Raven's Shade (Ravensblood Book 5)

by Shawna Reppert

  Gods, they were going to lose. And then there would be nothing between this darkness and the people that Raven loved. This world that he loved. How far would the darkness extend in its devouring rampage? Would there be anything of humanity left?

  He felt another presence behind him and a little to the side. Had the darkness made it through the weaving? Was the struggle lost? But no, he felt no darkness in his presence. And yet, something about this presence felt familiar.

  Morgan?

  Oh, gods, no! Morgan had promised, Winter had promised. They had lied to him.

  Not a lie came the combined thoughts of Winter and Morgan. We promised you that Morgan would wait someplace safe and he did.

  I waited until it was clear you will not win without the extra help, came Morgan's thoughts, twining through the magic.

  You lied! Your life, your survival was to be the last balm to my conscience, my last gift to this world.

  And yet how long would the boy survive if the shadow wins? Winter thought at him. Your conscience still has its prize. You did not allow Morgan to come. Morgan came himself against your wishes. Already she was weaving Morgan's strength into the spell. The weaving turned a warmer color, a pale gold like the first rays of sunrise, like wheat beneath the summer sun. Morgan’s strength helped the weaving grew strong again. The tears mended, the woven wall grew thicker and taller and wider.

  Then the darkness came back at them, came like a gust of wind, like a gale-force blast. The voices in that wind howled like the souls of the damned. Not just Raven's crimes now, but the crimes of every Ravenscroft that had ever cast dark magic. It wasn’t real; the darkness was playing with his memories, his guilt. It was using himself against himself as it had done with Heilman. The wailing terror and rage built until it became a reminder of every death, every scrap of pain caused by humanity through the eons across the world. And more, adding all of the death and terror that had occurred even before human ancestors began to walk upright. Every death, a cacophony of suffering.

  This was all that would remain of the world if the darkness were not stopped. They had done everything that they could, given every scrap of strength.

  There is one thing left. The voice in his head was one he had never heard before, and yet he knew it. The raven on the cave wall. Images flashed through his head, too fast for words.

  Morgan had seen/heard it, too. Raven felt it in the connection of their magic a half-second too late. Raven was exhausted, and Morgan had the reflexes of the very young. Morgan pulled out the blade that every farm boy carried.

  In that moment, Raven’s mind threw him back to Zack and death magic and the cells beneath William’s sanctuary.

  But Morgan slashed the knife across his palm rather than driving it into his heart. His blood spilled onto the earth. Earth and blood called out to the raven on the cave wall, joining its power to the theirs. Morgan shoved his life force out in a flash of gold streaked with blood red, creating a sloppy patch that tied directly to the protections put in place originally by the petroglyphs. Blood magic. Dark magic.

  Winter had talked about the power of mirror images, of the thing and its shadow. The wall had been woven of light and life. Death was part of life, and dark magic had touched Morgan once before, and now he had given that part of himself up to the weaving.

  But Morgan had given too much. There was no way the boy could survive the loss of that much energy; he had not the strength that came with years of working.

  Winter took the patch and without hesitation worked it into the greater weaving. Stretched and twined it until it ran like a gleaming-bright ribbon through the subtler work. The wail of the darkness raised in volume and pitch, until he felt that the shriek would drive him mad.

  The weaving, the weaving had to hold. He could not let Morgan’s sacrifice be in vain. Winter was working faster now, trying to finish the weaving before the darkness could push through again. She wasn’t going to make it.

  Raven remembered the cave in Australia, remembered what Bran Tarrant had tried to teach him about not rejecting his heritage entirely. Remembered a spell in the Ravenscroft journal he had never thought that he would use. He snatched up the knife that Morgan had dropped and drew the blade across the old scar on his wrist, letting his blood spill over Morgan’s. Murmuring the words to call on the strength of his own ancestors, a thread of black to run through the weaving.

