by Sara Thorn
Quinn sat up on the edge of his chair, which clued me in that he definitely still cared for her. At any other time, I might have been furious at the fact that he still couldn’t let go of his feelings for her, but right now, it was exactly what I needed. I needed him to come with me and to save her.
“What do you mean Mystreuce is the one killing her?”
“You and I and all of these humans are adrift on opposing sides of a rift. I didn’t see it coming; I thought we were all working together on the same side of things, but I can see now that I was wrong. You don’t just want to represent your fae people; you want to rule, and that I cannot allow. Mystreuce feels this great divide of power, and it is sharing the unease of the land with Mara, too. Bree is with her now, but her human body is failing. I came to ask for your help.”
“What would I be able to do against the wishes of Mystreuce?” he asked.
“Bree thinks your shadow magic can help save her.”
Quinn sat motionless in his throne. He didn’t even look like he was thinking about it. “By the time we get there, it might be too late,” he said.
“And it might not,” I added. “But you’re her last chance.”
Quinn stood up and walked toward me. He didn’t look at all like how he had before. He did, however, look powerful, and that was what Mara needed. Even his form had changed, and it looked like the shadow magic was rebuilding him from the inside out. He looked more sinewy, and it looked like it hurt him when he walked.
“Please,” I pleaded with him, hoping to appeal to whatever part of him was left that still loved Mara. “She needs you, Quinn.”
There was still an emerald sheen to his eyes when I caught a glimpse of them in just the right angle in the light. No matter what had changed him, or what he was changing into, he did still care about her. He wasn’t going to let her die.
***
When I showed up in the doorway with Quinn, Bree was so surprised by his appearance that she made a small gasp as he entered the room. Quinn walked over to the bed and looked at Mara, who lay in Bree’s arms with her eyes pressed closed. I hoped he knew what he was doing because I had absolutely no clue how to fix this, and I knew that her time was running out.
He placed both of his hands on Mara’s abdomen, and the colors on his skin seemed to swish around in a cascading swirl as he used his shadow magic to move around the magic inside of her. He was activating the dormant power in her that the fae woman had told us about. No idea how he was doing it, but I desperately hoped that it worked. Bree didn’t seem at all bothered by the fact that Quinn was pulling an enormous amount of shadow magic through his body. I guess she figured that he was already so far lost to it now that embracing it might be the only viable option for both he and Mara to survive.
I didn’t notice Athan’s body on the floor until I tripped over it and looked down. I thought that I would see his corpse rotting in the dungeons someday, but this was just as good, if not better. He had deserved to die a long time ago.
“Help me,” Quinn said as he looked across Mara’s body at Bree. He was struggling; I could see it.
Bree cautiously gave him her hand, and it seemed to add power to his magic as the swirling dark colors poured into Mara’s body beneath him. I got worried that he was worsening her condition instead of making it better. But when her eyes fluttered open, I sucked in a relieved breath.
The three of them stayed connected for a few moments before Quinn eventually lifted his hands from her and took a step back.
“Quinn?” Mara said as she looked up at him. “What’s happened to you.”
He turned away from her as she reached her hand toward his face. For a moment, I felt bad for him. This was partly my fault, too.
“Will she be okay now?” I asked Bree.
Mara was awake and alive, but she still looked weak and as if she were in pain. As Quinn took steps farther away from her, I walked to her bedside and helped Mara sit up. She held onto my arms and buried her face against my chest.
“I was worried that I wouldn’t see you again,” she said softly. She slid a small piece of folded paper that was near her lap into her hand and wrapped her fingers around it.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Something that I can hold onto for a while longer,” she smiled.
I wrapped her into my arms and kissed her, then looked back at Bree as I waited for her to answer the question that I had asked.
“I don’t know,” Bree said as she turned to Quinn. “What exactly did you do to her?”
“I gave her some of my shadow magic,” he answered.
“You what?” I said. I looked down at Mara to see if there were any visual traces of the shadow magic on her body, but thankfully there weren’t—not yet anyway.
