Page 14 of The Midnight Order
And now that someone knows that I saw them.
Chapter 5
Jasper
She’sinside when I rush up onto the porch, my speed and power making me soundless as I bend and sniff her dinner that’s getting cold.
Human, then.
When Corvin told me someone was living in the Dormund place, I thought he was lying. No one’s dwelt here since Soliel died.
I thought no one would occupy the dwelling again, but I was wrong.
I learned from the townsfolk that her name is Silver, which is hilarious because my fellow coven mates and I are allergic to it.
She’s a walking nightmare with a warning sign attached—one that says, ‘Stay away.’
But there is a process to these things, and we can’t deviate from the ritual, or the lower born will riot, especially after all this time.
We’ve put so much effort into finding the key that if we let one outsider slip through the cracks, we’ll have a war on our hands.
They want to be free just as much as we do, so we must test her.
After a century, I’m certain she’s not it, and she’ll be yet another we send on their way, memory-less.
Moving stealthily back into the trees, I make my way back to where Lowell is waiting.
“Well?” he asks, his deep voice carrying.
I nod, motioning with my hand for him to calm down. “She has to be tested.”
We both turn as she steps outside and snatches her food quickly, slamming the door again when she’s retrieved it.
Lowell smirks. “This one might be fun. She’s got spunk.”
“I don’t know why you must toy with them. There’ll be plenty of fear in their blood when they bring them to us.” I shake my head.
He shrugs. “It’s my thing.”
His thing. We all have one.
Each of us has some ritualistic thing we do when it comes to testing the outsiders, and I think it’s the only thing keeping us sane.
Lowell taunts and stalks them in the lead-up to the test.
Corvin loves to analyze their blood first, to delve into their lineage and what it reveals to him.
Asher will toy with them sexually and try to assess how their aura suits his needs, while I’ll talk to them and try to discern what brought them through Blackmoore in the first place.
Because if the curse doesn’t see potential in them, they’ll pass right through like we don’t exist.
Sure, the humans who need to know that we exist do. The rest of the world, however, is oblivious.
For the first two days after she arrived, I wondered if she was an exception to the rule. Her aunt lived and died here, the only human we ever allowed to do so, for a good reason, so I thought the blood connection allowed her to wander in unexpectedly.
Usually, we have a warning. The ley lines and wards surrounding and running through the town experience disruptions and outages right before outsiders enter our world from beyond.
“Are you done teasing her for the night? Corvin will want to have a sit-down before the retrieval happens tomorrow evening.”
