Court of Dreams (Institute of the Shadow Fae Book 4)

by C. N. Crawford

  My dad kicked his horse, galloping from the church, and the sound of clopping hooves echoed off the stone walls.

  The breath left my lungs.

  Ruadan. I didn’t have any other plan right now except getting to Ruadan and keeping him safe. His disguise would wear off soon. Everything else would have to wait.

  I charged into the churchyard after my father, then shadow-leapt backward on the route I’d mapped earlier.

  There, in the center of Smithfield, was the god Nyxobas. Or at least, Ruadan disguised as Nyxobas. His body seemed to suck up light like a black hole, and the world darkened around him. Only his silver eyes gleamed from the vortex of magic. I leapt into the pool of shadows surrounding Ruadan, taking cover in the billowing darkness.

  I tried not to look up at him, worried I’d lose my mind if I did. Instead, I closed my eyes and touched his cheek. “I found my dad, but the seal of death has been opened. He’s cursed. I need you to leave here now—”

  His hand was on the small of my back, pulling me into the vortex of darkness. I was dizzy again, overcome by the feeling that I’d imagined it all. I forced myself to focus on the high heels.

  “I’m not leaving you with Baleros,” he said. “We fight him together.”

  “He’s not here. I’ll try to deal with my father. But you need to—”

  The smell of roses made my stomach twist, and I whirled around to see Baleros. His body trembled, but he was approaching the god all the same. He wore his usual clothing—the baggy wool getup of a Victorian showman.

  “God of night.” His dark eyes twinkled. “When my Angel of Death slaughters half the city, I will be sure to dedicate the souls to you, Nyxobas.” He bowed with a strange flourish.

  A surge of wild protectiveness shot through me like flame. I stepped out of Nyxobas’s shadows. Baleros wanted to use my father to kill—and he’d be sure to count Ruadan among the dead.

  There was no running from the Angel of Death if Baleros had him as an ally. One way or another, we had to end this now.

  A ferocious fire burned in my heart, and my will to protect Ruadan hardened like volcanic rock. Dark magic flitted down my shoulder blades, sharp and smooth as a knife’s edge. My wings burst out of me.

  “Liora,” Ruadan said from behind me. The shadows around him disappeared. He’d dropped the guise of Nyxobas.

  Now there was nothing between Baleros and him but me.

  I had no whiskey, now, to quell my most savage thoughts, but Ruadan’s serene magic brushed over my skin. I simply had no other options. I had to end this.

  She had the name of Death, and Hell followed her.

  My gaze flicked to the skies. My father was circling above, midnight wings resplendent as clouds gathered beyond him. I felt an overwhelming longing to follow him up there, to unleash destruction over the city.

  My fingers twitched.

  Baleros’s eyes widened at the sight of me. A vision burst in my mind—the tip of my blade carving a horizontal slash across his chest, a vibrant splash of crimson, then a downward slash.

  Then, the burst of flame that would revive him again.

  “What did you do to my father?” I growled.

  Baleros stared at me. “He’s simply doing what he was born to do. The gods gave us all roles, didn’t they? The monsters of death, the breakers of hearts.”

  “And what are you?” I asked.

  “Me? I’m just here to put on a good show.”

  I drew my sword, desperate to slice him.

  Kill by sword, famine, and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.

  My death magic was ready to shoot from my ribs like hundreds of praying mantises bursting from an egg.

  Woe to the people who dwell on this earth.

  My father—cursed—swooped beneath the darkening skies overhead. Baleros was so close to getting what he wanted, but I’d never seen him looking so unsure before.

  How do you threaten a man who revives himself? “Where’s my mother?” I asked.

  Baleros shrugged. “Your mother, your entire village from Eden. I have them all. As long as you step away from the fomoire you’re shielding, I’ll return them all to you. Completely safe.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, attempting to look composed, but I could see the sweat beading on his forehead. “And you’ll have your father back, too. All I need is the World Key.”

  I tightened my grip on the hilt of my sword. “You’re not getting Ruadan. I don’t care how many times I have to kill you. I’m prepared to kill you over and over in increasingly creative ways, until the end of time. In fact, I’ve been looking for a hobby.”

