Read Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6) for Free Online

Eric!” Danica said. 
    “ They’re coming!” Wara shouted.  She fired into the darkness. 
    Ronan saw the shadows approaching.  Dead voices filled his head.  The wolves would be on top of them in moments, and slithering darkness flooded the walls like a tide of ink.
    Shit .  Ronan looked down at Cross, who still had one hand locked around Soulrazor/Avenger’s hilt even as he convulsed.  Shadow sweat broke through his skin.  Why not? Ronan thought.
    “ Give me a second,” he said.
    “ What?” Danica demanded.  “What are you going to do?”
    “ I’m going to try and find him.”
    Before Danica could ask what he meant Ronan took a deep breath and focused his mind.  He felt the distant sound of his own heartbeat as it slowed and faded to a far-off drumbeat in the mire of his soul.  His vision went grey, and the details of the world around him blurred.  Noise faded.  Something like smoke pushed around him as the air crystallized.  His fingernails turned black with frost. 
    He’d been trained to enter that refuge, a place where he ignored pain and fatigue.  When he set foot in the Deadlands he was utterly without fear.  Ronan had been trained to skirt the outer edges of that void, to walk its perimeter, but he’d never fully set foot into it.  He didn’t know what to expect. 
    Some said the Deadlands were just a metaphor for a trance-like state, a peace and calm for a damaged consciousness.  Ronan and some others thought otherwise – that the Deadlands were actually another world, a place of quiet and darkness, much like the Whisperlands except one could master the control needed to come and go.  He had a feeling that’s where Cross was now.
    Moments before his mind crossed over Ronan reached down and touched the twin blade.  Cold energy shot up his arms.  He screamed as ancient power lanced into his soul.
     
    Ronan is adrift.  His feet find no purchase as he floats through a void of water and storm.  The air chills his skin blue.
    He steps onto an island in the marsh.  Silver and grey mist cages him.  The air is silent and weighted with the stench of rot. 
    Cross is there, seated on the ground, looking dazed and lost.   
    Ronan walks over to him.  He can feel the wounds all over his body: shadows bleed from his chest, and his veins bulge black.  Ronan’s fingernails grow into claws.  He doesn’t need to see his own reflection to know his eyes have turned ebon.  Tufts of razor fur push out of his chest and face.
    One of the beasts appears in the mist, a shadow-wreathed humanoid with a monstrous wolf’s head.  Its hands are capped with iron-cold talons.  Eyes like blades cut through the hazy darkness.
    Ronan turns to face the creature.  Cross tries to rise and help, but Ronan shoves him away.  Only one of them will face the wolf.  Only one of them will suffer this fate. 
    The air is thick with the stench of the monster’s unnatural presence.  The island begins to crumble and come apart.
    Darkness explodes across his chest.  The still and silent air is broken by the sound of claws crunching through bone, the sound of blood glistening down edged nails. 
    The sound of someone dying.
     
    Drifting.
    He isn’t dead.  Not yet.
    He flies over fields of pain.  A young boy with a shock of black hair and a grim expression marches across a desert of skulls.  His naked back is raw with sunburns and scars from where the whip has landed.  His sandaled feet are bloody and blistered.
    He is only one of many.
    He is older, a boy of ten, alone in the mountains.  The thin shirt and clothing the Triangle has given him for this trial are as white as the snow, and the black steel katana in his hand is stained with blood.  The tracks of the Gorgoloth he’s slain lead back to their encampment.  He can’t leave until he’s killed them all.
    He grows older.  His body is tired.  For the first time in his life he considers letting go.  Giving up.
    He stands at the base of the steps,