The Prophet by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes Read Free Book Online

Ghosts howled through the edges of the boy’s awareness, lamenting not just their deaths, but their lives. They cried of the pain they had endured at birth, and all the wasted years they had spent without the taste of freedom. Some had been born free, and had been stripped of all vestiges of will before they were forced into this small gray cage. Others had taken their first wailing breaths right here, inside the walls of Midnight.
    It wasn’t long before a child born in Midnight learned never to cry.
    Malachi didn’t cry. Wrapped in the terror and despair of those who had gone before him, he hadn’t cried since his first infant exhalation. Nor did he reach for his mother, who had also been born here. She had nursed him and given him sustenance, but she did not know how to give comfort because she had never known any herself.
    He squeezed his eyes shut as Fate walked by the door, in the form of a man who moved in a sphere of destiny that called out to Malachi. There were many people in this place who dragged with them pasts so heavy that they were suffocating, but this man was surrounded by sparks and swirls of “what if?”
    Keep going, keep going,
the child thought.
Go away.
    The man paused. Malachi’s breath slowed. His chest tightened. The visions were indistinct so far, but he knew they could get so much worse, until they became painfully overwhelming. The man peered through the open doorway and asked, “Who are you?”
    Malachi tried to look up, but his gaze did not focus on the man at the cell’s door; rather, it trained itself on another time and place, long ago and far away.
    The sun was hot, merciless as it beat down on the people and crops gathered at the holy place, a ring of stone set in the desert.
    Those who followed Ahnmik stood in the shade of a doum palm tree, sheltered. The white falcon was god of the darkness, of power and coolness and deepest rest. His worship seemed to draw the color from his priests and priestesses, leaving them especially vulnerable to the harshness of the daytime desert. Those who followed Anhamirak, on the other hand, had their arms and faces lifted to the midday sun, which made their golden skin sparkle. Their goddess, the black serpent who represented freedom and passion, had made them vivacious and as brilliantly colored as gemstones. They drank in the heat as raw power.
    Between them stood Maeve, she who maintained the precarious balance between Anhamirak and Ahnmik, light and dark, freedom and control. At her cry, the ritual began. The priest and priestess of Kain and Kaya, avatars of thunder and lightning, began their courtship dance, which was as violent as a battle and cared nothing for the mortals beneath them.
    Keisha, priestess of Anhamirak, used her power to grant the lovers abandon and joy. Cjarsa, high priestess of Ahnmik, used the white falcon’s reins to hold the storm in check. They needed water for people and plants, not a typhoon to drown them all.
    Maeve, who bowed to no one but the eternal balance, lifted her face to the rain.
    When Farrell Obsidian glanced inside the cell and saw the woman and child, his throat constricted with shock and horror. This was impossible.
    He had already passed a half-dozen cells, each occupied by three to five humans of various ages. The cheerless gray rooms held nothing more than slim beds and simple tables where a candle or an oil lamp could be set down when necessary. They needed no doors or locks, because their occupants had long ago given up any dreams of escape. Some had been born in the outside world, then brought here to be broken. The vampiric trainers used a combination of guile, magic, and brutality to strip the free will from their victims, who then became perfectly obedient slaves. Others were born here, products of Jeshickah’s breeding program, which she approached the same way with humans and horses alike.
    Most of the sprawling estate that served as the heart of Midnight was overwhelmingly ostentatious, a