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

them. Lydia hadn’t noticed them before. These tall goliaths felt different from the singing oaks across the lake. There were no faces carved into their trunks, nor were they answering the call of their kind.

They were silent and foreboding. A shiver danced down her spine as she eyed the shadows clinging to branches in inky strands. She imagined the soft snicking sound of spider legs crawling through the black leaves.

“Who’s there?” Sil called out.

Lydia looked up to see determination set the Goddess’s face into hard lines. She was both terrifying and cruel in that moment. Gone was the warmth which had made her so lovely. Instead, a cold hardness had taken its place.

“I should ask the same of you,” the satiny voice crawled from the shadows. “Who dares step foot into our dimension without permission?”

Lydia’s eyes widened. She knew that voice. She would know it anywhere as it had haunted her dreams for months. Perhaps even years.

He was here already?

And yet, she could not find the familiar lithe form. Neither, apparently, could Sil.

“I do not speak to those who hide in the darkness,” Sil’s voice was harsh and cutting.

“Oh, but I am darkness.”

A shadow detached itself from the base of a tree. More peeled away from every surface until a great cloud of gloom gathered. With lumbering movements, it floated toward them. He was a rolling thunderstorm with lightning sparks shimmering inside his depths. He loomed over them as billows convulsed at the edge of the dead forest.

“You do not intimidate me, creature.”

“Speak!” Angry roils of black ink punctuated his shout.

“I do not speak to those without a face.”

“You wish a face in the darkness? A nightmare to add to your stories of this realm?” Lydia trembled as he chuckled. “Then you shall have it.”

A face formed in the murky mass. It pained her to see the familiar features, so painfully elegant, twisted with such rage. He leaned closer to Sil, hidden within a tangled coil of shadows.

“I have no fear of you,” Sil declared.

“Why are you here?”

“To discover. To learn.”

“Lies.”

Sil hissed. “I do not lie!”

“I was born of lies, little moon. I know when untruths drip from your tongue.”

Lydia had not expected this. Pitch spoke as if he had loved Sil his entire life. This was not the fairytale she had dreamed.

There was pure hatred in Sil’s eyes. It vibrated through her entire being until she was glowing red hot. Pitch pulled his shadows, expanding until he blotted out the dead forest.

“You dare to speak to me in such a way?” Sil shouted.

“I do!”

“I am a Goddess!”

“And I am a God!”

Lydia reeled away from them. Her feet caught over each other and she fell onto her hands and knees.

Let the Gods argue as they wished. Her mind fragmented into pieces of disbelief and shock.

God? He was a God?

She peered over her shoulder at the quivering mass of shadows and realized the truth. Pitch. He was no mere mortal man. She had always known that.

But she had taken his word that he was a Trickster. She had read about their species that long ago they had come into the human world to make themselves gods among men. But the God?

The darkness in him meant that he was not one of the Five she knew. Not one of the light which had guided them from this cruel dimension and into the human realm. He was one of the lost. One of the other Five, whom no one spoke of.

“You are infinitely more dangerous than I gave you credit for,” she murmured as he continued to scream at Sil. “Far more than I could have imagined.”

His angular face, even in the many shadows, was still stunning. Gloriously angry and increasingly agitated, he was a force to be reckoned with. And Sil did not show fear.

She stood before him in a beacon of light, her silken wrappings fluttering in the wind. Her power met his and held. Two unearthly beings locked together for eternity.

Lydia’s eyes burned as the light flared ever brighter and the trees fell silent. All she could hear was the ragged sound of her own breath. They had exhausted themselves, or so it seemed.

Knees aching, back throbbing, stomach nauseous, she looked up to find that the two gods were staring at each other with equal interest.

Sil was the first to break the silence. “You are an even match for me.”

“I could say the same for you.”

“There are none in my dimension who are my equal.”

Pitch’s shadows began to pull together. “And yet, there are many here who could do so.”

“Is that the truth? Or is that a half lie?”

He shrugged. “How many is ‘many’?”

“More than ten I would say.”

“Then there are not many.”

Lydia could hear the huff of breath from Sil. “That is not an answer.”

“I do not know you, Goddess. Nor do you know me.”

“I believe I would like to.”

“Would you?”

The shadows pulled until there was some semblance of form. Lydia could not see him as he was, waiting in the shadows of her bedroom as a man. This form was impossibly large. He still loomed above the seven-foot woman. Shadows made his body seem in constant movement as the wind brushed past and dissolved his semi solid form.

“You are curious,” Sil told him. “Unlike anything I have ever seen before.”

“You are light. I have destroyed things such as you my entire life.”

“Why would you do that?” Sil’s head cocked to the side. “Light does not exist without darkness. And darkness is bleak without light.”

Pitch’s face crumpled in confusion. “I-I-”

“You don’t have to understand it now. Someday you will.”

Sil’s hands fluttered in small movements until she pressed them against her skull. Her eyes flew open with a shocked expression as she whispered a quiet, “Oh.”

Lydia somehow knew, deep in her gut, Sil was having a vision. And one which would change the course of her life forever.

The goddess of light stepped forward until she could reach her hand out to Pitch. Her long fingers trailed down his newly created