightmares forevermore.