Embrace of Darkness
The Shadow Sorceress Book 6
Bilinda Sheehan
Copyright © 2019 by Bilinda Sheehan
All rights reserved.
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Contents
Embrace of Darkness
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Also by Bilinda Sheehan
Embrace of Darkness
The Shadow Sorceress
Book 6
Bilinda Sheehan
1
“No, no, no, no…” The words left my mouth but I wasn’t even aware of forming them.
The words on the wall danced in front of my eyes, mocking me.
You have only one father.
Turning back to face Graham I was once more faced with the horror of his end.
“Graham, come on, wake up,” I said, knowing he was gone and yet unable to stop the pointless words from escaping me. Reaching out toward him, I pressed my fingers against the side of his neck, his cooling skin slick with blood.
“You can’t be gone,” I said through gritted teeth, searching for the pulse I knew I wouldn’t find. “Come on, we’ve been through so much worse…”
Power flared inside me and instinctively I thrust both my hands against his chest. The magic spilled from me into him, searching for that divine spark that existed within all living beings, some called it the soul, or the spirit. However, I knew it was so much more than that because my magic had tasted its unique flavour before.
I’d experienced it within Mia when I’d brought her back from the brink of death, using the spark that existed within the demonic priest to keep hers alight.
But the zombies created by Jason and Heddou had been a different matter. Granted, they had retained an element of their souls but there had been no spark.
And when I’d held my mother in my arms as she’d died, her spark had been quenched and only Darcey’s presence and her words of warning had prevented me from doing something truly abominable.
There were after all, lines that should never be crossed…
There were rules meant never to be broken. The balance needed to be maintained.
With my hands planted against Graham’s body there was no denying the perfect stillness that held him in its grip. The kind of halcyon feeling that accompanied true death.
Screw the rules. Graham was dead. He wasn’t supposed to be. It wasn’t meant to be like this. And I could do something about it. The magic inside called to me, a siren song I no longer wished to deny.
People think it takes time for decomposition to set in, as if because you can’t see it, it’s not really happening. What they don’t realise is that from the moment the heart ceases pumping and respiration halts, the body begins to break down. Carbon dioxide builds, cells rupture, and enzymes are released which immediately begin digesting the very cells they have originated from.
Rigor mortis stiffens the limbs and the blood pools into the lowest parts of the body, leaving the skin strangely pallid in places and almost marbled in others.
Without that special little spark, or soul, to drive the process of living, the body is little more than an organic husk and so it was with Graham too.
My magic flowed through him but there was nothing to cling to, no flame to reignite, no spark to tend.
He was dead.
Everything he had been, everything he would be… gone.
“No!” Power built in my chest like a bubble that made breathing nearly impossible. If I held onto it, I knew I would go mad. It was too much, too strong. My emotions tangled with the power that resided in the very core of my being.
My skin burned, sweat sliding into my eyes, blurring my vision. I wouldn’t let him go, couldn’t let him go… and it was that one all consuming desire that drove me to let go the violence building inside my head like a scream I couldn’t voice. It ripped from me and for one sickening moment I felt each and every cell in my body, the power burning through them all like an inferno that sought to consume me from within.
Graham’s body jolted as though struck by some great electrical current. His body arching up from the blood soaked carpet.
Through my magic, I felt his damaged heart as it took a tentative beat. The muscle contracting suddenly as it struggled to force the coagulated blood through the arteries and veins that had already begun to break down.
“Come on.” I gritted the words through my teeth, my voice taking on the hollow ring of my power as it surged once more and slammed into his chest. His heart took a second shuddering beat, and then another. It was sluggish, slower than it should have been and that knowledge, the knowledge that his dead heart was now beating hovered at the edges of my mind.
But I couldn’t see past the tears in my eyes and I pushed the thought away.
I’d saved him once before. Brought him back from the brink of death, forced my power through his body so that his stopped heart beat once more. Of course it had been different then, he’d only hovered on the brink of death for a moment, teetering on the edge of the precipice. He hadn’t gone over then…
“Don’t leave me.” The words were little more than a whisper, dragged from the very depths of my soul, “Please…”
Graham’s blank eyes stared up at me and then for one perfect moment everything he had been returned. Recognition flared, the corners of his eyes crinkling as he smiled.
“Graham!” My exaltation was short lived.
Confusion washed over his face, brow creasing as he met my gaze. His body heaved in my arms, back arching, bones crunching as they were forced to contort in ways they weren’t created to move in. The smile died on his lips as his face twisted into a mask of pain.
