Page 104 of Claim the Light
CHAPTERTHIRTY-EIGHT
We fall forward into darkness.
Tyler’s body cushions my landing, the air audibly knocked from his lungs as he lands beneath me.
I spring up and away from him, no longer needing to keep his body solid. In fact, his ashen shape belongs in this place.
I release my wings and fly backward, putting a solid five paces between us.
He jumps to his feet with a roar. “Where the fuck are we?”
“Where we belong,” I say, swiping at the hot tears on my cheeks and fighting the constriction in my throat. “An oblivion that exists outside the knowledge of most supernaturals. The darkest of spaces, where the bodies of the dead can be picked over and their magic claimed.”
Tyler turns left and right, his black wings folded against his sides, while his wild eyes take in our surroundings.
“You can’t escape,” I say. “Not without my help. And I will never help you.”
He rages toward me. “Take me back!”
“No.”
His fist lands on my face, rattling my bones and sending me flying backward. I land on the cold, marble floor, too dazed to get up. Staring at the endless night above me.
The pain doesn’t last long. It seems that my body is becoming better and better at healing itself.
Tyler’s footfalls are coming closer, but I take a moment to lie still and catch my breath.
Specks of ash waft across my vision and I follow their path to my left.
I’m puzzled when the ash gravitates toward an uneven mound that lies a short distance away from me. A few more flecks of soot join them. They float in the same magnetic fashion that the ash wafted toward the keeper’s body when I encountered him. But he isn’t here.
I squint at the strange shape the ash has settled onto, trying to make sense of the shadows, before I finally recognize the folds of the keeper’s cloak.
The elemental keeper warned me that this place will now become like a vacuum. She told me not to stay long or it could destroy me.
Well, that’s what I’m counting on.
Tyler grabs me and hauls me upright, his face ugly in anger, but I knock his hand to the side, landing a quick sequence of blows to his chest that force him to release me.
I’m not in shock anymore and I’m prepared to fight back for as long as I must for the energy in this place to trap us both.
Every time I touch Tyler’s body, he becomes solid flesh that can be hurt and bruised and I make the most of the moments I have before he lets me go with yet another howl of pain.
He roars at me. “Take me back!”
I repeat. “No.”
With a growl, he spreads his wings and tries to fly upward, but he doesn’t make it farther than the height of my shoulders before he seems to hit a barrier. His arms strain, he grunts with effort, and then he drops back to the marble floor.
A flurry of ash wafts away from his body, all of it having lifted off him while he was thrashing.
Each speck glides through the air toward the keeper’s cloak.
He doesn’t appear to have seen it, and he won’t understand what it is. His hand darts out toward his own loose ash, his fist closing around the nearest flecks before he tries to press them back to his chest.
They simply float away from him again.
Interesting.
