Red Blood (Series of Blood Book 2) by Emma Hamm (best short books to read .TXT) 📕

“Technically it is.” Wolfgang licked his thumb and flipped a page. “This was once the holding room for bodies that had yet to be embalmed. Mungus, hasten your speed please.”

“Your language is getting weirder.”

“More weird. ”

Lyra’s jaw fell open. “Did you just correct my grammar?”

“Grammar is a fundamental skill of life.”

“And speaking like a human is also important. Why are you speaking differently?”

Wolfgang hummed low in his throat. “I have already answered that question.”

She wracked her brain to try and remember what he had already told her. Being in this room was like being in the middle of a labyrinth. Every time she turned a corner, she thought she was going in the correct direction. Somehow that was never true. Instead, Wolfgang managed to spin her around and around.

“The spells?” she finally asked.

“Sanitatem incantatores.”

“Bless you.”

He blinked and slowly looked up from the tome in his hands. Mungus had returned to his side with a rib cage full of ingredients. “What did you say?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Did you not sneeze?”

“I did not.”

“Wow.” Lyra leaned back on her hands and began swinging her feet again. “You don’t understand jokes either, huh?”

“I frequently misunderstand humor.”

She chose to remain silent. Wolfgang set the book next to her hip, and she took the opportunity to curiously stare at the words. She recognized the shape of some runes before everything began to swim in front of her eyes. She couldn’t have read what was on the pages if she had wanted to.

The strange movement of the inked words was making her sick. But she could see that there was a drawing there. If she slightly crossed her eyes it became a little bit more clear.

“Do not stare at that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it will burn out your eyes.”

She laughed. “No really, why not?”

Wolfgang reached over to close the book. “Because it will burn out your eyes.”

Lyra couldn’t control herself. She reached up to rub her fists against the offending eyes in hopes that she hadn’t already done damage to herself. “Why would you keep something like that around?”

“I don’t frequently have visitors staring at things, which are not theirs.”

He leaned close to her to stare into her eyes. She was instantly overwhelmed as she stared into both darkness and light. Black and blue, like a bruise, reflected strange sights she did not wish to dwell upon. He held worlds inside his eyes.

Moments passed as they stared into the gaze of the other. Lyra felt when he suddenly shut down. A cold air crawled from inside his cloak and wrapped around her wrists. It traveled up her body until her teeth were nearly chattering. Worse was that the curious expression on his face smoothed into something akin to marble.

“My apologies,” he said coldly. “I so easily forget the horror of my form.”

He raised his thin hands to carefully draw the hood of his cloak over his head once more. He must have bespelled the cloth, she mused. As soon as the fabric settled, she couldn’t quite focus on what was inside it. Every time light should have hit the harsh angles of his face, the shadows moved to hold onto its secrets.

Lyra bit her lower lip as her heart seemed to clench in her chest. There was that feeling again. The odd one that had been dull with his doppelganger but now had moments when it seemed to flood her entire being.

She couldn’t describe it. There was a tightness to her soul she had never felt before. Or perhaps tight wasn’t the right word. Tenderness. Peace. Anxiety. Qualities she had never associated with a male before.

Her hands touched the edges of his tattered cloak. The fabric was coarse against her calloused palms and eaten through in many sections by moths. It fell back to his shoulders, and she was careful to smooth it in place so that the edges creased.

“I don’t mind the way you look,” she said with a soft smile. “There are much worse creatures than a man who is scarred.”

Wolfgang stared at her with the now familiar dumbfounded expression on his face before he returned her smile. One of his front teeth was chipped.

His hand pressed gently against her knees. She could feel the imprint of each of his fingers. Long and lean, they pressed hard into the leather that encased her legs.

He began to murmur in a language that sounded familiar yet wasn’t. There were words that sounded like she should know them. A stirring in memories that were not her own suggested that these were a language she had heard once in another life. Sirens remembered very few things that weren’t pretty, shiny, or sexy. But this she had heard before.

Light glowed from between his fingers where they touched her legs. Her eyes widened. His hands clenched harder onto her knees as his voice grew softer.

Yet something was wrong. His fingers didn’t look normal. Before her eyes they grew crooked. His joints seemed to bend at awkward angles that no normal human hand should ever see. Red blood started to leak out from underneath his fingernails. Runes glowed from within his nail beds. Then his voice began to sound strained as he continued to murmur his spell.

Red. His blood was red.

“Stop,” she whispered hoarsely. “Stop, this isn’t right.”

He did not listen to her. The light emanating from the palms of his hands grew all the more bright.

“Wolfgang, stop!”

Lyra heard the crunch of bone. She scrambled to get off of the altar and broke contact with him as she threw her body towards the ground. The stone floor was unyielding against her knees and instantly bruised her flesh.

The pain was preferable to the sounds, which still rang in her ears.

“Lyra, you must not pull away for the healing to be completed.”

“I can’t. I can’t.”

She was breathing hard. The magic he performed was not the beautiful thing she had seen Illusionists create. He was not a magical creature, and somehow she had managed to forget that.

This was Blood Magic. Dark