Tomas Thornwood's Arc

Chapter 4 of 12

Tomas came back to the healer's cave with the mage's demand burning in his chest. Luca slept by the fire where he had left him. The fox spirit's ears twitched at bad dreams. Auria stood at her cauldron, red hair loose, silver eyes on Tomas. She had banished herself to these woods for practicing what her people called witchcraft. Now she was the only one who might save the boy she had helped him hide. "He wants Luca's blood," Tomas said. "To call off the shade. I won't give it. But I can't move against the ring either. I bled there. The shade knows me. If I strike it, it drains me dry." Auria pulled a heavy book from a shelf. Its cover was cracked leather, worked with faded gold. "This holds the old stories," she said. "Spirits, curses, the men who bound them. My family kept it." She turned brittle pages until her finger stopped. "A shade bound by blood feeds through the blood that woke it. Yours. That's the leash. That's also the flaw." Tomas leaned close. "Say it plain." "You can't cut the shade from a distance. But blood cast on running water breaks the tie." Her finger traced a line of ink. "The lake by your cabin. If your blood reaches it before the shade drinks you, the leash snaps. The shade loses its hold and returns to the stones." Tomas thought of the lake's threshold, the water the black hound could not cross. "Then I lead it to the water. And bleed there instead of at the ring." "You'd be baiting your own death," Auria said. "Too slow and it takes you." She pressed the herb bundle into his hand again. "For after. If there's an after." He did not wake Luca. He walked to the ring alone and cut his palm. The old wound reopened. Cold rushed the grove. The air thinned, and something without a face rose from the black blood at the center of the stones. It reached for the warmth in him. Tomas ran. The grove blurred past. His legs went heavy. His heartbeat slowed under the shade's pull. He fell twice and rose twice. The lake shone ahead. His pet wolf stood at the shore, scarred and low, hackles raised at the thing behind him. The wolf held its ground and snarled, buying him three strides. Tomas reached the water and thrust his bleeding hand under the surface. Blood curled into the current and swept away. The shade shrieked and tore backward, as if yanked by a chain. The cold left his chest. His heartbeat climbed. The shade thinned to nothing and fled toward the stones. Tomas knelt in the shallows, gasping, alive. The leash was cut. The shade could no longer hunt him. But the mage still lived by the ring. And now Tomas had broken the tool the mage used to bargain. The next move would be the mage's, and he would come for Luca himself.