Half-Shell Prophecies: Among the Mythos, #3 by Ruthanne Reid

Author:Ruthanne Reid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ruthanne Reid
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

● CHAPTER 12 ●

BRAN’S TOWER

I bet you thought I’d forgotten that weird god-dess’s comment about my father. Nope. I was just choosing not to think about it. But we’ll talk about that another time.

Bran’s home was a place I’d visited before, albeit under duress. There had been this whole thing with my uncle and a baby dragon and kidnapping and weirdness, and it ended with exploding taxidermy. This tower wasn’t a place I ever thought I’d go back to.

Bran’s home was a pocket dimension in northern Wales. Well. Sort of in Wales. If you stepped outside it, you could see a lovely little Welsh town at the bottom of the hill and what looks like a wrecked Iron Age hillfort.

But take too many steps toward that hillfort—assuming you’re magic—and you suddenly find yourself slipping out of the human world and into someplace else. Someplace of complete darkness, except for his tower—which was visible for no clear reason. Tall, black, and phallic, it glinted with tiny red pinpoints like thousands of eyes.

And there was no light. None. I could see, but it wasn’t because of light. Only my magical blood gave me visual access. I can’t imagine what a true nonmagical Ever-Dying would do in this place. (Panic? Panic.)

Bran’s castle stood exactly where an old Ever-Dying castle once had. Our parallel worlds often piggyback on one another in terms of building placement. Last time I’d been here, something I could sense but not see had stampeded by in the dark. “Bone-collectors, right?” I murmured, following Bran down his entry hall and trying not to be creeped out by the wriggling patterns on the rug under my feet, or the blue stones glowing in sconces in place of anything reasonable like torches, or the odor of sawdust and feathers.

That last one was kind of my fault. I blew up his collection of stuffed birds last time I was here. Long story.

“They’re just vermin,” said Bran, turning his head so that I could see the sharp line of his jaw and a hint of his full profile.

Dismissive. Authoritarian. Kingly.

My sarcasm makes it hard to see, but Bran was nothing to laugh at. He felt like a king with real authority, born and not made. I was nobody, comparatively. I could ignore that most of the time; I had to ignore it most of the time so it wouldn’t mess with my head.

I couldn’t ignore it here.

Reality seemed to warp where he walked, even though he just looked like a handsome guy in jeans and a t-shirt and bare feet, walking across the dark stone hall of his very own castle.

But he wasn’t that. He was the prince of the Shadow’s Breath, hero to the whole People of the Darkness, and his grandfather was some kind of insane cannibalistic monster, and I couldn’t ignore any of it here.

“They were too big for vermin,” I said.

“‘Big’ is relative,” he added.

We passed doors now, and just like before, escaping beneath each was a confusing plethora of sounds, smells, and weirdly dancing shadows.

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