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I frowned at the edge in his voice. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“Ilianna set up the wards this afternoon. I just got a call from him. Something’s trying to get past them. Something that resembles a gray shroud.”
MY STOMACH CLENCHED.
God, it was the soul stealer. It had to be.
But why in hell would it be attacking Stane?
“Risa?” Tao said. “You need to get over there. Now. Both you and that reaper of yours. You need to stop this thing before it gets Stane.”
“We’ll try. You stay away—”
“Ris, he’s my cousin—”
“And that fucking soul stealer can take you just as easily as him. Fire won’t stop it, Tao. Just wait for my call. Please.”
He didn’t look happy, but his grunt told me he’d do as I asked. I hung up and swung around. Azriel had drawn his sword. The blade was ethereal, alive with flickers of blue fire. It was the same sort of blue fire that now burned in his mismatch
ed eyes.
“Where do we go?”
“Follow me,” I said, and called to the Aedh.
“No, wait—” he said, but it was already too late. I was out of that room and speeding toward Stane’s.
Outside, darkness was already falling, and the city’s blanket of lights was beginning to twinkle into the shadows. The wind was sharp, buffeting my fleshless body, freezing even though there was nothing real and whole to freeze. I arrowed on, reaching for as much speed as I could, trying to ignore the wind and the cold and the fear that burned deep in the pit of my stomach.
I recognized Stane’s street and flew down it. Music began to ride the air, loud and heavy. The outside of the Phoenix was lit up like a Christmas tree, but it didn’t make the façade or the club any more inviting. Not that it seemed to stop anyone, because from the look of it, the place was packed. Maybe they were there mourning Handberry’s loss. Or maybe they were celebrating it. He certainly hadn’t appeared the most popular of bosses in the brief time we’d seen him last night.
I swept on. Stane’s grubby, steel-barred building came into sight. I swept around it, seeing little out of place, then realized I probably wouldn’t. Ilianna would have set her wards inside, not outside, where there was a greater chance of them being disturbed.
I slipped under the gap between the front door and the floor, then swirled to a stop as the containment field shimmered its warning. I reached for the Aedh again, re-forming and rebuilding my body particle by particle, until I was once more flesh and blood.
As I dropped to the concrete on my hands and knees, my body shaking and my breath wheezing past my throat, I felt it.
Evil.
An evil so thick and ripe bile rose up my throat and my soul shivered away from the awareness of it. The charm at my neck burned to life, its light ablaze with a fierceness I’d never felt before, smoldering against my skin and warming the air.
“Stane,” I said, my throat tightening against the urge to be sick and the words coming out little more than a harsh whisper, “lower the containment shield. I need to get in.”
The slight buzz of electricity died, and all that filled the silence was the rapid beating of my heart. Then I saw it—a shadow, a wisp, a trick of the light—hovering near the steps that led up to Stane’s command center.
But as I saw it, it saw me.
And suddenly it was right in front of me, its evil filling every breath, every fiber, until I couldn’t think, I couldn’t breathe, and all I wanted to do was run.
But I couldn’t.
My limbs were shaking, my muscles weak with exhaustion, and they just wouldn’t do what I wanted.
And that thing was reaching for me, its ghostly shroud forming hands that pierced my flesh and reached inside me. For the briefest of moments, I felt the power of the woman who had summoned and now drove it. I felt the depth of evil in her soul—a darkness that stained the very heart of me.
She was going to kill me—just as she’d killed little Hanna and Marcus Handberry. Not because she hated me, but because that was her task—to kill all those who stood in the way. Right now, the one standing in the way was me. And her creature was going to rip my soul from my flesh and consume it.
I screamed then. Screamed and ran.
