Page 119 of Thief of Souls
Coughing again, I roll onto my side and spew out a cloud of darkness. It’s like I’m vomiting pure shadow, and Soraya thumps me between the shoulder blades even as that merciless heat eats its way through me.
What the fuck…?
“What’d… you do?” I rasp, finding myself on the banks of the lake.
Soraya wilts over me, barely holding herself up.
Her skin’s the color of ash, her lips blue and her skin shivering. Somehow she’s aged a year in a single moment.
“What did you do?” I whisper, because I feel like I could leap a small mountain right now.
And she looks like she can barely lift her head.
Soraya staggers to her feet, hauling me with her. “You don’t know everything about me, Z. And it’s going to stay that way.” She trips against me, her body shaking. Weak. “You should have left me there.”
“Never.” Why can’t she see it? Why doesn’t she understand? “Do you remember when you had nightmares and I used to crawl into bed with you and hug them away? Do you remember what I promised you then?”
“We were seven,” she snaps. “We were children. We knewnothingof the world.”
I slide a hand through her hair, forcing her to meet my eyes. “I will guard your back,” I whisper. “I will shield you from the shadows. Always. Forever. Together. And I willneverlet you go.”
Soraya gives me a helpless look. “You’re going to get me killed.”
Tears prick at my eyes. I don’t cry. I never cry. And yet, there they are. “Are we even really living?”
It’s a confronting truth.
“Not for long.” Soraya claps a hand to her chest as she looks away. “Not if that prick finds us. Here. Where’s my knife? I need to cut this out.”
I dash away the tears. It’s not worth getting my hopes up. She doesn’t want to see it, and without her, I’m only half of what I once was. “Give me a look at it.”
“Don’t—” She tries to shy away, but I get a fistful of her shirt and tear it open. The arrow shaft is embedded just below her clavicle, but—
That’s when I see it.
The dark mottling that covers her chest.
Soraya grabs the shirt and whips it back over the wound, but it’s too late.
I sit back on my heels in shock. The blight. She’s one of the unlucky few afflicted by the blight. It feels like the world drops out from under me. No.No. “Why didn’t yousaysomething?”
Soraya stiffly tears her shirt sleeve to pieces and uses it to blot the blood weeping from her wound. “What was I supposed to say?”
“How long have you known?” Shock makes my voice ring in my ears. “When did you first see it?”
Her jaw works. “A year ago.”
So she knew she was afflicted by the curse when we stole into the Court of Dreams to steal the relic. It wasn’t just her soul she was trying to save. She was staring her death in the eye—a brutal, violent, painful death.
This changes everything.
There’s only one way to fix this. The blight is a cancerous twist on the curse that afflicts wraithenkind. Hundreds die from it each year, and we have no way of knowing who it’s going to strike next.
But if we break the curse….
Maybe she’ll have a chance.
My heart feels like a leaden weight in my chest.
