Raven's Shade (Ravensblood Book 5)

by Shawna Reppert

  “No—wait—yes. There was a, gods, I don’t know how to describe it. A whump, something I felt more than heard. Like the start of an earthquake, only it was in the air, too. I might have thought it was thunder, only the sky was clear. It happened so quickly, I thought I might have imagined it. I’m not entirely certain that I didn’t imagine it.”

  “You didn’t mention this before,” Raven said, voice carefully neutral.

  “No one asked before. I guess they were too busy thinking I was a suspect that they didn’t bother to consider me as a witness.”

  “You could have brought it up on your own.”

  Morgan hunched his shoulders, drawing into himself, not meeting Raven’s eyes, suddenly looking much younger. The change in body language forcibly reminded Raven that Morgan was just a year or so out of General Academy.

  “Like I said, I thought maybe I imagined it. Mentioning some indescribable, unknown phenomenon that might or might not have happened isn’t likely to make anyone any more impressed with my truthfulness.”

  Which may or may not be a valid point, but Raven thought it had more to do with a young man’s fear of appearing foolish. Raven would like to believe he’d never been this idiotic, but he’d been around Morgan’s age when, largely out of spite, he’d sworn loyalty to the most powerful dark mage of their time.

  “Well, I came here explicitly to give you the benefit of the doubt, so tell me more.”

  “There isn’t any more to tell. Like I said, it came and went. Could have been all in my head.”

  Something had happened, of that Raven was almost certain, but to press harder was to risk having the boy dig in and convince himself that he had imagined the whole thing.

  “So you were looking for petroglyphs and potshards. Did you find any?”

  “Nah. Not so much as an arrowhead.”

  “How close did you get to Devil’s Boneyard?”

  Morgan paused to think. “Hard to say a distance. Everything out here is so wide open, and the butte’s so big. You think you’re closer to it than you really are.”

  “If you had to guess?” Raven prompted.

  “Maybe a half-mile? Maybe less?” Morgan didn’t seem to be deliberately prevaricating.

  “What time did you leave?” Raven asked.

  Morgan drummed his fingers as he thought. “The days are still pretty short, and I didn’t want to get stuck out there after dark, so I started back as soon as the light started getting that orangey-gold that means it’s almost sunset.”

  Clearly the boy spent more time out-of-doors than Raven ever had. “And that would have been?”

  “Five-thirty, maybe, when I turned around. Wait—I remember looking at the dashboard clock and thinking I wouldn’t have time to stop at the library on the way back.”

  “Why didn’t you just teleport?”

  Morgan’s look told him he had just been dismissed as an idiot. “I had the farm truck. Picked up a load of hay on the way out. Parked it in the barn to unload the next morning. You can check the invoices at the feed store, and I think one of the boarders saw me unloading the truck the next morning, if you don’t want to take my parents’ word.”

  “Did you hear anything else unusual while you were in the park?” Raven asked.

  “No.” Morgan’s answer was quick, off-the-cuff. He’d probably answered that question so many times that he answered now without thinking.

  Gods. He wanted Cassandra here. He’d even settle for Rafe. Raven knew an obscene amount about dark magic and nothing at all about conducting an interrogation. “All right. How about anything that seemed normal at the time, but in retrospect could have been something else?” He refused to examine the sentence too closely, in case it made even less sense on inspection.

  Morgan’s brow furrowed, as though he were pondering the question. Maybe he wasn’t doing too badly after all.

  “There was—I heard something like a rabbit scream, off in the distance. And then what sounded like coyotes yapping, so I figure they’d made a kill.” He shuddered. “They have a right to eat, same as anything else, and they help keep the balance since people killed off all the wolves, but the sound gets to me, and I grew up out here. Sounds like some weird spirit creature cackling.”

  “You’re sure it was a rabbit you heard scream?” Raven hadn’t even known rabbits could scream, but he wasn’t about to admit his ignorance.

