CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN #2
Vesper lifted the cup to his nose and gave it a hearty sniff. The scent of something ancient, musty, and forgotten flooded his nose, like the scent of a room shuttered from sunlight for years.
He ignored both his instincts and Kyrith’s wide gaze and drank.
The liquid hit his tongue, seized it really, wrapped it in icy rivulets that reminded him of the day he and Izzy had stumbled upon that deer in the woods and he’d used his Hollow magic for the first time.
Because the way the liquid coated his mouth and throat emulated Death’s embrace. Despite his churning gut, he swallowed.
As he surveyed the clotted blood on the bottom of the cup, the black liquid nearly made a second appearance.
The Graver extended its hand across the table. Vesper’s stomach twisted, but he handed the cup back. And when the Graver’s hand came into focus, he now knew what that flash of white had been.
It was the Graver’s fleshless fingers.
And they were entirely bone.
Vesper retreated, but the Graver snatched the cup from his grasp. Before Vesper could stop him, the Graver dipped its finger into the clotted blood and brought it to its grotesque mouth. Its long black tongue slithered out and lapped up the blood in several thirsty strokes.
Bloody fucking Hollow. What kind of messed up morbid mosquito shit was that?
Thorrin clapped a hand over his mouth and not-so-subtly gagged. Kyrith shot up from the bench and backed away as if she’d just witnessed the Graver slit someone’s throat and dance on their fucking corpse. Gaelen and Dimitri sat silent as the dead, shock written across their faces like Nef.
“Fascinating,” the Graver hissed. “Your blood whispers many things.”
An icy chill slithered through Vesper’s veins. He yanked his glove back on, and his fingers rested on a dagger from his belt. Because nothing about this felt right. Absolutely fucking nothing.
Maybe Arborius had tricked them. Dragons couldn’t lie, but all he had told them was that they would find answers here. Not how they would. That conniving little shit. He should have never trusted him.
Kyrith’s fingers tapped against the handle of her blade, as if she asked it a question, because each drum seemed to hold words. As her sword’s unsettling buzz grew to a screech, it seemed to say only one thing.
Wrong.
Nef’s face turned an oceanic green and she cleared her throat, before she blurted, “I need some air.”
In a flurry, she rushed past Vesper and exited the tent. As he watched her go, he wanted to follow, but he couldn’t leave without answers. Even so, his attention warred between Nef and the Graver.
Vesper locked eyes with Dimitri’s warm brown gaze and nodded his head toward the exit in a silent request. Abruptly, Dimitri stood to chase after Nef.
The Graver’s attention didn’t waver from Vesper. “You are here to request answers for your sister? To retrieve her soul from where it is kept?”
How the Graver could discern that from his blood, Vesper didn’t want to fucking know. But either way, he nodded and replied, “I’ve seen her in my dreams. She doesn’t know why she’s there. Doesn’t know how to leave.”
“Her soul does not reside in the Divide.” The Graver swirled his skeletal finger in the cup then popped it into his mouth and sucked the blood from it, followed by a muffled moan. “It is elsewhere. I cannot see it.”
Vesper stomach dropped. This hunt for information was becoming an absolutely ridiculous game of cat and mouse.
Evidently, he was the bloody rodent.
“Well then, where is it?” Vesper demanded, his words sharp as blades. “You said if I gave my blood you would have answers. I’m not an idiot. I’ve seen her there. I spoke to Zyphira, and she—”
A wet chuckle rattled from the back of the Graver’s throat. “Zyphira knows nothing. She speaks in riddles.” It tipped back the cup and guzzled the remaining coagulated blood in a stomach-curling slurp. “You have only seen your sister’s soul. Her mirror.”
Vesper’s hands balled into fists. He wanted to punch the stupid tent wall and take down the whole thing. “You need to tell me how to bring her back. And why I could see her before and now I suddenly can’t.”
The Graver’s eyelids blinked over its empty chasms. “You cannot retrieve what is not lost. And only those who have tasted the inky shadows of death can enter the Divide. Those who enter without, must consume decay in other ways.”
As the realization struck him, Vesper couldn’t get any fucking air into his lungs. He had tasted those shadows. In fact, he’d drowned in them when he had bled out on that blasted tile floor in Deimos’s mausoleum.
The Graver stood. “I speak the truth. She is irretrievable.”
The cold slap of reality morphed into something hideous. Something dangerous and desperate and absolutely feral.
Vesper stalked toward the Graver, ready to rip out his throat for his trickery. He slammed his fist down on the table so hard he sent a few cups and loose papers flying. “That’s not good enough!”
