Ghost Silk (Ghost Perfume, Book 2) | ✔

4 - Make it sweet - Part 2 (Lukas; Rose)

Sand rippled in every direction. You could smell it, sun-baked, parched.

Nothing gave shade. The early morning heat burned the sands and warped the air itself. The sky was a thin stretched membrane on a furnace.

Ghosts as insubstantial as dryer sheets cruised the air above us.

People live here of their own desire, I remembered sourly. I couldn't imagine why.

I loathed the desert - the sameness wherever you looked, the sense of an alien presence watching you from every direction. The feeling that at any moment the sands might open up to swallow you whole.

Sasha rode at my side. The witnesses from the other three territories, Finn, Constance, and Ada, brought up the rear.

"I really did think Gabriel finished off the colony here," Sasha murmured to me. "If we haven't found anything yet today, I really doubt we'll find anything at all."

"Agreed."

We'd all thought the same - that Gabriel had killed off the colony that tested the borders around Cholla, and could turn his attention to Lotus.

Time was running out.

But then Michael received a call from Imogen that there'd been another worm sighting near the Cholla Gates. A survivor of the same colony, she claimed. They argued. Michael accused Imogen of trying to get Gabriel to clear the entire Montadras desert. He said the accusation was on the tip of his tongue that she was inventing shit, just to impede Gabriel's progress.

Eventually they agreed on a distance from the Cholla Gates past which Gabriel could no longer be held responsible for clearing worms. But Gabriel would have to do one last roundup around the area.

"My people are still afraid to go beyond their gates. The task remains incomplete," Imogen had insisted.

Michael, grown suspicious, told me to replace Owen as the witness appointed by the Alistairs.

Gabriel cut a calm, imposing figure in the distance. The sun glinted off the fine interlinked plates of his armor, fastened together with dark leather straps. His helmet boasted the crest of the Alistairs.

Shadows stretched across the sand from the elegant lines of the legs of his horse, picking the way forward.

I glanced back. The other three witnesses were falling behind. No prizes for guessing why they dragged their pace.

I hid my smirk. What a bunch of cowards.

"What's that?" Sasha said.

We'd rounded the side of a dune. We could now see that ghosts moved in a low, thick cloud several hundred paces ahead of Gabriel, to the northwest. A larger worm, the kind we had to be concerned about, had likely caught them there.

Great. Imogen hadn't lied.

Gabriel had already spotted it. He slowed, riding to circle the area from the side.

We halted our horses, so as not to interfere.

I glanced at Sasha, frowning. "Why do you have your sword out? We do not interfere."

"If a worm nears us, we have the right to defend ourselves," she said grimly. She was tenser than she'd appeared. The arm that held her silver sword was rigid.

Only our silver could pierce a worm's hide. For all the weapons of destruction and all the methods of attack that centuries could invent -- we still had to live and fight by the sword.

"A few days ago, one of them almost got past Gabriel," Sasha said after a beat, glancing at me. "It headed for us, it tried -"

"Then you should have run."