  Morgan opened his mouth for an automatic reply, but remained silent, paling. “I assumed that’s what it was. I mean, I’ve heard it before. It’s the sort of thing that freaks out city slickers, because it does sound like someone’s killing a baby. You don’t think—?” The boy looked sick at the thought he may have heard Lansing’s death, so sick that Raven glanced around for the location of the nearest wastebasket.

  Whatever Morgan’s intention may or may not have been toward his classmate, Raven doubted him capable of the cold-blooded focus of will necessary for the type of spell that would cause a death as gruesome as Lansing’s had been.

  “It couldn’t have been,” Morgan whispered. And then, in a stronger voice, “It couldn’t have been. The scream was too high-pitched. It might have been mistaken for a woman, or a child—they always say a rabbit’s death shriek sounds like a screaming baby. Lansing was a grown man.”

  Raven left the boy to his comforting self-delusion. No need to tell him that the screams of a man dying in agony bore little resemblance to the pitch of the same man speaking, or even shouting in anger. Raven wished he could rid himself of that knowledge and the memories that it brought.

  Chapter Five

  After interviewing Morgan, Raven wanted to look at the scene. Craig introduced him to the deputy-Guardian who would act as a teleport anchor to the base of Devil’s Boneyard Butte. The deputy looked like he was fresh out of General Academy, although surely they didn’t hire them that young and inexperienced. Brad? Chad?—Raven had already forgotten the name—made a valiant attempt to hide his unease at the assignment, and succeeded at least in making it unclear whether the nervousness sprang from Raven’s past as a dark mage or his current celebrity as one of the best-known consultants of Guardian International Investigations.

  Whichever it was, the young man gamely allowed Raven to anchor to him. Raven followed the connection through the ether until he faded back into being at a flat spot about a quarter-mile down the trail from where the recently-discovered cave opening gaped like the dark mouth of hell. Cassandra’s voice spoke from his memory—Raven, behave. He gamely resisted the temptation to deliberately loom over the deputy just to watch the reaction. It had been a couple years, at least, since he terrorized junior members of law enforcement just because he could. Hadn’t even wanted to, for the most part. He was just ill at ease because he was out of his element; he refused to take it out on what was probably a perfectly nice young man.

  “The boss said that I should wait here for you,” Chad—yes, it was definitely Chad, he remembered now—said. “Any closer is rated for master mages only—they’re being that cautious, even though the signature must be largely faded now. And, of course, they’re keeping the civilians out.”

  Raven didn’t bother to point out that he was a civilian. Although, he supposed, only in the most technical sense. The GII director had snuck up on him, damn her. Cassandra had probably seen it all happening and hadn’t warned him. Shaking his head, he took off his black suit jacket, folded it, and gave it to Chad for safe-keeping. He’d heard that it could be hot out on the high desert, but hadn’t paid the warnings as much attention as he might have. He rolled up his sleeves and started up the trail to the cave.

  It didn’t take long before a niggling sense of wrongness settled over him. Raven had more experience with dark magic than almost anyone now living, and yet this felt different from anything he’d ever known. The closest thing he could compare it to was the aftermath of a dark magic ritual, but this was less concentrated and yet more pervasive. Josiah, his Mundane bookseller friend and chess partner, had once
tried to explain the concepts of antimatter and dark matter. At the time it had seem nonsensical, but this, what he sensed, it felt like anti-life. Not death, no. Death was a natural part of life. What he sensed was a hint of something antithetical to life, as though it and life could not exist in the same space.

  He strengthened his shield and continued to the mouth of the cave, the wrongness weighing more heavily the closer he got to the cave. And yet he knew somehow that what he sensed was still the echo of the thing, not the thing itself.

