Sacrifice, page 23
part #3 of The Shift Chronicles Series
I nodded; the only answer I could manage. I was a little overwhelmed at how many there actually turned out to be—far more than the dozen I’d guessed at first glance. Too many to count as they crowded in the hallway, waiting to follow my lead.
I turned, and I stepped into the dark room.
It was unnatural darkness. Something from a spell, I decided quickly; my wolf sight didn’t adjust to it even after several moments, and the light from the hallway we’d left behind didn’t penetrate it for more than a few inches. I could still see that light if I glanced over my shoulder, like the proverbial glowing light at the end of the tunnel, but it looked much, much further away than it should have been.
I walked even further from it.
Will and Kael were on either side of me, two perfectly silent figures pushing through the blackness with me, making themselves known only by the occasional nudge of my hand with a cold nose. Valkos was directly behind us, trying, with little success, to counter the darkness with a spell that would light up our path for more than a few seconds.
I was saving my magical energy, relying on my other senses and trying to picture the room in my mind as I felt my way through the dark. I’d been in here a hundred times, it seemed like, but it was hard to get started on a mental image without at least some sort of visual cue. My outstretched hands eventually found something for me to grasp on to, though; the corner of a desk. I could picture Eli sitting at it. I could picture the low floor of the loft above it, and the staircase that led to that loft. I knew the exact way those stairs curved, the exact way they creaked when you stepped on them.
And I heard that creaking a second later.
I stopped walking. Held my breath. The others did the same, and the air hung like a still and heavy curtain around us.
Claws ripped through the stillness and caught me in the chest.
There was the familiar jolt: the crack of protective energy that always came when Carrick touched me. He fought through it, though, and I was lifted off my feet and thrown through the air. My side hit the edge of the loft’s railing, and I scrambled to grab hold of one of the railing’s bars. My chest burned, blood streaming from the claw marks; it was still quiet enough that I could hear that blood dripping to the ground below. I started to hoist myself up. I felt a brush of wind as something leapt past me, and then the railing shook as if that something had just landed on it.
When I glanced up, I saw a faint glint of moonlight eyes glaring back at me.
I made it halfway onto the railing on my own before I was knocked from it and sent spinning wildly over the floor of the loft, pulling up the throw rug and dragging it with me as I went. I rolled immediately into a formidable crouch, fingertips balancing me against the ground as I looked up.
I still couldn’t really see him, but I knew Carrick was close.
So close that he didn’t bother speaking above a whisper at first. “It’s been decided,” he said. “You are officially no longer worth the trouble of keeping alive.”
He dove at me. I felt it coming just in time to leap aside.
“I wonder how many more times you can manage that?” He sounded amused. “One way or another, this darkness will beat you in the end.”
“I don’t think so,” I muttered, regaining my balance and turning back toward his voice. Because below me, either the spell was weakening, or Valkos had finally managed to successfully counter it; a hazy gold color lit up the darkness—and that was proof that it could be beaten, even if that golden light wasn’t reaching up here yet.
Carrick rushed at me again. I was too worried about what was happening below, so this time he caught me, and he pinned me against a shelf full of books, popping a few of them loose and sending them tumbling down around me in a flutter of dust and pages. His hand clenched around my jaw, crushing it and using the grip to shove my face sideways, so that I could just barely see anything happening below.
But I could see—and hear—enough to know that the rest of Carrick’s pack had emerged, and that a second battle was beginning down there.
I sensed Carrick’s gaze tearing away from me suddenly. A moment later I heard the thunder of paws clattering up steps, and his hold on my jaw loosened.
A horrible, blinding flash of silver light shot from his other hand and toward the stairs.
Kael was in front, and he took the brunt of the spell. It kept going after it hit him, though, breaking over him like a wave that washed over Will next. As the light from the magic faded I caught a glimpse of both of them tumbling out of sight.
I forgot about strategy for a moment and just threw myself at Carrick, afraid that he’d fire another spell if I didn’t. My claws came out, and I was lucky enough to catch him solidly around the middle, even in the dark. I sank all of my weight into pulling him to the ground, and then I struck toward where I thought his eyes were. I felt him try to twist out of my reach.
He wasn’t fast enough.
I caught what felt like the edge of his cheekbone.
I ripped toward the center from there.
His blood swept over my wrist, and the sharp, enraged cry he gave was unearthly-sounding. But it was nowhere near as terrifying as the near silence that abruptly followed it.
He was simply breathing, his chest rising and falling, easily and certainly.
I still didn’t hear anything from the stairs—not even whimpering.
Everything happening downstairs seemed like an echo, like the sounds were confined to that tunnel I’d imagined walking through earlier.
I used the quiet to focus. I summoned fire, the way Carrick had taught me to, and it hovered between us, several individual flames dancing and illuminating what I’d done to his face. His whole appearance was as calm as his breathing. Blood still trickled from around his eyes, staining his face like mascara marred by tears. He couldn’t possibly see me clearly through all that blood. But it didn’t stop him from staring.
