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

For a moment, he thought she was talking to him, but then realized she had been eavesdropping. Talent after talent was being revealed. His Goddess was growing more powerful by the second. He had to stop her.

Pitch lurched forward, wrapping an arm around her waist. “No more spoilers, darling.”

He loved the way she leaned back into him. As if she trusted him. He had spent years convincing her that she could, and finally, finally, he got the satisfaction of knowing he had won.

Her antlers settled into the hollows of his collarbone. Bells jingled in his ears and the static electricity of her power danced along his shoulders. She fit into him like the missing piece of a puzzle.

How had he ever lived without her?

“Who are you?” Mercy asked.

“Secret, darling.” He raised a finger to press against his lips.

The darkness stuck to her swelled. The buzzing sound of bees and a vile acidic scent rose in the air. He could see it, hovering around her like a lurking shadow.

It wasn’t a normal power, but it was one he recognized. Malachi. The Void’s magic was as black as his soul.

Flashbacks burned his retinas. His siblings shrieking in the winds of sand they created, enjoying the way it tore into the eyes of their victims. Their horrid laughter as they choked people to death and move on to find their next victim.

Their magic had looked similar to Malachi’s. If he hadn’t swallowed them whole, he might have worried that one of their souls escaped him. But he could feel their presence pushing at the dark mass hovering above Mercy. They wanted to taste Malachi’s power. They wanted to feed off of him, hoping that maybe he would be strong enough to release them from Pitch’s grasp.

Mercy shimmered. Flames licked up her legs and twined around her arms.

“Help me!” she screamed.

He could not. Would not. There was too much to risk.

“Pitch,” Lydia whispered in his mind. “This is too much.”

It was. It was far too much for all of them. He tightened his arms around her waist and whispered in her ear, “I’m so sorry.”

She echoed his words, crying out as Mercy disappeared.

“Oh, Pitch!” She spun in his arms and buried her head in his neck. An antler sliced his cheek open with blinding pain. “I can’t bear this! I can’t do this anymore!”

“You can and you will,” he said. “You have to.”

“I’m so tired of having to do anything!”

“We’re the only ones who can do this.”

She was falling to pieces and his mind threatened to follow. They were making choices that Gods should make. This had to be the right choice because it was what they decided. Right?

He couldn’t afford to think anything less. The world could unravel but he would standby their decisions.

“We can only do our best,” he murmured into her hair.

“What if our best isn’t enough? What if we fail and all these people die because I didn’t see the right future? Because I was too weak?”

The same thoughts had danced through his mind more times than he could count. Pitch shook his head, flinging droplets of black blood into the air. “Then we will go to the next dimension. We will follow Malachi and stop him. We will try again and again until we get it right.”

“Is that really how you want to spend the rest of your life?” She lifted her tear streaked face to stare up at him. “You want to devote our entire existence to stopping one man?”

He wiped the tears away with his thumbs, framing her beloved features with his hands. “Saving the world is worth giving up our own lives, isn’t it?”

“Haven’t we done enough? Is two lifetimes not enough?”

“Not if we haven’t saved the world yet.”

Lydia sighed. Her fingers dug into his shoulders but she swallowed audibly and nodded. “Then there’s more you should know.”

His stomach dropped. Pitch sighed. “Of course there is. Why wouldn’t there be?”

“I don’t have to tell you.”

“Yes you do, I need to know what’s going on. How else am I supposed to help you?”

“You might not want to hear it.”

“Lydia.”

She ran her fingers through her hair, tugging on a few of the fine silver threads. “It’s not just Malachi. He’s working with someone else, someone who’s calling the shots.”

“He is. And who is it?”

“The Five.”

His tongue tangled into a knot. “Ex-Excuse me?”

“It’s the Five.”

“The Light Five? Not the siblings I swallowed?”

“Wouldn’t you know if it were your siblings?”

Pitch stumbled backward, catching himself on the piano. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t hear anything other than her words repeating themselves back to him.

It’s the Five. It’s the Five. It’s the Five.

“But why?” he asked.

“This is why the web was shattering. Time, whatever his name is, has been fiddling with the threads in an attempt to hide from me. They thought this world would bow to them, like the days of old. But humans don’t like to bow. The creatures are bonding with their hosts and people are forgetting that the Five exist. They don’t like that.”

“So they’re going to… what? Destroy the world to fix that? How does that fix anything?”

Lydia’s expression twisted with pity. “They’re going to try again. Hit the restart button and shed their blood, to create new creatures.”

“That doesn’t work. It doesn’t work like that here in this realm. I’ve bled thousands of times, and no new species have popped out of the ground.”

“They think if there is nothing left, that something might grow. It’s why they like Mercy so much. Why they tried so hard to keep her captive in that jail. She would be the perfect bomb to set off and destroy everything.”

Lydia’s body went rigid. Her head snapped backward and her hands shook. “No, no no no…” she muttered over and over again.

“Lydia?”

“They have her. They have her and they’re already trying to destroy everything. They think if they control her that she will do their dirty work.”

“What? Now?”

“It’s happening so soon, I didn’t see this. He hid something from