“Amber, please! Oh God—” Graham’s voice was wet and weak as his words choked off and his face went suddenly slack. The animation that had been Graham was gone, wiped away a if it had never been there at all.
My body felt hollow, as though a great fist had punched a hole through the centre of my ribcage.
The recognition I’d seen in his eyes was gone, lost beneath the grey film of true death.
Dread coiled in my stomach as I searched his face. Below the grey of his dead staring eyes, there was something else, something that lurked beneath the surface. An uncomfortable intelligence that caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand to attention.
“Graham, I’m going to get you to a
hospital, I’m going to get help…” My words provoked no response, no flicker of recognition in him and yet I could feel the sluggish beat of his heart beneath my hands.
It was wrong, it was all so wrong.
I was powerful but I wasn’t a god and just because I could bring Graham’s body back didn’t mean I could restore his soul. It was gone, I knew it… beyond my magic. But left in its place was a hollow darkness that threatened to swallow all the light around us.
I stared into his eyes, a scream welling in the back of my throat.
The body shifted in my arms, Graham’s corpse shuffling as though the limbs no longer functioned as they once had. He raised his arms awkwardly from the floor, elbows bent in the wrong direction. The pop of his joints brought bile racing up the back of my throat. Flexing his fingers as though only realising for the first time that he had fingers, he balled his hands into fists.
I tried to move away, to shuffle out of reach and as I moved, panic closed icy hands around my throat, cutting off my air so that the control I had over my magic slipped. It took only a second but as soon as I lost the hold I had on him, something wholly malevolent sparked into the eyes of the man I’d once called my friend.
I tried to pull him back under with my magic. If I could reassert control, then everything would be fine. Graham’s head whipped to the side, vertebrae grinding. A chunk of ruined flesh hit the saturated carpet, the audible plop making me lightheaded.
This was my friend…
This was Graham…
This wasn’t happening…
His grey eyes fixed me with their dead stare.
What lay on the floor was definitely not human.
He twisted suddenly, the wet sound of his ravaged body squelching as his arm whipped out, lightning fast. He grabbed my throat, fingers digging into my soft flesh as he flipped me over. My back hit the wet floor hard, knocking the breath from my lungs as a dull thud travelled up my spine. Graham landed on me, pinning me under his weight. The shock lost me a couple of precious seconds.
Graham, or at least the creature now wearing his body like a cheap suit, tightened his grip on my throat, cutting off my air supply. He was surprisingly strong, his eyes vacant, movements slow and controlled, fingers crushing my throat with an ever tightening vice-grip that showed no sign of letting up.
My heels hammered the blood-soaked carpet, beating a tattoo of sound that echoed in my ears. Digging my nails into Graham’s blood stained hands, I tried to pry his grip from my throat but only succeeded in gouging my own flesh.
My heart rate slowed, black eating at the edges of my vision so that it was like staring up from the bottom of a long dark tunnel. I knew the face above me so well I could have traced every line with my eyes closed. His lips stripped back revealing his teeth in a wide monstrous grin, eyes blank and staring, not an ounce of humanity visible. He was so unfamiliar, so alien as to be unrecognisable.
I tried to summon my magic but panic, along with a lack of oxygen, held me in its teeth and the harder I tried to latch onto it, the quicker it slipped through my fingers.
My movements weakened, death hovering at the edges of my mind like a dark spectre. I knew it and a jolt raced through me as I realised the creature above me knew it too. It yearned for my end… thirsted for my death as surely as the earth thirsts for the rain in the summer heat.
Would my death restore Graham’s soul? Would it bring him back fully, a life for a life? An eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind… The ridiculous thought popped into my mind and I felt hysterical laughter bubbling in my chest.
My fingers slipped from his hands, my body growing slack as the last of my fight slid away. Graham’s face twisted above me, moving in and out of focus.
Silence roared in my ears as the darkness overtook me. As much as I wanted to fight it, I had nothing left to give. My magic guttered within and finally faltered. My heart stalled as the last of my oxygen was burned.
I found Graham’s eyes and prayed for him to return but there was nothing. I’d brought a monster back and it seemed fitting that my end would be at his hands and not at the mercy of some strange creature dreamt up in Hell.
2
The warm press of a hand cupped against my cheek.
My name echoed over and over, brushed the edges of my mind, like the hushed and hallowed devotions to a god long dead. He called me. Nic. I would recognise his voice anywhere.
