Shadowcry - By Jenna Burtenshaw Page 0,78
Kate to stay clear of it as well. Somehow he doubted that was going to happen.
Kate was already standing in the center of the room, reading the book while Silas prowled around her like a stalking cat. She was biting her bottom lip, the way she always did when she was concentrating. Edgar didn’t know if she had even noticed Silas, but Silas was not taking his eyes off her. Edgar retreated so he was nowhere near the carved symbols, and Kate looked up.
“I think I know what to do,” she said.
Silas took off his sword and coat and joined her in the circle. “Then do it.”
Kate nodded and a brief flash of anxiety crossed her face. The look lasted only a second, but Edgar saw it and it gave him hope. He knew Kate well enough to know something was not right. She was hiding something.
Kate read one of the green-inked pages again. The experiments written in those pages were more rushed and random, as if the Walkers had tried to squeeze in as much as possible in a short space of time. If the main sections were daunting, the last section looked almost impossible and the warnings accompanying each technique were very clear.
One warning was written in small letters tracing around the edges of the current page, where someone had slipped a thin black feather next to an experiment called the “Most Dangerous and Permanent Binding of a Soul.”
The warning read in tiny green letters:
Beware this binding most of all. For once this deed is done there can be no reversal. The soul shall remain evermore tainted and broken, unable to walk fully the path into death. Trapped in perpetuity, half within the veil, half without, bound and subject to thee and thy blood.
No endeavor yet attempted has released a soul bound in this way.
There exists no method to apply.
Kate did not know what to do. She had never considered that the book would not tell her what she needed to help Silas. She tried to look confident, and if Silas knew she was lying to him, he showed no sign of it.
If what the book said was true, there was no way anyone could end Silas’s life. He was a creation outside the usual laws of the veil. Even if she managed to open a pathway through the veil, it would never accept him. And if she could not send him into death, what was to stop him ending her life and Edgar’s instead?
She couldn’t give up. She had to do something.
She turned back to the section called “Life & Death,” taking care not to let Silas see. If she could at least try to help him, maybe he would accept that she had done her best. Maybe then he wouldn’t—
“Wardens!” cried Edgar, pointing to the broken door and six black-robed men who had just reached the top of the museum steps.
Silas turned to face them, leaving his sword on the ground.
The patrol leader spotted him from the doorway and immediately gave his men the order to attack. Silas tightened his scarred hand into a fist. “Now, Miss Winters.”
The wardens spilled into the hall all at once, daggers out, but Silas stood his ground, ready to take them one by one. Two of the wardens headed right for Edgar, who ran into the circle to protect Kate.
She was out of time.
Kate concentrated hard, summoning up every ounce of will left in her. Frost glittered on her skin as the chill of the veil spread around her and, with a feeling that was a mixture between hope and dread, she reached out into the veil.
Chapter 18
The Half-Life
Kate felt the floor shudder beneath her as the symbols around the circle began to glow. The floor was shrouded in a soft blue light that seemed to rise up out of nowhere, and any of the Skilled nearby would have felt the pulse of energy swell outward as the lines spreading across it throbbed into life.
Edgar cried out in fright as frost whipped up his arms and face, and Silas’s gray eyes shone as the circle fed from Kate, infusing her energy into its carved symbols and spreading its own ancient power into her. He had seen this happen before during Da’ru’s many experiments into the veil and he held out his scarred palm and traced its burning pattern: the place where Da’ru had once burned her blood into his.
Da’ru thought that the knowledge written in the pages of Wintercraft would