The Secret of Spellshadow Manor 4 by Bella Forrest (life books to read TXT) 📕

piece, and find the information he needed about the essence—and once he had those things safely in his grasp, he would kill Caius. The thought of murdering someone made his gut twist, but he refused to make the same mistake he had made with Alypia and leave another royal to pursue him.

“Don’t be reckless, Alex,” warned Vincent.

“I have to go,” he replied.

By the time Vincent opened his mouth to say more, Alex was already gone. Running to the turret where he had held Ellabell beneath foggy moonlight, he knew what he had to do. There wasn’t time to turn around and tell the others. If he lingered any longer, seeking approval, it left more time for Ellabell to be hurt by the vicious man who had taken her. After all, Caius was known for his love of torturous spells and his joy in others’ suffering, and if the warden shared even a sliver of his brother’s cruelty, Alex didn’t want her anywhere near him. Alex was the only one who could get past the barrier and out into the forest, where she had gone, and it didn’t make sense for him to waste more time they didn’t have.

Alex coiled the strands of his anti-magic into his body, folding his solid form in on itself, and disappeared with a snap. As the world fell away and the sky rushed around him, he forced his mind to focus on the edge of the forest, pushing back the racket of a million racing thoughts. With a thud, he landed in front of the gatehouse.

I really need to get better at landing, he thought absently, brushing the dirt from his trousers.

Sprinting toward the windows of the gatehouse, he pressed his face up to the glass, checking for any sign of Ellabell in the room beyond. To his frustration, it was empty, but his keen eyes noticed that the map was missing from the desk. Inspired, he reached for his roughly sketched copy of the map, still crumpled at the bottom of his trouser pocket, and scanned it.

There was an indistinct track that led through the dense forest, toward a settlement just below the mountains. Alex figured it was as good a place to start as any.

He ran, following the overgrown path through the woods, snagging his feet on the coiled roots, shivering at the soft caress of creeping vines against his neck. It was a dry day, but the sky above was overcast, not a single patch of blue to be seen in the endless gray. To his left and right, he heard the crack of twigs and the rustle of unseen creatures in the undergrowth, startling him every time. He pushed away his fear, focusing only on what lay ahead, hoping he would find Ellabell before something horrible happened to her. With each step, his rage at Caius burned more fiercely.

The forest came to an abrupt halt. Ahead, the crumbling skeleton of an ancient settlement stood beneath the shadow of the great mountain that rose up behind, a towering tombstone to a ghost town. Black clouds swirled around the summit as the air shuddered with thunder, followed by spidery bolts of lightning that dashed the mountainside, flaring for a moment before fading to nothing. It was too far up for Alex to see the damage it had done, but the storm didn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon, lingering gloomily upon the peaks.

Nature had begun to reclaim the derelict buildings and broken sidewalks, flowers pushing up through the cracks in the cement and crawling across the decaying masonry. Walking through the deserted town, scattering rubble with every step, Alex glanced over the peeling names of storefronts and street signs leading to neighborhoods that no longer existed. He saw the name “Thunder Road” painted on a signpost that pointed toward the mountain. It reminded him of an old song his mother used to listen to while she danced around the kitchen, and he smiled with bittersweet remembrance, the memory urging him forward.

Passing what looked like an old tavern, Alex could make out lettering that spelled “The Feather and the Sword.”

Good name for an English pub, he thought as he approached it. Stepping carefully over the rotten floorboards at the entrance, he found himself in a damp, moldering room with a bar at one end that had all but fallen away, and a few festering chairs and tables that he imagined would disintegrate if sat on. A great tear in the ceiling revealed the floor above, but the stairs up there looked as if they had given in to dereliction a long time ago.

Where are you, Ellabell?

He returned to the street. As he scoured the tumbledown houses in the wreckage of a town, he came to wonder what this place used to be, and how it had found its way into the magical realm that held Kingstone Keep in its palm. There was something decidedly ordinary about it. It did not look or feel like it belonged to the magical world, yet here it was.

Who lived here? Normal people? Spellbreakers, perhaps? He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t get a sense of what this place had once been from the ruins, and yet his mind flitted toward his own kind, picturing them walking among a living version of this place.

A movement up ahead snatched his attention, his eyes snapping toward it. At the very end of the street was a building, marginally less derelict than the rest. It looked like it had once been a town hall, and it was still mostly in one piece. The cracked white walls gleamed as a sliver of sunlight pierced the dense cloud for a moment, making Alex wonder if that was all he’d seen—the flash of the sun’s glare against the few remaining windowpanes.

Not wanting to chance it, he made a beeline for the grand building. Walking with purpose, he strode toward it, realizing that if someone was watching from within, there was no point in hiding. The windows