If that was all I had left to hold on to of Alastor, it was insufficient by far.
Caught up in the dark storm of my thoughts, I failed to notice the chestnut-haired beauty flitting into the cavern with tentative strokes of her tail.
It was the sweet lilt of her voice cutting through the somber drone of the dead that snapped my head around. “Lady Ursela? I-I’m terribly sorry to disturb you. Others warned me not to come, but I had no choice. I had to speak to you.”
Sucking water through my teeth, I recoiled into the shadows. I had barely recovered from the ghouls’ last onslaught, I couldn’t fight them off again. Not yet.
“I mean you no harm!” the girl offered with a compassionate tilt of her head, extending one hand in my direction.
“It’s not me I’m worried for,” I forewarned, sinking farther into the darkened corner.
The mer let her hand fall. Lacing her fingers together in front of her, she nervously picked at her nails. “I don’t believe the horrible rumors circling the kingdom. You did all you could for our soldiers.” Chin quivering, her voice cracked with emotion. “What happened was simply a horrible accident. What followed … a travesty.”
I tried to speak, only managing a pained whimper.
All around me haunting faces churned, their full, ghastly forms emerging from the stone.
Like hungry sharks in chum filled waters, they swarmed our unsuspecting guest. Brushing her hair from her shoulders. Inhaling her scent as if intoxicated by it.
Oblivious to all of this, the mermaid continued, “After … everything, I didn’t know who else to turn to.”
“She was in the crowd,” the specter of a soldier missing half of his face murmured against the nape of her neck, causing the girl’s body to tremble with an involuntary shudder.
“Laughed as you suffered,” yet another, with blue lips and blackened gums, added.
Clinging to the reed, I prayed it would anchor me in the knowledge that this lass was young and innocent. She was no enemy of mine.
Squaring her narrow shoulders, my brazen guest ventured close enough for me to see the light dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose. “My fiancé was killed during the battle with the Lemurians,” she admitted, her face crumbling in misery.
“Do you think her tears would taste as salty as the sea?” a corpse in the late stages of rot pondered, dragging his tongue over the rise of her cheek.
Bringing my fist to my lips, I stifled a heave.
“Since I lost him, I can’t sleep. Can’t eat. The pain … feels as though it could consume me.” Her desperate stare beseeched me, pleading for understanding.
Round and round, the phantoms eddied. Each more horrific than the last.
“She knows not of real pain.”
“We could show her.”
“The poor soul.”
“I was hoping,” her request wavered with the tangible sorrow of true mourning, “you might know of a way to heal my heart and grant me a bit of peace … with magic. I’m willing to pay any price.”
Shaking my head, I tried to deny my own licentious longing.
This was the beast. The infection. It wasn’t me.
“She wants us.”
“Needs us.”
“No one will know.”
“Plant a garden of souls that wronged you.”
“Let her be the first seedling.” My mother’s spirit broke from the pack. Her gnarled hand reached for me, beckoning me forth. Her tone made it sound like a special honor I could bestow on the humble maiden.
The shell pulsed red against my breastbone.
My fist tightened around the reed.
“Lady Ursela?” she attempted once more, my silence seeming to give her doubt if I heard her at all. “Can … can you do that?”
The manifestations drifted around her, presenting her to me as if in offering. Silence descended. The living and the dead waited with vested interest, eager to learn of my true nature.
Slow rolls of my tentacles eased me out from hiding. As my head rose, an oily slick smile spread across my face. “My dear, sweet child, that’s what I do. It’s what I live for.”
Entombed in Glass
Unfortunate Soul Chronicles Book 2
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter One
Mirror, mirror on the wall.
You’ve all heard that fated call.
To the seer of present, future, and past,
a nameless face entombed in glass.
I know all,
I see all,
I can answer all … with flair.
Though to tell you the truth, I really don’t care.
Matters of mortals? Surely, you jest?
With no solid form, I find their troubles a yawn fest.
I guess I should mention I don’t have to rhyme.
Stuck in this wasteland, it passes the time.
Without such tricks and distractions, my mind would be destroyed,
lost and ravaged by this endless void.
If ending it all were an option, I would have done it by now.
Unfortunately, with no solid stature, I can’t fathom how.
Instead, I focus on those that cursed me here,
formidable connivers that many fear.
I do their bidding as a trusted pawn,
yet claims of my loyalty couldn’t be more wrong.
Each day that passes I scheme to break free from their thrall,
to honor a self-made vow … and kill them all.
Chapter Two
The stench of charred flesh gagged me. A cloud of smoke and rubble burned my eyes and scorched down my throat. Through that cloud of misery, she called to me. Her muffled siren song lured me back from the teetering edge of the beyond.
Coming to under a pile of rocks, I discovered blackened bones littered my chest. Gingerly brushing them aside, I forced myself up to sitting. Nausea caused the world to whirl around me, its force pounding spikes into my skull. Dabbing two fingers at the tender pressure point at my temple, I pulled them back to find blots of blood smearing my skin. What hit me, I couldn’t say. Regardless, that wasn’t to blame for the bile bubbling up the back of my throat.
