Jade Goldlight's Arc

Chapter 7 of 20

Back inside the treehouse, Jade set the torn cloak strip on the small table near her bed. Raihan padded in behind her and dropped onto his folded blanket, the red and white squares bright against the dark wood floor. Smoke curled lazy from his shoulders. He watched the door, then her, then closed his purple eyes only halfway. Jade lit a lantern and bent over the scrap. The frayed edges were blacker than the cloth itself, almost burned, but cold to the touch. She lifted it to her nose and pulled back fast. The smell was wrong. Not smoke. Not blood. Something like wet stone left in a sealed jar for years, with a sharp sweetness under it that made her eyes water. She tried to place it against every creature she had ever fought. Nothing matched. Raihan lifted his head. "It is not animal," the collar said for him. "It is not man either. I smelled it on the wind before I came to you. Long ago." Jade looked at him. He did not say more, and she did not push. She set the scrap on a clean cloth and pressed her palm flat above it. A thin thread of stone magic slid from her fingers. The cloth did not burn or crumble. Instead, a fine gray dust lifted from the fibers and hung in the lantern light. Hollow. The thing wearing this cloak was hollow inside, like a shell pretending to be a body. Jade sat back hard on the edge of the emerald bed. A shade, then. Or something close. Shades did not eat, did not tire, and did not die the way living things did. They wanted. And this one wanted Raihan because he carried something it had lost — shadow, maybe, the kind it could wear again. She folded the scrap and tucked it into a small box beside the lantern. Raihan was already watching her, ears forward. "I know what it is now," she said quietly. "Not enough to beat it. Enough to stop it from killing anyone tomorrow." He thumped his tail once against the picnic blanket. Outside, the cherry blossoms shifted in a wind that smelled, faintly, of wet stone.