Blood Prophecy

CHAPTER 37



Solange


I was floating over the battle, pale and transparent as mist.

For a long, sickening, horrifying moment, I thought I was back in Viola’s spirit castle.

“No,” I said, frantically. “Absolutely not.”

I had to get out of here. I couldn’t be trapped like this again, not now, while I could see my family below fighting for their lives. They glowed faintly blue. I shook my head, as if that would make everything normal again.

“I really can’t be crazy right now,” I moaned out loud.

“Merde, Solange, what are you doing here?”

Isabeau’s voice startled me so thoroughly I hollered, and jerked back violently, spinning like cotton candy at a carnival booth. I came to a dizzying stop while Isabeau floated next to me, frowning delicately.

I flapped my hands at her. “Help me!”

Her eyes were fierce as wolf’s eyes. “Where is your body, Solange?”

“Kieran and I were on one of the platforms,” I said, trying to remember. I squinted at the strange, black-and-white, overexposed photograph of the camp below us. People and vampires glowed like superimposed colorful fireflies. “There!” I pointed, trying to see through the leaves. I could just make out the gold flare of Kieran’s aura outlining his body as he stood over me, where I was sprawled unconscious at his feet.

“I have got to stop doing that,” I muttered.

“Bien.” Isabeau looked relieved. “But this is still most unusual. The energy I put into your spirit cord when you were trapped in the castle must still be linking us.” She looked briefly curious. “You and Logan are both naturals at dreamwalking.”

“That’s great,” I said evenly, trying not to panic. “What the hell is dreamwalking? And how do I stop?”

“Just recline into your body as if it were a bed.”

I couldn’t quite get the hang of it. I drifted up a few more feet before Isabeau told me to stare at my body and think of heavy things like ship anchors and mountains. Then she shoved me. The feel of her ghostly hand touching my ghostly shoulder was cold and unpleasant and strangely jelly-like.

I reached the top branches of the tree when she yanked me back up. I shivered, cold to my bones.

“Non,” she said sharply, changing her mind. “I am sensing too much strange magic around us. Stay close.” She lifted one of the amulets around her neck. It was round and metallic, the kind people keep perfume in. The same kind I’d kept Madame Veronique’s blood in on a chain around my neck before my birthday. She pulled a long thin thread of white glittering light out of it and looped it around our wrists, where she’d tied the ribbon while she exorcised me. “I cannot wait. The spell must be done now. You will have to come with me.”

“Are you calling up that mystical fog you used the night Mom killed Montmartre and Magda killed Greyhaven?”

She shook her head. “It would only put your humans at a disadvantage.”

Molten silver dripped from tree branches around us, gathering in puddles in the snow. “What is that?” I asked.

“Blood,” Isabeau replied.

Suddenly it was easy to feel the violence below seep into the air, making my spirit vision murky. I shuddered.

“Isabeau.”

I heard Logan’s voice clearly, even though he was whispering in Isabeau’s ear. “Hope is hiding in a pile of boulders southwest of the camp entrance.”

We drifted farther away from the safety of my body, searching through the auras. The boulders glowed with a yellowish-green light.

“Hope,” Isabeau said, sounding satisfied. There were six or seven guards around her position but they couldn’t see us.

Someone else did.

Something magical focused onto Isabeau. The feel of it bled off her onto me, like poisoned molasses, sticky and toxic.

“The Host,” she said darkly, clenching her jaw as she worked to repel it. The magic she was fighting prickled uncomfortably through me, but it wasn’t having the same effect on me as it clearly had on her. She went particularly pale, as if she were made entirely of silver and shadows. She was in pain.

Montmartre used magic against me in the past, and apparently his men were still using it. They hated me for helping to kill Montmartre. And they hated the Hounds, almost as much as the Hounds hated them. They hated Isabeau most of all, particularly for helping to defeat both Montmartre and his first lieutenant Greyhaven.

They’d known she would be here.

Because this spell clearly had only one target.

And it wasn’t my family.

It wasn’t even me.

It was Isabeau.