Read Online Braving Fate (The Mythean Arcana Series Book 1) by Linsey Hall - Free Book Online

of the tunnels on the north side, until we reached a huge chamber, the one located under the statue of Sir Walter Scott in the park. There was an enormous group of shadows. Fucking huge evil shadows. But there was no one, alive or dead, in the area. I’ve never seen anything like it.”  
    Was that fear in her voice? Not possible. Not from what he knew of Esha. “What do you mean, evil shadows?”  
    “Come on. Don’t give me that. You know what I can do.”  
    He did. She could see the evil in people’s souls as shadows.  
    What did she see in the blank space where his soul should be? He knew she could see the shadows of the evil that he’d committed. It made him wary as hell and was another of the reasons he avoided her. Although she didn’t care what anyone thought of her, he did. He’d worked hard to regain his honor. To do right in the world. He hadn’t yet succeeded and probably never would, but he didn’t know how to deal with the fact that she saw the truth of him. It made him itchy.
    “If there were no people—or ghosts—in the area, where did the shadows come from?” he asked.
    “I don’t know. That’s what is so freaky about this. It was huge and looked like you could walk into it and never walk out again.” She actually seemed shaken—there was fear in her wide, amber eyes.  
    “Until we know what this threat is, I doona want you going back there,” he said.  
    Esha sighed as she began to pace near the door. “Why not? You can’t see the shadows and neither can your guards.”
    “It’s too dangerous.”
    She laughed. “Seriously? Too dangerous for me?” She stretched out her arms.
    He scowled. But she had a point. For Mytheans, creatures of myth and legend, Esha was the thing that went bump in the night. She sucked the power out of other Mytheans and used it against them. She would be fine. He shouldn’t worry about her. And given that her kind had stolen his soul, he definitely shouldn’t be worrying about her. But he did. He just didn’t want to examine the whys of it.  
    “Just stay away. I’ll do something about it, I promise,” he said. “But in the meantime, doona go back there.”
    The cat glared at him again. It had been slinking around the room, alternately turning from smoke to corporeal form, sniffing anything that came into its path.  
      “Do something ? What do you mean something ? We have to address this immediately. I’m not joking when I say it’s really bad. The worst shadows I’ve ever seen.” Her eyes were bright, her face hard, her posture stiff. Her chest rose and fell with her heavy breaths and he struggled to keep his eyes on hers.  
    “I’ll look into it. As soon as we have some information, I’ll tell you. But doona, under any circumstances, go back there alone. I will handle it.”  
    He turned his back on her in dismissal, skirting the side of the desk and walking to the window. It was a dick move, but he had to get her out of here. He heard her huff, stalk across the floor, and slam the door behind her.
    Warren leaned over the desk, gripping the edge until it cut into his palms, and tried to drag calming breaths into his lungs. Damn it. He focused on his breathing, trying to forget the sight of her, the scent of her. How she made him feel.  
    One of her kind had stolen his soul and made him a monster, had made him kill those he loved. He shouldn’t want her. He shouldn’t like her. He shouldn’t feel this way about her. He shouldn’t feel at all, not if he wanted to keep the demons of his past from howling until his mind cracked.
    He leaned back on his heels and slowly counted backward from one hundred. One by one, he carefully packed the demons back into their coffins and locked the lids. They’d break free eventually, but for now he had a measure of rigidly self-enforced control that in its own way led to peace. As long as he wasn’t around Esha, he could maintain this.
    When his breathing had steadied and his mind had