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Chapter Three
Gia felt death.
In her youth, before her abilities had grown, it would only come as a darkness against her senses. As she matured, her abilities keeping pace with her physical growth, that brush of darkness became stronger. She couldn’t hide from death, and she needn’t fear it.
Those were lessons she’d learned in her youth, just as she’d learned how to call her shade to her.
That particular skill was one she’d learned in her adolescence, a rite of passage for her kind, while her father acted as her guide. It had been that rite, calling her shade to her, that had forever linked her to the earth, and strengthened her connection to life; where there was life, there would be death. No other option existed.
Gia understood death.
Neither death nor the darkness found in the deepest of shadows were inherently evil. Those born with the innate ability of shadow magic knew that better than most.
Everything that lived would eventually die. That was the cycle of life and shadow witches had to learn to respect that cycle as part of their training—to forget the natural order, the natural cycle was to risk losing yourself to your shade.
A shade was death—the echo of a soul who’d died violently in Underhill and couldn’t cross from that pocket reality into whatever waited beyond.
Through her bond with her shadow, Gia had grown up understanding the cycle of life and death, and what could happen when that cycle wasn’t respected. She’d long ago stopped fearing that brush of darkness that slid across her senses in the wake of death’s passing, even violent death.
She understood that touch.
Death left a mark—always.
But as they pushed onward up the face of the mountain, death seemed to stalk her and she had to admit, it was unnerving.
Finally, they reached a widening of the path, the stony surface leveling out enough that this would have been her chosen resting spot—if they weren’t being hunted.
Even without the warnings from her shade, Gia would have known death was on her tail.
“Something is coming.”
This time, it wasn’t her shadow who spoke, but the boy, Amy’s son and the reason the woman had betrayed so many to death.
Amy tried to tug him closer, fear a pale mask on her face, but he pushed away from her and glared, first at his mother, then at Gia.
“He’s coming,” the boy said again.
“The poor child,” the shade whispered. “He thinks he’ll be taken again. He knows who hunts us. But there’s only one. His men have turned back. There was a fall of rocks and the trail is blocked. It is just him. Only him.”
There was enough emphasis on that final word that Gia would have known just who her shade meant even if she hadn’t felt the wretched foulness of him like slime coating her senses already.
Still, her shade sent a mental snapshot and Gia found her mind’s eye locked on that mental image, a man in his fifties who might have been attractive if it wasn’t for the fervent gleam in his eyes.
Some might have called it devotion to duty.
But it was just madness...and hate.
Rand Blanton, leader of a local militia, a fake preacher, and all-around bastard. The hate he carried inside him had become a sickness, one that poisoned everything around him. It had also made him vulnerable, leaving him wide open to an even worse evil—a creature that had slid inside him like a parasite and now lived within his skin.
That monster was one Gia had been hunting her entire adult life.
Casting a look around, Gia searched for a place where her shade could hide and protect them. She found a faint fissure in the mountain face and pointed. “Go.”
“You need me.”
“I can fight that miserable punk on my own.”
Her shadow hesitated.
