Read The Darkly Luminous Fight for Persephone Parker for Free Online

hollow of her throat.
    “Alas,” she sighed after a momentary shiver of anticipation. “It was a door.”
    Alexi pursed his lips. “I was hoping you’d be done with those, too.”
    A dreadful, high-pitched shriek that only Percy could hear came through a painting, splintering a pane of glass. A ghost dressed in seventeenth-century foppery swept into the room and lurched, as if hoping to fright them. Alexi, who shared Percy’s ability to see the spirit, evaluated both her wincing reaction and the split windowpane; he grimaced.
    “Shriekers,” he muttered. “My least favourite spirits. Fitting, that a Withersby antecedent should be a noisemaker.”
    “Shh,” Percy commanded. The spirit hung its head and, defeated, vanished through the closed terrace doors just as the bedroom door was flung wide and a boisterous French accent filled the room.
    “Lord Withersby! You let them be!” Josephine stopped up short, realizing the spirit she chased was nowhere to be seen. Sheepishly, she turned to the couple who had tastefully disentangled themselves. “Forgive my intrusion, mes amis, I thought Great Uncle Withersby might have been after you. He likes to remove covers and do other unmentionable things, and I thought that might be a bit, well…Ah. Yes. Indeed. Hrm. Well, I’d better let you both dress for breakfast. All are assembled. Miss Parker, you’ll find a change of clothes in the wardrobe. Alexi, you’re far too tall for Elijah’s clothes, so—”
    “I’ll continue to look like hell, Josie, thank you. We’ll be down in a moment.”
    The woman nodded and disappeared.
    “She seems awfully nervous,” Percy noted, feeling her own unease.
    “Our lives remain in your debt. If you hadn’t come to the chapel, we would have died.” Alexi looked away. “I’d have been the downfall of mortal civilization. Me, a leader, ” he spat.
    Percy reached out and touched his cheek. “Whatever power lay dormant within me might never have woken without such cataclysm to bring it forth. And I’d have died if you hadn’t been able to rouse me. Your light met mine and woke me from death’s kiss. My God, though, Alexi…It was terrible in the making—all of it. It was as if something were eating me alive from the inside out.”
    “Your waking powers, surely, pressing against the limits of your mortality. Is that what drove you into the storm?” he asked.
    “I tried to warn you,” she murmured. “But I was burning up, maddened by whispers and fever, my body so weak.”
    Alexi glanced at her. “It wasn’t just my…rejection that incapacitated you?”
    Percy looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “Are you gauging the extent of your guilt or my womanly weakness?”
    Alexi appeared surprised by her directness. “Perhaps both.”
    Percy set her jaw. “While you devastated me, Alexi, my condition was compounded by having vomited pomegranate seeds that I never ingested.”
    Alexi’s eyes widened. “Oh, my.”
    “Perhaps your guilt and my weakness are each given a bit of credit in the face of such inexplicable supernatural phenomena.”
    “Indeed,” he murmured. “You’ve accepted my apology. But do you forgive me?”
    A mere month ago, she might have blurted a silly schoolgirl’s words. But harrowing circumstances had temperedPercy. He had been quite terrible while their destiny was misunderstood. But she stared at him now, at the love in his eyes, at the way his striking face was drawn with anxiety. She cherished the firm way he held her, and knew that he was unequivocally hers and helplessly under her spell—which was all she needed to know, for she’d long ago been under his.
    “Yes,” she murmured. He released a kept breath, and his body eased. “But I remain overwhelmed!” she continued. “I wake from fever only to find an entire other world accessible via the chapel of Athens Academy—a world from which such powers and terrors might come to hold court.” She offered him a dazed smile. “I’ve much