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

like yourself.” She had to give him the benefit of the doubt. After everything he had done, he had earned that.

“You do not know me.”

“I have seen you in history and in present. I know your beginning, your middle, and your many ends. I know you, as no one else has known you before.”

“You do not know me as she did.”

“I am her,” Lydia insisted. “I know I told you time and time again that I am not, but I was wrong! I am her and more because I know what she did not know. I see the future she could not unravel through the web of time. I see you in the way she never comprehended, nor had the chance to see.”

Darkness shattered all the stars in his eyes until they were swallowed by black holes. He was not her Pitch. He was a monster living in the skin of man.

An unearthly sound of groaning earth and gnashing jaws broke free from within his chest. He whirled away from her and shadows began to grow fangs. Claws slashed at the air as he fled down the hallway.

“Get up,” the warmth inside her urged. “Follow him. Do not let him break apart alone.”

Her useless legs agreed to listen to her whims. Stumbling like a newborn calf, she used the walls as her crutches and threw herself after him.

There was something wrong with the expression on his face after he saw the book in her hands. Not any of the journals, but that book specifically. There was more to it. He had ripped her from the memory already angry. Something had happened. Something she did not know and he would likely never admit.

She followed him. Her aching feet bent at the wrong angles but she continued forward. The muscles in her legs burned. Agony blistered from her heels and rattled the bones of her spine. Yet, she did not stop. Not until she stumbled out of the hallway and found him standing alone next to the piano.

Three stories of open space gave his shadows free reign. They swooped in the air all around him like birds of prey. They stretched long necks to the light and snapped at the beams they dueled.

His hands hung loose at his sides. His sharp pressed suit fit to the lean muscles of his legs and shoulders, while the tie at his neck hung limp. A lock of hair dangled in front of his face. He stared at the ground and did not acknowledge her when the echoes of her footsteps surrounded them.

“Pitch,” her voice ached as much as her heart. “What has happened?”

His hand stretched out at his side. Shadows curled around it like a beloved pet. Except the shadows were stroking him. They were soothing him, or so it seemed. She watched as the dark smudge sank into Pitch’s skin and left behind veins of darkness wriggling toward his heart.

They weren’t soothing him at all. They were feeding his anger, his rage, his disappointment at the world although she could not understand why he was feeling this way.

Silver sparks of light floated around her. Orbs created by her magic and need to heal him bounced from the tips of her fingers. This was not Sil’s magic, but Lydia’s. She had taken the golden heat of the past Goddess and tempered it with her own long lasting endurance.

She did not know where the understanding originated, only that it was there. Her magic had proven difficult. Impossible, even, for her to use until Sil’s memories unlocked her mind.

“Pitch,” she asked again. Her hand raised and the silver orbs danced. “Please.”

“What do you want from me?” he asked in a lightning strike voice. “What could you possibly have to say to me?”

“If you don’t want to talk about how she died-”

“Her murder is something we will never speak of!” His shout boomed through the estate along with sparks that danced along her skin.

He inhaled darkness until that was all he was. It wasn’t just fear, she realized, it was self-loathing radiating from him. He hated that Sil had died. He hated that he couldn’t stop it. And he hated what he had become in her absence.

All that and more pulsed off of him until all she could taste was pomegranates and sour wine. Her mind was flooded with all the possibilities of what was and what may occur. A black eyed boy praying to the God he was supposed to be. A delusional young man flooding a prison with darkness and nightmares just to hear the screams. An ancient man with a broken soul and guilt so thick it drowned him.

Then she saw it. She saw everything. The silver thread of present time tangling around his body like a net and sinking flashing hooks into his very soul.

A face slack with eyes empty. A body not yet swollen with death but still reeking of fragile humanity.

“You couldn’t have saved her,” she whispered. “She had taken too much. It wasn’t Juice, Pitch, it was heroin. You don’t deal human drugs.”

“It was in my club.”

“You cannot police everyone and everything that happens. You did not give it to her. It was not your fault.”

She heard the snap before she felt it. The wave of black that poured over her body and through the entire house. It hesitated for mere heartbeats as she thought it blinded her. Then it snapped back at him and blasted through the roof of the mansion.

The crunching sound was that of bone and flesh. A house made of magic was never meant to be harmed but he tore the roof from it like ripping out a spine. Lydia could hear it screaming and then the hollow emptiness as the power which had created this home drifted away into nothing.

An answering rumble began as the roof caved inwards. Shingles fell only to freeze in midair. The moths that blanketed the walls erupted into movement. A great mass of white and grey that just as suddenly stopped.

She