The Bound by JM Douglas - HTML preview

EPILOGUE

For days the spirit rested, curled in the shadowed corner of the room. It had not shed its shell in a dozen years, and the new skin was soft and pliable. At last it stretched, its hundred legs waving and tapping on the ground. The dream whisper scuttled from the room and slipped down the stairs, keeping always to the shadowed side of the hall.

There was work to be done. The boy had been a good vessel. It was time to pick a new host.

It knew the minds of all the rebels downstairs, knew them well. It had tasted them again and again as it rode the boy: caught their thoughts like cobwebbed insects, felt their feelings breeze over it like a scent carried by the wind.

Its vessel must be stable, able to resist the wheeling of the stars and unending vertigo. The vessel must have battled horror, faced itself. Found strength, and known where to find more. It scuttled under the great wooden doors and down the pebbled bank to the river moat, where the two humans sat talking of the future. It ran past Finian, and with a sudden rush onto Ulla: legs whisking up the woman's arm, across a shoulder-blade, and onto her neck as she thrashed and pummeled at herself. Finian sprang to his feet.

The dream whisper settled, and had half-tangled into her mind when her fingers at last closed around the body of the spirit and ripped it off, threw it down to the ground. Ulla's free hand closed around a stone, and she smashed the rock against the spirit. She ground the stone into its crackling shell.

She stood beside Finian and stared down with shaking hands as the air darkened, condensed, and pulled into the small gray stone.

“The face,” said Finian. “That face…it's...”

Ulla crouched slowly and picked up the stone.

The night sky blinked open, and the stars wheeled, and she could hear a hundred voices in her head, a hundred voices like fluttering fabrics before her that she could reach out and stroke, change, clasp, caress, and she dropped the stone. She turned and fell to her knees, shuddering, on the brink of convulsions. Finian grabbed her by the shoulders and she stopped, slumped back against him.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

Ulla nodded and measured her breaths, then turned to look at the strange bug's body and the gray stone, for all the world like the shattered rocks that surrounded it. And—yet—so different.

“Murdoc's dead,” she said with certainty, and realized as she said it that she had felt his death, seen Corliss through his eyes, in the memory locked into the stone and the creature who now lived within it. “And Corliss... she isn't Bound anymore. She's alive. On the beach.”

Their eyes locked, and held.

“Go,” she said.

The rowboats they'd used in the fighting still sat there, pulled a few feet up the shore.

“Yes,” he said, “I have to. Will you come?”

“I can't. The stone... I saw... there's something I have to do.”

“Will you still be here?”

“As long as it's safe, I'll wait.”

“I'll find you,” said Finian.

She watched him go, and kept her eyes on the water even once his boat was out of sight.

The sword still sat at the bottom of the lake. If they were going to win the war, Ulla thought, they needed a way to get it back.