Dawn Read Online Free PDF Page A

that time again now,” Trey said. “But…” He trailed off, sketching in the dust with his finger.
    “They took Rafe,” Alishia said. “He’s gone. He’s dead.”
    “He’s not dead!” Hope snapped.
    Alishia closed her eyes and felt the weight of what he had left her. It was an alien presence in her mind, contained yet filled with potential. It shied away from the dark. The more she sought it, the farther away it seemed to go, as if scared of what it would see through her eyes.
    “He is dead,” she said, “and the magic he carried has been stolen.”
    “He can’t be dead!” Hope said. She shook her head and looked at each of them in turn; Alishia, Trey, Kosar’s back. “It can’t just end like this.”
    “The Mages turned the sky dark,” Trey said. “We flew south for a while, then the machine just seemed to lose its power. It drifted lower. Its ribs started to crack and crumble. The ground shook. We dragged you into the center and sat there, and we landed here a little while ago.” He continued shaping dust and stones with his hand, as though building something new.
    “But it’s dead,” Kosar said. It was the first time the big thief had spoken, and though he stood he did not turn around. He was staring out between two of the cracked ribs that had protected them for a while, silhouetted against the pale yellow light of the death moon. “It brought us down gently, but died the second it touched the ground. It’s not a machine anymore. It’s a lump of mud and rock that doesn’t belong here, and we don’t belong here, either. I don’t think we belong anywhere in Noreela.”
    “There’s always hope,” the witch said. Alishia did not like the look in her eyes. There was madness there, just below the surface, a madness that seemed to shift and shape the witch’s spiraling tattoos.
    “Hope has gone,” Kosar said. He turned around and looked at Alishia, but there was no interest in his eyes. He came closer and sat beside Trey, his movements weary and slow. “If there ever was hope, it was in that boy. Rafe. That poor boy.”
    “We can’t be so sure he’s dead,” Hope said. “Why would they kill him? Why would the Mages come so far just to take him away and kill him?”
    “They wanted what he had inside,” Alishia said.
    “Of course they did,” Hope said. “Magic. But by killing him—”
    “It was inside him, Hope,” Alishia said. “Not really a part of him. Disconnected, a thing waiting to be born, and they opened him up and took it out.”
    “Opened him up,” Kosar said, staring down at his feet.
    “And how can you know all this?” Hope said. Her voice was rising, aggression showing through, and Alishia knew that the witch was terrified.
    “You know how I know, Hope. You all do.” She looked at her hands, held them up to the sky to catch some of the weak moonlight. “I’m getting younger,” she said.
    “It’s that thing inside you,” Hope said. “That shade. It’s you who ensured that he’d die, you know.”
    “That thing’s not inside me anymore.”
    “How can we know that?”
    “Because I’m telling you.”
    “And you expect us to trust you?”
    “I expect nothing, but I hope you do.” Alishia closed her eyes. “I had a dream,” she said.
    “What sort of dream?” Trey came close and touched her arm, and Alishia was so grateful for the contact that she almost cried. She smiled at Trey and leaned toward him, the movement speaking volumes.
    “Bad dreams,” Alishia said. “As though I have something priceless that I can’t look after forever.”
    “This is all so fucking pointless,” Kosar said quietly.
    They fell silent, and in the distance Alishia heard a skull raven calling into the darkness. She wondered what it had found sleeping, whose dreams it may be stealing and whether there was a volume in her dream library that would contain the knowledge of its victim.
    She relished Trey’s touch, yet something felt so wrong about her body. She