“Faolan helped you.” His sudden voice against the quiet made me jump.
I felt a strange energy building around him, and I instinctually straightened up and backed away. The flames I’d summoned followed, circling around me in an almost obedient fashion.
“I’ll be sure to kill him next, after I’m done with you. He’s proven terribly unreliable.”
I braced my stance and eyed the flame floating closest to me. “Better focus on me first,” I said, lifting my hands. The fire followed my movement; as I brought my hands together in front of me, the individual flames shot together and then collided into the one closest to me. It ballooned in size and intensity and I had to throw it immediately, before I lost control.
That strange energy I’d felt gathering around him erupted just before my fireball hit. It knocked my own magic back, nearly catching me in the shoulder before shooting off into the shelves behind me, cutting a path through them and then escaping through the wall itself. It left a crater as tall as me in its wake, broken beams of wood jutting in from its edges as dust and plaster swirled around it all. The winter wind rushed in through the space in a hurry, carrying snow that mixed into the mess.
Light slipped in, too.
It was almost morning, and I could see the first rays of sun peeking over mountaintops in the distance.
And Carrick was apparently distracted enough that he didn’t care to try and overpower the sun with his darkness spell, because it began to lift. As he stood and took a step toward me, I saw him, and all his irritation, brightly and clearly.
“You’d be better off sticking to cheap shots,” he said, swiping at some blood that had collected beneath his eye. “Leave the magic to the grownups.”
He was wrong, though. My magic was growing eager. It had been a while since I’d felt it press against my insides like this, building and burning and trying to unleash on its own. I’d grown strong enough that I was able to keep it in check, and to keep thinking clearly—but for how much longer?
The wind blowing in was cold. I tried to think about the sun. I tried to picture it warming my back as I faced him. And the thought of my skin absorbing its fire gave me an idea.
I was furiously working out the details in my head when Carrick sprinted toward me. He leapt, easily clearing the space above my head, and landed all the way over by the hole he’d blown in the wall. He ripped one of the jutting, broken two-by-fours from the wall and flung it at me. I caught it. Sort of. The force of it knocked me onto my back, and an instant later he was standing over me, one foot pressing the nail-covered wood into my ribcage.
I grabbed either end of the board—painfully catching the edge of my hand on another nail in the process—and I pushed back. And all the while I was thinking he can’t stand to touch me.
I threw all of my strength into one gigantic shove against the board. I pushed him off balance enough that I managed to scramble out from underneath. Then I swept around behind him, and I wrapped my hands around his head and pressed as hard as I could.
That charge of electricity came as expected, sending shivers up my arms and causing him to stumble. It didn’t disorient him as much as I’d hoped, but it did manage to stop him in his tracks momentarily. That magical energy I’d felt building around him waned for a moment, too.
And when it started building again, this time I was ready for it.
Because I knew how to draw energy from the space around me, and I knew it was possible to draw it from other people, too, even if I hadn’t liked the idea when he’d mentioned it to me.
As he spun around to face me, fingers still massaging one of the places I’d touched him, I held up my hands and crossed my arms in front of my body. That magic building inside me seemed to be concentrating there, along the lines of my palms and the veins of my arms. So that was where I would draw his to, as well.
Magic calls to magic, I remembered Valkos telling me.
And I could transfer my own power, parts of my own soul, to others—so this was basically just a reverse spell of that, right?
Just like absorbing sunlight.
I found myself backing up toward that real sunlight as Carrick smiled and stepped toward me. If he knew what I was planning, he didn’t seem worried about it. He radiated malice and magic, both with such force that for a second, as I stumbled backward, I thought I had to be an idiot to think I could steal anything from him. Let alone magic that I could actually control after the taking.
Focus, I commanded myself anyway.
“How would you like for me to kill you, then?” he asked. “I know quite a few interesting spells that should do the trick. Let’s see…fire or ice? Both seem appropriate. You seem to favor fire, I’ve noticed, but ice seems just as nice, given the winter wind swirling around us.” He blinked as he stepped into the patch of sunlight I’d stopped in. “So, which will it be, then?”
I didn’t even have to think about it.
“Fire,” I whispered.
Twenty-Four
sunrise
For a brief, staggering moment, it felt like the sun had risen completely, right there in the library. I was blind. Not just in one eye, but both. But even though I couldn’t see it, I could still tell that I was surrounded by a spell. I could feel it sinking into the space around me, its power saturating the air and making it difficult to breathe.
As suffocating as it was, though, it didn’t burn me.
My vision returned to see ghostly orange light wrapping around, strands of it dancing like flames toward the ceiling. But it wasn’t fire. It was more like residue, the imprint of an almost-spell, and it wasn’t burning me.
“Of course,” Carrick said, his voice low and savage. “Of course you would have to find one more way to make this irritating for me.”
My hands were glowing. My arms, too. Not just from the daylight, but from that magic I’d collected, both the absorbed and innate. I was trembling with it. It gave me a strange combination of feelings; power— oh, there was definitely power—but also a weight, a sluggishness in my bones that I couldn’t shake.