Fiery pain sat like a band of iron, circling my throat making each breath a labour of love.
Agony jolted in my chest as strong hands thudded against my body, my ribs protesting under the force exerted.
“Amber!”
It was his fear that brought me around. Raw and unadulterated terror that tore at my soul.
“Please, Amber… not like this.”
“Nic—” His name felt foreign on my tongue, as though spoken by someone else, someone removed from the horror that had unfolded. There was something I was supposed to remember… I knew it, deep down inside but the mind is a thing of beauty and mine had decided that remembering now would be far too painful.
He stopped pummelling my chest as I spoke and dragged me up from the ground and against his body. I hadn’t the energy to stop him and hung limply in his grip as he squeezed so tight I wondered if he would crush me to death under his relief.
From the corner of my eye, I spotted Nic’s machete lying next to him on the floor. The dark blood on the blade only vaguely registering in the back of my mind.
There was a cold detachment in my thinking. Everything that had come before seemed terribly far away, as though it had happened to someone else, someone that wasn’t me.
Another Amber had been forced to destroy Tess while fighting to save her friends. A stranger that had faced Jasper and Kalfu in the cemetery, preventing them from completing their nefarious plans. She had beaten back the ghouls, using her power to make them corporeal so that the others could stand a chance at killing them. And it had been that other Amber who had used the coin given to her by Baron Samedi to bring young Peter back from the otherside.
And for what?
Despite the hold he had on me, I managed to turn my head to the side, bile rushing up the back of my throat as I caught sight of Graham’s bloodied hand, his fingers reaching out toward me, pleading… imploring me…
I’d failed.
A soundless sob scrabbled in the back of my throat as Nic picked me up from the floor and carried me to the door. I fought against him, the urge to go back to Graham strong. But my body was weak, my spirit broken.
“I just want to hold his hand, please just let me hold his hand—” My voice was not my own in that moment, it was spoken by some wounded creature that twisted in Nic’s arms, writhing and wriggling in a pathetic attempt to go back.
“You don’t want to see him like that, Amber.” Nic’s voice was soft, placating and utterly infuriating.
“Let me go!”
I summoned my power. If he wasn’t going to release me, then I was going to make him.
Nothing happened.
The flame within stuttered and then extinguished, leaving me wrung out and weak as a newborn.
I tried again and again I was left wanting.
Nic carried me into the main office, setting me down in the nearest swivel chair he could find. I tried to stand but my legs wouldn’t support me. Tilting my head up, I stared into his eyes, finding in them a reflection of the pain I felt.
“What happened?” he asked, his voice soft as he crouched before me.
There was blood on his face and beneath the warm gold tan of his skin, I could see an ashen hue.
“I found him and—” I couldn’t bring myself to form the words.
I was no stranger to death. I’d been around enough bodies in my time and had witnessed the deaths of those I cared about.
I was even responsible for the death of my father.
Yet this time, there was something different about it all.
Graham had bee
n tough, smart, and strong. I’d have trusted him at my back for any case the Elite could throw my way and yet…
I glanced over Nic’s shoulder and caught sight of the bloodied hand prints on the door leading to Graham’s office.
“Why didn’t you try to stop him?” Nic asked gently.
“I couldn’t,” I said, my voice hoarse. “He got a hold on me and I couldn’t shake him free and—” I cut off, closing my eyes as I remembered the feel of his fingers digging into the soft flesh of my throat.
“You tried to resurrect him,” Nic said, a statement of fact without a hint of the accusation I had expected from him.
“I wanted to save him.” I buried my nails in the palms of my hands a poor attempt to quell the agony that raged within. Perhaps, if I could make it external to my body, I would be able to take a breath that didn’t feel like my heart was going to rupture inside my chest.
“I know, sweetheart…” There was such tenderness in Nic’s voice and it brought a fresh bout of tears to my eyes.
“How did you…” I swallowed hard, my throat burning as I tried to find the right words.
“It’s better if you don’t know,” he said with grim determination.
I dragged in a ragged breath but it didn’t fill the void in the centre of my being. Panicked thoughts fluttered inside my head and my heart hammered my ribs like a trapped bird beating itself against a window because it can see freedom beyond the glass.
“I caused it, Nic. If I hadn’t… meddled, then you wouldn’t have needed to stop him.” I wanted to jump to my feet and run from the room and keep running until the ache in my heart eased.
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