Thorrin’s hand circled Vesper’s forearm and tugged him back. Vesper panted, his vision blurred as his world crumpled around him.
“We need answers on the…” Thorrin started, but he choked on his words as the Graver turned its eyeless stare on him. “The pestilence infecting our land. The bloodlace. We wish to know its origins, and, more importantly, how to be rid of it.”
The Graver licked its long, pointed black tongue over its lips. “It is not for me to say. All I can say is Deimos is not the start. Nor is he the end.”
Thorrin clasped his hands together to hide the quake in them. “Then how do we rid it? And how do we help those infected by it?”
“You do not.”
A vein bulged in Thorrin’s tanned neck and fury lit his eyes. “We’ve searched for months for answers. We can’t continue like this. We have loved ones who are sick. People have been run out of their homes. And Arborius advised if we come here, you would give answers to—”
“The Keeper of the Holy Flame sent you here?” The Graver cocked its head at him in a swift jerk. “It seems he misled you.”
Thorrin’s roar mirrored animalistic rage.
But Vesper quieted as the overwhelming grip of hopelessness clamped a hand around his heart.
He shouldn’t have been fucking surprised.
Arborius would do anything to get his daughter, and they weren’t exactly on good terms after what happened in the mountain passage. Once again, he’d done this to himself.
Vesper’s eyes burned with shame, and he blinked hard before he turned from the Graver and said, “Let’s go. This was a waste of time.”
Gaelen and Kyrith gripped Thorrin’s arms and yanked him to his feet, even though it seemed he debated tackling the Graver and beating the snot out of it to get answers. They all shuffled out, but before Vesper could exit with the rest of them, the Graver seized his wrist.
His body jerked. Eyes rolled back. A sputtering sound slipped from between his lips as his body convulsed. His knees nearly buckled.
That touch did something to him.
Pried open something in his mind.
Shot ice through his veins.
Rattled his bones.
He clenched his teeth and tried to rip his arm away, desperate not to feel whatever that fucking nonsense was, but the Graver held tight. Injected something into him like the frigid death of the Divide.
“You must stay,” it insisted.
“S-stop. Stop,” Vesper hissed through chattering teeth. “L-let go. Fucckk—let go.”
“We have much to discuss, Hollow King.”
“I—shiiiitt,” he ground out between his teeth as he snatched his arm back.
His stomach condensed to a heavy slab of metal, and he stumbled back to get far, far away from the Graver and his death-kissed touch.
“I asked for answers. And you denied me. Unless you have guidance for Izzy, a cure for this disease, or anything about this bloody prophecy, this is a waste of mine and my comrades' time.” Then he snarled, “And don’t ever touch me again.”
“I can ask the gods anything else. Perhaps about your father. His untimely death. Or about your mother, should you choose to open your eyes.”
Vesper’s attention snapped to him, quick as a catapult launching its ammo. “My—my mother?” His voice trembled. “What do you mean? And my father’s heart gave out. There was nothing more…” But he trailed off as his mind descended into all sorts of dark places.
The Graver shuffled back to the table and grasped another cup. It downed the liquid in one greedy gulp before it turned back to Vesper. Its red-tinged lips spread into a smile.
Like Vesper’s world crashed into the sun, and the ground gave out beneath him, all the fucking pieces slid into their rightful place.
The Graver’s grin revealed thin needle-sharp teeth in a grotesquely wide mouth, like a bloody gourd split down the middle. Nearly severed its face.
And unhinged at the jaw.
Izzy’s words slammed into him.
There’s something else here. Things that live in the darkness. Something with jaws that unhinge—gaping mouths lined with jagged teeth.
While his legs begged him to run, Vesper steeled his expression and pretended to straighten a dagger on his belt. “We have all the answers we need.”
He didn’t make it through the tent flap before Nef grabbed his arm and yanked him through.
“Alright, that's the second time someone has grabbed me in less than a minute. This had better be good,” Vesper said on a sigh. His limbs still trembled from what he’d just seen. From that icy shock that needled his body. He just wanted to leave. “We need to go. Now.”
Even through his tunic, Nef’s nails dug into his flesh as she dragged him away from the tent. Vesper glanced behind him, but the Graver thankfully hadn’t emerged. His attention snapped back to Nef. Who was alone.
“Where’s Dimitri?” he asked. “I told him to find you.”
“What? I—I didn’t see him,” she murmured. Her wild eyes scanned the dark pockets of the cavern like something lurked in them.