Witchbreaker (Dragon Apocalypse) by James Maxey Read Free Book Online Page B

and pulled away a layer of slate tiles. His efforts only revealed more stones. He was completely drenched in sweat as he kept pulling aside fresh layers. Finally, two feet down, he reached the last of the slate. Glass glinted in the now dimming light. He leaned in close to stare into the dark interior.
    “What do you see?” asked Sorrow.
    “Nothing,” Brand said, sitting up and pushing aside more stones. “I need more light.”
    As he cleared away more slate, it soon became obvious that insufficient light wasn’t the problem. Instead, the coffin beneath the stones was made of smoked glass, almost tar black, hiding the contents.
    Brand brushed aside dirt, cupping his hands to block reflections on the dark glass, but shook his head when this failed to produce results. He blew on the edges of his hands where they’d touched the glass. “Ouch. That’s kind of hot.”
    “Hot?” asked Sorrow.
    “Everything feels hot to me right now,” said Brand. “A side-effect of digging holes. But this glass is like an oven.”
    “Climb out,” Sorrow said. She grabbed Trunk by the hand and said, “Lower me.”
    “What are you going to do?” asked Brand.
    “I’m a glass weaver,” said Sorrow. “I’m going to alter the glass to make it transparent.”
    “Nice trick,” said Brand as he pulled himself out of the hole.
    Sorrow dangled from Trunk’s grasp until she was a few inches above the stones. She dropped down and knelt over the glass. She touched it carefully. Brand had exaggerated its heat. It was far shy of an oven, more like a freshly poured cup of hot tea.
    She placed both palms on the glass. Pulses of energy flowed into her shoulders, feeling almost like ants crawling just beneath her skin. “There’s extraordinary power here,” she whispered. “I’ve never felt anything quite like it.”
    “That would have been a very funny thing to say when we first exposed the contents of the other grave,” Brand said as he sat on the edge of the pit.
    Sorrow ignored him. She concentrated on the substance beneath her fingers. Glass was easy to manipulate. Ordinarily, it would yield to her fingers as if it were a slightly sticky dough. But she didn’t want to change the shape of the substance, only its color. There must be foreign material in the glass to create the smoky hue. Could she isolate this and draw it out?
    Her brow furrowed as she found that the foreign material was caked mostly on the interior of the glass. The exterior parts of the glass she was touching were actually transparent already, but backed with a dark substance that swallowed all light.
    She gave the glass a slight push, hoping to dislodge the darkness. She was pleased when it worked and a chunk of inch-thick sooty blackness fell away. Unfortunately, all this revealed was gray smoke swirling in the interior.
    Suddenly, she was tossed a foot into the air as the stones around her jumped, as if they’d been struck from beneath. She landed as black smoke billowed up from cracks in the stone.
    She tried to call out to Trunk, but wound up coughing violently. Her eyes clamped shut as the acrid fumes burned them. The ground beneath her surged again, throwing her onto her back.
    A man’s hands closed on her forearm. With a tug that felt as if it would pull her arm from its socket the unseen man lifted her, rudely throwing her over his shoulders.
    “Hold tight!” Brand called out, though not to her. She managed to crack her eyes open ever so slightly and saw that she was thrown over Brand’s shoulder. She twisted to see that he had one hand on a shovel thrust down into the hole. At the edge of the grave, Bigsby lay with his head and shoulders out over the pit, holding the handle of the shovel down. Brand grabbed the shovel and used it to climb. This resulted in an ungraceful tangle of limbs as Brand pushed Sorrow from his shoulder onto Bigsby’s back as he crawled out over both of them.
    She was too weakened by her inhalation of smoke to protest as she