anymore. You have to take me to him.”
Kalon shook his head. “The city is too dangerous right now. They’ll be looking for us. I need to find us a safe place first, then we can send a message to Tristan.”
“No!” I snapped again. He wasn’t really listening to me. “We just barely escaped from a handful of Darklings and a big-ass murderous ghoul! All of them bearing the last name Visentis. Your last name! My brother and the rest of my team need to know this! They’ll be in danger, Kalon!”
“Dammit, I have my reasons for doing things this way. Can you please have just a little faith in me?”
He was frustrated, but my sense of urgency trumped everything else. I was too pumped up to care about my own personal safety. I started walking down the road, taking my compass out to find the north. The forest wouldn’t last forever, I figured.
“That’s fine. I’ll find my own way back,” I shot back.
“Esme, don’t do this,” Kalon replied.
“Listen, you go hide or whatever. I need to see my brother and keep my people safe.”
I had no idea where this level of snark was coming from, but considering everything I’d just experienced, I decided to go with it. Kalon had sort of already made up for some of the lies by getting me out of the mansion, but I was still stumbling across more things he hadn’t told me. I couldn’t let him off the hook that easily.
“Esme, don’t make me do this.”
“Do what?” I asked, gazing ahead. The north was somewhere to my left.
I heard him whisper something, then felt the cold blade touch the back of my neck. Everything darkened so quickly that I didn’t even realize I was passing out until I felt his arms around my waist. My head lolled back.
The deepest sleep enveloped me, my sense of urgency lingering somewhere in the pitch-black nothing I was sinking into. Oh, Kalon, what did you do now?
Kelara
By the time we reached the third site, a nebulous feeling swirled around me. A premonition telling me that I was barely scratching the surface about what had happened on Cruor. Every terrible event had left its imprint on this place. Every tear, every cry for help, had been woven into the fabric of this barren, mountainous wasteland. It was the same everywhere.
Empty, lonely, cold.
With every search we conducted, more ruins emerged. We’d settled in a valley where stony peaks rose around us, tall and quiet and gray beneath the misty red sky. The wind whistled across the remnants of a village. A forest must’ve once covered this entire area, and the wood nymphs would have lived in houses here.
Soul stayed close, revealing a side of his personality I was still working to understand. The maniac, the creature who had enjoyed mind games throughout his existence… he’d become attached to me. He took care of me, holding me up when I couldn’t stand, guiding me through my visions and this awful experience of digging through the Night Bringer’s memories.
It took some getting used to, but I happened to like this version of the Soul Crusher. “The Soul Mender” would’ve been a more appropriate title, but I didn’t say that out loud. He had a rep to maintain.
“This whole place is drenched in misery,” Morning said, sorrowfully looking around. Phantom and Widow stayed close to her the same way Soul stayed close to me. She needed support, too. She could feel her brother, though not as deeply and as intensely as I could, due to my hypersensitivity to death magic. We’d broken two Beta elements, and we only had three more to go. Of course, the process included a ton of pain and nightmarish memories, but I’d gotten through so far. I couldn’t back out now. The sooner we set the Night Bringer free, the faster we could move on to finding the Unending and speeding up Death’s release.
She was the only authority capable of setting Visio straight.
“He was here,” I replied after a while. “The Night Bringer.”
“We should take a moment, then,” Phantom advised. “To rest, to look around, to find the next Beta element.”
We’d searched a few other places before this one, but they’d yielded nothing more than vague imprints of massacres of the wood nymphs who’d once lived here, long before the Elders. This village, however… it felt right.
Widow and Soul started searching the area, brushing dirt and dust aside, unearthing pieces of stone as they looked for the next