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

thought inviting Bones to their home would turn into a pissing contest, but here they were.

He had waltzed into their home with the swagger of a man who was far too confident. The bones in his hair clacked as he moved and his midnight skin shimmered in her vision like the swirling magic of a scrying pool.

Though Pitch had kidnapped him, Bones held himself with an air of grace. There was no fear in his posture. No waver in his voice. The man was coolheaded as though they had invited him to dine at a dinner party.

Lydia made certain that they continued along that path. She murmured pretty words, simpered and flirted. Smoothing the way with a man like that was easy. He wanted to hear someone say how powerful he was, how good-looking he was, and he would do anything she wanted. Having him eat out of her palm would be a blessing, considering they needed to ask him to mend old wounds.

Pitch was not interested in that at all. He growled, he snapped, he pawed at her until she had to send him to the other side of the table.

Now, they compared old battle stories like that proved how manly they were. Each story grew more and more outrageous until she was certain they were lying to each other. And to what means? Bones was here, alive, eating their foot. Pitch was supposed to be a gracious host. At what point would these two realize they could be hospitable?

“I fought an Ogre with my bare hands,” Bones was saying. He lifted his palms from the table. “Ogres are incredibly strong. He struggled, but he was no match for my illusions. I held him down until he stopped moving and the entire time he thought it was his son. It started a war between the Ogre tribes. And I got what I wanted.”

“I’ve killed thousands of Ogres,” Pitch balanced his chair on two legs and propped his feet up on the table. “My sister created them.”

Before Bones could start in on another species he had killed, Lydia stood. Her chair squeaked like nails on a chalkboard. “I’ve had quite enough of this. You two need to realize that we share a common concern.”

“We’re merely talking, my love.”

“You are not talking, you’re sizing each other up! I don’t care which one of you is more powerful. I don’t care which one of you has the higher body count.” She lifted a hand to silence Pitch as he argued. “We all know it’s you, Pitch. You’re a God! You’ve lived for thousands of years in the same body as you do now.”

The two men were staring at her like she had grown a second head. She had the strange urge to shake her antlers at them and threaten to spear them through the throat.

Lydia lifted a hand and rubbed between her eyes. “Bones, we need you to talk with Lyra. To mend your relationship, it might help her along the way.”

“Me? That isn’t going to happen.”

“Why not?” she moaned.

“Lyra isn’t interested in talking with me. She hasn’t been for years now.”

“Why don’t you try talking to her?”

“Do you think I haven’t?”

Lydia lifted her gaze to his and saw raw pain in their depths.

“Miss Lydia,” he steepled his fingers. “Lyra was the closest thing to a daughter I’ll ever have. She’s not perfect. She’s a bitch, to be honest. But that’s partly because I made her that way. She’s a survivor, and that doesn’t mean she needs to be nice. I have tried to talk to her ever since she left, but she’s very good at evading me.”

Pitch leaned forward. “She said there was a debt owed to you. Something about mirrors?”

“I put that little curse on her a long time ago. She sees my reflection, not her own. I thought it was a good idea at the time. It forces her to at least acknowledge that I still exist. Now I see it was likely a bad idea.”

There was something to be said about overprotective fathers, but this took the cake for most stories she’d heard. Lydia lowered herself back to her seat next to Bones. “So she won’t speak to you at all?”

“No.”

Liquid, white light bubbled inside of her. Power, so strong that her fingertips glowed, pushed out of her throat. She reached for him, her palm laid gently out across the table.

“May I?” Lydia asked.

He stared at her hands.

“Bones,” she asked again. “May I touch you?”

“What are you going to do to me?”

“I'm trying to understand your past.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I don’t really have a way to explain it to you,” she whispered. “But I promise it will not hurt.”

Her words seem to do the trick. Bones reached out and linked his fingers with hers. It was so much easier to travel the threads when she was touching the person. Lydia sighed happily, drifting back into that easy place between life and death.

Smoke swirled around her and her mind filled with his memories. Every bit of life he had lived. Every second his creature had been awake and aware. Hundreds, thousands, millions of individual moments that made him significantly different from any other person on earth.

Lydia sorted through the memories, throwing some out of her mind as too personal or insignificant. She kept the ones which were helpful. The sweet scent of honeysuckle from the islands where he had lived as a boy. His overwhelming sense of duty and loyalty to an unnamed woman who wore bells in her dreadlocked hair. The love he felt for a little girl addicted to sparkly things.

He huffed out a breath. “What is that?”

“What?” she murmured.

“I’m remembering things I haven’t remembered in years.”

“Buzzing bees around tropical flowers?”

“The taste of salt on my skin after surfing for hours,” he murmured.

“Sun bleached sand?”

“Haunting calls of whales.”

“I’m sorry you had to leave your home,” Lydia curled her other hand over his, squeezing gently. “It’s never easy to leave the call of the ocean behind, is it?”

“I wanted