Black Blood (Series of Blood Book 4) Emma Hamm (popular novels txt) 📖

“Was?”

“I should have guessed you would catch that,” Lydia grimaced. “I may have attempted to eat a large amount of peanut butter and shellfish right before you came back.”

Shadows poured from his sleeves. They coiled out from underneath the legs of his pants and stretched out of the collar of his shirt, jagged edged and sharper than any she had seen before.

“You what?” he growled.

“It didn’t work,” she rushed out. “Obviously. I’m still here. I didn’t know you were coming back and didn’t know what I had gotten myself into. You could have been a serial killer and I would not wait for you get back and crazy murder me. But something changed, I don’t know what, I’m assuming Sil. I didn’t die. I didn’t even have a twinge of a rash.”

“But you attempted it.”

“Well, yes. I wasn’t about to let you kill me!”

Lydia didn’t see him move. One moment he was leaning against the door, and the next, he was looming above her.

Pitch was darkness. Shadows traced the harsh cut lines of his cheekbones and trailed down his shoulders like long locks of hair. Anger made his expression fierce. He was so close she could smell the distinct scent of cedar and fir she now associated with him.

Great gusts of breath stirred the hair at her temples while every inhalation brought his overheated chest against her immobile one. And yet, she did not feel fear. Lydia knew she didn’t have to fear him. Though he was fierce and overwhelming, he was not dangerous. Not to her.

“You will not do that again,” his voice was guttural and ragged.

“I have no plans to do so.”

“What changed?”

“I don’t have an answer to that.”

They stared into each other’s eyes. His were dark as the night and hers pale as the moon. Lydia hovered in a world of darkness and he was the only thing holding her aloft.

His gaze shifted. His eyes lingered upon the puffed curve of her lower lip.

Her chest rose to press against his in a brief moment when her breath held. “You should go,” she whispered. “I think the red woman’s future is happening sooner rather than later.”

“What is she?”

“I think she is a Phoenix.”

“They’re dead.”

“I don’t think I’m wrong with this one. But I do know that time is ticking and she cannot be lost.”

His eyes flicked to hers. “Now you sound like her.”

And then he disappeared. The only thing remaining was the lingering heat against her skin where he had hovered. A long shuddering sigh rocked her shoulders although that was still all she could do.

“Please hurry Pitch,” she murmured. “She’s important, though I don’t know why.”

Lydia slept for a long time. Her body, although no longer entirely human, needed to heal. Every time she walked through the threads of the future, she found herself paralyzed again.

Her existence became an endless loop of training herself to see the future and healing. Pitch returned to tell her that he found the red woman and locked her up. That was a relief although guilt left a sour taste upon her tongue.

Time blurred. She awoke, usually to find a tube in her arm, ate what she could, and dove back into the threads.

Lydia followed the lines of Time as if it were a new religion. She watched people live their lives from beginning to end in the blink of an eye. Love flourished. Children were born. Couples struggled and fell apart. Everything she could see and manipulate.

At times, the future was dark. Rare creatures faded into legend. She watched a Giant become hated and feared. She watched a Hag grow up thinking that ugliness came from the outside, rather within. Worst of all, she watched creatures who were different hide from the world.

It was better this way, she convinced herself. For in those moments when she followed the long threads of Time, she also found him.

Malachi.

His thread throbbed with pain and anger. She ran through his history with tears streaming down her cheeks. There was so much pain. Mother, father, family, lovers, friends. All gone. All vanished without a trace.

There were many years of solitude. Years of being locked away and alone. His mind twisted and warped until all he could see was an ending where everyone felt his anguish. She worried the red woman would share the same desire, the same fate, the same ending.

An ending she was slowly realizing was the reason for her existence. Her own thread of beginning started with the sparking knowledge that she needed to stop this Malachi from taking the world by storm. She was the only one who could do that because she was the only one who could see every possible ending.

Her mind threatened to snap with the weight of it. Lydia had to stop him or watch her world burn to the ground.

Eventually, she learned how much to push her body. It took a very long time. But she woke up, blinked her eyes, and lifted her arm from the bed.

Lydia licked her dry lips and smiled. “There it is,” she murmured. “I knew I would get it.”

Pushing up on her elbows, she looked around the room for her constant shadow. Her kidnapper had become a reassuring presence although she didn’t understand why. A kidnapped woman shouldn’t become attached to someone like that.

Stockholm Syndrome was a threat, she thought. Although, she didn’t believe she suffered its effects.

“Well, if he planned to kidnap someone, he couldn’t have picked a better person.” She reached down to shove her legs off the bed as she muttered. “No one cares that I’m gone.”

Her legs remained useless. Her brain told them to move, and they refused. She didn’t have feeling in them anymore.

Lydia stretched her arms over her head as she thought her plan through. This was the first time she’d awoken and felt healthy. Well, sans legs.

Next to the bed, a wheelchair was within easy reach. The dim light glinted off the metal frame.

“Always thinking ahead I see,” she murmured. Pitch always seemed