Grave Destiny (Alex Craft, #6) - Kalayna Price Page 0,33

took an enormous amount of energy for a ghost to interact with anything on the mortal plane—the fact that I was a convergence point between planes meant ghosts had no trouble interacting with me. I hadn’t known this fae in life and he hadn’t died peacefully. There was a good chance he’d come out angry and I would be an easy target. I did have some defenses against ghosts, but it involved draining them, causing them to cease to exist. I was hesitant to use it.

You’re getting ahead of yourself. After all, maybe Stiofan would come out grateful for not being stuck in a dead body inside Faerie forever. Not likely, but possible.

I’d raise Kordon’s shade first.

Activating my circle, I dropped my mental walls and removed my charm bracelet holding my additional shields. The bitingly cold wind of the land of the dead ripped through me, rustling the body bags and sending my curls flying, but my circle contained it, leaving the rest of the room untouched. Around me, the world seemed to decay. I didn’t pay too much attention to the moth-eaten body bags or the rotting hardwood below them. I had a thin, bubblelike shield still encircling my psyche, and it helped prevent me from merging planes unintentionally, but if I paid too much attention to what my psyche saw in the other planes, gave it too much credence, sometimes my magic pulled it through into reality. Ms. B would be furious if I ruined the floors.

Reaching out with my magic, I channeled it into the smaller body. My magic flowed toward it quickly, greedily— it had been almost too long since I’d last raised a shade—but as soon as my magic sank below the flesh of the corpse, sharp pain zinged through me.

I yelped, stumbling backward.

“What happened?” Falin asked. He stood just outside the edge of the circle, but thankfully he hadn’t touched it.

I rubbed my hand, as if the pain had been a physical thing, a prick of the finger or a slice of the palm, but it hadn’t been. It was like something had hurt my grave magic. That had never happened before. I reached out with my magic again, more tentative this time. I let it trickle into the little goblin’s body, waiting for the stab of pain again. The pressure of the grave pushed under my flesh and the chill warred against my living heat, but there was no unexpected pain so I released my own living heat, let it travel the path my magic had carved, sending it into the body.

A small form sat up from the bag. I hadn’t known the goblin in life, but I’d seen his body. Being only memory and magic, his green leathery skin looked pale and washed-out on the shade but still had the lightest cast of green. His tunic was the same as the one we’d found him in, blood staining the front. My dislike of blood extended to ghostly projections, but my curiosity won out and I looked at his chest where the sword had emerged from his physical body. As I suspected, there was no sign of it now.

Dugan made a sound—surprise? alarm?—I wasn’t sure. He’d never seen me raise a shade before. Maybe, despite his long life, he’d never seen a shade at all. I shot him a wan smile, checking to ensure that he hadn’t crept any closer to the edge of my circle. Assured he wasn’t about to charge my barrier, I turned back toward the little collection of memories that was Kordon’s shade.

“What’s your name?” I asked the shade, more from habit than need.

“Kordon the shadow-sculptor,” the small shade answered, his voice much deeper than I would have expected for a fae so small. Just because he was the size of a child didn’t mean I should expect him to be childlike.

I shot a glance at Falin. “You guys can hear him okay?” I asked. At his nod, I focused on the shade again. “How did you die?”

“I was in my workshop, sculpting a particularly intricate shadow. I didn’t hear anyone enter, but I felt the hand land on my shoulder a second before the pain cut across my throat. I struggled, choking on blood. Darkness closed in on me.” The shade said all of this without a hint of emotion touching his voice or the horror he must have experienced changing his placid expression. “Everything went still and silent. I couldn’t move. Nothing sounded right. Nothing felt right.