Fractured Magic (The Shadow Portal Book 1)

by N. M. Howell

  Keeping these in mind, she placed her feet in what felt like a natural position. She held the thoughts, focused her intent, gesticulated with her hands. Was that a glow between her palms? Raina let it fly. As she watched, Trini’s blouse wrinkled. Slightly.

  Trini closed her eyes, lips pouched, head tilted. “Okay. I kinda felt that.”

  Raina bent over, hands on her knees, breath ragged. “I did it.”

  “Sure. Yeah. Yay for you. Do it again, but actually try to cause me some harm this time. This is offensive Fray Spelling.”

  “Just give me—” Raina sucked air “—one second.”

  Trini’s hand twitched. Raina jerked with the pain.

  “Ow!”

  “Static Lunge! Right now!”

  Raina tried to recall the shade of green, the elongated chirp, the body placement.

  Slap!

  “Ow-ah!” She rubbed her flank. “Stop it, you sadist!”

  “You’re gonna get a lot worse than a spank in the middle of a fray.”

  “A fray? How can you possibly fight when you have to remember all this stuff?”

  Trini smirked. “Practice.”

  “Forget it! I can’t do this! You can spank me all you want but I don’t have any magic.” Raina sat on the mat, elbows on her knees, face in her hands. After a few moments, she heard voices somewhere deep in the chamber. She scoped the room, but it was too large, too shadowy to see anything. “Who’s back there?”

  Trini walked over. “Something big is going down pretty soon. The confraternity is making plans, they’re down here all hours. We need to worry about you. You need to learn to protect yourself.”

  She reached out a hand to Raina. Expecting a trick, Raina hesitated. Then she allowed herself to be drawn to her feet.

  “Maybe I’m doing this all wrong,” Trini said. “However you Bright Fae do your magic, it looks the same. Same motions, same gesticulations, same results. Maybe magic directs you, instead of you directing the magic. So let’s get down to basics. Real simple basic kiddie magic. Intent Transitive—I make a motion that I want carried out at a distance. It’s not truly a Fray Spell, because I get back as much as I give. For example, when I spank your butt, my hand stings.”

  Raina thought about it. “I never considered this a spell. There’s no Light Fae term like Intent Transitive. It’s just something we do when we’re babies. We have to learn to control it.”

  “Let’s try it. Here’s how it goes. The color behind your eyes is the pale bright blue of the sky on a spring morning. The sound behind your ears is a sudden, brisk wind through the trees. The gesture is right handed, thumb bent all the way down, fingers curled in. Your intent is how quickly you snap your fingers straight—keep the thumb down. Ready?”

  They took their places on the mat. Raina concentrated hard, bringing the color and sound solidly in her mind. She raised her curled hand up, and snapped the fingers straight.

  “Ow!” Raina cried, shaking out her hand.

  Trini didn’t say anything. She lay on the concrete beyond the mat, unconscious.

  22

  For the next few days, Raina threw herself into relearning spells in the Dark Fae manner. It felt good to give a little back. Trini did away with the kid gloves. Raina rose to the challenge. It took some getting used to, but she found she could summon magic just as the Dark Fae could from the earth around them. It felt weird, backwards, as if it was the very opposite of what her instinct told her to do. Rather than drawing magic from with her, she drew it from the outside in. She supposed it made sense, given the dark and light were two sides of a coin. Opposites. The thought of the Lord Fae came to her mind, but she pushed it away. If humans could learn this, there’s no reason she couldn’t. It had nothing to do with some stupid Fae history.

  One by one, she learned how to produce each Fray Spell by a combination of mental images and sounds coupled by precise gesticulations.

  Initially, she hit her spells about half the time, but as the days went by, she became more and more accurate. The problem became her control. Raina couldn’t say why her spells were amplified so much, but it became worrisome as she consistently smashed through Trini’s Adargo Dires and Targes Viridescent.

