A Shade of Vampire 84 A Memory of Time - Bella Forrest Page 0,49

have to be extremely careful. Once Petra set her mind to something, she was almost unstoppable. Almost.

Nethissis

With the groups and missions established in painstaking detail, I left the others to their own affairs and took my favorite Reaper out for a walk. Seeley and I had to do our round of the city, anyway. As we walked, nightfall approached, and the rain began an incessant downpour. Rudolph stayed back with a gradually healing Maya and the other ghouls, content with the day’s hunt. Trev was going to assign defensive positions to some of them, as well.

Roano was big, and despite its Word and death magic protections, it still needed physical defenses. We didn’t want a repeat of Orvis, though we had a slight advantage this time around: the city had been built on higher ground.

Most of the wall surrounding Roano had been eaten away by the passage of time, so we could see much of what lay beyond. There was a sense of calm coming from the Nightmare Forest in the east. It was nothing more than a blanket of darkness at this hour. We couldn’t see much, but the knowledge that it was there gave me a sense of comfort. The Darklings could probably survive a trip through those woods, but it wouldn’t be easy, and that made me feel better.

To the north, only jagged rocks and an abandoned road ruled along the coast. The south worried me, since the road down there connected directly to the imperial city. Granted, there were about eight hundred miles between us and them, but it still made me feel uneasy. The west was the safest. Nothing but water, a raging ocean with foaming waves and who knew what swimming beneath the surface.

“There’s a lot on your mind,” Seeley said as we strolled along the old wall. Neither of us could feel the rain. Our feet didn’t sink into the softening mud. The cold would never seep into our bones. We’d left the material world behind to linger between life and death. At least Seeley had a sense of purpose. I didn’t.

“You can tell?” I replied, half-smiling.

He took my hand in his, and I was thankful that I could feel his touch. It was different than physical contact, however. Perhaps more intense. I sensed his very soul every time. “You’ve got that look on your face,” he said. “This might come as a surprise, but I know you pretty well by now.”

There was a note of pride in his voice. I couldn’t help but smile. “It doesn’t surprise me at all, considering everything we’ve been through together. These past couple of weeks have been... intense. I believe troubled times are when we get to really know the people closest to us.”

“True friendships are forged in the fires of adversity, right?”

“Pretty much.” I chuckled. “I guess there’s a lot on my mind. It would be hard for me to lay it all out for you.”

“I get it. You’ve got your own situation on top of all this,” Seeley said. “And honestly, I’m still adjusting to everything we’ve learned. I have always known death magic was more than just the sounds and sub-words I was taught, but I never dared to ask. I only took what my superiors gave me.”

“Spirit must’ve gotten really close to Death for her to trust him so much,” I said.

“Meh. I think she felt lonely, thankful he’d stuck around. Remember, we’re talking about millions of years here, not a decade or a century. That’s a lot of time to spend in solitude, so I get where she was coming from with her gratitude toward Spirit. And his patience was extraordinary. He’d been harboring hatred toward her all that time.”

I sighed. “It doesn’t come as a shock, then, to see how detailed his plans and contingencies have been. He thought of pretty much everything, including the eventuality of his demise.”

“Our challenge is to figure out exactly how far he went with all this. Spirit considered a number of possible scenarios, so we just have to analyze each of these threads and adjust accordingly. Whatever we might consider a measure against him, he’ll likely have thought of and implemented a countermeasure. It’s certainly complicated.”

We stopped near the crumbling base of the western tower. It was round and covered in dust and reddish dirt, the bricks gnawed upon by the wind and rain of two million years. The bad weather didn’t look like it would end anytime soon, and I kept thinking about