I could hardly move.
I could only watch as he shifted into that black wolf from my nightmare, and his giant, terrible form filled up what seemed like every inch of the loft.
I dropped to my knees.
(That magic is too strong for you), came his gleeful voice in my head. (It would likely just crush you on its own if I let it, but how about I just help it along?) He lowered his head and stalked toward me with slow, deliberate strides. One step closer. Two steps. Three. Four—
He leapt.
At the last, desperate second, I caught him in the chest. I used the force of his rebound to throw him over me and send him crashing through the hole in the wall.
I ran after him, and I jumped.
I still felt like I was crawling, and then jumping in slow motion. My landing in the grass was awkward, and he was already on his feet. He went for my throat. His claws sank in, and his wolf form seemed completely, insanely indifferent to the way my skin tried to repel his touch.
I grabbed his leg and tried to push his claws back, but they’d already done all the damage they needed to. My vision was fading. The glow of magic beneath my skin was going with it. The world was turning dark, and I tried to picture something, anything—anyone— to bring back a little bit of light.
(So this is how it ends.) The words were soft in my head, like something from a dream. (It is what it is, I suppose. But for what it’s worth, this is not at all how I wanted it to go.)
“Me either,” I coughed, and I felt blood trickle out of the corner of my mouth. I shut my eyes. I thought, again, of Vanessa and all the silly, wonderful plans we’d made that day in the kitchen. “Me either,” I repeated.
I felt him draw back.
“I still wanted to go out in flames,” I said.
I heard him start to utter a reply.
And then all the world around us caught fire.
Epilogue
I was sitting in a circle of burnt grass, some of it still smoldering and smoking. My skin seemed to be simmering with it, like I’d just gotten the worst sunburn of my entire life. I blinked back tears that were partly from pain, partly from smoke.
The black wolf was on his side about twenty feet away.
Not moving.
Not even breathing, as best I could tell from here.
My body was still trembling. But I felt much lighter, and though my balance swayed a bit, I still managed to get to my feet. I took a few steps toward Carrick and then paused. Waiting. Watching.
Until his chest rose and fell with a slow, shaky breath.
No.
I saw other bodies moving closer, and I started to panic. I didn’t know whose side they were on, or what they would do next—I just knew what I had to do next. Carrick was on death’s doorstep, and I wasn’t letting him get away. I shifted my claws, and I ran as hard and fast as I could with every ounce of energy I had left.
But when I jumped, instead of feeling the grim satisfaction of my claws sinking through flesh and fur, I collided with a barrier. It sent shockwaves into my body that continued to shudder through me for several moments after I slammed against the ground beside it.
I lifted my head and steadied my wobbly vision just in time to see Cerin float down from the library. Several more of her pack members followed soon after, each of their leaps as graceful and ghostlike as hers. They landed as if their spots had been predetermined. As if they’d rehearsed all of this somehow. It was surreal—but not in the same eerily beautiful way as their first appearance in this yard.
Maybe because now I knew they were unearthly devils instead of angels.
Cerin walked to Carrick and commanded two of her followers to pick up his lifeless body.
“No.” I made myself stand up. I summoned what little fire I could still managed—a few tiny, pathetic little wisps of it—and flung them at the barrier, only to watch them bounce harmlessly off it. “No, NO, NO!” My hands pounded—stupidly—against the barrier. And it shocked me, of course. I fell back, massaging my knuckles, while Cerin smirked at me from the other side.
“Coward!” I snapped. “Is this what you do when someone actually lands a hit on you? When you start to lose? You just run away?”
She laughed. “Lose? My child, we haven’t even come close to losing. We have controlled our world for centuries, and our hold remains—you may have shaken our control off your friends tonight, but what does it matter? They were as good as dead the moment we touched them, anyway.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Of course, we would have considered saving them, had you cooperated. But that didn’t work out, did it?”
“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” It took every bit of discipline I had to keep myself from stupidly hitting that barrier again.
“You’ll see,” she said with a smile. “And when they’re gone, we’ll come back to collect you. Carrick would simply like you dead at this point, probably, but myself? I prefer to let my prey suffer as long as possible. And besides: who knows? You suffer enough, maybe you’ll get desperate and decide to join our cause after all. I remain hopeful. Either way, we’ll see each other again soon, I’m sure. But until that moment comes…” She gave me a little bow, and took a few steps back toward the rest of her pack. “Goodbye for now.”
The darkness, the one I’d walked through in the room above, was suddenly back. It swept over me, stealing the sunlight away little by little until I could see of it was a tiny pinprick in the distance.
And then that disappeared, too.
I fell back to my knees, buried my face in hands that I couldn’t see, and I cried.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. I slowly looked up. The daylight was hazy, but it was only from thin clouds covering it; there was no spell. There was no sign of the barrier, or Cerin, or Carrick, or any of the rest of their pack.
That hand on my shoulder gripped tighter. I spun around, still prepared to fight. But the eyes I met were kind, unwilling to meet my challenge—a fact that was still going to take some more getting used to.