  Trini, bruised, winded and hesitant, turned to teaching Raina more basic spells, Impels, Precipitations and Phazes. When one of Raina’s attempts at Impel Oblige, the moving of inanimate objects, nearly knocked down one of the pillars holding up the ceiling, Trini made a T with her hands.

  “Time.” Trini coughed out concrete dust. Gravel rained down around them. Both she and Raina turned eyes on the ceiling. When it seemed stable enough, Trini folded her arms. “Well, I guess there’s something I can’t teach you, but you really need to learn. That’s how to pull it back a little. I’ve never had a problem with too much power, so I don’t know what to tell you.”

  In the same unseen corner of the room, voices argued, the echo making them unintelligible. When Raina scowled toward the sound, the voices stopped.

  “Okay, Trini, tell me who’s back there. I can tell they’re talking about me.”

  “The Egalitarian Confraternity is formulating—”

  Raina dropped her head and stared Trini down. “I’ve had enough of that. I’ve had enough of whispering behind my back. I want to know who’s back there watching us.”

  “Just people!” Trini wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  Raina blew out her cheeks. “We’re not doing this anymore until I know what’s going on.”

  Argument broke out again in the distant dark, this time growing closer. From behind the black pillars, a group of men and women walked toward Raina and Trini. All but one of them stopped short. He strode nearer, features becoming clearer as he moved into the glow of the light orbs.

  An undefinable feeling of dread filled Raina like icy water.

  “I’ve been watching you.” The voice was very deep, slightly rough with age, though his progress through the chamber was straight-backed and purposeful. “The confraternity and myself have gone back and forth about our meeting.”

  At first, the man looked bland, unremarkable features so plain that you wouldn’t remember the man even moments after being introduced. Raina realized it was more than that. It was so deft a Phaze that she didn’t want to remember the face. She’d seen it before. On the subway. The janitor at the school. Even on the day the portal was attacked. As he neared, the blandness receded. He grew taller, complexion darker. The color of his eyes shifted from muddy brown to deep purple. His brows arched, cheekbones rose, hair going nearly black from a sandy brown.

  Finally, they stood face to face. Every part of her wanted to deny what she saw. Except she couldn’t. She looked at a man she had seen before. Most recently, she’d seen his image drawn in watercolor, gilt and ink. This was the man from the book. The man standing next to her mother, the image captured long, long ago.

  Raina felt a quiver run through her. “I don’t think so.”

  The man nodded. “You know me.”

  “I’m done.” She held up her hands. “I’m so done.”

  With quick steps, Raina headed out of the vast pump station. Before she reached the doorway, the man stepped in front of her out of the shadows.

  “Raina.” He entreated her with kindly eyes, a slight smile.

  “It’s not true!” she shouted in his face.

  He held his hands out to her. She spun away. “Get out of my face! I don’t believe you.”

  “Raina, please.”

  Tears blurred her vision as she ran. Her foot caught the edge of the practice mat, and she tripped. Lying face down, she let the tears come. Deep sobs racked her body. She covered her head with her arms. “No, no, no, no, no…”

  “Gods beyond,” the man breathed. “Is she all right?”

  “Give her a moment.”

  Raina felt the man’s presence as he crouched down, but rose at the sound of Melchior’s voice. She left her head buried. After a while, she cried herself out. She still couldn’t
find the energy to lift her head.

  “I see the connection.” Derek’s voice. What was he doing here?

  “The eyes, the cheeks,” Trini agreed in a whisper. “Definitely related.”

  She rolled over, swiping at her eyes. “Shut up, you two.”

  Melchior stood with Belle, Derek and Trini. And the man.

  Raina sat up. “Who are you? Really.”

  She braced herself. Raina already knew the answer. There was always a vague thread of it, running through her life. Her interest in the human world, so alien to her family… Her mother, teaching her Dark Fae magic, even if Raina never knew that that’s what it was… Her ability to survive beyond the life-giving magic no longer flowing from the portal.

  The idea that she was not Oliver Raeyelle’s daughter felt so repugnant, even though it felt so much like the truth.

