Isle of Bones: A Nightworld Story (Children of the Night Book 2) by Zan Safra

Author:Zan Safra [Safra, Zan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sinsonte Press
Published: 2022-01-26T06:00:00+00:00

7

AYANDA

The wheel of the automatical gondola churns, carving a foamy wake as it carries us south. I keep my eyes on the gondola’s prow, determined not to look at anything further ahead. I already glimpsed the island.

I tug at the bandage binding my splint, trying to tighten it without hurting myself more. The anodyne’s numbness has long since worn away. Pain burns in my arm, a shard of red-hot glass slicing straight into the bone.

I form a knot in the bandage and brace myself, closing my eyes before I pull it tight. The pain darts up my arm like volta. I fight not to scream, but a strangled noise leaks through my teeth nonetheless.

“Ayanda?”

I open my tearing eyes. Yurei huddles on the bench beside me, watching me with worry. The green glimmer shines in his eyes, remaining now, not flickering as before. The same hue tints his skin.

I let out my breath and shake my head. “It’s nothing. It hurts, that’s all.”

The paddlewheel turns, the waves lap at the gondola’s smooth hull. Churn. Creak. Lap. Churn. Creak. Lap.

My thoughts flit back to the island. Isola di Poveglia, the Isle of Bones, Isle of Death, Isle of Ghosts.

I haven’t believed in ghosts since I was a child. When I was small I listened to every one of the tales Andreas told in the dead of night, whispering as he held a candle under his face. There were days I spent sleepless, curled like a snail under my blankets, convinced that spirits would slink out of the mist and snatch me away. But Madrina found out soon enough, assured me that ghosts were nothing more than stories, and sentenced Andreas to a hundred lines of I will not scare my sister.

That was the end of it, and since then I’ve known better. The dead don’t return as spirits, they return with fangs.

Churn. Creak. Lap. Churn. Creak. Lap.

I sneak a glance at Yurei, but his gaze is fixed ahead. “Look.”

I look. Isola di Poveglia looms out of the water, a dark, misshapen slab. The waning moonlight silvers the uppermost branches of a forest but reveals nothing else. It catches in the canopy, not a drop of it reaching the ground.

The gondola adjusts its course, steering for an ancient dock that seems little more than a pile of sea-slimed rocks. Beside me I hear Yurei breathe deeply, steeling himself, or trying to scrape up strength.

The gondola noses up to the dock. I ready my botanical lantern and step out onto the rocks. Yurei follows me unsteadily, his footsteps louder than I’ve ever heard. The shore is hardly a shore at all, but a muddy, root-laced mess of branches and decaying spiderbone vines.

I unlock my lantern and hold it aloft, casting its foxfire light over a wall of dark trees and undergrowth. Nothing stirs in the forest, nothing I can hear.

And there’s not a single trace of the Dead.

Fear claws out of my chest and up my throat. I’m blind without my lantern. I can’t wield my glaive.

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