I was sitting in a nest of bodies.
Death’s violent hold marred the terrain as far as the eye could see. Mermen and humans alike slaughtered and left for dead without an ounce of mercy.
Only then did my hazy mind manage to form the memories of what had come to pass. Princess Vanessa of Atlantica, for whom I had joined the Royal Guard to be worthy of, evoked a spell to grant us mer-soldiers legs. Her goal? Allowing us the opportunity to, quite literally, gain ground in our war against the humans of Lemuria. Vanessa’s bold maneuver worked—for a time. Evidence of that laid in the Lemuria castle now crumbling into the sea. What fleeting victory we claimed was brutally stolen by the horror that followed. Without warning, Vanessa’s spell … broke. Mermen screamed in anguish as they were robbed of their borrowed legs. Collapsing to the ground in vulnerable heaps, their tails returned. From there, the Lemuria soldiers killed them with ease. Stabbing bayonets into their flipping fins, they left many to slow, torturous de
aths. Others were given the quick release of a blade’s edge.
I should have been one of them.
That was my place, among my men.
I could vividly recall the clap of my sword against that of a foul-breathed human’s. As I gained the upper hand in my push against him, magic swirled around me. Light reflected off the hint of my sunset orange scales returning.
Then … nothing.
I had no recollection of how it was I maintained the soot-covered legs stretched out before me, as so many others were cheated of theirs.
It had to be Vanessa. Somehow … she saved me.
Surrounded by ghastly misery, her noble act of kindness seemed tragically unjust. How did I rate, in the scheme of things, to draw breath while flies buzzed around the corpses of my fellow soldiers?
“Alllllllastor.” So lost was I in my own reverie, that I almost missed the call of my name riding in on a lashing breeze. It was the familiar lilt of the voice that launched my heart into a hammering crescendo, and snapped my head around.
As I struggled to lift my crumpled form from the ground, the rocks beneath me gouged my palms. Finding footing, I tried to rise on unsteady legs.
“Vanessa!” The left limb held. The right crumbled like dried seaweed under my weight. Treacherous knee buckling, it forced a pained yelp through my gritted teeth when it connected with the earth. White-hot pain roared through my thigh. Hand trembling, I reached down to gingerly touch a wound I didn’t know I had. Neck craned, I cringed at the slice tore in the back of my leg. The muscle was filleted, tissue and tendon hanging slack in a gruesome cavity.
“Allllaaastor!” Vanessa’s voice—or perhaps my mind’s mocking illusion of it—called a second time. She sounded farther away. Like a lifeboat sailing on in search of survivors, every moment I hesitated, the opportunity drifted farther from reach.
Desperation seeped through my veins, urging me into motion. Cracked and bleeding hands clawing at the blood-soaked earth, I dragged myself over the devastation with one working leg. I couldn’t allow myself to think of the forms beneath me as actual beings. Not yet. Such thoughts would render me immobile. Instead, with the acrid taste of ash burned onto my tongue, I focused every ounce of my remaining strength on reaching the peak in the landscape up ahead.
Sweating and straining, I forced my elbows and forearms to guide me up the terrain when my battered hands could take no more. What could have been a second, or an eternity later, I crested that lofty summit.
Heart skipping like a dolphin riding waves, I caught a glimpse of her. Vanessa, my angel of mercy, crouched down to speak to another survivor―concern creasing her brow, strands of raven hair lashing at her pink cheeks.
Even at that distance, I recognized her patient with equal parts awe and bewilderment. Of all the dedicated, able-bodied members of the Royal Guard, Sterling was the absolute last person I expected to see alive. Once, he occupied the cell opposite Vanessa’s when she was wrongfully imprisoned in the dungeon of Atlantica’s castle. The penance for his crimes had been a forced position on the front line of the war. Hers … was a disgusting display it made my blood boil to think of. But that’s her story to tell.
Mine involves the day Sterling was assigned to my platoon, and I watched his bumbling antics, full of doubt he could make it three steps on land. That was in large part due to his ramblings about a pipe-puffing caterpillar, and something called a Jabberwock. But, I digress. Despite my skepticisms, he survived. I gladly accepted this blessing from Mother Ocean, and allowed the eccentric lad to bend Vanessa’s ear long enough for me to heave myself within shouting distance.
Sweat dripping from my brow, I shuffled on. Dead, unseeing eyes assaulted me from all sides. Broken, discarded weapons scraped at my flesh. Still, I lurched on.
Between the breaking waves, the wind tossed a few random words of their conversation back at me.
“… only needed to get to the water.”
“Common sense …”
“Alastor … gone?”
Swiping at her cheeks with the back of her hand, Vanessa brushed away tears that slipped from her lashes.
Making no attempts to comfort her, Sterling drummed one finger against his bottom lip. “… ever really here at all?”
Snapping upright, Vanessa shouted words that were swallowed by the ocean’s thunder.
The quirky little man merely cocked his head in response.
Shoulders sagging, her gaze drifted to the sea.
A fist of fear closed around my throat. In moments, I would lose her. Biting back the pain, I forced myself up on my good leg. Limping onward, I reached for her, shouting her name loud enough to make my lungs ache.
