“You’re not dying,” the girl insisted, the aggravation clearer in her voice. “You’re shifting.”
“Look at your Magi-cursed hands!” Still another voice. Coren peered into the shadows of the other corner, and her eyelids lowered in recognition.
“Second Son,” she said. Her head swiveled back to Sy, who still clutched the blanket around her nakedness. She pushed the edge away, revealing her hands.
Dizziness washed over her, and she slumped against Sy as she twirled her hand in the sun-dappled room. Each finger now ended in golden, curved claws, glittering like glorious death.
“And you have wings,” Sy whispered, his finger pulling her chin up and around, so she could glimpse what waited over her bare shoulder. Giant wings crowded the room behind her, crushed beneath the rafters of the room. Feathers shone softly in the mix of shadows and sunlight that was created by their downy drape against the room’s grimy attic windows.
“I am both light and dark,” Coren whispered, pulling a clawed hand away from her back, where the feathers of those wings did indeed seem to meld with her skin, connected to her bones beneath. “I am a shadow.”
“You are not Shadow,” the other girl cried, a panicked look on her face. “You’re a Weshen shifter!”
Coren suddenly felt a surge of strength, and she leaned away from Sy, careful not to snag him with her golden talons.
“I’m a monster,” she breathed, staggering to her feet. She stood before them, swaying, clutching the blanket to her chest. The fabric seemed to catch on something at her waist, and she lifted it, revealing the Vespa’s golden claw, now looped and curved through the skin of her stomach. The wings trembled, their tips brushing the cobwebs from opposite corners of the room.
“I’m a monster,” she repeated, her voice growing to an inhuman shriek on the last word. Her brain itself felt shifted, and where she once yearned to run the plains of Weshen Isle, now her wings ached to test the breeze. Clumsily knotting the edges of the blanket around her breasts and tangling the braid of her whip in her awkward talons, she scrambled across the bed and to the window, throwing it open, clawing her way out in a mess of arms and feathers and too many wings.
Someone, maybe left behind in the room, or maybe in the streets far below, screamed as Corentine burst into the summer sky above EvenFall.
Resh whirled on his brother. “Where is she going?” He had no idea what that girl had just turned into, but he recognized that they could use her power.
Sy barked out a laugh, shoving his hair from his too-wide eyes. “How should I know?”
The door slammed just then, and Shanta was gone. Resh muttered a curse. Wasn’t that just like her?
“We need to find the witch before she hurts someone,” he said, bending to tug Sy’s bow sword from the bag in the corner.
“She is not a witch, and you will not harm her!” Sy cried, moving to wrest the weapon from Resh, but he was too slow. Resh was out the door and down the stairs before Sy could catch him. Out in the street, all he had to do was follow the screams.
Sy’s footsteps pounded after him, but Resh’s training was as good as his brother’s, and he was not emotionally compromised. Was it Sulit magic? Umbren? Resh had never studied Weshen history like Sy, but surely he would have remembered Vespa-girls.
The city streets quickly turned to the selvage of dirt paths and fallen barns, and then the open field stretching into the forest and mountains beyond. Wings flapped high above Resh, and a cackle of laughter floated down from the air. He knelt on one knee and steadied his aim on the bow sword, the sun glinting down at him as the girl-turned-witch-turned-monster swirled above.
“Reshra, no!” Syashin yelled, crashing into Resh just as the arrow left its notch, soaring up into the air.
There was a beat of silence, and then again, the laughter. The sky seemed empty above him. A trick of the Vespa that any hunter knew - from a certain height, their bodies and wings blended with the pale sky. A single opalescent feather drifted down to land at Resh’s feet, and when he stooped to gather it in his fingers, he saw one bright drop of blood resting on its spine.
He began to smile, but a whoosh of air nearly knocked him off his feet, and the punch of feather and bone against his shoulder finished the job. The bow sword tumbled to the ground, and Resh with it, a searing pain in his neck and shoulder and all the way down his arm.
