A woman with the gift to speak to the dead—and the assassin pursuing her—may be the only chance a crumbling empire has of holding back true evil, in this electrifying fantasy romance from the USA Today bestselling author of Radiance.
Siora has been on the run for longer than she cares to remember, from her past and her gift. Born with the ability to see and speak to ghosts, she has heard their desperate pleas as an otherworldly predator stalks the dead amid the fertile killing fields of the collapsing Krael Empire. The creature’s power and reach are growing with every soul it consumes, but Siora is preoccupied with her own troubles: namely an assassin who has sworn an oath of vengeance against her.
Gharek of Cabast was once the right-hand man of the reviled empress but is now a wanted fugitive. Although his reasons for hunting Siora are viscerally personal, what Gharek can’t anticipate is that when he finally does find her, she will hold the key to saving his world, or what’s left of it. To make good on old debts and protect the vulnerable dead from a malevolent force, Gharek and Siora will both need to make an ally out of an enemy—and trust that will be enough to save each other.
Gharek held a small lamp
aloft to illuminate the path ahead. He didn't worry that the fragile light
might be seen in the distance and alert someone. His mount's hooves crushing
sticks and brittle deadfall would accomplish the task long before the light
did.
The music of insects and bird calls had been
loud just before he crossed the tree line, a cacophony of whistles, rustles,
and chirps. Those sounds died away the closer he rode to the ruins of the dead
city until the silence itself held its breath and only the gloom shrouding the
trees breathed. His amiable mare stopped suddenly then pranced backward,
tossing her head and snorting. Gharek tapped his heels against her sides to
coax her forward. She'd have none of it, fighting the bit in her mouth as she
pivoted on her hooves to trot back the way they'd come.
Gharek reined her to a halt, considering whether
it was wise to continue his scouting in another direction or make camp nearby
and wait until morning to resume his hunt. He'd lose time with camping but
trying to find anyone in this darkness while riding a spooked horse was an
exercise in futility. Besides, he could make up the time in daylight. Siora was
on foot, he on horseback. He'd cover far more ground in less time than she
would, and the chance she'd outrun him if he spotted her was nonexistent.
He guided the mare to retrace her steps, and
this time she readily obeyed the command, eager to put distance between them
and the city that squatted like a pustule on the landscape. But she'd taken no
more than a pair of steps when something wrapped icy fingers around Gharek's
spine and wrenched him backward. He flew off the saddle as if lassoed from
behind and landed on his back. The ground beneath him vibrated from the beat of
his mare's hooves as she bolted past him into the labyrinth of trees.
He lay there for a moment, stunned and winded.
The ice shard wedged against his backbone remained, though whatever had ripped
him from horseback didn't press him into the dirt. A few more breaths and he
lurched to his feet, unsettled by his unusual clumsiness, alarmed by the
violence of an invisible force that had so thoroughly unhorsed him. There'd
been no trip rope to clothesline him, nor had he been riding fast when he fell.
The lamp he held had fallen when he did, lost somewhere in the underbrush when
its flickering light had guttered. Darkness hung thick enough to scoop with a
spoon.
His muttered curses sounded loud to his ears as
he peered into the sepulchral black, hoping he might spot the mare standing
nearby or at least find a partially cleared path that led back to open pasture.
He took a step only to suffer a hard clamp on his backbone, as if the icicle
there had suddenly transformed into a shackle locked around his middle.
Invisible tethers seized his arms and legs and he was jerked to one side and
then the other as if by a drunken puppeteer with their hands on the strings.
Gharek staggered, struggling to keep his feet,
struggling to free himself from the bonds that held him in an unbreakable grip
that both dragged and yanked him in the direction of Midrigar's walls. He
careened through the dark, along a jagged path that propelled him into tree
trunks before spinning him away to tear through the underbrush. He tried
planting his feet in the dirt to no avail, his boots carving skid marks as he
was pulled along like a cur on a leash. His palms left bloody smears on the
bark of those trees he tried to grip for purchase and was wrenched away with
little effort.
The iciness slithering down his spine spread in
creeper tendrils throughout his body, wrapping around his lungs and heart, his
liver, even his tongue so that his curses and snarls slowly ebbed away and his
struggles waned. Speaking was an impossibility, breathing a challenge, and he
was reduced to nothing more than a grunting, shambling mute driven inexorably
toward an ancient city of the damned and a fate he could not know but feared
with every part of his soul.
Excerpted
from Raven Unveiled by Grace Draven Copyright © 2022 by Grace
Draven. Excerpted by permission of Ace. All rights reserved.
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