AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“The Norsemen are unexpected,” Eli said, his words half-questioning.
Iggy nodded. “She only has limits when she thinks about it. Geneviève remains her own worst limit.”
Then with a nod to the sandy ground, Beatrice ordered. “Dig. Find me a weapon.”
Whatever was going on with the combining of power had shifted something inside Geneviève. He couldn’t explain it, but her eyes—reptilian in shape, glowing as they sometimes did—weren’t seeing this world. Something had drawn her attention.
“A heart without a body.” Geneviève scanned the area, clearly seeking something. “I have to find it.”
“What?” Iggy asked.
“Theheart.”
“Geneviève?” Beatrice put a hand toward her, as if to stop her, but Geneviève shook it off.
“A heart isn’t a weapon,” Iggy pointed out.
“It’s trying to reach the water” was all Geneviève said. “It’s trapped in glass. It’ll batter itself against the glass . . .”
She stared back to the visitor’s centre.
Eli wasn’t sure of what exactly was happening, and it felt like an odd time to go out collecting hearts. A heart was not much of a weapon, but he trusted Geneviève.
“So be it,” he agreed, gesturing her forward.
Then she started walking away from the beach, the ruins, the dead. Something dead beckoned her forward.
“We will return.” He glanced at the others, as if expecting an argument that they were wise enough not to utter.
And in that sliver of a moment, she was gone,flowingtoward the visitor’s centre.
With barely a thought, heflowedtoward her—not as fast or as gracefully as a truedraugr. It was her magic, not his, so it still felt strange to use. Stranger still would be letting her out of his sight. Eli stayed at her side, while the others stayed with the dead army.
They had to collect a heart under glass.
17
GENEVIÈVE
“Geneviève?” Eli’s voice followed me, and I wanted to answer, but a heart was beating against glass—a dead heart I had woken. I needed a lot of things, but in this instant, I had to retrieve that heart.
It was the only thing I could think about.
I jerked the door open, and for a moment, I paused. Listening. Waiting. Then the heart started thumping again. It was like a drum, thundering in the room. The song called me forward.
A heart without a body, it wanted to answer my summons, to come toward me like the dead had done, but itcouldn’t. And it was imperative that I found it, that I protected the heart. I had a strange certainty that this was the single-most important thing in this life that I would do.
It’s not, my logical mind whispered.
But my gravesight led me forward. Like the grid of the city, this was a strange overlap, as if a map were drawn on the sand and soil. I had to follow it to the building where we had already weighed and measured the artefacts.
Nomagic here, I’d thought.
No magic here, Iggy and Beatrice had said.
Everything said there was no magic within that building, but something had changed when Beatrice and I summoned the dead. I heard the heart begin to beat.Thumpthump-thumpthumpIt drummed steadily as if alive.
I wasn’t in the habit of summoning hearts. I was a necromancer. I summoned the dead. So why wasthisheart summoned by the necromancy? Why had it not joined its body?
