Page 99 of Stealing Embers

“What now?” I ask the flying nuisance.

For the next ten minutes, the little light bounces from spot to spot on the mountainside, showing me exactly where to put my hands and feet. Eventually, we reach a plateau. I throw my body on it and lay my forehead to the snowy ground.

Have I ever been so excited to be laying on the frozen earth before?

I think not.

My limbs are jelly.

How I managed to make that climb without accidentally phasing is a mystery. My body shakes with the aftereffects of the adrenaline rush.

When I get my breathing under control, I crawl toward the rock wall. The plateau is shaped like a triangle with stone shooting up on two sides, and a scary drop straight down on the short end. It’s like someone cut a pie-slice out of the mountainside.

Shuffling forward on my hands and knees, I tip my head up and squint into the night sky.

Just how high do these cliffs ascend?

My hand lands on something chilled and a little squishy—that is, compared to the rock beneath me.

A lump is blanketed in a fresh layer of snow in front of me. When I brush some of the loose snow away, a hand is revealed.

Yelping, I fall back on my butt. Luckily, that part of me is half frozen, so I hardly feel the bite of the unforgiving ground beneath me.

There is a person buried under there.

A dead one from the looks of it.

I can’t detect any movement from the mound that indicates the person is breathing.

Working up the courage to take a closer look, I notice that only about an inch of snow covers the body, so it can’t have been here long.

I don’t know what to do.

Would ignoring it make me a horrible person?

The annoying sparkler swoops in and flits over the lump, hopping up and down on various parts of the body.

I swat it like a fly. Its actions seem disrespectful.

The little nuisance doesn’t appear to have liked that and rings my head like a pixie on Red Bull before zooming back and forth over the frozen person.

“You havegotto be kidding me. You want me to touch it?”

The sparkle stops on what I assume is the head and doesn’t move.

Is it trying to stare me down?

“This day just keeps getting worse,” I grumble as I creep forward.

Grimacing, I stretch out a shaky hand and wipe some of the snow away, revealing an expansive upper back and broad shoulders.

Definitely a guy.

Don’t think too hard about it, I coach myself as I continue to dust the flakes off the body.

I leave the head until last. He’s facedown and I’m more than a little worried his face wentsplatwhen he fell, which won’t leave much for anyone to identify . . . and will be super disgusting.

Nephilim or not, crushed faces are not something my stomach is equipped to handle.