  Ruadan stepped out from behind me, his sword glinting in the sunlight. “This sounds like leisure time we could both enjoy.”

  Baleros looked up at the skies again, eyes locking on my father, and nausea rose in my gut.

  The beast climbs from a bottomless pit.

  Baleros’s dark eyes glistened. “Then you’ve made your choice. And of course you choose death. You’re a monster, just like him.” A mocking half-smile. Then, a subtle gesture—just a flick of his eyes up to the death god above. “I never should have let you out of—”

  Ruadan lunged forward, driving his sword into Baleros’s chest, ripping his body apart with brutally efficient violence.

  I tore my gaze from Baleros’s shattered body to look at my father. Had Baleros signaled to him?

  The necklace—the red flowers around my father’s neck—glowed with magic.

  Trumpets blared, and darkness spilled out from his body.

  Chapter 32

  A star named Wormwood fell from the sky, poisoning the rivers. Hail, fire, and blood rain down on the earth, and the mountains crumble into the sea.

  My toes curl with ecstasy and sulfur blasts from my mouth.

  The explosion of death magic that hit me was a disturbingly pleasurable rush, perfect power trembling through my bones. Sulfur, blood, and ash clouded the air around me, and an overpowering scent of myrrh. Then, the smell of charring of flesh.

  When the magic departed my blood, I was left with the taste of dust in my mouth, my limbs shaking with euphoria.

  Even before the air cleared, I could feel it around me—the absence of life, the stillness of the hearts and blood. Leaves withering on their branches, grass wilting to a dry gray.

  And most of all, grave silence.

  Death reigned.

  A small fire burned before me—the charred remains of Baleros’s body. He’d rise again, a repulsive, corrupted phoenix from the ashes. No one else would.

  I didn’t want to look to my left. Ruadan lay there, his heart no longer beating. I already felt his death—the absence of his magic in the air suffocated me. It was like someone had sucked the oxygen from the world. I felt like my soul had died with him.

  My whole body had gone cold, fingers twitching.

  I glanced up at the skies, where my father carved a vicious arc above London, feathers gleaming.

  Then, slowly, I forced myself to turn my head.

  Ruadan’s perfect body lay curled like a child sleeping, his skin gray, chest no longer moving. His sword had fallen from his hand, glistening with gore. His pale hair hung in his face, and a cluster of wilted dandelions lay by one of his hands.

  The sight of him broke me, and a strange quiet overtook my mind, silent and still as the dead lying around me. I wanted to lie down with them, and my body no longer wanted to move.

  Nothing could kill my dad except my mum. I didn’t really understand it except that she had some kind of magic from the Old Gods.

  That meant I did, too. Right?

  The angel—the creature once my father—circled overhead like a bird of prey. He wasn’t my father now. He was the Horseman of Death.

  I pulled a bow off one of the demons, and I ripped his quiver off him. I plucked an arrow out. The iron stung my fingers, but I pierced the tip of my finger with the arrowhead anyway. I’d poison it with my blood.

  Then, I nocked the arrow,
training the tip right on my father’s heart.

  Pure, heavy silence in my skull, dark as the clouds of ash above me. Only then did my hands stop shaking.

  I loosed the arrow, and it shot through the air, finding its mark in his chest.

  One shot, and the arrow tip—coated in my blood—pierced his heart. The shot jolted him, and his wings seemed to carry him for a few moments. Then, he spiraled down to earth. A sharp chasm of grief split my chest, but my mind was too quiet to make sense of it. Something had broken in me; I’d moved into a place without language or meaning. Now, only instinct drove me.

  I surveyed the ground around me, and a glint of metal on one of the demons’ bodies caught my eye. I crossed to him, and I plucked a knife off his body. Then, from another fallen demon, I pulled an iron mace. Its heaviness felt perfect in my grip. That was what I needed for what would come next.

  I scanned the ashy air around me.

  Now, I needed the scent of roses.

  Baleros was coming back, and he wouldn’t stray far from the World Key. Some fierce, animal part of me wanted to protect Ruadan’s body with all the fight I had left.

