Daughter of Gods and Shadows by Jayde Brooks Page A

feeling, an anxious, compelling emotion. It was a thought over and over in his head, a warning that he needed to do … something. And that he couldn’t stop until he was finished. It wasn’t until he found her that the feeling went away and that the words finally came to him in a whisper:
    One for three
    Bring me
    Redeem me
    Or die the lamb.
    â€œWhat is that?” the man kneeling next to him asked, staring at the unusual object Dave had dug up from the ground in a corner of the room.
    Dave didn’t know. It was made of metal, one thick, continuous piece of metal, rust colored and heavy for something so small. It was as old as anything in that pueblo, and it looked like it could’ve belonged, but it didn’t.
    It wasn’t even as long as his index finger, and it consisted of a star symbol with a small cut-out circle in the center. It was strange, and it was warm, too warm to have been buried nearly a foot underground for years.
    â€œIt looks Celtic,” his partner said. “But what would it be doing here?” He reached for it, but Dave jerked it away.
    Dave looked at the man next to him. “Do you hear that?”
    The man looked strangely at Dave. No. He hadn’t heard anything. He hadn’t heard her voice—the trinket’s voice.
    â€œIt was clear,” he blurted out all of a sudden. “Loud and clear! I heard it! I know I did!”
    Dave stopped walking abruptly in the middle of a Norfolk street, causing traffic to screech to a halt. Angry drivers honked their horns and yelled profanities at him. He closed his eyes and remembered. “Such a beautiful melody,” he said emotionally.
    The man kneeling across from Dave the day he found her reached out to touch her. She wasn’t meant for him.
    â€œNo!” he shouted, shoving his colleague so hard that he fell back onto the ground.
    It whispered to him: “Take me to her. She will not come for me.”
    â€œWhat are you?” he asked in disbelief. Was he losing his mind? “Are you … alive?”
    No! No, Dave wasn’t crazy. He was as sane as anybody, a stable and intelligent man, with a PhD. He’d never given in to whims.
    â€œWhy me?” And then he realized that he was talking to a piece of metal.
    â€œYou are strong and chosen,” he heard it say.
    Agonizing screams erupted, and a look of sheer and utter shock bulged from his eyes as his fingers lit up like embers and quickly burned like overcooked meat. The man he’d pushed scrambled to his feet, while the others rushed in at the sounds of the commotion. The people around him tried to help him, but the curse leapt from him onto them. The others grabbed Dave by the shoulders.
    She punished them for touching him, and he watched in horror as they burned, the whole team, and all that was left were pillars of ashes all around him. He meant to drop her back onto the ground, but she was a part of him, the flesh and bones of his hand protectively cocooned around her. 1935—that was the year he found her, and he had held her ever since .
    He wore layers of clothes—shirts, pants, several coats—but still he could never seem to get warm, even in summer. Dave hunched in a doorway at the back of an abandoned warehouse in an alley. She had led him here, Norfolk Virginia, but he still had a long way to go. He drew his old knees to his chest and pulled himself as tight into himself as he could. The dull ache of arthritis throbbed in his knees, but that was nothing. He held his left hand close to his chest. He’d wrapped it in old socks and a couple of T-shirts until it looked like he had a cast. Keeping it wrapped helped with the pain … some.
    Dave had tried to cut it off. His hand. He’d tried a couple of times, but she would never let him. He had hacked and hacked until his arm was a bloody mess of flesh and tendons splayed out in front of him like a crimson piece of abstract art, and until