Gremlin Night Dale Smith (comprehension books txt) 📖

as the old sorcerer’s saying went. I shook my head again. I sounded like my grandmother Mary.

“She said she wanted to protect Sylvas, and was sorry she couldn’t protect me the same way.”

“None of this makes sense,” Tully said. He was right. It didn’t. Why would she let her killers inside? And what had happened to them?

It hit me then and my mouth went dry. Therese had cast a ritual sacrifice spell. She’d set a trap for the things that apparently lurked outside her house.

“We need to check Therese’s room again,” I said.

The brownie shook its head. “No, bad place now.”

“You don’t have to come,” I told it.

Tully raised an eyebrow.

“She’d prepared a trap. A sacrifice spell, I’m sure of it.”

“But I didn’t see any evidence of a spell.”

“Sacrifice spells are different.” They were banned for a reason. Therese using one was an act of desperation, and crazy, literally, since it was a different sort of spell. She was a clairvoyant, not a sacrifice sorcerer. Taking on two different kinds of sorcery could start you down the road to either wizardry or madness, and only a very few sorcerers had the potential to become wizards, capable of casting more than one sort of sorcery. Sacrifice spells could be dark, or gray. Dark was when you sacrificed others. Gray was when you sacrificed yourself.

Blood magic was a way to boost sorcery, but it was the opposite of the complex rituals that sacrifice spell-casting needed. I did blood magic because I had to. My mind wandered down the rabbit hole of blood magic, and why I needed to do it.

“Marquez?” Tully asked.

I blinked.

He and the brownie both stared at me.

“Are you alright, Marquez?” Tully asked.

I shook myself. “Sorry, just thinking.” I couldn’t let on what I’d been brooding about just then.

He didn’t look convinced. The brownie just looked uncertain, but Tully and I were new to it, so it didn’t know us, or know what our actions meant.

“Come on,” I said, “let’s get this done with.” I strode down the hall back to Therese’s room, breathing through my mouth to try and minimize the stench. Poor Therese.

Tully stepped into the room, while the house brownie huddled behind my leg. I glanced down. It watched Tully, keeping my leg between it and a view of the bed. I didn’t blame it. I strained to see the mana in the air. There wasn’t any. None. That was weird. There had been traces a few minutes ago.

Tully slowly swept his gaze over the room. Up, down, left, right, fast, slow. Then in reverse. Then in a counter-clockwise circle. He peered up at the ceiling, watching something, then looked down at the floor.

All I could see were cobwebs on the ceiling, and dust bunnies. Weird place for dust bunnies.

The floor had more dust bunnies. Strange, because the rest of the house was spotless.

A terrified little moan came from my ankle. The house brownie starred at the dust bunnies on the floor.

“Bad things,” it said. “Very bad!”

My eyes narrowed. The sacrifice magic had worked.

Tully bent down. “All that’s left of the ravagers.”

Residue. I shuddered. Therese’s ritual took a great deal of mana to fuel it, to destroy the ravagers, which meant blood, and more than that, pain.

She was dying of cancer. But she would die for a purpose, something worth dying for.

Tully plucked a scrap of paper out of the largest dust bunny. Faint embers of mana rose like sparks from a dying fire and glittered for an instant in the air before vanishing. How had we missed that before?

It was a small piece of parchment paper, with crimson writing on it. He held it up, reading it. I watched his dark eyes scan the paper.

His jaw tensed.

“What is it?” I asked him. “Where did it come from?”

“From one of the ravagers.” His voice sounded stiff. He held out the paper.

I stepped into the room, the brownie still clutching the back of my leg, riding it like a child might ride the leg of a parent. My fingers trembled as I reached for the paper. I brushed Tully’s hand. It was so warm. It felt like connecting to the bones of the earth, reassuring and solid. I wanted to grasp his hand and hold it.

I breathed in deeply and took the paper. It had been crumpled into a ball from the looks of the surface.

I smoothed it out, discovering two pages of parchment. The writing was liver-colored. Bile rose in my throat. It was blood. You’d think blood wouldn’t bother me so much, since I spilled some of my own once or twice recently, but my stomach roiled at the sight of it.

The words had been written in blood.

The words stung my eyes.

I, Therese Sprig, acknowledge the great elf, Sylvas Highspire, to be my companion and lover. He means more to me than anything else in the world. I want him to live forever.

He is guilty of no wrong in my eyes. What he has done I accept, because I love him. The Councils of the Hidden, from the Lodge of the Ancient Ones to my own R.U.N.E., are wrong to ban this love.

My heart is with him, my soul is with him, no matter what happens to this frail body.

The cancer is taking me slowly, so I will go quickly.

But I will not die in vain.

The darkness wants to claim my knowledge for its own foul ends.

A wizard came to me, demanding that I give over Sylvas. A wizard whose identity was cloaked from me, both physically and magically.

I refused the demand. The wizard left me, telling me I would die and Syvlas would be destroyed, all for naught, unless I gave him up. Then the wizard conjured the ravagers, and set them outside my house, saying they would be released to ravage on Solstice eve.

That was a day ago. Solstice is tomorrow.

I give my body, my soul, my life, to save the ones I love, from the darkness, and my lover from himself, for he