Shadowcry - By Jenna Burtenshaw Page 0,94
moved close by: a dark shape surrounded by an empty void of black. Death drew back from it as it forced its way into the flow, and Silas stepped into the current, as immovable as a rock in the face of a storm.
“Silas!” Da’ru reached out when she saw him. “Help me, Silas!”
Silas looked at the glass locket hanging from her neck, its surface stained with his dead crow’s drying blood. “After everything you have done,” he said. “You still think I would help you?”
“You have no choice!”
“Yes,” said Silas. “I do.” He grabbed the locket and snapped the chain from around Da’ru’s neck.
“No!” she cried. “Stop!”
Something moved beside Kate. A shade, darker than the rest, crept past her and started wrapping itself around Da’ru, holding her like a spider binding a fly.
“Life is too good to waste on you,” said Silas. “Your life is over and death is a pleasure you will never know.”
Da’ru struggled to free herself as the shade clung tight, gaining clearer form whenever it moved close to Silas. For one brief moment, Kate was sure she saw gray eyes within its darkness and then she knew what she was looking at. Silas’s broken spirit—the part of him that had been left behind within the half-life—had joined them in the current.
“Silas!” Da’ru cried, her voice echoing out across the city square. “You cannot do this! You are bound to me, Silas!”
“The ways of death are familiar to me now,” said Silas. “Because of you, I can never know the peace of it. You betrayed me, as you have betrayed hundreds more.”
He held the locket in his scarred hand. The fire in his palm had burned away, but the old mark left by Da’ru’s blade was still deep and dark.
“Twelve years ago, you made a mistake,” he said. “You made an enemy of me, and now you will feel the emptiness I have known for yourself. Your soul will scream and no one will hear you. It is over, Da’ru. I will make the half-life your prison for as long as I live. And as you said: immortality lasts a long, long time.”
The shade smothered Da’ru like an oily web, capturing her spirit and dragging it out into the empty void of the half-life. Silas watched Da’ru’s body release its final breath, and the shade pulled her spirit down through the stony ground, into a deep level of the veil that the circle could not reach.
The last few members of the crowd who had dared to stay in their seats now fled with the rest, pushing themselves up against the outer divide, desperate to escape before they faced the same fate, and Kate felt her connection to her own body start to weaken and break. The sudden feeling of separation took her by surprise. Her spirit caught upon the gentle flow of the current and her body fell to the ground, detached, empty, and still.
Silas saw Kate fall and he crouched down beside her, brushing a strand of hair from her half-closed eyes. It looked as if all life had left her, but he knew better. Da’ru was gone, yet the circle was still active. Kate’s spirit was not lost yet.
Silas lifted Kate up in his arms. Every step was a struggle and with every inch he gained, death willed him more powerfully to turn back. Its promise of peace overwhelmed his thoughts and smothered his senses, but still he walked forward, knowing better than to listen to something that could never be his. Da’ru was right. No matter how much he longed for it, death did not want him.
With one last immense effort, Silas broke out of the current and into the half-life, carrying Kate’s body through the veil and hesitating on the edge of the central circle just long enough to hear Da’ru’s screams echo distantly upon the air. For twelve years he had longed to hear that sound, to finally be able to repay her for what she had done to him. He had always known it would be worth it. He had been right.
Silas closed his eyes, allowing the call of death to tempt him one last time, then he opened his hand and let Da’ru’s glass locket fall to the ground. The little sphere fell slowly, as if all those years of waiting had been crushed into those last few moments and, with the quietest of tiny sounds, it smashed.
A patch of blood stained the ground among the broken shards and a