One by one, he took and took and took until there was nothing left.
When he finally pulled away, I felt like a dry husk. If not for his hands around my neck, I’d probably blow away.
“It is over,” he said.
I nodded dumbly, compelled by his strange, otherworldly power to believe him. Obey him.
With one hand still wrapped around my shoulder, he held out his other hand between us, palm up. A single black feather hovered there, spinning in place. He whispered an incantation that sounded as old as the earth, and the feather transformed into a golden-eyed owl.
He blew a silvery breath into the bird’s open mouth—Sophie’s soul.
The owl flapped its great wings and took off through the open window. The shield I’d inadvertently cast disappeared, and Ronan was at my side in a heartbeat, catching me right as my knees buckled.
Death—that's what he was, I knew now—turned his back on us, closing the windows with a simple flick of his wrists.
Ronan's arms wound tight around me. He was the only thing holding me up, the only thing keeping me tethered to reality.
“What thefuck?” Ronan growled at the hooded man, rage rippling through his muscles. “What did you do to her?”
Speaking to his own reflection in the glass, Death said, “The human body is incapable of eternal rest unless its soul passes through the Shadowrealm. Without this passage, the body believes the soul is merely traveling, and will endlessly seek to be reunited with it.”
“Say again?” Ronan demanded.
“If I’d allowed the witch to keep that soul, the woman to whom it once belonged would’ve become a revenant, her body animated, but not alive.” Turning to me, he said, “A mortal body is not made to carry two souls indefinitely. The souls would eventually fuse, feeding off each other, fighting for sustenance until the body could no longer support them. At that time the body would die, and both souls would be trapped inside the vessel for eternity.”
“You had no right,” I said, but Death either didn’t hear me, or didn’t care.
As if I was no longer in the room, he turned to Ronan and said, “She doesn’t yet possess the skill to—”
“You don’t know the first thing about her,” Ronan said.
“The skill to what?” I demanded.
Death finally turned his attention back to me, his eyes still glowing faintly. His body, which had initially looked like the same shadowy substance as the raven, had solidified.
Didn’t make him look any more human.
“You’re Shadowborn,” he said.
Shadowborn?
The word tumbled through my consciousness, snagging on a memory—water? A creek, maybe?—but I couldn’t hold on. I had no reference for it, nothing to make it stick.
Death put his hand on Sophie's chest and whispered again in that strange, ancient tongue.
“Where is she?” I asked. “Can you bring her back?”
“She is dead. Her soul has passed on to the Shadowrealm, as it should.”
“Why didn't she come back? The girl in the alley… I thought… My magic…” I trailed off, confused and scared. I hadn't told anyone but Darius about Bean, and though Ronan was still in the dark on the matter of my so-called necromancy, I was certain Death already knew my secrets.
All of them.
“That is not a fate you wish upon someone you love,” he said. “You brought back certain aspects of the girl she once was, but you were not able to properly reinsert her soul. With discipline and training, you—”
“Gray,” Ronan said, “what girl? What are you talking about?”
I untangled myself from Ronan’s embrace and knelt on the floor next to Sophie’s bed, smoothing the hair from her forehead. Her skin was cool to the touch and as pale as her sheets.
