Page 62 of The Rebel Seer

Rhys grabs his brother’s hand. “You can’t save him.”

“I can’t…” Lee’s face is pale, his eyes tortured. “They’ll eat his soul. They’ll exterminate everything he is and was and could be again. I can’t…”

Neil’s soul floats from his body, a confused look on his face, and then he’s searching for something. For Lee. He holds a hand out but he’s already getting sucked into the vortex that is Myrddin’s soul.

I can’t. I know him. I know I don’t know this Neil, but I know him. I know the beautiful, loving, funny variation of him, and I cannot let this pass.

Something opens deep inside of me, something warm and powerful. Like a fire or a boiling pot. Like warmth in winter. That heat flows through me. Strange. I thought any death power would be cold, but there is infinite warmth in this, a calling and longing. There is love in this power.

I hold out my hand, and Neil’s soul freezes as though caught between the two of us.

Myrddin interrupts his under-the-breath chanting. Lee said he was pulling down the wards that held magic from this space, but he stops because those wards aren’t holding mine at all.

My magic is older than any ward. Wards exists because of my magic. Everything exists because of this sweet heat and light flowing through my veins.

But I am small now. Where once I was infinite, I am now defined and trapped in flesh. I don’t completely understand the images flowing through me. They aren’t images, exactly. Colors and feelings and impressions of mist and time and a man weeping at what he must do.

Myrddin’s eyes glow as he directs his power toward the soul we fight over.

Neil’s soul jerks another foot toward him.

His power is greater than mine for the moment. I cannot do it alone.

But just because a soul is dead does not mean his will gone. I can give him a choice.

“Do you see a light?” I ask. “Nothing can stop you if you choose the light. If you choose to move on. He’s trying to take you to a place where the light cannot touch.”

Neil frowns even as he is moving inexorably toward Myrddin. “I don’t see it.”

Damn it. For some, it takes a while. His death was so sudden.

“There is nowhere for him to go,” Myrddin says with a smile.

But there is.

There’s me.

“I offer you my soul space,” I say, opening myself to him. I offer that space where Harry Wharton lived for many years.

And Neil takes it. He reaches out, and I realize my power is a golden thread. He holds it and pulls mightily, dragging himself away.

I feel him slam into me and then it’s like the world starts again.

Rhys curses and hauls me up and over his shoulder, and then we’re running. I barely catch sight of Lee and Sasha covering us as Rhys leaps on the window’s edge and over.

We’re falling, and I think we’re at least three stories up. I brace myself for impact, but vines wrap around us, silky and strong, wresting us from our fall and delivering us gently to the ground.

When I look up, they are doing the same for Sasha and Lee, depositing them on the soft grass next to us.

“Get them!” Myrddin yells.

“The temple is this way.” Lee’s face is grave in the moonlight. “We have to move quickly. He’s almost got the wards down.”

We race off into the night.

Chapter Sixteen

Zoey

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