Burned

it shall be!” Neferet’s face twisted in pain as Darkness drank from her again, but she didn’t flinch—didn’t move until the air around her pulsed, bloated with her blood and her oath.
    Only then did she lower her hand. Her tongue snaked out, licking the scarlet line and ending the bleeding. Neferet walked to him, bent, and gently placed her hands on either side of his face, much as he had held the human boy before delivering his deathblow. He could feel Darkness thrumming around and within her, a raging bull waiting eagerly for his mistress’s command.
    Her blood-reddened lips paused just short of touching his. “With the power that rushes through my blood, and by the strength of the lives I have taken, I command you, my delicious threads of Darkness, to pull this Oath Bound immortal’s soul from his body and speed him to the Otherworld. Go and do as I order, and I swear I will sacrifice to you the life of an innocent you have been unable to taint. So thee for me, I mote it be!”
    Neferet drew in a deep breath, and Kalona saw the dark threads she’d summoned slither between her full, red lips. She inhaled Darkness until she was swollen with it, and then she covered his mouthwith hers and, with that blackened, blood-tainted kiss, blew Darkness within him with such force that it ripped his already wounded soul from his body. As his soul shrieked in soundless agony, Kalona was forced up, up, and into the realm from which his Goddess had banished him, leaving his body lifeless, chained, Oath Bound by evil, and at the mercy of Neferet.

CHAPTER TWO
    Rephaim
    The sonorous drum was like the heartbeat of an immortal: never-ending, engulfing, overwhelming. It echoed through Rephaim’s soul in time with the pounding of his blood. Then, to the beat of the drum, the ancient words took form. They wrapped around his body so that even as he slept, his pulse allied itself in harmony with the ageless melody. In his dream, the women’s voices sang:
Ancient one sleeping, waiting to arise
When earth’s power bleeds sacred red
The mark strikes true; Queen Tsi Sgili will devise
He shall be washed from his entombing bed
    The song was seductive, and like a labyrinth, it circled on and on.
Through the hand of the dead he is free
Terrible beauty, monstrous sight
Ruled again they shall be
Women shall kneel to his dark might
    The music was a whispered enticement. A promise. A blessing. A curse. The memory of what it foretold made Rephaim’s sleeping body restless. He twitched and, like an abandoned child, murmured a one-word question: “Father?”
    The melody concluded with the rhyme Rephaim had memorized centuries ago:
Kalona’s song sounds sweet
As we slaughter with cold heat
    “. . . slaughter with cold heat.” Even sleeping, Rephaim responded to the words. He didn’t awaken, but his heartbeat increased—his hands curled into fists—his body tensed. On the cusp between awake and asleep, the drumbeat stuttered to a halt, and the soft voices of women were replaced by one that was deep and all too familiar.
    “Traitor . . . coward . . . betrayer . . . liar!”
The male voice was a condemnation. With its litany of anger, it invaded Rephaim’s dream and jolted him fully into the waking world.
    “Father!” Rephaim surged upright, throwing off the old papers and scraps of cardboard he’d used to create a nest around him. “Father, are you here?”
    A shimmer of movement caught at the corner of his vision, and he jerked forward, jarring his broken wing as he peered from the depths of the dark, cedar-paneled closet.
    “Father?”
    His heart knew Kalona wasn’t there even before the vapor of light and motion took form to reveal the child.
    “What are you?”
    Rephaim focused his burning gaze on the girl. “Begone, apparition.”
    Instead of fading as she should have, the child narrowed her eyes to study him, appearing intrigued.
“You’re not a bird, but you have wings. And you’re not a boy, but you have arms and legs. And your eyes are like a boy’s, too, only they’re red. So, what are you?”
    Rephaim felt a surge of anger. With a flash of movement that caused white-hot shards of pain to radiate through his body, he leaped from the closet, landing just a few feet before the ghost—predatory, dangerous, defensive.
    “I am a nightmare given life, spirit! Go away and leave me in peace before you learn that there are things far worse than death to fear.”
    At his abrupt movement, the child ghost had taken one