Read Online mythean arcana 06 - master of fate by Linsey Hall - Free Book Online Page A

captured by the witches at the university and tossed into the aether prison.”
    “Fuck.” His gut pitched. 
    “Fuck is right.” She shuddered. Even in the dim light, he could see the shadows enter her eyes. “I was in Europe. It took them a long time to figure out what I was doing and even longer to catch me. But they were successful. The aether was terrible. The worst place in all the afterworlds. It felt like drowning in the cold dark, all the time. Over and over.”
    The aether was vital to the universe. It connected earth and all the afterworlds, an ephemeral substance saturated with the magic of the immortal world. It could be used to travel, fuel certain magical beings, or house the unconscious souls of those waiting to be reincarnated. In all those incarnations, it was harmless. Useful, even.
    But if one were trapped in a prison built of the aether, conscious and fully awake, it would be hell. Cold, dark, and silent—utter misery. Rage filled him that the university council had never told him what they’d done. 
    And that he’d failed her. 
    He’d worked at the university for years before he’d been captured by the Seer. He’d taken the job as a way to increase his chances of locating Aurora. In exchange for his occasional services as a timewalker, the university had agreed to inform him if anyone in their great network of Mytheans had seen her. Instead, from what she was saying, when they’d found her, they’d tossed her into the aether because she’d been so dangerous. He’d been trapped in the Seer’s dungeon for almost twenty years by 1705, when the university captured her. They hadn’t been able to find him when it had come time to imprison her. And perhaps they thought she was so far gone that they couldn’t risk his trying to save her. 
    But if he’d been free—maybe, maybe he could have helped her.
    The thought of the missed opportunity made him ill. 
    “Why did they no’ just kill you?” he asked. Her crimes had been great enough to merit death. He hadn’t realized the extent of them until now—of course the university would keep the existence of such a rogue as quiet as they could—and the idea that she might have faced execution turned his stomach.
    “I was too powerful. No one could get to me. When the witches gathered enough strength, with the help of another soulceress, they performed a remote spell that sucked me into the aether prison they had built. And for three hundred years, that was it for me.”
    Holy shite. And he thought his life had been hard? He rubbed the raised scars on his arms, grateful he’d never broken. “How the hell did you get out?”
    “The aether weakens occasionally. Not more than once every couple hundred years. And I still had all that power from my souls. I broke out. I built myself a home on an island in the Mediterranean. Sought out my sister.”
    Esha. She’d come to Iceland a year ago, needing to get up on the glacier. He’d loaned her snowmobiles and supplies, but hadn’t asked why she’d needed them. He hadn’t cared. Now he realized what she’d been doing. “Esha was the baby your mother carried. And she saved you.”
    “Bingo. After I did some really nasty things to her boyfriend, too. But Esha saved me anyway.” There was awe in her voice. “She freed the souls I’d stolen by stabbing me with a soulceress dagger. It ignites magic that frees the souls. Once they were gone, I had my sanity back.” There was an odd tone to her voice.
    “Why did you want a portal to the old soulceress city? Was there something there you wanted?” Had she known he was nearby?
    “No. I was mad at the time, from all the souls I’d stolen. And paranoid. The last time I remember actually being sane was when my mother was killed. Not only were Mytheans chasing us, so were the damned mortals. I wanted a way for Esha to get to me that no one else could access. A way that only a soulceress could find. A portal in the soulceress city could only be