His head thumped against the ground, and when his eyes opened, the sun was blotted out by the girl standing above him. Crouching, she pushed a knee into his chest, her wings draped around them like the curtains of a private tent. The blanket wrapping her chest fell open at the waist, and he could glimpse the gold talon piercing her skin, as well as the coil of her whip around her slim stomach.
“I should kill you for trying to kill me,” she murmured, leaning close to his face and demanding his attention with her bronze-fire eyes. “But I won’t, because I care for your brother, and he cares for you.” She lay a hand on his chest, five golden claws stroking the skin around his heart. “I may be a monster on the outside, but you, Second Son. You are a monster on the inside.”
She watched him for a long second, and Resh marveled at her control. And, certain parts of him admitted, her fierce, beautiful power. He knew she could kill him with a single swipe, and yet she didn’t. Even after he had tried to kill her, she resisted.
He’d never known a witch who resisted using whatever power was available.
Corentine stood suddenly, folding her wings against her back.
“Sy,” she whispered, suddenly looking very, very afraid. “Will I stay like this forever?”
Sy only shook his head and stepped toward her, running a finger reverently down the feathers of one wing. She shivered in the summer sun, and something stirred inside of Resh, awakening a dangerous, jealous interest. Sy was taller and stronger and a better hunter, and held all the rights of First Son, but girls had always been the exception.
Girls fell easily for Resh, but never for Sy.
Yet here was one girl who preferred the First Son, and Resh wanted to know why.
Resh staggered to his feet, clutching his arm. “You truly think this is Weshen magic?” he asked Sy, grimacing against the pain. He was certain his shoulder was dislocated, and possibly the bone of his arm had broken.
“Of course it is,” Sy said. “I have a book in my bag at the hotel. I’m sorry you never sought any of these secrets. But they were always there for you to find. And now you have them all. What will you do with them?”
Resh ignored the gruff question that poked at how he’d betrayed Sy once. He hadn’t decided what he might do with this new knowledge. He hated the idea that Sy had been keeping so many secrets. Not only from him, but from all the Weshen people, who didn’t have Sy’s access to travel and books.
“What can she do?” he asked instead.
“She can do a lot of things,” Corentine bit out, her amber and gold eyes sparking. She drew the blanket from her bare stomach, running a shining claw across the braid of the whip circling her sun-brown skin. “And not all involve magic.”
Resh nearly grinned, catching himself just in time.
Sy stepped forward, moving between them. “Both of us can SourceShift, disintegration and fusion. That’s what you saw on the beach. SelfShifting, now within and without.”
Resh nodded, although he knew what none of those words truly meant.
“Resh, Corentine is the strongest shifter Weshen has seen since before the Separation. None of what you’ve seen her do is Sulit magic, no matter what her family did before.”
The brothers locked eyes in a challenge, and for once Resh backed down. He and Sy were different, but they were brothers: Weshen alone in the kingdom of Riata. Whatever this girl could do, he hoped she could be convinced to do it for their people.
“Can we go back to the hotel to figure this out?” he asked, rolling his neck to loosen the knot of pain. “I think I’ll go ahead and call for that doctor after all, since Shanta r
an the second she saw this mess.”
“I would say I’m sorry,” Corentine said, “but I’m not a bit.” She turned away from them and stripped off the blanket, throwing it higher around her shoulders and pulling it tight. The wings weren’t visible, but her back looked deformed and hunched. It would probably pass in the streets of EvenFall, though.
Sy glared at Resh, then gathered his bow sword from the grass, and the three of them slowly walked the road to EvenFall for the second time in a single day. Silence accompanied them, as though even the small birds of the air were afraid to squawk at Corentine’s form.
Resh trailed slightly behind Sy and Corentine, his eyes fastened on the restless, shifting mass beneath her blanket. He was even more uncertain what to think of this girl now.
