Lost Ones-Veil 3 by Christopher Golden Read Free Book Online Page A

awareness of the fact that he’d killed a man. It troubled him that he was not more upset by this. Once upon a time, he knew he would have been crippled with the horror of having taken a life. Now it only seemed necessary.
    It occurred to him that he had never understood war until now.
    A clanking of metal came from down the corridor. Oliver turned to peer to his right and his face brushed against the grate. A hundred tiny needles of pain stabbed him.
    Careful not to repeat his mistake, he looked through the grate. A chorus of boot heels greeted him. Then he saw the first of the Atlantean guards and found himself frozen, hands against the door.
    Atlantean guards and soldiers passed his cell. Their marching had a thunderous rhythm, like horses drawing a carriage. A grim-faced Yucatazcan paraded Collette past him, her head hanging in defeat, her neck red and swollen.
    “Coll?” he said.
    She glanced at him, but the guard shoved her through the still-open door of her cell. Collette fell to the stone floor, cursing quietly.
    Oliver ought to have been relieved. His sister was still alive. But still he waited to exhale, wondering what had become of Julianna. Had she freed Frost, or had the Atlanteans killed her?
    The guards ignored Collette, standing at attention, weapons held at the ready, and that was when Oliver saw her.
    Julianna floated along the corridor, dangling from thin, oil-black tendrils that held her aloft like the strings of some horrid marionette. Some of them wrapped around her arms, holding them behind her back, wrists tied together. They encircled her waist and throat, and a single tug might be enough to end her life.
    Oliver saw all of this. He saw the bruised and bloodied left side of her face—an injury startlingly similar to his own. Yet he focused on her eyes, which were wide with terror. Her chest rose and fell, and a reedy whisper of air slipped in and out of her lips—all the breath she could draw with the black smoke tendrils around her neck.
    His lips silently formed her name.
    Behind her came Ty’Lis. The sorcerer bore the physical signatures of Atlantis with his narrow face and greenish-white skin, but his golden hair was striking and he wore his yellow beard in a thick braid. In black robes with crimson trim, he seemed like the devil of some alien Hell.
    He held his left hand up and from his wide sleeve flowed the black strings in which Julianna had been tangled.
    The sorcerer grinned, showing jagged teeth as green as his skin.
    “I swear to God,” Oliver began, his voice a primal snarl that he himself did not recognize.
    Ty’Lis held up his free hand, the grin growing wider. A Cheshire Cat grin. A hungry tiger’s grin.
    “Hush, Bascombe.”
    A horrid smell filled Oliver’s nose, eradicating the scent of blood. It was putrid, sewer stink, like the unwashed death-smell of an entire end-stage cancer ward.
    In the cell across the corridor, Collette retched.
    “I will speak. You will be silent. Otherwise, your lover will die,” the sorcerer said.
    Oliver obeyed. In the opposite cell, he thought he heard his sister whimper. But that couldn’t be; Collette Bascombe didn’t cry. Only the destruction of her marriage had ever broken that part of her resolve. He heard her muttering quietly, perhaps a prayer to whatever gods might hear her on this side of the Veil. He hoped that the Atlantean would not think of this as disobedience. His command had been to Oliver.
    “I have little time to spare for you, so I will speak plainly. Some attempt to escape was expected, of course. Perhaps you have learned better, now, and perhaps not. Regardless, I won’t kill you. It may be that the High Council will have use for you, yet. However—”
    As he spoke, those black tendrils pulled Julianna toward his outstretched hand. He wrapped long talon fingers around her neck. The strings tightened and she wheezed. Where her face had been scraped and bruised, droplets of fresh blood dripped down her cheek. Julianna