Silver Blood (Series of Blood Book 1) Emma Hamm (mobile ebook reader .TXT) 📖

her own body. The Truth had been laced with something else. Something she didn’t recognize.

She stepped away from her physical form and watched the coming events with shock and horror. Wren was able to see her own body strapped down to the chair by enchanted binds, but she was no longer inside of it.

Gaia whispered an unknown language under her breath, and Wren’s body on the chair bowed in pain. Her head shook back and forth. Her arms trembled as she struggled against the bindings that were now cutting into her flesh. Worst of all was the expression of extreme pain on her face.

All of this Wren could see, but she could not feel any of it.

“What is happening?” she whispered. “What are you doing to me?”

Her voice sounded warped. It was muffled as though she were attempting to speak through water.

“We chose to spare you the fight.” The male voice came from beside her. He was an unusually handsome man and shorter than Wren by a few inches. His hair was so black that it reflected the light as blue. Intelligence glittered in his eyes as he stepped to her side and looked up at her.

“Who are you?”

“You know who I am.”

Wren turned to look back at her body as it still struggled against the restraints. “One of the Five.”

He nodded. “The second brother. You may call me Kairos.”

“Not your real name, I imagine.”

“I am not known to be foolish.” His reply confirmed her suspicion.

Wren thought for a few moments before asking, “So you’re Time?”

He looked at her in shock. “How did you figure that out?”

She gestured around them. “This.”

“You’re smarter than you look.”

“I know,” she answered before asking, “Where are we?”

“A place that is not a place. An In-Between if you will. You are with me, not with them.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s not very clear.”

“Answers rarely are.”

He had a point. Wren found that his presence beside her made the scene unfolding slightly easier to watch. Lyra’s eyes were massive as she stared at the struggle, and Jiminy was visibly holding onto the back of a chair to force himself not to move.

“Is it usually this violent?”

“Never before,” the man beside her replied.

Then, the unthinkable happened. Wren’s head was tossed back, her lavender hair flying around her. Her eyes snapped open and her jaw stretched impossibly wide. Out of her mouth crawled thick black smoke that erupted out of her body and into the glass container in a pillar of darkness.

“Name yourself,” Gaia said firmly.

A laugh echoed in the container. The smoke had finally stopped billowing out of her mouth. Now it hung above her limp body attached only by a thin tendril of black that disappeared into her throat.

“Name yourself, Demon.” This time Wren could feel a tingle of power that swept over her. She could feel the echoes of it without being inside her body. The words that came out of Gaia’s mouth offered no option of denial.

E growled, and the smoke slowly took on a form. Faces could be seen in the swirl of the smoke, but no face ever remained consistent. They stretched and warped the darkness that was her creature.

“Legion.” The word was whispered, but it sounded like a scream in Wren’s head. “Legion, for we are many and one.”

“Ah,” Gaia said quietly. “So you are a Myriad.”

“Myriad. Legion. Legend. Monster.” The words were each said with a different voice. “Many names, one voice.”

“I thought your kind had died out long ago.”

“The last.”

“You were brought here to help us,” Gaia said. “Will you submit?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“For her.” A face formed in the smoke and looked directly towards Wren. She didn’t believe that anyone in the room could see either she or the small man beside her. But E could see her. The face was not familiar, and she found herself desperately wishing that it was. She should be able to recognize the creature that meant so much to her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

The face nodded once and gave her a sad smile. Then it disappeared back into the swirling mass of faces.

“Your host? Helping us will only prolong her life,” Gaia said.

“Or end it prematurely.”

“No. Malachi will tear this world apart if we do not stop him. By refusing to help us you are ensuring her death.”

“Everything dies. We will protect her.”

Wren made a soft sound. She pressed her hand against her mouth, but E had heard her again. A few other faces formed in the smoke to turn and look at her. An older woman, a young man, and a middle aged man stared at her and all smiled at the same time.

Gaia was growing frustrated with the creature that didn’t provide her with the answers she wanted. Wren could almost hear the ticking in her head as she attempted to find a question that would force E to give her what she wanted.

It was Burke that finally spoke. When he did, his voice was softer than Gaia’s but no less powerful in its tone.

“Why did you hide what you were from her?”

All of the faces turned as the smoke began to agitate. “Do you question us?”

“I do.” Burke stepped towards the glass, his hands fisted at his sides. “You caused this. You kept yourself hidden from her. From the one person you swear to protect. Everything you have done has brought her to this point.”

“You do not know what I am.” E’s voice was one voice that echoed with hundreds of others, all overlaid with each other. “I am not one creature, but more than you can comprehend. I am souls gathered for many years and collected into one being. I am every creature that has ever existed and more.”

“And you still were too selfish to tell her what you were.”

Wren could see what Burke was doing. He was goading E into telling him its reasoning by angering it. However, she also knew that E was far too intelligent to fall into that trap. She had tried to do the same thing to it when