Death's Dancer by Jasmine Silvera

Author:Jasmine Silvera [Silvera, Jasmine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kindle Press
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

When Isela closed her eyes, she saw the room again—the bloodbath it had been even before demons had begun to manifest from the shadows.

“It’s called an aedis,” Azrael supplied, and in her mind’s eye she stood beside him, surveying the space. “The room.”

She remembered the sense of déjà vu that struck her upon entering her mother’s hidden room behind the studio. It had been similar in so many ways: the long counter and shelves lined with jars and containers. And on the center island, a giant book on an angled pedestal Bebe referenced as she assembled contents in a small stone bowl.

Isela’s memory took them back to Havel Zeman’s little room again: the bloodied walls and bits of flesh scattered all around her. She turned a slow circle, extended fingers reaching to touch something that should have been there.

“The book,” she said, stopping before the empty lectern.

Azrael murmured, “A grimoire.”

The sense of him beside her in her memories vanished. When she opened her eyes, she was surprised to see him standing across the room. “What?”

“Grimoire,” he said impatiently. “It’s a book of spells. Necromancers collect them.”

“You have one?”

Azrael dismissed the question with a wave. “I have several hundred. But I’ve been around for a while. I wasn’t paying attention in the summoning. It was there on the counter. Old—much too old for a second-rate soul reader like Zeman. When we got there, it was gone.”

Hundreds. Just how old was he?

“How long?” she asked before she could check herself.

Azrael looked at her blankly.

“How long have you been around for?”

It seemed to take him a moment to realize what she’d asked. Azrael turned on one heel and studied her.

“I am very old,” he said cautiously.

“How old?”

“I was born somewhere on the plains shadowed by the Caucus mountains,” he said slowly. “Before the common era.”

Isela jerked as her body made one more attempt to follow its most instinctive urge: flee.

“Christ,” she muttered.

Azrael’s mouth canted. “I never got to meet him.”

“You’re two thousand years old?”

“Plus or minus,” he said. “The records weren’t very good in those days, and once I stopped aging, it was easy to lose track.”

“Stopped aging?” she said lightly. “That must be convenient.”

She studied him again. The lines of his face felt familiar and yet somehow foreign. The truth was written in his bone structure and features, calling back to an earlier age of humanity.

“The grimoire was missing,” he urged. “Anything else?”

Isela was trying to stay afloat, struggling to keep herself from falling into complete hysteria. The shaking started at her fingertips and worked its way into her shoulders. She gripped her elbows in an effort to keep still.

“I don’t. . . remember.” Isela gulped in air. “I don’t. . . know. Why would someone steal an old book? And kill him for it.”

“You know the answer to the second question,” he said. “It was a distraction. To keep us from seeing what they were after. What she was after.”

“The Queen of Diamonds,” she surmised.

Azrael nodded. “You were right. She was a necromancer, one we thought succumbed to death or madness.

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