Chapter 27
Cold dread hardened in the pit of my stomach.
This was the thing that killed Addy. I imagined him pressing one of his curved blades to my grandmother’s neck as she stood in her kitchen three months ago. Rage stormed like a hurricane inside me. What an insane, frantic fear she must have felt in those last few moments. I wanted him to feel that fear.
That panic.
That pain.
But much, much worse.
“You’ve caused an uproar in my city.” His face was full of wild fury. His eyes dull, flat and lifeless, yet glared at me like I was a little bug he wanted to squash. Around him, mist rolled through the graveyard, curling and creeping around each stone and tree.
My gaze dropped, and I scanned the ground. I left myself completely vulnerable. I should have taken a knife or something, anything. I needed a stick or a rock. There was nothing but the icy fall of rain and the ground turning liquid beneath my feet.
“Flowers,” he growled out, stepping forward. “And Mathias.”
I looked back up, surprised to hear Mathias’s name. Our eyes stayed locked for several uncomfortable heartbeats. For the first time, I took everything in I could about him. He was strikingly young and scarred, his shoulders heavy with anger and bitterness. And he looked ready to kill me.
Yet I noticed, he stepped no closer. Why was that?
He could have hurt me last night in the apartment. He could have easily grabbed me in the street before. Why hadn’t he?
Maybe it was because he couldn’t.
“You’re no more of a god to me than my right pinky is. You can’t even touch me here, can you?” Heat rose in my cheeks. I wanted him to get angry, just as I was.
And I needed to buy more time to figure out what to do.
He sneered down at me, unmoving. It didn’t look like he was falling for my bluff. Then a glimmer caught my attention just behind him. Something about the trees and fog around him seemed off—they were shimmering—like heat rising off the pavement on a sweltering day. Then a form moved slowly out from behind him, a woman, pale and gaunt, with the most haunted eyes I had ever seen.
Hemlock smirked. “What a quaint little family reunion.”
My heart sank. Was I going mad? My dead mother was standing in front of me like a nightmarish creature. Was anything I saw real?
Her eyes were wide, her mouth slack. She tried to step closer to me, confusion and shock etched into the deep gray lines and cracks in her face, but Hemlock touched a finger to her elbow, and she shrank back instantly.
She never escaped. She was never free of him.
All these years, I believed she was gone.
Freaking Addy, she did use the present tense when she last spoke to me. What did she say…“Your mother loved the king, she was obsessed with him, such as humans become. She thought she could fill the empty part of his soul, and no matter how much she tries, she never can.”
“Your life for her pathetic existence,” Hemlock said darkly.
“Let me speak alone with her,” I insisted, ignoring his offer. How did I know who she was and what I was seeing? Heat flushed though my body. What game was he playing? Why had everyone lied to me?
“No.” He stepped forward and reached his hand out and touched the bruise on my face. My stomach flipped violently, but I refused to back away from him in fear. “Poor child. All you’ve ever wanted was to be loved,” he leaned closer and whispered. Every muscle in my body tightened and began quivering with rage. “How does it feel, child? To know I’ve destroyed every hope you had?”
I wanted to slit his throat and watch his neck open up like a fountain. My pulse sped painfully, and I clenched my fists tight.
“Will you save your mother? Or will you let her suffer? And what about Mathias? Will you let him suffer as well?”
“What did you do to Mathias?”
His smile was sickening. “Hemlock will be the name of god on your lips.”
“Fuck you,” I spat.
He slithered up next to me, his movements liquid shadows.
“Your fealty, for their souls,” he whispered against my ear. “Or I could easily kill you now. How sad would that make your mother? How much more do you think she could endure?”
In Ravenswood, a soul is the only true currency left. “My fealty?” He wanted my touch, in Ravenswood, to make him feel alive again. “You want to use me. Use me for what I can do.”
“Come home to your family, Princess.”
“Don’t, Raine,” my mother’s voice called out. “Don’t ever go back there.”