“She has some of the magic of Mystreuce running through her already,” Quinn said. “I felt it.”
“But shadow magic?” I said. “I thought you were going to use it to help her, not inject her with it. What will that do to her?”
“I couldn’t help it,” Quinn answered. “There is no way for me to wield magic now without the shadow magic intertwining. It is within everything that I do and everything that I touch.”
“Remember that shadow magic is just another pure form of magic,” Bree said calmly. “The vessel and the caster decide how the magic will be used, not the other way around.”
But Bree’s eyes looked different, darker. And so I wondered if maybe she had been altered by Quinn’s touch.
I held Mara to me as if letting her go would somehow allow Quinn’s magic to take hold of her. Hopefully, it had been just enough to help her heal and not enough to do anything else of consequence.
“Where are you going?” Mara asked as Quinn started to walk toward the door.
“Away.”
“Quinn, stay here with us.” Mara sat up more in the bed and looked at him with pleading eyes.
“How could you want me to stay here?” he asked. “You heard what Athan said to me and what I have done. You know what I’m planning to do.”
“You don’t need to do any of that,” she said. “We can go back to the way things were when the three of us were all on the same side. And now, with Bree, there are four of us to handle what is going on here on Mystreuce. Fix what you’ve done, clear the distortion from the other humans, and let’s continue to work on what we were building before this happened.”
“Don’t you see, Mara,” he said solemnly. “I don’t want to go back to the way it was. I loved you; I still love you, and having it be the three of us and watching you fawn all over Cassius was torture for me. I don’t want that anymore.”
“But surely you don’t want to turn into Athan,” I said as I tried to join Mara in her attempts to bring Quinn back around to us.
Perhaps the shadow magic had taken too deep a hold of him to remember who he had been, or maybe this was who he had been all along. “You’ve enslaved humans just as your people were enslaved. You can’t really want that. You’re not that type of person.”
“I am now,” Quinn answered. “It’s a means to an end, nothing more.”
“Then why don’t you just kill me now?” I shouted at him as I gently left Mara’s arms and stood up to face him. “If that’s what you want to do and you know that you have the power to do it. Go ahead, kill me. What’s stopping you?” I held my arms outstretched before him.
“No, Cassius, sit down,” Bree screamed. “Quinn, stop!”
But Quinn looked past my body at her on the bed. He held her eyes and looked both sad and ashamed. As much hatred as he seemed to have grown for me, he still loved Mara more. He wouldn’t kill me now. Not in front of her. But I had no doubt that he would soon try to.
“Bree,” Quinn said once he had broken gaze with Mara, “are you coming with me?”
I lowered my arms and turned to see her reaction.
“I cannot,” she said. “I am thankful for all that you have taught me, and for a time, my feelings for you would ha
ve made me stand at your side no matter what you had done. But I can see now that you are too lost for me to help you find your way back. You are so blinded by your affection for Mara that you are willing to risk all things to have her, including yourself and everything that she and you both love. You will need to find your own way back from that dark place; no one can do it for you.
Quinn didn’t look affected by her words; instead, he looked angry and discontent. Without another word or glance back, he walked out of the room.
“Do you think he will come back?” Mara asked with teary eyes as I sat down beside her again.
“No. I think that at some point, Quinn will come for me, and when he does, he will try to take you. But we’ll be ready, and I won’t let that happen.”
I could see that Mara was saddened by the loss of Quinn. Even though he remained alive and well, the man she had cared for was too lost within himself to exist anymore.
“Come on,” I said as I helped her get to her feet. “Let’s get you some food.”
***
Mara’s recovery had been fast, too fast. In a matter of hours, she looked as though she were right back to herself again. I didn’t know that much about how human bodies worked. But I was pretty sure that the rate of recovery was unusual, even with the help of Quinn’s shadow magic.
“I want to train,” she said to me after we had finished talking with some of the fae who still lingered hesitantly inside the castle walls.
