Blood Moon (Book Three - The Ravenscliff Series) Read Online Free Page A

flinched. A Nightwing sorcerer could never permit his opponent the element of surprise. But still, he was a fifteen-year-old kid, and rotting corpses were his weakness. He’d take a ghost or a demon over a zombie any day.
    But after about thirty seconds (twenty-nine longer than he should have allowed himself) he managed to concentrate on what he had just seen, and he realized it was no corpse at all. It was the woman, the one he sought. She had played some kind of trick on him. She was standing a few feet away from him now, laughing hysterically over the fright she’d caused him.
    “Devon!” Her laughter was crazy, the sound of a disturbed mind. “I scared Devon!”
    “Yeah,” he grumbled, “and you won’t get that chance again!”
    “Scare me now!” the woman cried, her eyes wild, her hands waving in the air.
    “How did you do that? How did you make yourself look like a corpse?”
    She just giggled insanely.
    “What is your name?” Devon asked. “You know mine, so tell me yours.”
    “Only if you can catch me!” Crazy Lady said, still laughing, bolting off once more down the corridor into the darkness.
    Devon ran in pursuit of her. He thought about using a burst of sorcery to catch her. Maybe he could reach out his hand and cause his arm to stretch long enough to grasp the back of her neck. Or maybe he could turn his hand into a kind of magnet that would just draw her back to him. Could he do it? Should he try?
    He was still mastering this stuff, after all. He’d learned how to do some things just by willing them to happen: making himself invisible, for example, or disappearing and then reappearing somewhere else. This would be a new trick. He concentrated on the magnet idea—but as soon as he did he felt the heat. The heat—which was the sign that either demons or another sorcerer was near.
    He paused in his pursuit. If the demons were loose again—
    But his intuition reassured him that was not the case. The heat that pressed against his cheeks must have indicated instead that some sorcery other than his own was present. It must have been that the woman whose laughter echoed through the dark was a sorceress herself!
    “Show yourself!” Devon suddenly demanded.
    And all at once, ahead of him in the darkness, the figure of the woman emerged. In her hands she held the same kind of glowing ball of light that Devon held.
    “So many years,” Crazy Lady said, looking at Devon and not sounding so crazy any more. “So many years … I had forgotten the allure of sorcery …”
    “Who are you?”
    She smiled at Devon. “You really do not know, do you?”
    “No, but you know me. You know about my past.”
    Her eyes danced in the reflected glow. “Your past … is that what you have come to Ravenscliff to find, Devon?”
    He took a few steps toward her but she backed up, skittish, like a cat. He didn’t want her to flee again, so he stayed in place, keeping a distance between them.
    “Yes,” he said. “I want to know the secret of my past. Who my father was. My mother.”
    She smiled again, almost kindly. “Is that so important to you?”
    “Of course it is. I deserve to know!”
    The woman seemed almost sane as she approached him. Long white hair framed her face, but of her age Devon still couldn’t be sure. Twenty? Forty? Eighty? Her eyes were dark but her skin was pale, pale white—smooth as a baby’s while as brittle as ancient parchment.
    “And you have learned nothing, nothing at all, while you have been at Ravenscliff?” Crazy Lady asked, only a few inches now from Devon’s face. He did not move, not wishing to startle her.
    “I have learned some stuff, but not all,” he said, holding her gaze. “I have not learned the names of my parents, or what connection they had to Ravenscliff.”
    “Your parents?” She seemed to consider the idea. “Do you seek the names of your parents?”
    “Yes.” He was growing impatient. “How many times do I have to tell you? I want to know my father,