Mother Ocean, let her look up. Let her see me.
The mercy I pleaded for was lost to the ocean’s roar. Pulse drumming against my ribs, I hauled myself onward. Every muscle in my body ached. The shroud of defeat set in as her amethyst stare locked on the horizon.
“Vanessa!” I tried again, throat raw from emotion.
Cawing seagulls swooped overhead, drowning out my raspy shout.
In reluctant acceptance, Vanessa took a step toward the shoreline. Then another. Each squish of sand beneath her toes stomped my heart to shards.
“Vanessa!” Every ounce of my being pleaded for her chin to tip my way. One sweeping glance could secure our forever. Acting on reckless abandon, I damned the pain and heaved myself onward. Afraid tearing my gaze away would mean losing her, I didn’t glance down at the debris blocking my path until my foot caught on the cold, clammy tail of a fallen merman. A fresh blaze of anguish scorched through my leg, slamming me down on the bed of rock and carnage.
Blood gushed down the back of my thigh in a steady stream, the world spinning around me in a dizzying blur. Planting my palms, I pushed myself up in time to see the gleam of Vanessa’s violet fins dive to the depths.
Her name tore from my chest in a final plea she would never hear.
My future ... my forever … disappeared beneath the cresting waves.
With nothing left to cling to, my head and hopes crumpled into the sand.
Chapter Three
“She seemed sweet. You really should have stopped her,” a husky voice pointed out, the shadow of the newcomer stretching over my crumpled form.
Vision blurring, I blinked hard to focus my gaze warped by blood loss. A current of raven hair, tinged with hints of blue, framed broad shoulders. The sharp angles of his bone structure reminded me of the unforgiving features of the Artic merfolk. His modest grey robe was tattered and singed along the bottom hem, it’s frayed fabric swaying around his ankles like licking black flames.
“Royal Alchemist Hades?” I croaked, bowing my head out of equal parts respect and blood loss. I was just a boy when he and his brother, Poseidon, petitioned Mount Olympus to have him reallocated from Atlantica. Even so, I could vividly recall being in awe of the power that crackled from him like a brewing storm.
“Now, now,” Hades confirmed his identity with a dismissive wave of his hand, “that’s not necessary.”
Dutifully, I dragged myself up onto one knee. Injured leg stretched out uncooperatively behind me, I clamped one shaky fist over my heart. “You are royalty, Your Highness. As a member of the Royal Guard, it is my duty and privilege to honor you by addressing you as such.”
Hades’ face fell slack of emotion, his lip curling with a hint of distaste. “Quaint, but not what I meant. I’m a Lord now. You’re not supposed to make eye contact, or speak in my presence.” Face an impassive neutral, he blinked my way for a beat before a charming smile coiled at the corner of his lips. “I’m kidding, of course. I mean, I am a Lord, but most of my subjects take the no talking thing to an extreme. Therefore, I welcome that faux pas.”
“I’m sure they only mean that as a show of respect, my Lord.” Keeping my head ducked, I grit my teeth as the throbbing in my thigh triggered black spots that swam before my eyes.
“Quite the contrary, they’re all dead.”
Brow pinched tight, my posture swayed as I glanced up.
Eyes crinkling with amusement at my confusion, Hades chuckled. “My title is as Lord of the Underworld. The moans from the River Styx are the closest I get to conversation most days.”
Shifting my crumpled leg beneath me, I cleared my throat to mask the blinding bolts of pain jolting through my torso. “What … is such a regal man doing in a damned place such as this?”
“Life takes us—” Hades’ calm colloquy cut off, bubbling panic widening his eyes. Mouth gaping, his cheeks contracted in frantic gulps. Managing to choke out a labored croak, he swallowed hard in victory over the momentarily crippling onslaught. “My apologies. When Zeus granted me human form he left in the part of my brain that thinks I’m supposed to be breathing water. Every now and then, my body believes it is suffocating. Nothing more fun than sporadically thinking you’re dying. But, enough about me. Tell me about your little mermaid. Risqué falling for a princess, isn’t it? How tragically taboo.”
Knowing my place in the hierarchy, my only choice was to deny my love, no matter how it pained me. “No, m’lord. I sought only her guidance to deliver me back home.”
Fiddling with the crystal charm strung around his neck, Hades screwed his thin lips to the side, his stare fixed on the lapping waves. “Yes, of course. I always sob uncontrollably when I need directions. Tell me, is it a habit of yours to lie to royals, or is this a new—albeit it, dangerous—hobby you’re sampling?”
Sagging forward, I caught myself with one hand. Choking on pain, I managed a grunted response. “A thousand apologies, m’lord. I know any feelings I may, or may not, have for the princess, your niece, are strictly forbidden. I meant no disrespect.”
Hades bristled, his chin lifting with a haughty twitch. “I cannot, and will not, fault anyone for falling in love. That euphoric agony is one that enslaves us and drives us to madness or salvation. I could wax poetic on the topic until the sun sets over the waters’ edge. However, I feel I should first point out that you’re bleeding in torrents.”
The Unfortunate Souls Collection Page 23