The Shadow King (9 page)

“Then you
are
following me.”

He chuckled, and his gaze was back. “You’re a smart girl, if a little too brave.”

Time hiccupped, and suddenly, a sucking sound filled the forest. Blackness crowded her vision, she became disoriented, and then everything settled down again. She blinked, taking a step back.

The six of them had moved.

They were much closer now, and they’d surrounded her in a half-moon. The blonde was a mere three feet away. He tilted his head and shook it in obvious bewilderment. “You’re trying to get into the Shadow Realm, aren’t you?”

Violet was scared, but there was a hammering of her heart and a readiness in her tense body that warred with that fear. When they’d surrounded her in Seattle, a stranger had saved her. She couldn’t have held up against them on her own down there. But she had prepared since then – with just such a scenario in mind.

“What makes you say that?” she asked aloud as her right hand curled into a fist in the pocket of her zipped-up hoodie. The spell she was privately preparing was a simple one, but powerful, one of Lovelace’s own infamous creations.

It was also somewhat forbidden.

But Violet couldn’t see why. She’d searched for reasons, and the most she’d been able to come up with was something about darkness reacting to darkness – the warlock magic being one kind and the unseelie being another. Violet could understand the basic premise, since she and her sister were the only Tuath fae she knew of who had become warlocks. Apparently, warlock magic was normally too difficult for unseelie to control. It was like trying to get the negative end of one battery to stick to the negative end of another.

But for Violet, this wasn’t a problem, and it never had been. To her, dark magic felt more like the
positive
end of a battery. It
fit
. It made sense to her soul. It flowed, to and from, and made her whole.

So it was with this understanding about herself that she had gone ahead and prepared the
Separation
. It was one of Wolfram Lovelace’s most powerful spells. It was as simple as the hand going from fist to splayed, a sudden release of heavily concentrated dark magic in one fell swoop. It was said to slam into an opponent so hard, it would temporarily separate them from their souls.

There was nothing more discombobulating than that.

The spell had largely gone without mention in Lalura’s classes; it was just accepted that they not attempt it. Lalura had skipped over it, along with most of Lovelace’s magic, and Violet had just never asked.

But what was done was done, and hopefully her efforts and bravery were about to pay off.

The blond man’s eyes flashed, catching the light, just as Violet pulled her hand from her pocket, held it outward – and opened it.

Chapter Eleven

Pitch moved invisibly from shadow to shadow, disappearing and reappearing like a spectre, the vague form of a tall, strong man one second, and a vague memory of the same the next. Hunting in the Dark was finished early for the night, but he couldn’t go home. He was restless. And besides, the mortal world was devoid of real heroes. It was up to beings like him to fill in the hollow, empty spaces left behind. He may as well help where he could.

So he had moved out of the Dark, through the Unlit Woods, past portal after portal, and into the mortal world. He would hunt here.

He was shadow jumping from one alley to another when he felt the evil vibrations move through the darkness to brush against his senses. He followed them to the scene to find the victim was already on the ground, blood dripping slowly from a cut across her temple. No doubt, she’d acquired it when her bully had punched her, and she’d clearly fallen from the attack to hit her head on the asphalt. She was pressing her hand to her stomach, and her face was gaunt-white, tinted ever so slightly green at the edges.

A stomach punch, then.

“Of course,” he said, his tone low, his voice little more than a whispered hiss.

The man who’d been in the process of crouching over the woman froze in place at the sound of Keeran’s voice. His head jerked up at the unexpected intrusion. He hadn’t heard Keeran approach. He hadn’t seen him, either. And yet there he was, standing right beside him, his hands in his pockets as if he were a casual observer.

“What the –” The attacker rose at once, leaping back to his feet to no doubt consider his options. There was another man on the scene now. Did he attack the man too? Or run like the coward he was? Keeran would have bet everything on the latter if there had been leisure time.

The girl’s cell phone had fallen along with her. Without paying the attacker much heed, Keeran bent to casually retrieve it. On his way back up, however, he dealt with the man once and for all.

Time always seemed to slow down around him when he “went shadow,” as he’d come to think of it. He was simply so fast, everything around him appeared to drop into another tempo, one half as fast as he was, or slower. Even sound was different, coming in a few octaves lower than normal.

That was how the attacker sounded when Keeran attacked. He felt the man’s body bend around his fists, creasing over his knuckles as if he’d suddenly turned into a balloon filled with silicone. Keeran kept moving, prepping for a second strike, and even planning what he would do for a third, when it dawned on him that the man was no longer conscious.

So, the Shadow King solidified once more, tall and still, as the young man’s unconscious form crumpled to the ground at his feet.

Keeran knelt to assist the injured woman, when all at once the world flashed completely dark around him, instantaneously growing black from edge to edge. It was sudden and unexpected, and Keeran rose and took a stumbling step back, blinking to clear his vision. Darkness
never
obscured his sight. He could see right through it! What
was
this?

But just a few beats after it darkened, it lightened again into twilight. Just a flash, that was all it had been. But Keeran had never experienced anything like it.

A pain, dull and throbbing, came on as suddenly as the blackness had, and focused somewhere near the center of his chest. Keeran touched it gently, his expression growing concerned.

The woman on the ground stirred. Keeran bent, placed her phone in her hand, and firmly wrapped her fingers around it. He used magic to make the call – 911 – as he gently brushed a lock of hair from her bloodied forehead. Then he stood, moved back into the shadows, and exited another alley miles away. He had just stepped out onto the main street when the world went black again. It lasted a millisecond and lifted, but alarm shot through Keeran as it never had before.

