Page 22 of Bright Soul

“Three days,”he echoed back.“Yet it feels like the trickle of minutes through time or a pair of eternities intertwined.”

“Are you okay?”I burst out.“Tell me what you need. Should I sneak into the audience chamber and grab you?”

“No!”he shouted.

I flinched, drawing Ben’s attention. I affected a carefree shrug and rubbed my arms like I’d caught a sudden chill.

“Stay as far away from Myuna as the pocket dimension permits. Give me your word that you will evade her, bright soul,”Phaeron continued with feverish intensity.

“I can’t do that…not while she has you.”

He chuffed with frustration, and I recognized the cadence of cursing in his first language before he switched back to English.“She is a hundred times more powerful than you, even in her much diminished state.”

Someone took a hold of my arm, and I jumped again. It was Ben, who squinted down at me. “We’re going,” he said, indicating where our coven was heading toward the elevator. “You good?”

“Talking to Phaeron,” I whispered, tapping my forehead.

“Uh huh,” he replied skeptically.

I followed with an annoyed scoff. “I think Myuna is torturing him. He doesn’t sound like himself.”

What he didn’t know was that, without an immediate reply from me, Phaeron was repeating my name a few times in a panic.“We’re going to save you. I don’t know how, but we will,”I promised him.

“Cress,”he said, but this time, he caressed my name.“Don’t. Your time should be occupied with finding an escape, not me.Do you not yet see the danger I pose to you? Myuna snatched control of me without effort. I crave to consume your soul every time I see it. I fear the desire will only grow worse with my exposure to her fell presence. You’ve bonded to two strong, stable men… Allow my act of love for you to be of sacrifice so you may live without fear of me losing control in the darkest corners of night.”

“Okay, Phaeron,”I replied pointedly as I got into the elevator with my coven and we started to descend into the pits of the library.

“Your agreement comes too readily,”he replied in a suspicious tone.

“Isn’t that what you want?”Tears pricked my eyes, and anger churned in my gut.“You should have come with us, you know. Instead, you gave up, and now you expect me to do the same. Well, I’m not! And I won’t promise you something that goes against my very being. No matter how much you shout at me in my head, you’re coming home with me. Hana saw that I would have a chance to save you in the future, and Iwill.”

For a long, terrible moment, he was silent. I worried our silk-strand connection had snapped somewhere in the middle from my raised voice.

“I did not give up.”He was far angrier than me, and I immediately wanted to duck away from the sharpness of his response.“I felt Myuna’s presence create a controlling tether between her and me. If I had gone with you, she may have been able to compel me from afar. Instead of languishing next to her, I could have delivered her the souls of everyone who escaped when I turned back. I ask in turn, is that what youwant?”

“Of course not,”I murmured. I was amongst the last to exit the elevator when it arrived on floor negative twenty-eight. Bella brushed against my ankles before disappearing into the librarywith my other two cats, Milo and Jin, while we waited for the elevator to retrieve Geo and the other librarian witches.

“Sometimes I forget you are a shortsighted mortal,”Phaeron scoffed.“The passion of youth with no bracing of sense.”

I gaped, then gritted my teeth.“Excuse me?”I demanded.

“There is no saving me!”he roared.“Do not court a fate worse than death trying!”

A headache threatened to split my skull.“You know what? I really don’t need this right now,”I replied.“We’re about to face some mangy giant dog things, and I can’t have you distracting me.”

“Mangy…dog…”he repeated slowly.

“Doskalos,”I supplied.

“Fuck. Who is we?”

“I thought you didn’t want to know much of what I was doing,”I snarked. This was about the time I’d hang up on an argument or leave a text on read, but we were connected by magic Braza controlled, as I had no idea how to get his stirred-up presence out of my head. Not that I truly wanted to, even with our disagreement.

He sputtered. An accomplishment, really, in mind speech.“Fine. How many doskalos?”

As he started probing for the strategy we were using, I realized I’d missed almost all of the plan in favor of talking to him. We were creeping down the stairs to floor negative twenty-nine, and it was a little late to ask,wait, what are we doing?I hated being that person at school, let alone on the edge of a seriously dangerous situation.

So, I told Phaeron everything while we waited for the familiars to return. “The hallway is clear,” Jin reported. The small black cat was the first to come back and accepted a single pet down her back before she stepped out of my reach. Sheprojected a feeling of fear to match the way she hunkered down. “You can hear them on the other side of the doors. The one at the end of the hall is much louder.”

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