Read Online Shadow Blade by Seressia Glass - Free Book Online Page B

four a.m. and Kira wasn’t ready to talk to Balm. Not now. Not when the emotion was still too raw.
    Her relationship with the head of the Gilead Commission gave a whole new meaning to “complicated.” Balm had saved her when her burgeoning extrasense had forced her adoptive parents to abandon her and threatened to drive Kira insane. Kira hadn’t made it easy for Balm, but she’d been half-starved, half-mad, and half-broken by guilt and the burden of her strange powers. As with Normal adolescents, anger had become a defense and she’d channeled it into her training. Being able to go to any public place—a restaurant or theater, or even shop for food, clothing, necessities—without being bombarded with the thoughts and emotions of those who’d touched the things she wanted was all due to her training at Gilead.
    The training allowed her as much of a life as she could have. Being “gifted” with the extrasense of psychometry gave her the ability to receive the thoughts, history, and emotions of others through touching them or their objects. The gift also cursed her: the smallest patch of exposed skin became a receptor and her psychometric power also siphoned off the life force of anyone she touched—no matter how slightly or accidentally. Unable to control her abilities, Kira could never have functioned in society at all without the instruction she’d received from Gilead.
    That offset some of the other things Gilead had done—like making her into a Shadow killing machine, refusing to save Nico, hiding the truth about Comstock .  . .
    Kira ignored the blinking red message light and wound her way through stacks of books, equipment, and artifacts. Her steps faltered as she passed the worktable she and Comstock had leaned over so many hours before. His loss hit her again, sharply, the void of his absence filled with what-ifs as she continued through the room and past the freight elevator at the back to the stairs.
    If she had known what he really was to her, if they’d just been honest with each other, she might have taken him down the spiral staircase to the lower level. She might have shown him some of the rarer objects she kept in her office or her most private space behind the replica mural from the Valley of the Queens that depicted Queen Nefertari playing senet. Her hand strayed to her pocket, the bloodstained fabric still tucked safely inside. She took small comfort in the knowledge that a part of Bernie was with her now and she could do something to ensure he found peace.
    The mural slid to the left after she sent a pulse of power through it. More than a few people would consider her extra precautions nothing more than paranoia, but after an imp had slid through a fracture in the millennia-old pottery that held him and nearly destroyed her former office, she’d learned to be careful. Most of the time her protections were designed to keep things from getting in. They also served to keep things from getting out.
    She moved steadily past her collection of weaponry—both ancient and advanced—past ritual gear too dangerous to remain in the mundane world, past her second, smaller office and its triple-guarded vault that currently housed the Egyptian dagger.
    A lifesize reproduction of the Weighing of the Heart ceremony emblazoned the far wall with bright color. Ancient Egyptians believed the heart, not a soul, measured the deeds of a person’s life. After a harrowing journey through the underworld, the dead arrived in Osiris’s palace and were taken to the Hall of Judgment. The mural showed Osiris sitting on a throne as the ruler of the afterlife, with the forty-two gods arranged around him. They bore witness as the dead person confessed all the things he hadn’t done to show that he had been a good person in life and deserved to continue living after death. The jackal-headed god Anubis stood by the gilded standing scales of truth and justice, ready to weigh the deceased’s heart against the feather of