They were fearful of going back to the forest and getting into a confrontation with the humans. Fae were extremely powerful and potent people, and it wasn’t the fear of fighting that caused them to pause; it was their reverence for the peace we had created and their desire to protect it that kept them from rushing into conflict with the disillusioned humans.
“Are you sure you’re feeling up to that?” I asked. “You nearly just escaped the clench of death. I think you should give your body a moment to rest.”
“I have given it a moment, and if Quinn intends to launch some sort of offensive against us, then I need to be prepared.”
“Quinn won’t hurt you,” I said.
At least that was the one consolation in all of this. He wasn’t like Athan when it came to Mara; he cared for her and wouldn’t harm her.
“No, but he will hurt you, and that is the same thing.”
Against my better judgment, I agreed to train with her in the courtyard. Bree came, too. She seemed more interested in watching Mara, though, than she did in actually preparing herself.
“Let’s just stick to the warm-ups for now,” I said. “Just to get your strength back and work on your form.”
Mara nodded, and we started our first match together. I started by taking it easy on her as we wrestled, but when she knocked me to the ground and beat me within seconds, I decided to go ahead and make it more challenging. After the third time that she had bested me, I began to wonder if Quinn’s shadow magic had given her some sort of residual buff, like an after-effect that would fade like coming down from a high.
“How are you feeling?” I asked just to make sure that she wasn’t pushing her body too far, too soon.
“Great,” she smiled. “Let’s go again.”
I wanted to try something to see just how much she could do against me without hurting her. As far as I knew, no human had ever been touched by shadow magic before, so this might have been an extremely unusual side effect. This time, as I went to reach for her waist to knock her off balance, I slid behind her instead, making her think that I was coming straight-on but fooling her at the last minute. In the second that it took for her to turn around, I grabbed her from behind and tried to pull her off her feet. When she turned around to look at me, her eyes were wide with surprise, and she fell toward me, knocking into my chest and sending us both falling backward.
I laid on my back against the ground with Mara straddled above me, which kind of defeated the point of me trying to be in an advantageous position. But when I laughed and reached up to kiss her, something pulled against my wrists and held them fast to the ground beside me. A moment later, I felt something wrap around my neck and start to choke my breathing. Mara looked horrified as she tried to pull away what had gotten hold of me. When she had finally managed to free my neck and a wrist, I sat up and pulled my other wrist free. I looked around me and saw what looked like roots that had pushed up through cracks in the ground had wrapped around my legs and ankles too.
“What the hell?” I muttered as I pulled myself free from all of the entangling roots and vines.
I stood up with Mara as we both looked down at the torn pile of roots on the ground. Wide cracks had opened up in the dirt to have allowed the roots to shove their way through. Even now that they had been pulled apart, some of the stretching, finer tendrils still wriggled against the dirt the way a worm in a dry heat would.
“Was that shadow magic?” I asked, looking over at Mara.
“I have no idea what that was,” she shrugged. “I didn’t do it. I was just wrestling with you, and all of a sudden, when you pulled me down, they came out of nowhere.”
“No,” Bree said as she walked toward us. “This was not shadow magic. These roots are from within the land. They are part of Mystreuce.”
“Why in the hell is my own world trying to attack me?” I asked.
“It wasn’t trying to attack you,” Bree answered. “It was trying to protect Mara.”
Mara looked as dumbfounded as I felt.
“Remember those powers Mystreuce granted her when she was appointed high consul?” Bree said. “I’d say they’ve awakened now.”
Thank You For Reading!
Thank you for reading book two in the Marked by Night Saga. It’s amazing that you were willing to even pick up my book when you don’t know me!
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About the Author
Sara Thorn writes dark paranormal romances filled with all her favorite supernaturals. Her series, Marked by Night, is planned for over 30 books. Sara loves all things “geeky fantasy” and spends her free time playing RPG’s and browsing the shelves of used bookstores.
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