Fifteen – 01

Ghosts.

Leinth’s lips thinned as she slowly approached Matthew Astoris from behind. She could sense what waited beyond the wall, the mist that had risen well outside the confines of Marin’s wardings. These were cold ones, frigid as the depths of winter, as the dark shadows of her soul before the day she’d met Seamus, the former Taliesin, all those long-gone yesterdays ago.

“Phelan really did reach too deep, didn’t he?” Matt asked softly, not looking at her as she climbed up the wall to perch beside him.

Leinth frowned, glancing at him before her gaze drifted to the mists, dark and bluish and chill with tendrils of gray and white lacing through it. It was hardly a natural mist, she knew that for certain. “What do you mean?”

“When we stopped the lindworm,” Matt murmured. “Phelan drew on something, said to my sister that he’d reached too deep. He really did, didn’t he? That’s why they’re here.”

A shiver crept down the winter goddess’s spine and her lips thinned. “You think so?”

“Why else would they be here?” He left the fact that they hadn’t attacked yet unspoken. Leinth could sense that the ghosts beyond the walls were waiting for something, but she wasn’t quite certain what.

And their Spiritweaver is afield. Poor planning on our part, isn’t it?

Something tugged insistently at the edges of her thoughts, something disturbingly familiar but elusive. She rocked back, frowning. “They’re waiting for something,” she whispered, not quite knowing where the words came from.

Matt looked at her askance. “What the hell would they be waiting for?”

Leinth glanced back toward the field. A flicker of blue-green caught her eye, a figure drifting through the mist. Her jaw tightened as her stomach sank.

Just what we need. Someone else wanting our throats torn out.

“Their leader.”

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