Blue Blood (Series of Blood Book 3) by Emma Hamm (books to read this summer .txt) 📕

life to recognize it anymore. And for that, I am very sorry. I feel terribly guilty about it. But I want you to remember this so that you will have a chance.”

“It’s not your fault,” Mercy said, brows furrowing.

Pitch shifted in his shadows. “Lydia, we said we wouldn’t.”

“I know.” The deer woman stepped out of Mercy’s arms and back towards Pitch. Her face had changed from a neutral marble expression, to one of sadness. “But she needs it.”

Mercy felt cold without the woman’s arms around her. Even more than that, she felt alone. She’d never been so lonely.

Panic made her speak before thinking. “Ignes?”

“Here,” he said inside her head. “That was incredible, it felt like—”

Lydia interrupted them. “Like coming home?”

“You can hear him inside my head?” Mercy asked, startled.

Before Lydia spoke, Pitch stepped behind her and clasped a hand over her mouth. “No more spoilers.”

Mercy would never forget this moment. He was merely a tall, thin man, until he stood behind her. His shadows fanned out behind him like great wings of darkness. Artisan hands smoothed down Lydia’s face until one clasped her shoulder and the other curled around her delicate waist.

And Lydia, the glinting light, did not banish his shadows. Instead, she absorbed them and turned their darkness into silver. When she tilted her head back against him, her horns curved into the hollows of his collarbone and the strong planes of his shoulders.

They were a couple made of darkness. Not the neverending bleakness of the abyss, but the silvery glow of moonlight illuminating the world in a different way.

“Who are you?” Mercy couldn’t help but ask.

Pitch raised a finger to his lips. “Secrets, darling.”

“There are too many secrets in this world as it is.”

Lydia chuckled. She turned within Pitch’s arms and slid her hands along his shoulders. Somehow, in those graceful movements, his coat came away. She folded it over her arm.

“Just remember, you can always return to me, daughter of light and love,” Lydia murmured.

“I was born to be a weapon,” Mercy told the deer woman in confusion.

“If you truly believe that, then we’re all lost.”

A faint fuzzy feeling in Mercy’s head distracted her. It was the buzzing of bees, or the rapid beat of a bird’s wings.

“What?” Mercy asked as she shook her head.

“I’m sorry you have to go through this,” Lydia said. She tucked herself into Pitch’s arms and turned her back on Mercy.

“I summon you, Phoenix.” The voice was dark, demonic, not Ignes’s. But it echoed inside her head all the same. “I summon you to me.”

The moths burst into flight. Thousands of them swarmed in the air and fell like snow upon the shoulders of Pitch and Lydia. He stared at Mercy with impossibly dark eyes.

“Help me,” she cried out as her body melted away. Ignes’s power swelled as he fought the summons. This man was not their master, and yet, he was. “Help me!”

The last thing Mercy heard from inside the cursed house of shadows was the sound of a woman weeping.

14

“I just want to know where she is. That’s all,” Jasper growled.

“She’s with Pitch,” Wren assured him. “I’m sure she’s fine. No one could be with Pitch and be in trouble.”

“So you say.”

“I know him more than any of you.”

“And just how much is that?”

Burke shifted on the couch he and Wren were seated upon, stretching his arm behind her. His fingers curled into a fist and opened. Jasper understood the subtle movement for the warning it truly was.

Yelling at Wren wouldn’t fix the fact that Mercy had disappeared on the tails of Pitch’s magic. It didn’t change that he was worried about her. But it felt better to release some of the pent up rage threatening to turn his vision red.

“She has to be fine,” Bluebell muttered. “We’d know if she weren’t fine.”

“I don’t think we’re that connected to her,” he said quietly, so the others would not hear.

“No, but I still think we’d know.”

He didn’t want to entertain the thought that Bluebell was talking about soulmates. The Fairy was all too obsessed with the idea of souls being interconnected in this dimension. He had listened to her prattle about fate and how lucky humans were more times than he could count. In the end, reality had always smacked him in the face, reminding him that he was still alone as he chased after a woman who didn’t love him back

But, Mercy might. He was convinced she could offer him the same kind of love the others shared. Maybe even more. From where he was seated in the only recliner in the room, Jasper had a perfect view of the newest lovebirds.

Wolfgang was seated a handspan away from Lyra. His feet were perfectly placed on the floor so that they were parallel, and his hands were a mirror image of each other atop his thighs. The man was into details, apparently.

“I see this is still a thing.” Jasper gestured at them. He wanted to be happy for them, but a spark of jealousy still burned whenever he saw them together.

Lyra was next to Wolfgang, leather pants wrapped around her body like a second skin. Her hair was high in a ponytail, and elaborate makeup painted her face. Jasper knew exactly what she looked like without that makeup. He didn’t want to remember, but it wasn’t likely he would forget.

He remembered every wrinkle and groove. Not in an obsessive way, as it once might have been, but because he savored the memories they shared. She was family. He had told her that, and he still believed it.

“Still a thing.” She smiled as Wolfgang touched her knee. “Is that going to be a problem?”

Jasper heard the steel edge to her question. “No.”

“What changed?”

“Everything.”

Lyra stared at him a few moments longer. Her eyes traced over the burnt hair on one side of his head, the unruly mess of his beard, the dirt that still streaked his skin.

“You look like shit,” she finally declared.

“Feel like it, too.”

The grime was wearing