  And the darkness disappeared. Raven gasped in the suddenly clear air like a drowning man breaking the water’s surface.

  Raven crumpled to the hard earth, unable to even keep to his knees. Uncontrollable tremors ran through his muscles, and he could hear his own pulse pounding in his ears, unsteady and too fast. Sweat soaked his clothes, and he closed his eyes against the spinning of the world around him. The surface he lay on seemed to rise and dip though his mind told him he lay on solid ground.

  Morgan. The thought made him grab hold of his slipping consciousness, made him force his eyes open, raise his heavy head enough to look around.

  Morgan lay still on the ground, unmoving, his coppery-tan complexion gone a grayish-pale. No. Gods, no.

  Fear for the boy impelled him to hands and knees, and Raven crawled the few feet to the inert form. He felt for a pulse. Nothing. No, please, no.

  And then, there, so weak he might have imagined it against his fingers. A pause, then another weak beat.

  Raven looked over his shoulder to Winter, who sat cross-legged on the ground, shoulders slumped, head drooping. She seemed almost translucent around the edges. Was that an effect of his own fading strength?

  “You’re a Healer. Save him!”

  “He is beyond my help.” Winter said in a raspy whisper that sounded too far away. “He is beyond our help.”

  “No. I can’t accept that!” Not another young person dead from Raven’s failures.

  “He has linked himself to the petroglyphs,” Winter said gravely. “The darkness has been driven away, but the raven on the wall must still be healed in order for the world to be safe. It will pull from his life force to heal itself. We can only pray that it will be enough.”

  “What? Why is it not taking from me, then? I also spilled my blood.”

  “Yes, but your blood is not tied to the land, to the petroglyphs,” Winter said, voice calm and gentle in the face of his panicked rage.

  Winter had said something about Morgan having been descended from Blue Deer, who fashioned the petroglyphs which Winter had brought fully into being.

  “You brought him here to be sacrificed.” And Raven had helped. In his own way, unknowing, Raven had helped. “You are no better than any dark mage.”

  “Your divisions and your morals are not mine. If you choose to judge me such, then so be it. Morgan came here willingly, gave himself willingly, even as you were willing to lay down your own life in the fight. He was not coerced, as your Daniel was coerced.”

  Her tone said her words had not been meant as an attack, and yet he flinched under them. “So we should, what? Just sit here and watch him die slowly, and you don’t even know for certain if it will work? There has to be some other way.”

  “I already gave my earthly life force to stop the darkness the first time it came,” Winter said. “Remember that I am not truly alive in the same sense that you are.”

  “There has to be some other way. You said my blood will not do, because I am not related—”

  “There is one other way. In some ways our magics are not so different. The technique that you taught your apprentice Daniel to charge the Ravensblood would work as well to charge the raven petroglyph and seal the rift once more. It would be a more certain way of repairing the crack that allowed the darkness to come through and the raven would no longer draw from Morgan to heal itself. If you are in time, Morgan may yet live.”

  He no longer even bothered to wonder how this returned spirit of a shaman knew about the man who had been Raven’s apprentice back when Raven was a dark mage. Daniel had died charging the Ravensblood. Ra
ven was stronger in magic than Daniel, but he had also exhausted the last of his reserves.

  “If I do this, I will die as you did,” Raven said. “As Daniel did.” He would never see Cassandra again. They had thought they had all the time in the world to be together.

  “I cannot say for certain,” Winter said. “Our situations do not exactly parallel. The petroglyph only needs to be healed this time, not brought into being. And yet I was not as exhausted as you are now when I worked the magic. You might survive still.”

  “But it is not likely.”

  “No.”

  Another thought came to him then, one that scared him worse than death. “If I replicate the method used to charge the Ravensblood, even if I do not die, I will have burned out my magic. I will be functionally a Mundane.”

  “Nothing is certain,” Winter said.