  I sniffed the air, mentally sifting past the scents of myrrh, sulfur, blood, and decay. After a few moments, I found what I was searching for. The sickly-sweet rose petal scent among all the death.

  The church again.

  My powerful, black wings beat the air, carrying me toward the medieval church. The sooty wind tore at my hair as I flew, and it stung my eyes. But within moments, I was at the church doors.

  I gripped the hilt of the knife as I crossed into the church. In the nave—where, just minutes before, I’d seen the Horseman of Death—I now found Baleros brushing ash off his clothes.

  His head snapped up as I stalked toward him.

  Vaguely, my brain recognized the look of terror on Baleros’s face and that he’d gone pale as milk.

  Only a heartbeat until I was before him.

  First, I had to break his bones. That’s where the mace came in. Crouching, I swung it into his knees—the right one, the left. I vaguely registered his screams, that he was falling to the stone. I whirled, smashing into his ribs. I crushed his arms next.

  Baleros was the one who’d taught me to use a mace—the brutal and precise swings, the blunt force.

  When he lay crumpled and broken, bleeding onto the flagstones, I pulled out the knife. As if from a distance, I heard myself say, “You made me think I was a monster. But there’s a difference between being a monster and a survivor. And that’s what I am—a survivor.”

  Until now, I’d never really escaped that dirt cage—not completely. Because the rusted bars and crushing sense of worthlessness had lived on in my mind. All Baleros’s lessons—the laws of power, my true nature—had lived in me. I’d carried the one central truth he’d imparted to me—that I was a monster. I’d never freed myself from that prison.

  I’d always known that I’d never rid my mind of his voice until his heart stopped forever. And that was why he had to die.

  The thing about Baleros was that he kept coming back. But the thing about the gods was they wanted nothing more than the souls that were due to them.

  Whatever Baleros was screaming at me, I tuned it out. I’d broken most of his bones, and he wasn’t going anywhere as I carved the symbol in his chest—the sigil of Nyxobas. Three pointed arrows, the moon, and a circle. Blood streamed down his chest.

  When I’d finished making the mark of Nyxobas, I straddled him at the waist. I brought the knife down hard, sliding it just under his ribs to stop his heart.

  A flicker of euphoria in my own chest. Then, I leapt off his carcass.

  I stared as a white light bloomed from his body like smoke—his soul leaving his corpse.

  I took a few more steps back as the gods appeared.

  To my left, Emerazel’s charcoal body appeared in the church in a blaze of flames, her skin cracked with fissures of lava. And to the right, the vortex of starry shadows, the icy eyes of the night god. Two ancient enemies, one miserable little soul.

  The gods hardly noticed me, this angel of death in their midst. I took another step back and stared as the two gods grasped for Baleros’s soul, greedy as children fighting over a piece of cake.

  They ripped his worthless soul in two, tearing it down the middle like an old rag. My old gladiator master, forever shredded, never again to be whole.

  I kept the knife from Baleros’s chest, my own little macabre trophy, and I rolled it between my fingers. The weight of Baleros’s lessons evaporated off my body like a lifted curse.

  The smell of rot filled the air, and I frowned. More death—here in the church?

  I traced my fingertips over the stone walls as I followed the scent of death out of the church, the smell drawing me like a candle flame draws a moth.

  I stalked out of the church, an angel of death covered in the blood of her old master. I crossed under the vaulted arches to the cloisters. I pushed through the door, and the scent of death hit me like a fist.

  That’s where I found them—the inhabitants of Eden. They lay in piles on the cloister floor, iron chains around their bodies.

  It took me a few moments to find my mother’s vibrant red hair, covering her purpled face. Her body was hunched over on the stones. All this was Baleros’s work. His masterpiece—his greatest show.

  Too bad there was no one left to watch it.

  Still, that eerie silence in my skull, quiet as a pile of bones….

  I still held tight to that knife, slick with Baleros’s blood.

  With my wings cascading behind me, I crossed out of the church. Out here, the ashen landscape of death mirrored my state of mind. I wanted to join the dead.