First, she had been nothing more than another island girl, safe and protected and faceless to someone like Resh. Then as Sy had fixated on catching her, she had grown into an aggravation, a problem Ashemon had asked him to solve so Sy might have an heir. And not that many days ago, he had labeled her a witch before the entire Weshen community.
Although he still didn’t understand her magic, he’d never seen a Sulit witch take the shape of a MagiCreature. And Shadow, which he knew was from Umbren, had been torn apart by the Vespa at the base of the mountain, releasing its hold on her before the shift had happened.
But what kind of Weshen magic would join a MagiCreature with a human, when all they’d done for generations was try to kill each other? There was too much he didn’t understand.
Resh decided that for now, he would trust Sy’s claim that Corentine wasn’t a witch.
By the Magi, she was terrifying, and if she were loyal, that terror could be turned on their enemies.
Resh was also forced to admit that the skin on his chest still thrilled where her claws had skimmed his heart. He’d known so many, many girls, but this Weshen woman was different.
The Sulit witch leaned back from the glass-smooth surface of the scrying pond and stared at the hard-faced Weshen woman. The two young Weshen watched her back with matching eyes of pale sky, appearing much older than they should have.
“Does she live?” the woman asked, her eyes pinched in concern.
“She more than lives,” the witch assured her customers. She pushed aside the braids of her black-blue hair and clutched her fingers in the folds of her dress. Her excitement must not show, or the woman might grow suspicious. “She and the boy have defeated Shadow for now, and she found the strength of the Vespa. Her body accepted its poison, and her magic shifted her very bones into the wings of death.”
“ShapeShifting,” the woman murmured, her eyes shining with tears.
The witch shrugged. Her people had their own names for what the Weshen had once been able to do. The important part was that their shifter power was indeed returning. The girl would be sought after by many, and the witch was nearly bursting with excitement.
“You have given me something valuable to use against my sisters,” she said. “And for that, I will tell you my true name.”
“Thank you for your help,” the Weshen woman answered, bowing low to the ground.
“I am StarSeer.”
“And I am Maren,” the old woman responded, raising her head. “These are-”
“I know these children. They have been spoken of in prophecies, nearly as often as their elder bloods. Do not spend the currency of their names too easily, Maren. My sisters have many things in mind for the future of your people.”
“Won’t your sisters know us by sight?” the boy asked then, and the witch smiled at him. He was far too young now, but perhaps one day, his heart might be hers.
“My sisters know many things, but there are always spots of blindness. Do not open the eyes of your enemy before you are ready to gouge them out.”
The girl shuddered at this, and StarSeer studied her. She was as delicate and beautiful as the pink leaves floating around them, but surely there was the strength of the black bark within. That strength shone easily through the boy’s matching features, and StarSeer wondered for a moment if they would both live long enough.
She might be able to look into her pond, of course. Her family’s ability to cast their eyes across the MagiSea could sometimes be stretched. Her grandmother had begun teaching her to cast her eyes across the seas of time before the Sisters of the Heart had found them.
“We travel to Rurok now,” Maren said, rising to her feet and gathering her things. The young ones rose with her, flanking her like miniature guardians.
“You should know this, then,” StarSeer said, and the woman paused. “There is one who waits in the black city. He sits on a throne of mockery in a tower of Rurok.”
“A man? On the throne before witches? That must indeed be a mockery.”
StarSeer nodded. “He has given up much to sit there, but some will give more to see him fall.”
Chapter 28
“What am I supposed to do with all of this?” Coren demanded, gesturing to herself with golden-clawed fingers, once they were again enclosed safely in the attic room.
Sy didn’t answer because he truly had no idea. Not that he knew much about this sort of shifting, but he kept expecting her form to shift back to normal, just as it did when she SelfShifted to a younger form. Her magical energy should have depleted, forcing her back. After the day they’d had, they were both nearing exhaustion.
The Weshen magic was finally awake, and neither of them had any idea what to do next.
Sliding her wings from beneath the blanket, she rummaged in her bag and shrugged an unbuttoned tunic on backward, so it covered her chest but left her wings free and her back exposed.
