The Wind Thief (Vanished, #4) by B. B. Griffith

Author:B. B. Griffith [Griffith, B. B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Griffith Publishing LLC
Published: 2022-12-15T22:00:00+00:00

12

GRANT ROMER

The bell knows it was almost snatched away. It feels heavier now, like it wants to sink into me. Warmer too. It gets like this when things are happening just outside of our sight.

Dark Sky’s words still ring in my ears. “When the time comes, you’ll give it to me.”

Hos is staring bullets at the bell and at me. He’s still holding his fingers like it stung him where he grabbed it, but he looks like he wants to try again anyway. Only Dark Sky’s orders keep him seated.

Dark Sky knows what Hos doesn’t. The bell only works right when it’s given freely. Anyone who takes it messes up the balance. Shit breaks.

When Chaco vanished, Dark Sky smiled. He moved back to his sandpainting like that was all the evidence he needed that he had everything figured out. He’s carefully sifting black sand into the jagged outline of a snake, singing to himself in a low rumble while sweat drips from his brow onto the painting.

He sure as hell looks pleased with himself. Confident that whatever signal the bell sent out fell on deaf ears. He thinks the danger has passed. But he ain’t lived with the bell, not like me.

If he did, he’d know the danger never really passes.

Dark Sky said the bell is nothing but a tool. That I may be the Keeper, but it isn’t mine, and maybe he’s right. But that’s only part of the story. I may not own the bell, but it sure as shit owns me. That’s what people don’t realize about this whole arrangement.

Once the secret of what this thing can do gets out, the Keeper is never safe. Nobody I love is safe either. All we can do is run when we have to. Lay low when we don’t. It happened with the agents, and it happened with Coyote, and every time we get out of trouble, I think maybe we’re home free.

We ain’t.

I look carefully into the faces of the people I love, boxed right in here next to me, and I can’t help wondering if each time the bell brings trouble down, they think of me a little bit less as Grant and a little bit more as the Keeper.

Or in Kai’s case, maybe she’s not seeing me at all anymore. I try to tell myself that’s because she’s not right. Dark Sky has her under some sort of spell, something cutting her ties to me. But fire can’t exist without smoke, and the bell hanging around my neck simmers day after day. One day, that look Kai is giving me now is how Mom and Dad and Joey and everyone will look at me.

I won’t be Grant anymore. I’ll be the Keeper. And that’s it. The world needs a Keeper more than it needs a Grant. And the world gets what it wants.

I know I’m spiraling. Usually, my bird talks me back up, but even my bird up and left me, and this bell is getting so damn heavy.

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