Total pages in book: 50
Estimated words: 47894 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 239(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 47894 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 239(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
“I’m guessing people who have friends and neighbors?” I offered.
“No one fears us!” he howled.
Protect yourself.
I gasped because that was Corvus talking to me without me speaking first, and it sounded far clearer than moments ago.
“And the other histories showed me the truth. We do not need to mind the rift. We never needed to tend to Corvus and be servants to the land. We could be free.”
“You’re free now,” I reminded him as he made a motion mimicking pulling a sword from a scabbard.
The ice blade was terrifying, and I wanted to get up and run, but I knew Corvus was just now reaching out to me, and it had both Lorne and Argos underground. I hoped it was healing them, but if nothing else, it was protecting Lorne, and if I broke communion with my land, what would happen to him?
I sat there in the icy whipping wind as Giles closed in on me, saw him making a flicking motion with his right hand and felt small spikes hitting me, embedding in my arms, in my chest, and it was hard to breathe with how cold it was, but the spikes in my throat made it worse.
“We never needed to be tied to the land,” he said, standing over me. “Even now, you can’t save yourself because you use the land to keep a dead man and a dead cat from me and hope that somehow your blessed earth will save you.”
“Guarding the rift is our sacred duty. Why do you concern yourself when you’re not bound here?”
“But I am, Xander. I’m bound to all the guardians who have died on the land because this is where they lie. If there was no Corvus, there would be no graveyard here and my soul would not be tethered. But I am! Because of you! Because of every single one of you cursed guardians.”
I felt the land shudder in fear. I felt Corvus shift under me so my folded legs were buried in the earth. “You’re the last of this wretched line, and if I kill you and destroy Corvus, all of it will be gone. I’ll be free.”
Clarity was always helpful. Because if he succeeded in destroying Corvus, and he killed me at the same time, that would, in fact, unseal the covenant. The magic would flow out of the land, the graveyard would disappear, everything would cease to be. The rift, however, would remain, and there would be no one to keep evil from flowing into our world, but Giles Corey didn’t care because he had no bond to anyone or anything. It all made sense then, and all I could do was watch as so much relief washed over his face before the blade touched my skin.
“I love you!” I screamed for Lorne and clenched my fists in the earth, then thought of Corvus.
I love you.
We love you.
Time slowed. I took a breath in, then exhaled it out.
And then the blade splintered into millions of pieces. They rose up slowly, floating, before becoming snowflakes and falling softly all around us. I was mesmerized, as was Giles, from the surprise on his features and the awe in his eyes.
The wind was gone, it was so quiet, and when I glanced around, I saw a hooded figure dressed in black, too far away to make out.
“How dare you interfere,” Giles roared, which was painfully loud in the eerie silence.
There was no reply.
He fashioned another icicle, much smaller than the one he’d flung at Lorne and killed Argos with but it had to fly a much greater distance. I knew exactly what he was going to do.
“Watch out,” I yelled the warning, and Giles rounded on me, brandishing it like a dagger. It would have easily pierced my heart had it not changed to water in his hand. “You should run, Giles,” I whispered. I certainly would have.
Turning from me, he gasped as his gaze returned to the figure—who in the blink of an eye had moved from across the field to stand at my side.
I looked up but couldn’t see much under the hood, and I wondered if I was hallucinating.
“You will die for this,” Giles threatened the figure, but before he could do anything, he was moved backward. Not thrown or hurled; instead, he disappeared and reappeared farther away, as the figure had done. One second he was in one place, the next in another, erased and then remade in a different location. I couldn’t begin to imagine the skin-crawling horror Giles must’ve felt. To be truly at the mercy of another, for them to think, I want you here, and then you were, was hard to wrap my brain around. And the stronger you were, the more alien it would be. Giles was the most powerful hedge-rider in existence, as far as I knew, and had just experienced all that he was being stripped away in a single heartbeat of time.