Resh, of course, had immediately sent for the doctor, then sprawled on the single bed, nursing his injuries while leafing through the book Sy had salvaged from Damren’s room.
“These are incredible,” he murmured. “Not only a Vespa, but every MagiCreature we know of could join with a shifter. The Restless King would sell his soul for an army of these shifters.”
“He likely did once,” Coren muttered, still pacing. “Does it say anything about how to shift out of these stupid wings?”
Resh smacked the book shut with one hand. “Now why on earth would you want them gone?” He stood and stepped toward her, stalling her pacing as she edged away from him in the narrow space.
“It’s going to be a bit hard to blend in like this,” she bit out. Sy smiled, making sure to keep his back turned to them. Of all the possibilities Coren’s new form had opened, the one he liked best was that she no longer had to fear anyone, including his brother. Her abilities with a whip were certainly frightening, but these wings…these wings would reduce any attacker to a babbling mess.
“Now, Corentine,” Resh practically purred. Sy bit at his lip to keep from laughing. She was going to break another of his bones if he treated her like one of his summer girls. “These wings - these beautiful wings - they will scare the whips right out of the hands of those slavers.”
“The Wesh!” she said, suddenly understanding. “Sy, he’s right! We can rescue the Wesh anywhere now!”
Sy did turn then, considering the two of them. Resh was still holding his left arm tight to his chest, but with his right hand, he had reached up to touch a feather. And even more impressive, Coren was allowing it.
“We could,” Sy said, and Resh dropped his hand, blinking. “But we’ve missed the auction. We have no idea what happened to the Wesh. The ones the king bought are gone, and the others are probably scattered across the Riatan countryside by now.”
Coren’s face fell. He almost wished he hadn’t said anything, but it was the truth. She needed it.
“It was me, wasn’t it,” she said, twisting toward the window. “I caused us to miss the auction.”
“I think these wings are worth it,” Resh said, stepping closer to her again, his eyes following the dance of feathers across the walls.
“Nothing is worth someone else’s life!” she snappe
d at him. “If I were a true Vespa, I’d be flying straight for StarsHelm right now. Vespas deal in revenge. They carry the stench of death and iron,” she murmured, and Sy shivered even in the muggy heat of the attic room. He knew that smell, and she’d named it perfectly.
“Maybe I should forget these men and their petty battles for power, and fly to Sulit and rescue my family,” she continued, her voice taking on a menacing lilt as she turned to face them. “You wanted so badly for me to be a witch, Second Son. Perhaps I’ll go be one.”
The gold in her eyes shone as brightly as her claws in the shadows of the room, as though they were pulling the light from the dark. Sy glanced at Resh nervously. The corners of the room seemed darker in an instant, and Sy scanned the room, looking for the slink of Shadow among the shadows.
Could it have survived the Vespa attack, too? Would it find them again?
“Corentine.” Resh’s voice was quiet in the stale air. “You aren’t a Vespa. You aren’t Shadow. All my life I’ve prayed half a prayer, and now I’ve been shown the rest.” He held up the book of magic. “You’re a Weshen warrior, and you were made like this to protect your people.”
She turned wild eyes on him, the feathers of her wings seeming to glow as they swished behind her. “Revenge on the king is a sort of protection, is it not? And who is deserving of protection more than my innocent twin brother and sister? My own twin was ripped from me when he was eight! What a warrior he could have become!” Her voice had risen to a sort of shriek now, and Sy stepped forward cautiously.
She turned toward the window again, her eyes seeking something in the sky. “You two can rescue the Wesh. You don’t need me. I can fly to Sulit. I can fly,” she repeated. Sy was growing more anxious at the wild twisting of her words. Her face flickered with indecision and regret.
“I know nothing of your family,” Resh began, reaching a hand toward her and letting it fall. “But I know Sulit witches. They take, and take, and take.” He had advanced with each step until he was toe to toe with her.
Shift of Shadow and Soul (SoulShifter Book 1) Page 28
