Ghostlight (The Reflected City Book 1) by Rabia Gale (i can read with my eyes shut TXT) 📗

could sense it trying to solidify enough to form something. His eyes narrowed.

A trap?

For him—or Arabella?

He crooked his left hand and Sorrow flashed into shape in his fingers. Here, she was even more glorious, like iced lightning, with intricate patterns etched in quicksilver on the blade.

There was a tug on one of his lines, one that led straight into the mist. A strong pull, and with it the scent of rain and sun-warmed linen.

If there was ever a scent of Arabella Trent, this was it.

Wait, Winter had cautioned. Don’t go out to her. Reel her in.

Sorry, Winter. I can’t do that with wraiths about to be born.

He strode across the boundary of his safe place. The cuff around his wrist tightened, followed by a pinch between his shoulders.

Trey reached behind him and detached the line there. It crumbled to a wisp.

It would take Winter and Sutton at least a quarter of an hour to hook him again.

That was enough time for him.

And with that, he swung Sorrow in an arc through the torso of a newly-formed snow maiden, her hair still spinning gold out of grey, her eyes and mouth still ill-defined holes. Cold sprayed over him in specks that burned; he twitched phantasmal armor around himself.

And then the mist cleared and Trey looked out at dozens of snow maidens, intermingled with cobwebbed cloaks and small black barghests with fiery-coal eyes.

“Come on then,” he said, beckoning. “Who’s first?”

The wraiths fell in swathes before Sorrow. The half-formed creatures were no match for him.

If only there weren’t so many of them, crowding together, reaching out with plucking fingers, snapping muzzles, and tangling folds.

Trey suspected that they were only there to slow him down.

Which meant someone didn’t want him reaching—

A familiar shriek pierced his senses. “Trey!”

The mist had cleared, leaving him in the middle of a steel-grey plain with a high-vaulted ceiling of milky-white. Distant figures were pinned to it; they writhed like insects. Trey didn’t spare them too close a look.

“Arabella, here!” he called back as he decapitated a barghest. Smoky flames spurted out of its severed neck, consuming both head and body. Trey put his gauntleted arm in front of his face and thrust himself through a crowd of cloaks. It was like forcing his way through layers of draperies.

Draperies that whispered and gibbered, reminding him of every sin, every nightmare.

As if he hadn’t hardened himself against everything they could throw at him. Brother-killer. Pervert. Liar.

Trey spoke a few curt words and his armor turned white-hot and flared. Cloaks disintegrated in the blast.

“Trey!” Arabella came scrambling over the edge of the plain, tripping over her feet, clutching something to her chest. “Help me!”

And behind her, like a towering thundercloud with eyes of fire, a massive hell hound heaved itself onto the plain.

What a monster! Trey thought appreciatively, resting Sorrow on his shoulder.

The creature’s muscles rippled under its coal-black hide. Its paws were as big as carriages. Strands of toxic slobber fell from its mouth, the ground smoking underneath. Its growl reverberated against the arched ceiling. The skeletal figures affixed to it stopped their struggles and held still in fear.

Arabella was pale against the hell hound’s tar-black bulk, still running, still valiant.

Not that she had any hope of outdistancing it.

The hell hound stretched out its neck, mouth with double rows of teeth and black gums, wide open. It loomed over Arabella, then lowered its jaws with a snap.

On empty air.

One moment she was in the blast of its fetid breath, the next Trey jerked the life line she gripped.

Arabella stumbled upon landing and pitched forward into his chest. He caught her around the waist, steadying her.

“Sorry,” she said, the word muffled.

The hell hound raised its muzzle in a howl so bone-chilling that Arabella quivered and clutched the lapels of his coat even tighter.

“Hey, now.” Trey gently held her away from him, one hand on her shoulder. “Don’t you have the vapors right now. You’re a game one, aren’t you?”

Some color returned to her pale face. Arabella caught her breath in a half-sob and half-gulp and bit her lip. She nodded.

There were tears on her face, the first Trey had seen so far in her adventure.

He left Sorrow point-down next to him, and pulled a mist-thin handkerchief from his equally insubstantial coat pocket. With calm practicality, he dabbed her face, seemingly paying no attention to the hell hound galloping towards them.

Arabella glanced nervously over her shoulder.

“Don’t worry about the friend you brought,” Trey told her, reaching for another one of his lines. He jerked them both to another part of the plain, and once again, the thwarted hound raised up its cry.

Arabella stared at him. “You’re,” she said, almost accusingly, poking his shoulder, “a ghost.” Her finger pressed into him with a feeling that was half-ticklish, half-prickly.

“I had to leave my body behind.” The hell hound’s giant head appeared once more. Once again, it ran for them in ground-eating strides. “Tell me what happened, Arabella. I can only use my life lines two or three more times.” Already short-lived, they were crumbling rapidly.

The usual spells and runes didn’t last long in the Shadow Lands.

She nodded, face set and determined. There were smudges on her face and her skirt was sadly tattered.

She looked adorable.

Not the time to be thinking of such things,

“There was someone else in the pawnshop besides Mr. Gibbs. But he—or she—did something to my memory so I can’t remember him or her at all. The same person trapped me in a pentagram using my mother’s ring.” She held up her right hand with a dainty gesture.

“Effective, but with a glaring weakness you obviously exploited. Excuse me, Arabella.” Trey put an arm around her again and shifted them again.

She was still talking, the words tumbling out of her. “It was a trap for you. They meant for you to follow me. The ghoul was there, too.” She shuddered.

Trey couldn’t blame her.

“And,” Arabella went on, triumphantly, “I remembered what was going on in the pawnshop. A miasma