Unhallowed (Rath and Rune #1) - Jordan L. Hawk Page 0,91
Emeline finally seemed to become aware of what they were about. She turned away from Irene, mouths flopping as a thousand voices whispered or spoke or screamed: “No! I will not be bound again; not to you; not to anyone.”
A wall of wind slammed into them. It tore Sebastian’s hand from Ves’s tentacle, sent him hurtling into the wall—
Then there was no air. None at all. Sebastian’s lungs heaved, but failed to inflate, because there was nothing to fill them. His hands flew to his throat instinctively, scrabbling at nothing.
He was dying. Just as Arthur had died. And there was nothing he could do to stop it.
Blackness spangled the air in front of Sebastian’s eyes. He fell to the floor, but the pain seemed distant, unimportant compared to the agony in his heaving lungs. He needed air, but there was none, stolen away by the monstrous undead thing before him.
Then a host of tentacles wrapped around him: arms, legs, chest. A thin thread of air passed his lips, and he gulped it down, again and again. It wasn’t much, but it was far better than nothing. His vision cleared, and he looked up, expecting to see Ves.
Instead, it was Nocturn who bent over him with worried eyes. “Vesper!” he called. “Get over here—now!”
The blasphemous thing that had been released from the book screamed her rage. But Irene now stood between her and Sebastian, weaving a spell which apparently protected her from Emeline’s breath-stealing power.
Then Ves was there, and Noct handed him over. Ves’s human hands clutched the unbound book, but he hauled Sebastian close with his other arms. “Are you all right?”
Sebastian’s breath eased even further, enough to say, “It doesn’t matter! Get binding, now!”
Noct had moved to support Irene, chanting rapidly alongside her, his hand also resting on the staff. The gemstones glowed like Christmas lights now, afire with the magic they both channeled from the great arcane vortex beneath Widdershins.
Ves pulled his own binding kit from his pocket, but hesitated. “I think…I could be wrong, but from what you said about Dromgoole, I think these spirits have to be bound to someone.”
Sebastian began to reassemble the book, thrusting the folios in where they seemed to belong. The writing made his brain itch, and he hoped it wouldn’t spoil everything if one or two pages were out of order. “Alexander Dromgoole bound them all to himself and they drove him mad.”
“He made that sacrifice for a reason,” Ves said. “It wasn’t enough just to wall them away, though once they were walled away, clearly the spirit traps held even after his death. Though maybe that was because his hands were the ones to create the traps in the first place.”
“What are you saying?”
“We need to bind it to someone. By using some part of them, I assume, given the hair thread.”
“We hardly have time to make thread!” Sebastian snapped. “And we certainly can’t use Fagerlie’s!”
“Blood on thread might work,” Irene called over her shoulder.
Ves hesitated. “I’ll try mine, but I’m resistant to sorcery, so it may not work.”
Sebastian met his gaze. “But mine will.”
Ves’s eyes widened in alarm, their strange goatish pupils dilating. “You can’t. Sebastian, these books drove Dromgoole mad.”
An odd sense of calm settled over Sebastian. “It took all four of them to do it, at least according to Ladysmith. So we’ll just have to find some way to destroy the books before it comes to that, won’t we?”
A desperate look came into Ves’s eyes, as though he wished to object. But instead, he silently threaded the heavy needle and handed it to Sebastian. “Pass it through your flesh, then hand it to me.”
Sebastian swallowed—but this was the only way to be sure his blood covered absolutely every inch of the thread. He took the needle and held it over his arm, hands shaking just a little.
They were all going to die if he couldn’t do this.
Sebastian stabbed the needle into his forearm, going deep enough to make sure he hit the bloody meat of the muscle, and came out the other side.
It hurt—the needle was no small thing used by doctors on their patients, but thick and tough. He gritted his teeth when Ves grabbed it and yanked it through to get enough bloodied thread to begin.
He felt each tug as Ves ran the needle through the holes punched into the book seventy-five years ago, when the same comet that now bathed the earth in its tail had also