Cinder X (Death Collectors, #2) by Jessica Sorensen Read Free Book Online Page B

what?”
     
    His attention strays over my shoulder as he picks a chunk of clay off his shirt. “I’m going to help you the only way I know how, by giving you some advice.” He looks at me and when our eyes fasten, fear pulsates through me. I don’t know where it stems from, whether he’s scared and I’m sensing it, or if he’s simply scaring me. “Have you ever heard of something called a ambulate umbra ?”
     
    “No… why?”
     
    He yanks his fingers through his hair, leaving it sticking up. Then someone bangs on the door and moments later a face appears in the small window at the top. Their eyes are bleeding, seeping out like rain and splattering across the glass. I glance back and forth between the dead person and the Professor, wondering if he can see it, but he continues on with the conversation, unbothered.
     
    “The problem is, I have no idea where it is…” He keeps talking, his hand falling to the side, his brows dipping together. “Or who even has it.”
     
    I hitch my finger under the handle of my bag, adjusting it higher on my shoulder as I watch him pace back and forth in front me. “What is it exactly?” My eyes widen as the door creaks open and the dead person enters the classroom, glancing around at the art on the wall with a perplexed look.
     
    Again, Professor Morgan seems oblivious. His forehead creases and then scurries over to his desk. “How about I show you,” he says as he opens his desk drawer. He retrieves a pencil and paper from the drawer and starts sketching while the dead girl just stares at me. There is a mark on her neck like a rope burn, the tips of her hair stained with blood. As I look closer, I recognize her features as one of the girls I saw in the newspaper; one that was murdered a week ago, her body found near the forest.
     
    “Help me,” she says in a haunting hollow voice as she stares at me with a distant expression. “Help us… free us from the pain. He’s got our souls trapped, Ember. And he plans on trapping a lot more and then destroying us all.”
     
    I want to ask her what she’s talking about, but what about Professor Morgan? What would he say if I started talking aloud? If I told him I could see the dead?
     
    Debating what to do, I start to open my mouth, deciding that looking insane might be worth the risk to find out what’s going on. But as soon as my lips part, she disappears, vanishing into thin air without so much as a sound.
     
    “I’m much better at drawing what I mean than trying to explain it,” Professor Morgan continues to talk, while I stare at the spot where the girl vanished.
     
    He’s got people’s souls trapped? Like someone is stealing souls and keeping them? Or is it something different? And who’s he?
     
    As my thoughts keep racing, Professor Morgan glides the pencil effortlessly across the paper. He makes one last stroke then drops the pencil down on the desk before holding up the drawing. My jaw just about hits the floor, but I smash my lips together to conceal my shock. It’s a drawing that looks almost identical to my grandmother’s necklace; the one Cameron has and swears my Grandmother stole from him. The problem is, I have no idea what the color of it is, so I can’t be one-hundred percent certain.
     
    A warning goes off inside me not to utter that I know where or what it is. “So it’s a necklace,” I state the obvious.
     
    He nods and hands me the drawing. “It’s believed to have the blood of the original leader of the Grim Reapers, Altarius Vinceton. He created it to protect himself from his own kind, making it out of Chrysoprase and sealing it with the blood of himself, which was the more powerful of the two elements so it made the green in the Chrysoprase turn a dark red.”
     
    Dark red. I stare at the drawing, the lines forming a near replica of the necklace I once owned. It has to be my grandmother’s necklace. “But why would this Altarius guy need to protect himself from the Reapers if