“NESSIE.” SHE STOOD there, emotionless, as I choked out her name, tears streaming down my cheeks. The copper crucible strapped to my back slid and fell onto the metal floor with a loud clang that broke the steady ticking of the enormous clock behind her.
“How did this happen?” I asked, knowing she couldn’t answer me.
I had told Nessie to stay here and wait for me. And here she stood, in exactly the same spot I had left her. If I had been gone a year, I had no doubt there would be dust collecting on her shoulders.
But I had ordered all my other revenants to stand watch and protect the hospital. Perhaps the aggressors had thought that the ones who’d converged in the foyer to defend the building were all the revenants I had; perhaps none had thought to climb the hundreds of steps to the clock tower.
I looked up at Nessie, who still stood quiet, motionless. Was her soul aware of what had transpired? Had she stood here, a statue, hearing the wet thwacks of blades against flesh for however many hours it took to decimate my revenants?
The weight of all I had done and all I had failed to do pressed down on my ribs, choking me of breath. I stumbled up, clutching at my chest as I felt my heartbeat ratcheting. Nessie watched me silently as I staggered to my desk, gasping for air. Black spots flickered across my vision. My hand reached for my chair, but it was my left hand, the one that no longer was there, and I stumbled, dropping to the floor.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe and everything was going wrong and my heart was going to burst, and if I died, so would Nessie. But it didn’t matter because she was already dead, and I would be, too, because I couldn’t breathe.
My right arm curled protectively over my chest as I huddled on the floor, trying to remember what it was like to not be dying.
I gulped for air, sweat stinging my eyes, but I didn’t blink away from Nessie’s gaze, and she, of course, didn’t turn away from mine.
I don’t know how many lifetimes passed, but in the end, I got up from the floor. My hair was matted with the drying blood and gore from downstairs, my skin smeared with it, tears tracking down my face. My heart hurt. But still, I got up.
There was work to do.
I stabbed at my shaking hand, forming the blood key to open the copper crucible. I didn’t know what I was looking for; it was just the last recourse remaining. I shifted the contents carefully, aware of the grime on my skin, trying not to smear congealing blood on the delicate old paper. Even so, my hand brushed against the box the Collector had given me, the one I had been unable to unlock.
One of the copper bands disappeared. The upper band, the one that had refused to open with my blood.
I stopped, my breath catching. The runes spoke of blood that was alive, and blood that was dead. It must have been the gory mess of blood from my ripped-apart revenants that had opened the upper band of the lock. I squeezed a fresh drop of my own, living blood on the box, and let it splash onto the copper. The lower band faded to nothing.
The box was open.
My breath caught in my throat as I carefully lifted the lid. Inside was a single object, long and narrow, wrapped in white silk so aged that it was brittle and yellowing. I peeled the fabric away carefully.
My hand shook as I pulled out a crystal knife.
It was about twenty centimeters long, most of it a thick blade. Clear as glass, but light enough that I thought perhaps the center of the blade was hollow.
“What do you do?” I mused, holding the knife up to the milky-white light streaming through the clockface in the tower.
There was no book inside the box, no helpful instructions. I shifted the knife from my real hand to my shadow hand and felt a jolt of power at the touch.
The blade itself didn’t seem that sharp—when I scraped it against my boot leather, it didn’t cut at all. But while the entire knife was smooth, I could see embedded inside, glittering as if faceted, runes running all along the hilt.
I squinted, trying to read them. There was one that repeated, almost in a pattern, and while it was familiar, I couldn’t quite place where I’d seen it. It took several moments for me to finally remember. I lunged for the copper crucible, pulling out the books the Collector had given me, the ones I’d read over and over again on the long, lonely journey back home. I picked up the oldest book and flipped to a place near the end. “Cadavers,” I read aloud, “once raised, store their life energy inside their imperfect bodies. The savvy necromancer can then use his revenants to enhance his own power.”
After that, several chapters were ripped from the book. But, in faint pencil and sketched with a shaky hand, someone, perhaps the Collector, had drawn a rune—four lines pointing up, connected by a horizontal line along the bottom. Beneath that was a single word handwritten in the margin: lich.
I still didn’t know what the word meant, but if the rune in this book matched the one engraved inside the crystal knife, then surely the blade had been made by a necromancer.
Using my shadow hand, I raised the knife up. My shadow hand seemed darker somehow, more corporeal. I gasped and looked down at my crucible. The black energy that swirled in its base, the energy that gave me the power of death over life, was spilling out of the iron bead, pouring over my shadow arm.
Power crackled in my blood. I felt as if electricity was sparking inside me. I felt stronger. Invincible.
I swung the knife through the air. An eerie sort of electricity emanated from the blade.
I wanted to test it. Looking around, I settled on my worktable. I steeled my arms, then threw my full strength behind the crystal knife as I stabbed at the table.
I spun around, off-balance, and fell on my backside. The worktable, despite taking the full brunt of my blow, was unscathed. Not even a scratch.
“What good is a knife that can’t cut?” I muttered.
I looked for an answer, which meant, of course, I looked to my sister.
Her eyes were focused on the crystal knife.
I stood slowly, crossing the clock tower. The ticking matched my steps. Nessie’s eyes did not leave the clear knife in my hand. But as I drew closer to her, her body started to tremble.
“Nessie?” I said.
Silence.
But I didn’t need her words to know that she was more than afraid. She was terrified. Her lip curled over her teeth in a repulsed snarl. This thing, this crystal knife . . . despite the power, I could sense that it was wrong.
I stared down at the blade. At the hilt there were glimmers of light, strings of gold that I recognized as my sister’s soul.
My body connected my crucible to the blade, and both my sister’s soul and the dark power inside my crucible’s base bubbled down my arm and around the knife.
I wondered—if I could pull my sister’s soul out of the darkness, could I then put it back into her body? Would that be all it took? I couldn’t do it on my own. I had reached into my crucible before with my shadow hand, trying to extract Nessie’s soul. My power alone wasn’t enough.
But perhaps with the crystal knife . . .
I had to test it first, before I risked hurting my sister.
I reached with one finger on my right hand to touch the edge of the clear blade. As soon as my skin brushed against the crystal, I felt indescribable cold, so icy that it burned. I snatched my finger away—there was no mark, no sign of damage, but it took several minutes before feeling returned to my finger.
Meanwhile, a faint golden glow filled the crystal blade.
I looked at Nessie. She looked at the knife. Silent tears streamed down her face.
I shifted the crystal knife to my right hand and lifted my shadow hand toward the edge of the blade, little finger extended. As soon as I touched the crystal, the ghost-finger started to disappear. I jerked away, willing the shadow to reform.
I felt no pain—without flesh, there is no pain—but the shadowy finger did not return. It was gone, eaten by the darkness.
The knife did not cut flesh. It severed souls.