Page 3 of A Soul to Embrace

“Fuck,” he whispered as his arm fell and his head craned back in exhaustion.

Despite the cloudiness of his vision, the white blur and the dark-yellow glow were unmistakable.

The chuckle that came through his cracked lips was from someone who understood that they were staring their reaper in the face and lacked the will to fight it.

“Come to finish the job, have you, Mavka?” he slurred, unable to even muster up a sneer before his eyes rolled back.

For a moment, he swam in blissful nothingness. Unfortunately, it was taken from him when the Mavka grabbed his hair and tore him from the rubble.

He winced back to alertness when something hard raked down his back.Ow...The back of his skull thunked against a jutting rock before his entire body rolled over it.

“Ow!” he belted out when his shoulder butted into an obvious tree root. “Watch where you’re going!”

He received a strange chitter in response.

He hissed out a sharp breath when his shoulder wedged against something hard, and he felt a stretch up his neck. A few strands of his firmly gripped hair were yanked out, and he reached up with both hands to try and take the worst of his own body weight.

Only one hand came up, and he opened his eyes to assess the stump of his left arm. Shit. He’d forgotten.

Unable to tilt his head to the Mavka dragging his limp body down the mound of his castle rubble, like they were some kind of barbarian and he was a club, he shifted his focus to the eight-foot hedges that came into view. They appeared to have been shoved on an angle due to some force, likely from the power that wretched redheaded human had thrown upon the ground.

The Mavka yanked him over a small ledge of earth carelessly. He crashed to the ground, almost kneeing himself in the damn face with his only remaining leg.

Fighting against his waning consciousness and the black dots swirling in his low vision, he tried to think about who was manhandling him like an ogre.

He hoped it was Merikh finally collecting on Jabez’s promise that he’d leave his kin be, so long as that bear-skulled, bull-horned Mavka joined him, but he doubted it.

Jabez was too delirious to think any further. Until they finally released his hair, which pulled his head upright, he was unable to assess them.

It likely wouldn’t matter anyway.

His fevers were worsening, and before long, without healing, he was likely to... die. Without blood, he’d have nothing to sustain himself through the ookmanik sickness.

Soon, the crystallisation happening within his body would reach his chest, and his heart would stop.

After what could only have been days of intense torture, Jabez eventually opened his eyes peacefully, and in his own time.

Darkness greeted him, but that wasn’t a sight he was unaccustomed to. He’d been living, like most Demons, out of the sun’s rays. However, unlike a normal awakening, gnarly and twisted tree roots dangled from the dirt ceiling. They forked across it like a net to keep whatever large tree they belonged to from crashing down on top of him.

Most of his vision was grainy and muted, his sensitive sight allowing him to only see so much in such deep shadows. Although his vision was far superior than a human’s, not even a full-fledged Demon had the sharpness of a Mavka’s sight.

A Mavka he could hear whimpering just beyond his feet.

Jabez lifted his upper lip in a twisted sneer before smoothing his features.

How long have I been out?By the pungency of his own scent, the dryness in his mouth, and the hunger that pervaded him, he figured days.

He tried to count what he could remember. He’d spent mostof a night and possibly a day holding up his damn castle from crushing him. Then he’d spent an unknown amount of time trapped beneath it. With this Mavka having dug him out during the last rays of sun and then running with him, another rising and setting of the moon had passed.

Then they fucking tortured me.

For days, all he’d felt was agony. So much so that had he been a weaker being, he would havebeggedfor them to end him. Even swimming in the waves of death’s ocean, he hadn’t been that pitiful.

The question was: why was he still alive? If they didn’t kill him, the ookmanik sickness should have.

He should be a rotten corpse or, sickeningly,food.

Yet... he somehow felt better.

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