  But most likely, yes. His thoughts finished what he did not say. It would be dark magic, as all death magic was, even if the ritual was an act of self-sacrifice. That was nothing he could worry about now. Cassandra would understand. If it mattered to anyone else, they could prosecute his damned corpse.

  “You knew it would come to this,” Raven accused Winter. “And yet you said nothing.”

  “I knew it might. Would it have changed any of your decisions had you known earlier?”

  He had come already knowing he might well die battling the darkness, and he had been prepared to pay that cost. But to deliberately give his own life in an act of sacrificial magic. . .worse, to risk living a half-life without the magic that defined him. . .He’d like to say that in the end he’d have made the same choices. But he could not swear to it.

  At best, it would have been a distraction he could not afford when he had needed all his focus on fighting the darkness.

  He hated that Winter was right.

  Would there never be an end to the payment owed for his past? But even as he finished the thought, he knew the task he faced had nothing to do with what he did and did not deserve. What mattered was that it had to be done, and he was the only one who could do it.

  There was no other choice now, not really. He could not let Morgan die, even if it were certain that Morgan’s sacrifice was enough to seal the rift. He did not want to leave Cassandra, leave their son, but he would not be the man that Cassandra had married if he could let another die in his stead.

  “I will need to be in physical proximity with the petroglyph to make this work.”

  “Go, then.” Winter said. “I will stay with Morgan. I will feel when the petroglyph has been charged, and I will make sure that the connection separates cleanly so that he can recover without complication.”

  They were not very far from the cave, but he’d barely made it a few feet to Morgan. A thousand feet might as well be a thousand miles. He made it to his hands and knees. Tried to stand, failed, and fell. And so he crawled forward, cramping muscles screaming at every movement. The jagged rocks bruised his knees and tore at the skin of his hands as he dragged himself forward. Spikes of pain at least kept him conscious as the sun beat down, baking his fevered skin. Now and then a strong spasm ripped through his body, freezing him in place and stealing his breath.

  Though magic was a thing of will and spirit, the will and spirit were housed in the body, and one could not abuse one’s endurance as he had without physical repercussions. By all rights his mind should not have let him push himself to this extreme, and the tunnel vision that shadowed the edge of his sight told him that he still might faint.

  No. He could not allow himself that luxury. Too much depended on this last push. When he no longer could keep to his hands and knees he crept on his belly until he gathered enough strength to push up again.

  He couldn’t say how long the journey took. The sun was not moving in the sky. It felt like eternity, like if he somehow made it back home everything would be changed, as though he were Thomas Rhymer returning from fairyland. He pushed the thought from his mind. He didn’t think he’d be making it home. He’d have to make his peace with that.

  He reached the mouth of the cave. Crawled further, reached the spear-carrying warrior and collapsed, panting. The cave floor was cold and it leached the heat from his body. He felt nauseous, and he shivered so hard it hurt. Spots swam before his eyes, and he felt momentarily disoriented, as though he were about to fall even though he already lay on the ground.

  Shock, he registered distantly, as though the diagnosis was for someone who had nothing to do with him. Shock from the temperature difference and. . .and. . .

  He was losing focus, and fought to pull his mind together. He was too close to give up now, but his limbs had become too heavy to move and his head ached as though someone had driven an iron spike through it and he could not move.

  Despair crept over him. Strength of will had its limits, even for the most determined. At some point, the body reached the end of its endurance and failed. He couldn’t even crawl. How was he supposed to channel magic?

  Almost without volition his hand closed around the silver raven Bran Tarrant had given him. Remembering another cave in which he had nearly died. Only this time there was no dark-skinned, blue-eyed enigma to force-feed him questionable potions.

  But then he could feel a warmth, a tingling, as though magic not his own swirled around him. Disconcerting to face unknown magic when he lacked strength to defend if needed, but nothing about this felt dark. It felt like soft desert wind and sun-warmed sand-stone, sounded in his head like a distant, half-heard chant. Something about it tickled his memory. Tarrant? No, that just popped into his head because he had been thinking of the man. It was almost like the signature he’d felt from the warrior petroglyph, yet simultaneously more powerful and less focused. It was as though the earth itself had absorbed the energies of a shamanic people long gone and radiated it back now that it was needed most.

