Read Online Shadowed By Wings by Janine Cross - Free Book Online Page A

arm’s length, studied me as tears sparkled like stars upon her cheeks. “My beloved. Listen.”
    “Mama—”
    “Listen.”
    I bit my lip, held my breath. Silently, I prayed that she wouldn’t break this magic spell of love and sanctuary by uttering the last name I wanted to hear right now.
    “Waivia needs you, Zarq.”
    I closed my eyes and felt my insides wither, felt the sanctuary and certainty of her affection draining as swift as a gutter torrent away from me.
    “You need to find her, Zarq. Leave this place. Forget this apprenticeship madness of yours and find her.”
    “Mother.”
    “She’s all alone.”
    “Mother.”
    “She needs me.” Her voice turned gravelly; her hold upon my elbows became a grip. I dared not open my eyes, wanted to turn back time to moments before, when she’d wept and whispered love against my neck. I wanted to lock myself forever there in her embrace.
    “They hurt her, Zarq. She was only a baby and they hurt her.” No more was it the voice of my mother, but a gritty rumble of earth and rock. “I thought that my kindnesses to their own children would protect her, but I was wrong. I chose wrongly. I should have fought them. Despised them. They were no clan of mine, those pottery women. They hurt my Waivia.”
    “Mother.”
    “Leave here, Zarq.” She abruptly released me. “Find her.”
    The smell of sulfur burned my nostrils. The light behind my closed eyelids turned a luminescent blue. The stench of carrion began souring the air.
    I opened my eyes. No longer did my mother stand before me in the shape I loved, but in the shape of my mother’s haunt, large and nacreous, a six-foot-tall buzzard with scaly legs the slick reds and whites of viscera, strips of rotted flesh impaled on hooked talons. Luminescent blue feathers bristled upon a breast inflated with growing anger. Red eyes above a beak lined with tiny shards of teeth glared at me.
    “Find her.”
    “She’s dead,” I whispered.
    “She’s not!” the haunt cried, and somewhere a mouse shrilled as an owl snapped its spine. “She lives.”
    I backed away from the haunt, weeping. “She was sold as kiyu almost ten years ago. Sex slaves don’t live long. She’s dead, Mother. Dead.”
    “Find her!”
    “No.”
    The haunt shrieked rage, and its eyes sank into its head and rattled like pebbles down its throat, so that I stared at dark caverns instead of eyes. Maggots writhed within those pits, and they dripped over feathered cheeks and wriggle-fell down a feathered breast to gray talons.
    “Go away!” I cried, tears streaming down my face, wanting her to stay, but stay in the form she’d once been, long ago, the mother who had sung lullabies to me, laughed like the clear trilling of a bunting bird, tenderly picked splinters from my palms and kissed away all tears. “I won’t look for her, Mother, not now, not ever! Let me live my life—”
    “You waste your life here!” the haunt shrieked.
    “No. I can change things, I know I can. Just listen to me; just believe me: I can make it so no daughter is ever sold from her mother as kiyu again. Please, let me try.”
    “I don’t care about other daughters! I care only about Waivia!”
    “Waivia is dead!” I shrieked. “She’s dead, understand? Now, go; leave me alone. Go!”
    The haunt shook its feathered head at me, clacking its beak. With a hiss, it launched into the sky and flapped upward, into the night, luminescing like a lost star.
    I shuddered, soaked in chill sweat, and wept tears of anger and frustration.
    Beside me, I heard a gasp. I turned.
    Ringus stood there panting, eyes glazed with fear. He was pressed against the edge of the butchering table, fingers gripping the thick wood for dear life.
    “Eidon,” he breathed, ineffectually trying to call the veteran to his aid. “Help me, Eidon.”
    “Tell no one about this,” I said, my voice choked with threat.
    He nodded, eyes locked on mine.
    “Now, get out of here,” I said. “Find your Eidon