  With magic, what you didn’t know could very definitely hurt you. Could kill you. He moved slowly, carefully, reaching out with his magic to look for traps, to look for an ambush. The high desert was still, so still that he could hear his own pulse like thunder in his ears. The gravel on the path crunched beneath his feet. Was it always this quiet? He’d thought the Craft lands up on Chehalem Mountain near-silent, but there had been the rustle of small animals in the underbrush, the chittering of birds and the occasional buzz of insects, the high-pitched call of a hawk announcing its territory.

  He startled at the blur of movement as something yellow-brown and rodent-sized darted from behind a rock of the same color. It was across the path and down a hole almost before he registered its form in his mind. Prairie dog? Did they have those in Oregon? It seemed too small to be a groundhog, or at least it was smaller than that improbably-named creature they dragged out every year in Pennsylvania in a superstitious bid to predict how late Spring would be in arriving. Nothing dangerous, at least. It had probably been frozen, camouflaged by its surroundings, until his approach broke its nerve and it bolted for a more secure sanctuary.

  Perhaps the other creatures in this dry, spare place were just wary as well, not emboldened as forest-dwellers might be by the more abundant cover provided by the woodlands. It was a more comforting hypothesis than the possibility that most of the wildlife had been driven off by the oppressive feel of darkness that grew with every step.

  Could this be a residue of whatever magic that killed the developer? It would have had to have been a powerful working, indeed, for its aftermath to be spread so wide and linger so long. A more powerful working than he could imagine coming from a young man barely out of boyhood.

  There were places in the world known for their dark power. Usually it was a remnant of large and horrific events that had repeated over and over again. Sometimes the energy was so strong that even Mundanes sensed it, and named the place haunted or cursed.

  This place was called Devil’s Boneyard, for reasons no one had ever satisfactorily explained, though there were conflicting folk tales about fossils being found or notorious bandits being run to ground. The research Raven had done prior to the trip turned up neither significant fossil finds nor any record of desperados meeting violent death in the locale. Several sources claimed that Devil’s Boneyard was an almost literal translation of the indigenous name for the place. For all he knew, the place carried a bad reputation back to Neolithic times. Hard to believe of a place that had become a popular destination for weekend rock-climbers.

  No. Even the most magic-blind of Mundanes could surely sense the dark power that rolled off this place like fog off of dry ice in a production of Macbeth. Whatever was going on here must be a relatively new development.

  He reached the mouth of the cave, which was barely high enough for him to enter without stooping and narrow enough that if he reached out to either side his fingertips would brush the black volcanic rock on each side. The place reeked of a dark power wholly unfamiliar to him, and he realized that he was afraid.

  Fear, personal fear for himself, was not something he was used to. He knew the wariness-mixed-with-adrenaline of magical combat, yes. And the last years had taught him the helpless, desperate fear that his wife and his child were in danger and he might not be enough to save them. He had faced death and, though he did not want to die, the prospect had not brought this gut-sick, heart-pounding terror that threatened to rob his will. Not even William had triggered this level of fear in him, and Raven had been afraid of his late master in a way that he had feared no one since his father had been killed when he was a child.

  The early years of his childhood and then, later, his time serving William, had molded him (some might say warped him) in such a way that he did not have the instinctual fear-response that most people sensitive to magic felt in the presence of dark power. But this was something different, something alien.

  If Morgan had been responsible for this, it went far beyond any training the young man had, beyond anything he could have found in any book he would have access to. That would make Morgan the most powerful wild talent ever to live. And though the wild magic that erupted sometimes at adolescence was a thing so different from trained magic that people once blamed it on ghosts and demons instead of realizing its true source, still Raven could not imagine that the boy could be that powerful without him sensing something.

  He had come to investigate the cave. He would not let his mind take him wandering down paths meant to distract himself from that goal. He had trained his will to the practice of his Art; it was stronger than his subconscious, no matter how wily the latter might be.

  He took a few deep breaths, grounding himself, and moved forward, deeper into the cave. When he had left much of the daylight behind, he pulled from his coat pocket the crystal sphere he’d charmed to act as a portable light globe. Was it his imagination, or was the radiance of the globe dimmer than usual?