I tore my eyes off his and stared at the creature he said was once my mother. Her scalp shined where the clumps of her hair were missing, and I could see the angle of every bone under her grayish skin. I had to help her, there was no choice if I would or not—I just didn’t know how yet. And Mathias? I couldn’t even begin to think about what Hemlock might have done. Deep inside my heart, I knew I could never walk away from what I had seen and felt when he kissed me and set my soul free.
I could no more leave them to rot in Ravenswood than I could stay here, haunted by their kind. Everywhere I looked here, I saw ghosts like a part of Ravenswood had come back with me, opening my eyes. There was a beauty in it, knowing loved ones watched out for you and helped you walk through life.
But my family, they were trapped—they couldn’t walk through life with me—so maybe I had to walk through death with them.
My mother’s hand covered mine, squeezing it so painfully tight, crushing my fingers with what felt like steel bones under taut skin. “Make no deal with him,” she whispered. Her voice wavered and trembled over her words. “He has no honor. No humanity left.”
I looked down at our joined hands and felt a gentle pull beneath my skin. A blush spread across her skin, her fingers softening and filling out. I could save her—I could save my mother.
“Raine,” she whispered. “Our souls are lost, forget us.”
“I can’t,” I said. No one deserves to be forgotten. No one’s mother deserves that, no one’s father, sibling, grandparent, child—no one’s soul deserves to be forgotten about.
The air around me glittered like the fading sparks of a firework. The pull under my skin grew, tugging me—I felt it in my teeth and the tips of my toes.
“How can you be a lost soul if there’s someone like me who cares enough to come find you?”
My mother’s eyes closed, a single tear slipping from each.
“Someone lost is just waiting to be found,” I whispered.
Hemlock’s hands fell heavily on my shoulders, dragging me away from my mother. She stumbled back, groaning—her hands reaching out to try and keep hold. Slowly her image ruffled, fading first in color then form until she was nothing more than a dim shadow over the slush and stone of ground.
I sucked in a deep pull of air. It tasted of snow and rain and life—things I may never taste again. How could I turn my back on my mother? Or Mathias? Blood pounded in my ears. My heart thudded in my chest. Every part of me shook and tingled in a dizzying effect. My nails dug into my palms. I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t say no. My chest grew tighter as bile rose in my throat. There was no other way.
“My fealty for their souls.”
Grayish, scabbed dead hands clenched around my throat, and the world spun around us like a carousel. What had I done? His fingers pressed in, and for a moment I could no longer breathe. Hemlock drew a long, deep, rattling breath, freezing the world around me. Pressure yanked at my chest, and then I saw it. Swirls of white light seeped out of my skin, so warm and bright and full of love and hope. It curled out of me like a symphony of notes and danced along my skin. As they reached the king’s fingers, they quickly changed into darkened vines of black smoke and ash, melting like wax into his rotting skin.
His filthy, smiling lips pressed into the flesh of my cheek, and all the life felt like it was draining out of me. Every part that held innocence and hope, goodness and love, he drained from my body, slow
and steadily as if he was enjoying each tortuous moment.
When he finally exhaled, I could breathe again and gasped and gulped in whatever air I could.
Our souls weren’t lost. They were stolen.
“Good choice,” he said, laughing.
Darkness crept along the edges of the graveyard, and it dimmed the sky until a deep blackness blanketed over us and dripped down into earth and stone. Bare branches of trees reached up to meet the emptiness of the sky, curving to form a roof of their dry, tangled limbs. My stomach flipped as if I had dropped from a far height, and then before me thick gloom gave way to Ravenswood’s tall cavern, filled with towering roots and packed earth. The two stone ravens that stood sentinel atop the archway, staring down at me as if smiling.
“Very good choice, my child,” Hemlock repeated, pulling me forward onto the cobblestoned path into the city.
Little did the Dark King know, I was human with a world of experiences behind me, and my fingers crisscrossed behind my back the whole time.
Fealty-smealty. It was time to fight back.
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Ravenswood (Ravenswood Series Book 1) Page 23
