Read Online Magic Unchained by Jessica Andersen - Free Book Online

around him and then scramble up and away from the attack. But nothing was working right; she couldn’t hold on to him, couldn’t get up, couldn’t do anything but lie there as more shots rang out and one of the boys started crying.
    Dear gods, only one. Only…
    Blackness.
    Sometime later she awoke. She knew it was later by the angle of the sun, which was suddenly too bright, making her squint through a haze of tears as she tried to focus on Red-Boar’s face. His eyes were swimming with moisture, his face etched as always with grief. But it wasn’t old remembered pain right now; this agony was fresh and new, and wholly focused on her.
    She was dying. She didn’t need to see it in his eyes to know it. Her body was numb and cold, her heart stuttering. “Triss… tan?” she asked, forcing her lips to shape the word. “Rabbie?”
    A tear broke free and tracked down his face. “Rabbie’s fine. And you’ll…” He swallowed hard. “You’ll see Triss soon.”
    “Noo…” She closed her eyes as something broke inside her with utter and devastating finality. There was pain—terrible, rending agony—but there was also astrange sort of peace that said soon it wouldn’t hurt anymore. Soon it would be over—the pain, her life, all of it. Red-Boar, though, would have to live with the agony, not for his own sake, but for Rabbie’s. Her heart broke anew, because there could be no greater torture for him, she knew, than to be once more the survivor.
    “Take him home,” she said, knowing that if she hadn’t been chickenshit they would’ve already been in the States with their names changed and the last surviving
winikin
in charge of their anonymity. But she had been too afraid of the Nightkeepers’ high-pressure, high-tech world, clinging instead to the familiar forests she’d grown up in. That was her mistake, her sin. “Keep him safe and raise him right. Promise me.”
    His tears were flowing freely now and his eyes were soul-deep wounds without end. “I promise.”
    She tried to respond, but the only thing that came out was her final breath as the world went dim. Then dark.
    Then gone.
    Rabbit awoke to find himself lying on the stone floor of the library, cold and stiff, with tears drying on his face and an aching hole where his heart used to be.
    “Hello?” The word came out as a croak, nearly unrecognizable. “Are you still here?”
    There was no answer. She was gone.
    He rolled onto his side with a groan, then lay there for a few seconds, gulping for oxygen. His stomach muscles hurt and his throat was raw, like he’d been retching. And his whole world felt off balance, like it had gone off the road and halfway off a cliff, where it teetered, waiting for a stiff wind to send it crashing down.
    His eyes locked on two gleaming pieces of stone lyingnearby, fitted together. Dragging himself to a woozy sort of upright position, he reached for them, then hesitated.
    The eccentrics had faded, one to its normal flinty black and the other to a bright white quartz that was shot through with reddish iron streaks. They looked like normal stones now rather than artifacts that had the power to allow a spirit’s essence to pass from the dark barrier onto the earthly plane. But that was what they had done.
    His mother’s ghost had come to him. He had seen her, talked to her.
    It almost felt like a dream, except that the eccentrics were there, connected. Just as he felt connected now to her… and to the twin brother he’d forgotten. Tristan.
Gods.
    Exhaling softly, he touched the stones, which parted with a soft, almost musical grating sound. He didn’t feel anything when he picked them up, didn’t get any indication that they were more than plain stones, not even when he fitted them together once more. They aligned perfectly, with the spiky shapes of one fitting into the indentations of the other to create a single whole. But they didn’t click into place and there was no heat, no power.
    He would have tried