Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,34
on the bright side. There’s a one in four chance I find it and that’s fine. But, I mean, even if you die, Lucien can just make you a Heartless! With me.”
He shoots me a withering ruby-eyed look. “You seriously don’t know by now?”
I blink. “Know what?”
“Have you ever seen a witch with a nonhuman Heartless?”
“I’ve seen maybe four witches in my life.”
He sighs. “Only humans can become Heartless.”
“Oh.” I blink. “Well. That explains a lot.”
“Does it?” he drawls, pushing me gently away from him. I stumble to a stop in front of the east side, and he turns the corner around half a stone stairwell and is gone.
Y’shennria’s home is even more ruined than I thought. Up close, you can see all the witchfire marks, black and deep, and the remnants of a battle. Massacre, really. Old, old bloodstains on scraps of rug and bookshelves, hidden from the elements by the ruined walls so well I wouldn’t know the brown marks were blood at all if the hunger couldn’t smell it. I shudder and try not to think of any of the bloodstains being Y’shennria’s. Or worse—her family’s. Her baby’s.
This place is just a shell—barely any infrastructure left at all. Y’shennria’s hiding here? Maybe there’s a cellar sequestered away somewhere, because there sure as the afterlife isn’t a single room left intact. There isn’t even enough hall left to walk in, my shoes finding purchase in the titanic piles of stone bricks and wooden support beams bleached pale by the grassland sun.
The thunderstorm hits right when I reach the top of one such pile, crackling lightning across the sky. This pile is the tallest out of the ruins and gives me a perfect view of everyone else—Lucien with his eyes to the ground, Fione tapping semi-intact walls with her cane suspiciously, and Malachite on his hands and knees, listening with those blade-long ears of his. A banner flaps beneath my feet, and I squat, pulling it up by its loose threads and admiring the washed-out emblem I can finally see—a raven with four wings taking off from a single tree.
“Where are you?” I whisper to the emblem. “I miss you.”
Something behind me crackles and I whip around, ready for the inevitable landslide of brick and wood I’ve created by disturbing the pile. But there’s nothing. No movement, or rather, a movement so small I barely see it at all. There, in the center of the pile and on the very top, something pokes up green from the dust and debris. It grows, bigger and bigger, before my eyes and only when it sprouts a bud and many fine thorns do I realize it’s magic.
A magic black rose that blooms right in front of me.
Y’shennria. The thickets of them in front of her manor in Vetris.
I can’t contain my laugh as I walk over and peer down at it, half embarrassed. “You seriously weren’t supposed to hear that.”
“There you are.” I jump at Lucien’s voice so close all of a sudden. He’s standing behind me on the rubble, eyes riveted to the rose. “Gods above—emotion magic.”
“Is that…a big thing?” I ask.
“It’s difficult,” he asserts.
“Oh? And how would you know? Have you been trying to spell emotions lately?”
“For a while I thought I could get you to leave Varia using it,” he admits. “But it turned out to be far beyond my capabilities. And my conscience.”
I ignore the barest swelling of my chest. “Right. So. What does this little thing mean?”
“Someone who knows you made this spell,” he muses. “They knew you’d come here, and you’d feel a specific emotion in this approximate area. It’s tailored to you, and only you. Very delicate work—and a very powerful witch.”
My heart hammers. “Nightsinger?”
He pauses for a moment. “No.”
“How would you know?” I frown. “You’ve never met her.”
“I’ve felt her,” he says. “Through you. No, this is someone much more powerful. And with help from someone else, someone who knows you very well.”
“Y’shennria,” I breathe. “This is her sign to me. Can you do anything with it?” I pause and give him a knowing look. “Something that won’t hurt you?”
“Perhaps,” he agrees. “Go find Malachite and Fione, and I’ll think of something.”
I have the creeping urge to refuse, thinking it some ploy to get me away so he can do risky magic again. But he just stares at me, and I know I have to go. I have to trust him. If we don’t have trust between us, we have nothing.