  That’s when the grief slammed into me, a knife-sharp split in my chest, the pain so intense I could hardly think. It was like my heart had been hewn from my chest. My ribs had turned to iron spikes. My body was punishing me for continuing to breathe while Ruadan didn’t. Ruadan’s secrets would die along with him. His childhood in Emain, the memories of his brothers—all dead with him.

  With that acrid burst of death magic from my father, I had no doubt that the knights of the Tower were lying dead now, too. Bodies rotting in their cowls.

  London was a mass grave.

  My own death magic was ready to burst out of me and rain all over the earth, just as my father’s had done—

  It took a few moments for the words to come back into my mind so I could understand things again. Red hair, my mother’s slumped body. This was the second time I’d seen my mother dead—both times from the Plague. That particular death magic that my father and I possessed.

  Dead twice.

  Now, my thoughts were roaring in my skull, the noise deafening. That tiny, red ember lit in my heart again.

  But Baleros’s voice wasn’t there in the din. Just mine, now.

  Red hair, spread out over the dirt.

  My father had brought my mother back, hadn’t he? He’d brought them all back from the shadow hell after they died of plague. I had my father’s powers. We could reverse this magic. Both of us could reverse it.

  Fix it, then.

  My wings lifted me into the air. The hollowness of my chest had knife-sharp edges. I needed to fill it with something. I swooped over Ruadan’s body, taking in the wilted flowers in his fist. The sight of him ripped me apart once more.

  I needed to fix it, just as Nyxobas had said.

  My chest was an empty vessel as I hovered above him.

  The name Liora—it meant my light. They’d called me that because I had my mother’s light, and now a fiery light began to burn brighter, deep inside me.

  I let a vision dance in my mind of Ruadan threading together dandelion wreaths, of him hunting in the forest with a spear he’d made for himself. I could almost feel our fingers entwining once more.

  His essence—that savage serenity—poured into the hollowness in my chest. It curled around my ribs, easing some of that sharpness, warming m
e. As Ruadan’s essence filled me, so too did the death magic all around me. I was pulling it into me, feeding from it. My back arched, and I drew the magic out of the dead around me.

  I let the toxins fill me with spirals of dark power. Then, my wings lifted me higher in the cloudy, sulfurous skies.

  My father’s myrrh-scented magic whirled into me, filling the void between my ribs. Power infused my limbs and wings, spreading out from my heart, down my shoulder blades, snapping through my bones. It shot down my arms, my legs, until it reached the ends of my toes and my fingertips. My chest swelled as the deaths of everything around me flowed into me.

  The deaths of all those around me—the demons, the fae, the knights in the Tower—they all poured into me.

  I could feel life slowly returning around me—the withered leaves turning green again, faint pulses starting to beat in veins. Tiny puffs of breath filled still lungs, and skin began to warm.

  Ruadan.

  I soared down once more. My eyes were on Ruadan’s body as the color returned to him and one of his fingers twitched.

  A low, almost inaudible beat—the pulse of blood. A heart’s pumping. Then, Ruadan’s electrical magic crackled in the air.

  All around me, life stirred. The lungs of demons filled with air. Somewhere, I was certain my mother was stirring among the bodies in the cloister, pushing her red hair out of her eyes once more.

  But right now, I was angling my flight towards Ruadan. And I wouldn’t feel whole again until our limbs were intertwined, chests pressed together, hearts beating in unison. I threaded my fingers into his hair, and I pressed my lips to his. This was where I was meant to be.

  My wings slid back into my body, and I pulled away from the kiss to look at Ruadan.

  He stared at me, stunned, irises black as pitch. “You brought me back.”

  “Baleros is dead. For good,” I murmured into his neck. “And we’re never again going to part.”

  Chapter 33

  I knelt by my mum, and we stared at each other. She looked exactly the same—same pistachio-green eyes, porcelain skin. Same cherry-red hair. I’d changed drastically, but she’d been preserved like a perfect blossom in amber. She was even wearing one of her glamorous dresses: gold beads and gossamer threads. Tiny blue gemstones gleamed from her forehead.