  He lay for a few more moments, soaking up power as a rock soaks up heat from the sun. Then he dragged himself to his feet and staggered forward, one hand finding support from the cool, smooth wall of the cave. When the way was no longer lit from the sun outside, he continued on in darkness, not wanting to spare even the tiny flicker of will it would cost him to waken a light globe.

  It seemed like a lifetime later before he reached the place where the cracked raven was illuminated by the light that filtered through the hole in the cave ceiling. He knelt before it, palms against the stone. His heart beat slower now, still irregular. A tremor ran through his body as he centered himself, preparing the ritual words in his mind. The words that would act as a focus as he gave the last of himself to the carved bird on the wall.

  He didn’t feel ready to die. Did anyone feel ready to die, when the end came? Would he rather live on without his magic?

  He was glad that the choice ultimately was not his.

  Was this how Daniel had felt, that horrible night when his apprentice had charged the Ravensblood? Daniel, I’m so sorry.

  Raven forced his ragged breaths to steady, just for a moment, just long enough that he could still his mind.

  You are not alone. We are with you to the end and beyond.

  Winter? But Winter was with Morgan.

  The petroglyphs themselves.

  Calmness came over him, peace came over him. His sluggish magic surged one last time, he shaped it with words and will and gave it over to the raven on the wall.

  A distant rumble started, then grew louder. Thunder? No, it was the rocks of the wall moving, healing the crack in the raven, sealing the place in the ceiling of the cave where it had broken open. Dust drifted down over him, then pebbles and small rocks. Would the cave collapse on him? Cassandra would be sad if they were unable to recover his body.

  He was tired, too tired to worry about it. There was nothing but darkness now, but it was the honest darkness of the cave, cool and comforting. It was a good place to sleep at last.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Disjointed moments passed through his awareness. Were they dreams? Did t
he dead dream?

  Cassandra's voice talking right beside him. But wasn't she in Portland? It had to be a dream. Unless more time had passed that he realized? Other voices that he recognized. Ana. Mother Crone. Even Rafe once. Was this that thing they talked about where your life passed before your eyes? He’d expected it to happen a lot quicker. But maybe the afterlife was akin to the ceremonial time of trance and minutes, days and hours passed by, backwards, forwards and around. Faster, slower, faster again, and things came and went in ways that made no sense in the real world.

  He heard many voices chanting in a language he did not know. Apparently whatever automatic translation that had happened before had gone. He regretted its loss.

  At one point, he opened his eyes to glaring white walls and bright light. If this was the afterlife that he was never to too terribly sure about, he didn't think he wanted to spend an eternity here. Maybe the chanting would come back if he closed his eyes? He slipped back into the welcoming darkness before he could manage any further thoughts.

  The next time he surfaced, he was awake long enough to hear the muted PA system calling staff to various rooms using medical abbreviations that were their own secret code. So. He was alive, and he was in the hospital. Too tired to formulate an opinion on either of these facts, he slipped away back into sleep.

  When he woke again, still alone in the white room, it was to dimmed lights and the steady quiet of the hospital at night that he was all too familiar with from his previous visits. Absolute peaceful silence, broken only by the occasional squeaking of the nurses’ rubber soled shoes, loud only by the contrast. His whole body ached as though he had hiked the entire butte and then fallen off the top. Twice.

  Cautiously, he reached for his magic. He wasn’t strong enough to do anything with it just now, but he needed to feel it, to know it was still there even if he was not strong enough to wield it. This wasn’t the first time he’d driven himself to the state of exhaustion, not even the first time he’d pushed to the point of risking his life. When he’d woken on those occasions, his magic had been weak, trickling through him like water sinking through sand, but it was there.