  We’ve been dishonest with you, Raina.

  Her mother’s voice echoed in her head. Was this man the dishonesty? If so, he was a pretty freaking big lie.

  “My name is Kraevek.” The man crouched down again until they were nearly eye to eye. “Lord Fae Kraevek, or at least I was a long time ago. As to who I am really—”

  Don’t say it, don’t say it, the words repeated in her brain.

  We’ve been dishonest with you, Raina.

  “I’m your father, Raina.”

  No, no, no, no, no…

  We’ve been dishonest with you, Raina.

  “You, Raina, are my only child. My daughter.”

  Kraevek rose, offering his hand as he did. After a long hesitation, Raina took the hand and let herself be lifted to her feet.

  “I don’t want to believe it.” Raina heard a shudder in her voice.

  Kraevek’s features fell. “I understand that. Oliver raised you as his own. He remains your father in nearly every sense of the word. If not for him, both your mother and I would be dead. Perhaps you as well.”

  “The Dark Fae wanted to kill you? Kill Mom?”

  “Dark and Light both, Raina.”

  Both? “I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this.”

  “You aren’t meant to. Each side of our converging species has been fighting the inevitable for eons. Both Light and Dark Fae leadership suppresses this information, that our two separate species are evolving through magic to become something different. Our secret histories have taught us that the creatures we are all to become are powerful beyond reckoning.”

  Raina’s features went hard. “Creatures like you?”

  “Yes.” He angled his head toward her. “Creatures like your mother. Creatures like you.”

  The few gathered Egalitarian Confraternity looked on, not speaking. Human, Dark Fae, half-fae, all hung on Kraevek’s words. Expectant eyes fell on Raina.

  “If you will walk with me, we have much to talk about,” the Lord Fae said.

  Raina was fairly certain she did not want to hear what the man had to say—what her father had to say. No, not her father. Oliver Raeyelle was her father, despite where she may have come from. This whole thing was beginning to turn into a nightmare.

  Heart heavy, she understood though that she needed to know more. Somewhere in this confused mess lay the key to Oreálle.

  She thought she would have preferred the nithedrake.

  23

  Kraevek led her across the dark station to a doorway she had never seen. Beyond, shelves of books lined two walls, mismatched chairs and a table made from a spool of steel cable stood between. Raina expected the man to pull down some dusty tomes. Instead, he continued through the room to a hallway.

  “The Fae have leveraged many human ideas to promote separatism,” the man said, walking on. “Most recently of course has been the science of genetics. Now it can be proven that Light and Dark Fae are separate species, vaguely related cousins. Such is not the case.”

  At the end of the hall, a steep staircase led up. “What do you mean?” Raina had read the studies herself. The information seemed conclusive.

  “What human science cannot fathom is the influence of magic. Think of Oreálle, forever in sunlight. How would any creature evolve in such a place? Would it dismiss the need to sleep, even the need to move? And in the case of the Light Fae, why would we develop such an affinity for magic if everything was provided for? You see, Oreálle was never a world of eternally sunlight and clement meadows. It is, and this is where human science gets it right, a separate dimension. A dimension where each side of the Fae evolved. Yet ancestors of both Dark and Light Fae did so in different eons. It would be mere speculation, but it may well be that the Dark Fae became Earth-bound many hundreds of millennia before the Light.

  “Time itself is different in that dimension, and, as you’ve experienced your whole life, time can be manipulated there. Do you know how the portal was constructed?”

  Raina followed Kraevek through an iron-bound door into a hallway crammed on each side with rusting, dripping pipes. “No. It was always there.”