  His hand slipped to his waistcoat, where the Ravensblood once would have been. The artefact had saved his life more than once, but it was no more. Its creation had cost the life of his apprentice, and he would not pay that price ever again.

  The cave didn’t smell like he had expected. But then the caves of his imagination were damp things full of dripping stalactites. This cave was dry, with a flat, dusty smell almost, but not quite like that of a library. It reminded him of old, powdery wood and cold granite, with a hint of something almost—garlicky? Oh, of course. Naturally occurring arsenide compounds.

  A little further in, he saw the first of the petroglyphs. It was vaguely anthropomorphic, with stick-figure arms and legs. Its oval body had two rows of downward slashes that could have been meant to represent ribs, wounds, or body paint. The head was a triangle, the mouth gaping open to reveal large, sharp teeth. The eyes were spirals set in circles. In each hand it held—a stick? No, a spear, to go by the inverted v shape at the top of each one. The power emanating from it took his breath away. Fear shivered down his spine, and he took a step back.

  It took a few breaths to center himself and realize that this was not the source of the dark power that filled the cave. Whatever this was, it was strong, dangerous in its own way, but not inherently evil. The little bit he’d found in the files said that the archeologists called in by law to assess the site had said that the petroglyphs were old, older than Stonehenge or Newgrange, old enough to have passed from the knowledge of the tribes that lived here when the Mariner first landed. And yet the power had not faded.

  The tribes spoke of the petroglyphs as though they were living things with wills of their own. Raven had thought it just a metaphor, a way of translating what these images meant to those not raised in their culture. Now he knew that these things were real in a way he could not articulate, born of power outside of his understanding.

  A memory came to him, another cave with strange beings painted on the walls.

  “What did you do to me?” Raven had asked Bran Tarrant in that faraway cave in Australia.

  “Sent you on a shaman’s journey. I knew you’d either come back a new person, and healed, or die on the journey. You were dying anyway, so it seemed worth the risk.”

  Raven shook his head at the enormity the gamble Tarrant had taken, the audacity of what had been forced upon him. “So this is what you do to people someone brings you to heal? Make a shaman of them?

  Tarrant only laughed at his outrage. “Never before. And probably never again.
For one, most people don’t have what it takes to survive the journey. For another, I only did it because I saw that this is what you needed, the reason you came to Australia.”

  “I came to Australia because a group of people who insisted they knew more than me thought it was the best way to avoid arrest.”

  “Of course, that was the reason. And it wasn’t. Things happen for more than one reason, you know.”

  This was why, for all his respect for Mother Crone, he tended not to spend much time with Craft people. Too much exposure gave him a headache.

  “You don’t have to worry about being a shaman, you know,” Tarrant said. “You aren’t. Well, you are, but not really. Being a shaman is about being true to your deepest self, and you, my friend, are a mage straight to the core. You just had a deeper need than most mages to come to terms with all of who and what you are, and this seemed like the way to do it. Maybe not the best way, but the only way I could come up with.”

  Raven had trained in Art where learning was vital and trusting to pure, uncontrolled instinct could lead one to a horrible death. But this petroglyph was something older and more powerful than his Art. Raven touched the pendant he always wore around his neck, a silver raven with a red stone in its beak, a gift from Bran Tarrant.

  He closed his eyes and trusted in a power he had only tapped once and scarcely believed he had, trusting in Tarrant’s words where he did not trust his own training. He, who had only knelt before to William his master, knelt now before this strange and eerie image. I know my ancestors stole this land from the people who you protected. I know I am likely trespassing on sacred ground where I have no right to be. But if you are, indeed, sentient, you surely must feel the darkness gathering. I seek only leave to investigate that darkness, to stem the tide before there is more death.

  Both the gesture and the words came out of some deep well within him that he’d had no awareness of until this moment. He sensed a—softening? Easing? A wordless permission to continue.