“Harric?” said a familiar voice. “What are you doing? Where are your clothes?” The voice seemed near, yet whole worlds away. Gods take it for interrupting!
He reset a slipping foot, readied himself to spring, only to watch in dismay as the Unseen’s path and figures faded from the fog. Stars winked where the Black Moon had been. It was gone.
“No!” he gasped.
The Mad Moon followed its brother beneath the horizon. The sky paled. Golden sunlight glimmered on the few hilltop islands in the west, and the stagnant air finally stirred, shifting hair from Harric’s eyes.
“Harric! Answer me.”
Harric stared in confusion as crimson drained from the fog and Caris’s head and shoulders rose through it directly before him. Big as she was, she could stand on the sill of his window with her head above the fog. Her face floated before him, a dream interrupting a nightmare.
“Harric, what in the black moon are you doing?” She clamped a strong hand around his ankle. “If you jump, you make her stupid doom come true!”
Claws erupted from the fog and seized her hair from behind, hauling her head back and peeling her away from the gable.
She yelled, twisting aside while clinging to the roof with one hand and to Harric’s ankle with the other. Then she dropped as if something knocked her feet from beneath her, and her grip jerked Harric’s foot from the slates.
He fell, slamming his side on the roof before she released him and he plunged over the edge into the fog. Somehow, he caught the lip of the roof with one hand and slowed his descent enough for Caris to snatch his wrist. His fingers lost hold, and this time he swung downward in her grasp and crashed against the ladder beside the window, jarring his arm in its socket.
He cried out in pain. Caris cursed steadily.
Harric groped until he found the bottom rung of the ladder, and hooked a knee over it. Before he could propel himself up, icy hands collared him and squeezed. He pried at them with his free hand, but they were bone hard and slippery. More hands grabbed his ankles and dragged him from the rung to swing free again in Caris’s grasp. She groaned and tried to lift him, but the fog countered with such terrible strength that her grip slipped from his wrist to his hand.
“Grab something!” she cried.
Harric dared not release his grip on the hands at his throat, and he struggled in vain to free his legs.
Wind gusted his hair sideways and banged a shutter above. One of the claws on his ankle released him and he flung his knee back onto the rung. Another gust cut across the face of the inn, and its force seemed to literally blow the strength from the hands at his neck. He pried the fingers free and grabbed the ladder. He sucked cool air into his lungs.
As sunlight streaked the morning sky, the grasping hands withered like paper in fire. Faint screams of pain echoed around him, weirdly present yet distant. To ground! It is done!
In the thinning fog Harric saw Caris throw a leg over his window sill, eyes wild and desperate. Straddling the sill, she hauled him to his feet. “Get in!” She practically shoved him through the open window, and he tumbled through.
Harric embraced the floor in relief.
Caris piled after him through the window. She staggered to her feet and whirled to face the window, fists balled to face pursuit.
“It’s all right, Caris — it’s over.”
She turned. Eyes wild, she grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him to his feet. Her hair had broken free of its binding to stick out at wild angles or cling to the sweat of her face. “What in the black moon was that?” she gasped. Her eyes pleaded for explanation as if sanity depended on it.
Harric blinked. He took her hands in his, mostly to reassure himself, and managed a wry smile.
“That,” he said, between panted breaths, “was my mother.”
*************************************
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YOU ARE READING
The Jack of Souls (Multi-award winner!)
Fantasy************************************************************************************** An outcast rogue must break a curse put on his fate, or die on his nineteenth birthday. To survive, he'll need the sword of a maiden, the aid of an immortal, and...