  “Long ago, before written history, small portals existed on all corners of the Earth, including the place now known as Central Park. Light Fae lived near these tiny cracks, narrow passages to Oreálle, from the Orient to the New World. They needed the flow of magic the way living things on Earth need the sun. Human legend tells about caves to the Underworld, magical glens where people became lost. Through our magical evolution, the Light Fae learned to control the portals. A fragment of each small portal was taken during a fair late morning and brought to New York. These fragments were assembled into a broad gateway that allowed easy passage to a wonderful, carefree place. All Light Fae came to live within the unified realm, and why wouldn’t they? Living on the verge of dimensions, magic unsteady as it attempted to bridge from Fae to human realms. These in between places were home to the Light Fae since the race first evolved, sometimes more on the human side sometimes more on the fae, but never quite belonging to either side, only belonging to the magic that made up their beings. The magic that made up the half-worlds they lived. It was no surprise when the entire race grew tired of this fractured magic, banding together to form the great portal, finally creating a proper bridge between both realms. The deal with the humans was the perfect opportunity to carry out the grand plan. If gave them a home. And the perfect guise to do so.”

  Another door stood camouflaged in a concrete wall. Kraevek waved a hand and the door opened onto a hallway of white subway tiles.

  Raina hadn’t heard that version of things before and wondered if the man was mad. Something in her gut told her he wasn't lying. “This is all new to me.”

  “Lord Fae began it all. It was the small amount of Dark Fae blood that bound those in-between realms to earth and allowed the Light Fae to connect with the human world. Their magic, their very bodies, adapted to this half-state. It’s how the Light Fae have adopted the ability to form their ears as Fae or Human, a product of the binding of that magic to Earth. That binding is what allowed them to travel through this world to create the portal. Likewise, it's the magic from these transitional realms that clung to Earth and allowed the Dark Fae to flourish here. We all come from the same magic, after all. Magic draws.”

  “Magic draws,” Raina repeated in a whisper.

  “But there was a great problem,” he continued. “The only thing that gives magic power is the physical world. Magic defies physics: physics defines magic. In a place where everything is magic, it becomes mundane, feeble. The Light Fae abilities atrophy.”

  Raina was trying to keep everything straight but struggled. “What happened to all the lesser realms the Light Fae had come from?”

  “After a time, the portal proved itself a success and held the magic there. All magic. The remaining traces from the remaining magical realms scattered throughout the human world began to fade. The very magic that fueled the Dark Fae race. They suddenly had to fight harder to find it, desperately seeking it wherever they could. When it became known to them what was happening, it made the Light Fae vulnerable to
attack and also the perfect prize.”

  The winding tiled hallway led to a subway station. Kraevek continued to the exit. They emerged on East 63rd and Lex. “But why would the Dark Fae destroy the portal if that was the source of their magic?” Raina asked.

  “Uncertain, but we have our speculation. Anger for taking the magic. Revenge. Perhaps they thought by closing the portal that magic would return to this realm ripe for their taking.”

  Raina suspected little bit of all those things were true. “They wanted to stop the Light Fae from taking their magic.”

  “Yes. Unlike Light Fae, the Dark cultivate the remnants of magic. The greatest source of this, at least until five years ago, was the forests of Europe—the place where human fairy tales emerged. It was where the highest concentration of the in-between realms once were and where the most magic remained following the creation of the portal. That is why you now see so many Dark Fae flocking to the city. Where once magic flowed like a mighty river, only stagnant pools remain. It is from this that the Dark Fae draw much of their power. But even that is dwindling. They’re desperate to save what they have left.”

  “But the portal is destroyed,” Raina replied. “It’s done. And their magic is still lessening.”

  “Ah, yes,” Kraevek nodded. “Because they had it wrong. Certain factions of the Dark Fae see the destruction as a boon. But just as the Light Fae become weaker by their existence in Oreálle, the Dark Fae become more violent as the remnant magic is used up. The magic was now flowing into Oreálle, but rather from it. By closing the portal, that source of magic stopped. That is why both sides of the Fae must exist in balance.”

  Raina’s thoughts were a mess. “Then why do the Light and Dark fight each other so much?”

  Kraevek hung his head. “For the same reasons humans do. To cling to their own identities by fostering an us-against-them mentality. To secure resources, even though magic by its very nature is not a commodity, but a process.”