Black Blood (Series of Blood Book 4) by Emma Hamm (scary books to read .TXT) 📕

she were being attacked. Her quaking knees buckled, sending her tumbling backward.

He watched her fall. She crumbled onto the stairwell like the dead moths he found on his floor each morning.

“That is it,” he growled as he swept up the stairwell.

His shadows trailed behind him like a great cloak of night. He knelt before her, palmed her cheek in his hand, and rubbed the tears away with his thumbs.

“Let me help you,” he begged. “You do not have to do this alone.”

Her eyes were luminous and impossibly large. Tears glowing silver dripped in pearls down his fingers. “You did this to me.”

His heart threatened to shatter. “I did, darling. I did.”

“So why should I trust you to make it easier?”

There was no good answer to her question. If she were a smarter woman, she would never trust him. Pitch was a dangerous man who never did anything other than harm those he loved.

If he were a kinder man, he would have brought her back to her friends and let her solve the riddles of Time on her own. She was smart enough to do so.

His chest expanded in a great inhalation of breath. He did not make the honorable choice.

Lydia sighed as he slid his hands underneath her legs. Her spine branded his fingers as he hauled her against his chest. She was lighter than a bird. He counted her ribs with a single pass of his hand. Each ridge a broken song inside his head as he reminded himself just how much he had harmed her.

The burning guilt made him wish to wipe the feeling of her from his fingers. It ate away at his form until his hands no longer had flesh, but were darker than night and made of shadows. They held their substance so his precious cargo would not drop and were tipped with claws capable of shredding anyone who dared take her.

Her head lolled against his chest. White hair caught upon the collar of his shirt, leaving webs of silver across his body. As Pitch looked down upon the strands which ensnared him, he realized another, sharper, change.

His clawed hands of shadow were not made entirely of darkness. Instead, touching her had sent sparks of white light echoing through his magic. The cloak of shadows trailing up the stairwell and into the corridor behind him also showed the effects of her magic.

A man made of shadows was a man made of the night sky when she was in his arms.

“How far gone are you?” He asked as they walked toward her bedroom.

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“What changes have you seen? What are you capable of?”

“I don’t-” she stuttered. “I don’t know. It started a few nights ago. I could…. see things. In the shadows of my room that I shouldn’t be able to see.”

“What were they?”

“They looked like people I once knew. But they were wrong, twisted, and furious.”

He toed open the door to her room and paused. “Angry?”

“Like they wanted to hurt me.”

He didn’t want her in this room. She had been rotting away in here for too long, to use the words she had shouted at him. Though it was a beautiful room filled with the most valuable things he could find, it was still a bedroom. And only sick people were confined to such a place.

She would not linger here. He turned on his heel and left, walking toward a much more pleasant place.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Somewhere else. Tell me more of this dream.”

“That’s it. They wanted to hurt me and when they bent over my bedside, I woke up.”

“Were you yourself in the dream or someone else?”

Acknowledgment sparked in her eyes as she looked up at him. “You think I’m dreaming prophecies.”

“It is as good a place to start as any. Many Oracles believe themselves to be the people whom they dream of.”

“So Sil was an Oracle?”

“She was much more than that.”

The next door swung open for them at his request. The house had swept most of the dust from its corners and set a roaring fire ablaze to heat the chilled room.

“What is this place?” She asked him as she looked around.

“I suppose it would have been considered a living room.”

An opulent one at that. And rather outdated. Victorian furniture bled red splashes of color lined by golden frames. The walls were plastered with red wallpaper and white roses that seemed to peel from their 2D origins and trail onto the ground. It was a royal’s chambers, red, gold, and rich mahogany.

He settled her onto the couch. “Ask for anything you wish, and the house will provide it.”

“How?”

“Magic.”

“I suspected that,” her voice was grim. “But whose magic is it?”

“A Summoner’s. And an old friend before you accuse me of kidnapping him as well.”

A crooked grin spread across his lips as he turned to the fire. It did not need his help, but he grabbed the poker all the same to adjust the logs.

“Why are you being so kind to me?” she asked.

“It is as you said. You hold the last bit of a woman who was very dear. I will guide you through your changes, and in doing so, she will remain alive in you.”

Because Sil’s magic never made me King of the Stars as well as of the Night. Because I did not realize I was dying before I met you. Because my hunger is cavernous and just the sight of you fulfills my every desire, he wished to say. But he did not.

Obsession was a dangerous game. The past and present were melding together for him. He remembered her clearly. His Sil. A firecracker of starlight who was both brutal and unforgiving. He saw the goddess of old inside Lydia, the never-ending well of power growing beneath her skin.

She was not Sil because there was more to her. Sil had been a warrioress where Lydia was delicate. Sil had been the tempered blade, Lydia the finest thread of steel. Both strong. Both capable.