The very next moment, complete silence also engulfed him. At once, he felt as if he were floating, disconnected and light. He closed his eyes, and an image popped into his mind:

In the midst of the surrounding shadows of the deepest woods stood a single oak, tall and proud. Its branches were far-reaching, its roots winding, and it glowed like a second moon. A lonely animal howled in the distance.

Keeran opened his eyes, at once understanding. He moved again, and the world slowed down around him. He was shadow and mist and solid will, slicing through dimensions like a passing thought, a wolf on the trail of a scent more precious than existence itself.

*****

The moment the spell released, Violet realized two things at the same time. She realized it was a mistake to have cast it, and she realized it was too late to take it back.

Once, very long ago, when she was quite small, Violet had crawled over her garden wall and wandered into the rose maze behind her family home. Rose mazes were popular among Tuath, however they had to be regularly groomed, or the hedges developed blood thorns. These appeared just like rose thorns, but were slightly darker, and much sharper. The thorns lay splayed across tentacle-vines, and those long, thin vines carried food to a mouth that waited hungry and deep within the rose bush.

The Blood Thorns themselves were small animals that sat inside the rose bush as if in a nest, soft and furry and so dark red, they were nearly black.
Black cherry
, she would call them now, she supposed. But they fed on one thing, and one thing only: blood. They created the tentacle-vines and their thorns through their own kind of survival magic in the thickest, most un-tended-to areas of rose bushes.

Violet had entered the wild rose maze, and after wandering for some time, she leaned against the wall. A Blood Thorn’s tentacled vine pieced her palm. There was an initial sharp sting, and Violet tried to pull back her hand. But the vine had her.

And in the next moment, her blood was pulled out of her arm so fast, she felt it rush, hard and furious, and the feeling was terribly odd and wrong in a nauseating way. She was only fortunate that her sister had come looking for her, or she would have met a bloodless end in that maze.

Now, as she released Lovelace’s spell in the deep woods of the Twixt, she felt something horribly similar to that in her right arm. This time, however, it wasn’t her blood that was rapidly sucked through her palm and into the world beyond – it was her
magic
. It flowed as if a massive bellows were inhaling it, pulling it viciously from the depths of her soul. At the same time, something else rushed in to fill the empty space vacated by her own magic, and that something new was darker, stronger, and more potent.

The overall effect was one of fierce shock. Violet heard a scream rip out through the forest, and she was vaguely aware that it was her own. The tall trees bent to twist around her. She watched from a strange, suspended distance as her magic slammed into the group of half a dozen men. Upon impact, the night seemed to explode. Their forms erupted, shifting from solid matter to black mist, dusted with what looked like trillions of miniscule star fragments. But it didn’t stop there.

More power flowed through her; she’d become a conduit for darkness – in and out, through her body and spirit it poured, ripped her apart, and sealed her back together again differently. The cloud of sparkling shadow stuff the men had become swirled in a building wind. The wind spiraled, rising through the bending, warping trees, until the sparkles within it matched the shining of the stars in the circle of sky above.

When the cloud of black thinned out to a mere twinkling fog before disappearing completely, Violet at last felt the spell give. It was like a living being, this blast of legerdemain. Stronger than her, it used her body, used her mind, and now that it had finished what it was created to do, it surrendered to quiet.

Violet’s arm lowered. Her knees hit the ground. She doubled over, only now realizing that she’d stopped screaming. Her fingers curled into the ground beneath her, which had been blasted clear of thorns, plants and debris by the spell, and was now nothing but dirt.

Her body trembled, infused with something unfamiliar, something wildly wonderful, and something decidedly deadly. She was intoxicated, poisoned once again, but this time on the black magic of the world’s most notorious warlock.

She closed her eyes, feeling simultaneously and inexplicably giddy.

At the sound of a footfall, she turned her head to find a shining black boot beside her. For some reason, she had the strangest urge to laugh.

Chapter Twelve

He arrived at the small clearing just in time to watch Violet Kellen let loose with one of the most powerful dark magic spells ever invented. The moment he came out of his transport and became solid, he locked eyes on her. When he saw her tightened fist open outward, he instantly recognized what she was doing.

The men standing several feet away from her froze in fear, and probably would have recoiled if they’d had a chance, but none was afforded.

Keeran knew enough to protect himself from the magic’s ripple effect, and had barely made it behind the nearest tree when the shock wave washed through the clearing and dispersed into the surrounding forest. It ripped the roots of several trees from the ground, vacuumed the floor of all its thorny vines, fallen leaves, and debris, and cracked off branches to send them flying deeper into the woods. Keeran kept his head down, braced himself, and weathered it, gritting his teeth when he felt its familiar power brush the confines of his shadowy mind.

It whispered. They were sounds he almost understood, words
nearly
formed, things he automatically and naturally yearned to decipher. They taunted and tempted, brushing along his nerve endings until his fangs were once again scraping the top of his bottom lip.

But he shoved them back in with instant ferocity, and pushed the sounds away with the same furious intent, as his nails carved a brutal path in the bark of his sheltering tree.

A few long moments later, the spell died down and the whispering quieted, becoming the scrape of autumn leaves across the ground. Keeran opened his eyes and straightened. The forest had gone silent.

But there was a roaring in his soul, re-awakened by the touch of something long forgotten. When he stepped around the tree and his eyes fell on Violet’s brightly glowing form kneeling in the blast center of her spell’s aftermath, he knew damn well what she’d done. For a timeless moment, he stood stunned, just gazing upon her. His body was motionless, his breath arrested, but his spirit trembled, and he could feel the mirrored protection of his eyes giving way to a heated glow he’d long since thought he’d lost.