Lead Heart (Seraph Black Book 3)

Copyright 2016 Jane Washington

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www.janewashington.com

Books available in the Seraph Black Series:

Book One:
Charcoal Tears

Book Two:
Watercolour Smile

Book Three:
Lead Heart

Book Four:
A Portrait of Pain
(
2017
)

Other books by Jane Washington:

Hereditary
: Book One of the Beatrice Harrow Duology

The Soulstoy Inheritance
: Book Two of the Beatrice Harrow Duology

Edited by David Thomas

ISBN-10: 0994279558

ISBN-13: 9780994279552

Dedication

Chapter
One
:
Patterns in the Dirt

Chapter
Two
:
Scream it Sweetly

Chapter
Three
:
The Truth About Secrets

Chapter
Four
:
The Walls Bleed

Chapter
Five
:
Cultivate the Abominate

Chapter
Six
:
When Sandcastles Fall

Chapter
Seven
:
Wonderkid

Chapter
Eight
:
Life Insurance Policies

Chapter
Nine
:
Body Swap

Chapter
Ten
:
Perils of Creation

Chapter
Eleven
:
The Voda Residence

Chapter
Twelve
:
Jack in the Box

Chapter
Thirteen
:
The Status of Pain

Chapter
Fourteen
:
The Silent Wounds

Chapter
Fifteen
:
The Hint of Resurrection

Chapter
Sixteen
:
Dead, and Dead, and Dead Indeed

Chapter
Seventeen
:
Bring me to Battle

Chapter
Eighteen
:
Wise Men Don’t Die

Chapter
Nineteen
:
The Sound of Warning

Chapter
Twenty
:
The Human Threat

Chapter
Twenty-One
:
The Power of Darkness

Chapter
Twenty-Two
:
Trust in Terror

Chapter
Twenty-Three
:
Lady of the Night

Chapter
Twenty-Four
:
Lady of the Fight

Chapter
Twenty-Five
:
Dancing for the Devil

Chapter
Twenty-Six
:
Unveil and Impale

Chapter
Twenty-Seven
:
Brimstone and Frost

Chapter
Twenty-Eight
:
Parapets

Chapter
Twenty-Nine
:
Fallout

“Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.”

-Arthur Schopenhauer

So much had happened. It was hard to keep it all straight in my head. It was becoming a pattern of sorts for my life to suddenly explode and then for the fallout to rain down on me in a shower of clandestine snowflakes for months and months while I waited for the next attack. Only… when the attack finally came, I would discover that the snow had been falling for so long that I had become buried to the neck, utterly helpless to fight my way free. It was hardly surprising that the messenger didn’t seem to be utilising every free moment of his time to stalk me into submission. He was more than just a masochist with a fixation. He seemed to consider himself a master of illusion, and he needed time to prepare for his next trick.
That
was what worried me, in the end: the fact that he was so unreliable. Give me a casual neighbourhood stalker any day: someone who would predictably follow me to work and back, maybe peer through the window a few times, maybe steal my hairbrush and make a voodoo doll out of the loose hairs. Anyone, really; anyone with predictable stalking habits and a medium-level fixation on cult magic.

That was a testament to how messed up my situation had become… I was pining after a perfectly normal stalker that didn’t even exist.

The messenger had gone dark for another three months, leaving me alone with a single, recurring nightmare that replayed inside my head on a broken loop, spinning around and around in search of a better outcome. My father was alive. He wasn’t my father. Kingsling was dead. Silas had shot him. Silas had shot me. Quillan had shot Weston. Silas was gone.

Silas was gone
.

He had endured three months of unthinkable torture while the rest of us tip-toed around the house, afraid of even admitting that we had been defeated. We were wasting too much time trying to think of a solution to an unsolvable situation. I wanted to turn myself over to Jayden, who might be able to organise a trade: me for Silas. Quillan had once explained to me that Jayden was an unreliable asset to the Klovoda. People called him the
hypnotist
because of the strength of his ability to manipulate the mind, and that power only
occasionally
benefited the Klovoda. Sometimes his actions benefited Weston, sometimes Kingsling, and sometimes nobody at all. I had a feeling that Jayden was on his own side, and it was almost worth the risk to see if his side would line up with mine.

Unfortunately, Quillan wanted to err on the side of caution. It was the only time we really spoke—when I wanted to push the plan and he wanted to warn against it. I wouldn’t say that we fought, exactly… but we certainly weren’t getting along. Noah and Cabe might have gone for my plan if their memories of our bond hadn’t been taken away by Jayden—or, at least I assumed that it was Jayden. As it was, Cabe was withholding any opinion whatsoever and Noah wanted to bypass Jayden’s involvement and ship me off to Weston without preemption. Surprisingly, Poison and Clarin were siding with Quillan, and
unsurprisingly
, Tariq didn’t want me anywhere near the Klovoda at all.