Imprisoned (Book Five of the Castle Coven Series): A Witch and Warlock Romance Novel by Hazel Hunter

Author:Hazel Hunter [Hunter, Hazel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allure Press
Published: 2015-06-04T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

THEY WALKED FOR a timeless distance, and slowly around them, the world changed. The sky was the same as it always was, but the ground turned hard and flinty, making them walk carefully. Soon they started seeing cairns, piles of blackened rocks that designated graves. There were small wooden staves around each cairn, each with a name. Hailey shivered when she realized that each grave marked the passing of at least eight people. Some marked as many as fifteen.

“What kind of place is this?” she murmured, keeping her voice deliberately low.

Kieran shook his head.

“It’s a killing field,” he said flatly. “These people died all at once. That doesn’t happen in peace time. The only other thing it could be is a sickness.”

Hailey felt her stomach churn at the suffering that Piers must have seen. She was prepared to find him as a crying child or a shattered man. She was not prepared for what came next.

The area that they were traveling through was misty. It was hard to see more than twenty feet in any one direction. The cairns rose up out of the mists like hulking beasts, making Hailey and Kieran walk a little closer together without thinking about it. They had stopped talking almost entirely.

The first thing she heard was a skitter of stone and the rush of feet. She heard voices, hushed and urgent, speaking, and then more running. She tugged on Kieran’s arm to get him to wait. As she predicted, the people came right for them.

It was a man and a woman, and they skidded to a stop as soon as they saw Hailey and Kieran. Hailey stared. These people were completely recognizable as duplicates of Kieran and Hailey themselves, but they were so changed. The strange Kieran wore an eye patch, and his bare chest was latticed with scars. The strange Hailey was stick thin. Half of her head had been shaved. She stared around like a wild horse, the white completely visible around her eye.

“What new trickery is this?” the strange Kieran snarled. He didn’t have a sword. Instead he shifted into a fighting stance, putting his body between his Hailey and the newcomers.

“We’re not your enemies,” Hailey said softly, showing the pair her empty hands. “I…I think we’re you. Or you’re us. But either way, I promise I won’t bring you any harm. Please, stop and talk to us for a moment. We don’t know what’s going on.”

The strange Kieran snorted.

“That sounds like a pretty pack of lies to me,” he said.

“Are you phantasms that he conjured?” asked the other Hailey.

It hurt Hailey to look at her doppelgänger. There was something achingly young and vulnerable about the way that she held herself that made Hailey herself ill. She wondered if she had ever looked like that back in her hungry teen years, if she had been that wild-eyed, that frail. It was strange to be simultaneously repulsed by your double and to want to feed her a good meal.

“Who do you think sent us?” Hailey asked gently.

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