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

he’d been climbing for at least five minutes. His quarry could have taken a dozen routes different than he had. She might have been anywhere within these passageways. How would he ever find her?
    He would use his sorcery, that was how.
    He closed his eyes and visualized the house as it stood on the top of the hill, overlooking the sea on one side and the village of Misery Point on the other. It was a creepy old place, to be sure, but pretty majestic, too: floors made of marble, shiny black wood inset with stained glass and crystal. When Devon had first arrived at Ravenscliff, he had been awed by all the ornamentation, what Mrs. Crandall called the family’s “trinkets.” Suits of armor, crystal balls, carvings of shrunken heads—Devon would later learn that these were the souvenirs from the Muir family’s many years of sorcery.
    But most wondrous of all were the ravens—those black-eyed familiars of the Nightwing, which had long roosted all over the house, but which had disappeared when the Muirs had renounced their sorcery. That renunciation had come after a terrible event—a tragedy the Muirs called the “Cataclysm”—in which Mrs. Crandall’s father had died in the Hell Hole that existed under the great house. The decision was made at that point to end the family’s long association with the Nightwing. Accordingly, the ravens had flown off into the darkening skies that very night, with the belief that they would never return.
    Yet they had. The ravens had come back. They had settled all over the house, taking up their former places of honor, when Devon March, his Nightwing powers intact, had come to Ravenscliff to live.
    And Mrs. Crandall had been none too happy about it. More than once Devon had seen the lady of the house angrily shooing the birds away from the terrace. But she knew that so long as a Sorcerer of the Nightwing lived at Ravenscliff, the ravens would remain.
    Good thing, too: the ravens had saved Devon from a demon attack not long ago. He’d come to feel a great fondness for the black birds with their shining dark eyes. They were his; they were part of who he was and where he came from.
    If only they could talk.
    For despite all that he had learned during these past several months at Ravenscliff, Devon still did not know the answer to the central mystery. If Ted March hadn’t been his real father, then who was? And his mother—who was she? Had they both been Nightwing? What had happened to them? Why had they sent Devon away to be raised by Ted March? And why had Dad, on his deathbed, sent him here to Ravenscliff? What was the connection between this house and Devon’s past?
    She knows , his Nightwing intuition told him. The woman I’m pursuing now … she knows. She knows who I am.
    Devon paused to listen. He thought he heard a sound, a footstep. He couldn’t be sure. He listened intently, as Sargon the Great might have—using not just his ears but all his other senses as well. A Nightwing could track someone through the slightest scent. Could he find her that way? If not by sight, then by scent?
    But all he kept getting was Cecily’s perfume.
    Cecily—the girl he was in love with. Devon tried to block out Cecily’s scent but found he could not. It was getting in the way of tracking down his quarry. And he knew why. As stupid as it sometimes made him feel, Cecily intoxicated him. She fascinated him. Sometimes he couldn’t think of anything but her. Cecily was not only pretty but strong, too—and smart, and crafty. She was also Mrs. Crandall’s daughter.
    The mistress of the house wasn’t pleased by Cecily’s budding romance with Devon. Maybe that was because she didn’t want her daughter trying to reclaim the Nightwing heritage she had renounced for her before she was born. In fact, if Mrs. Crandall had her way, Devon would be forced to give up his powers, too—so terrified was she that, by using them, he’d bring back the Madman.
    The Madman who had killed her father in the