Read Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One for Free Online

satisfaction, that it left in its wake. Xhea shivered and wrapped her arms around herself.
    “What did you do?” She didn’t understand how the ghost had vanished or so suddenly returned, nor what she had done to bring her back—if the darkness had brought her back at all. She only knew that she had to do everything within her power to keep that darkness from overflowing again.
    Shai didn’t answer, only stared with pale eyes that gleamed silver. Xhea grabbed the tether and pulled until their faces were but a hand’s width apart. Shai gasped and struggled to pull away, but Xhea held tight, fingernails digging into her own palm.
    “Tell me,” she said, voice low. “Tell me what you did, how you left this place. Tell me how—”
    And stopped, caught breathless.
    For it was only so close, face to face, with all the bright magic gone from her vision, that she saw it: a glint hidden deep within the pupil of Shai’s eye. A single spark, white and fierce and pure. Xhea stared, thinking: Just a reflection, just a flicker of light.
    Then it came again—a glint—and again, in the ghost’s other eye. Xhea refocused her eyes to see the magic more clearly, and then there was no pretending, for Shai was alight with bright magic. And the dead had no magic—unless . . .
    “No,” Xhea whispered, a soft and useless denial. Only once had she seen a ghost that glimmered with magic—once—and she had sworn then that if it were in her power, she’d never witness, never allow, such a thing again.
    She released her grip on the tether and began to search. She ran her hands through the air around the ghost, fingers outstretched, as Shai watched in perplexed silence. Xhea was careful never to touch the ghost. She knew that she could pass her hand right through Shai with little more than a chill against her skin, but still she shied away, as if her fingers might encounter warm flesh instead. But even focused on the most minute sensations against the skin and hair of her hands, Xhea almost missed it: the familiar slipperiness of a tether.
    A second tether.
    She followed the length, testing its strength, its boundaries, its shape. This tether was not joined to Shai’s heart, as the first was, nor to her head as tethers often were, but to her body as a whole. As had happened but moments before, within a few feet of the ghost the tether narrowed to little more than a thread—and a ragged thread at that, damaged and fraying. There was something other than her father that bound the ghost to the living plane.
    Still that voice whispered in Xhea’s head: No, no, no .
    Shai might be dead, but oh, it was easy to see now that she had magic. Here in the dark, with no bright magic affecting Xhea’s vision, Shai was strangely alight, the tiny sparks growing brighter and more frequent as Xhea watched.
    “Shai,” Xhea said quietly, calmly, as if she were not holding back her fear with sheer will alone. “Did you return to your body?”
    Shai’s response seemed startled from her: “Yes.”
    “Did you mean to go there? Did you want to?”
    The ghost shook her head. “I was here, with you, and then I was just . . . there. Trying to wake up.”
    Quieter still: “Did you open your eyes?”
    “No. I tried, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t see at all. It was so cold and so dark and I hurt . . .”
    No. Oh, please no. Yet still Shai glimmered.
    What had Shai said the day before? The words came as if from very far away: I’m asleep. Only asleep.
    Feeling the black fog coil contentedly through her, Xhea whispered, “Then this must be a very bad dream.”

Across the width of the small room and back again, Xhea paced, her hands twitching restlessly at her sides. The sound of her unsteady breath, her echoing footsteps, failed to fill the silence.
    An hour or more remained before dawn, but there was no point in sleeping; no need even to try. The shakes from her ebbing adrenaline made it impossible to sit still. She wanted to run, to fight, to