Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,101

there.

It won’t come to that.

That night isn’t an easy one. Even with Lucien at my side, I can’t sleep at all. I slip out of bed, careful not to wake him. He needs all the rest he can get for the…everything. Everything ahead of us. The fight. The fall. And the rise, after.

The halls of the Black Archives are patrolled by the matronics at night, but the smaller halls where they can’t fit have night watch polymaths, their silver robes softly illuminated by the handheld white mercury lamps they carry. Word of newcomers carries fast in an enclave dedicated to knowledge, and they all nod at me as I pass—well aware of who I am, of what I am. It’s almost strange, to be treated like nothing special. Like a non-threat, when Vetris treated me as everything but. Breych, this place. Only recently have I learned Arathess is much bigger than its hate for Heartless.

The cool stone floor feels good on my bare feet, and the windows display the midnight ocean like a proudly sparkling black jewel. Bit by bit, I can feel my body settling even as my mind buzzes—Varia’s out there still. The stars in the sky look less beautiful and more like spears pointed dead at all the world.

Dead.

All of them.

All of them, if we don’t do something.

Windonhigh, Helkyris. Other continents. Everyone else is too busy protecting their own. But our own is us—one another. Fione, Malachite, Lucien, and me. Yorl. Varia, too. She’s one of us, no matter what she’s done. She’s in over her head. She needs us.

All of us, protecting one another in our own ways.

If the world won’t fight, we will.

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a flash of ochre tail rounding a corridor. But…the only celeon I’ve seen here is Yorl. And that color, it’s definitely his. But why is he up? Shouldn’t he be where we left him—studying the book with Fione? Is he resting, maybe?

“Yorl!” I call out, trotting after him. “Wait up!”

I round the corner he disappeared behind, but there’s nothing. No one, as far as I can see down it. I do a pivot, catching another flash of ochre to the right.

“Hey, Yorl!” I shout. “Seriously, slow down!”

My words echo hollowly about the stone, but I lunge around the corner this time, determined to catch up with him. My burst of speed is cut short as the right hall widens into a massive, polished balcony of volcanic glass. It overlooks the ocean, the long stretch of it disappearing at the moonless horizon: pitch-black on pitch-black, streaked with silver starlight.

Except in the very center is a tall streak of yellow fur with vermillion patches. Yorl. No—not him. Too tall to be him. Too bent-backed. Whiskers too droopy with age, tail silvered on the very end like an old man going white. Dewclaws too long and hard to be young.

The celeon turns and smiles at me, voice a rumbling purr.

“Ah. Zera. We meet at last.”

Green eyes, a broad muzzle, the same coloring. It has to be Yorl. But it’s not. It’s more like an elderly version of him. It might just be the starlight, or the reflection of the white mercury lamps off the black-glass balcony, but I swear the celeon’s outline shivers like water. Like hot gas. Like he’s not all…real. He seems to follow my thoughts and looks down at his own body, then back up at me with a wry, white-whisker smile.

“I see you’ve noticed my curious state. You’re the first one—the first mortal to notice me at all. And that’s a comfort, in its own way.”

“Who—” I stop myself. “There’s no way! Are you Yorl’s—”

“Where are my manners?” He cuts in smoothly. “I am Muro Farspear-Ashwalker.” He motions with his paw to the balcony railing. “Please. Join me.”

“You’re supposed to be—”

“Dead?” He laughs with all his yellowed fangs. “Yes. But then again, so are you, are you not?”

Muro—or the ghost of him, I can’t decide—turns to face me head on, the shimmering near obscuring him. But it can’t obscure his face, every clear whisker and bristle and old scar between the fur. It can’t obscure the way his emerald green eyes replicate twice down his face, and then twice again, three eyes on either side of his long, proud, lionlike nose.

Six eyes.

My brain spins, but he just laughs softly. “We seem to have the same ailment.”

He looks like me when I turn into the monster. When I Weep to control it. Six eyes.