Coven Keepers (Dark Fae Hollows Book 10)

by Thea Atkinson

  “What’s so funny?” the girl asked.

  “All of it,” I said. “Every blessed word.”

  I laughed again, because really, even Ianna had thought the oracle was wrong. That was why they’d asked me to leave.

  Just remembering those words from the few scant moments I had been allowed in the main hall forced a burble of laughter from me. Imagine it. The light returning. We hadn’t seen true light for generations. It had been so long since true light reigned that darkness had begun to infect the beings who populated the hollow. Like a virus of old, it took root and grew. If unchecked, the darkness overtook them completely.

  Then the oracle had said the covens would be looking for this human child. Fae, witch, and human alike. All of them. Even the coalition of Dark Fae, and all for different reasons.

  “He needs a protector,” I said, laughing straight out loud then, because that was really the funny part—the thing Ianna in all her wisdom had a tough time believing.

  “Who does?”

  “The child. He needs someone to save him. And that’s why the elders are arguing. He’s too important to assign to just anybody, but no one wants to go. It’s a riot, if you think about it.”

  “Go?”

  I hugged myself to keep the nerves from taking over my body and shaking me like feathers in the wind.

  “Yes, go,” I said. “No one wants the task, and everyone knows it needs to be someone responsible, but they’re torn because it’s also the perfect chance to get rid of me.”

  I felt the tension tighten the air around me as she went rigid.

  “A fire-touched witch, you see,” I said aloud. “That’s the last thing the oracle said.”

  I chuckled beneath my breath, but I didn’t feel the least bit happy.

  The girl beside me finally backed away. I felt rather than saw her magic whisper across my face as her curiosity for who I was finally got the better of her. My eyes burned at the sudden light.

  “Sweet Miriam,” she said. “It’s you.”

  “Yeah,” I answered when I noticed her black eyes grow wide.

  There was only one fire-touched witch in all the coven, and she was pacing the outer sanctum, grumbling about oracles and chatting up a young witch who now had that typical look of fear across her face after seeing me up close.

  “She’s not all that special, the oracle,” I said to the girl as she spun on her heel.

  Her shoes thudded against the tiles as she ran headlong into the shadows beyond the sconces.

  “Black eyes,” I called out. “Black hair, just like you. Just like all of you.”

  I heard the catch in my voice as the door to the Sanctum was torn open and the girl’s footsteps retreated through it.

  I had expected the oracle to be something extraordinary because she was supposed to be a descendant of Miriam. I thought maybe she would look like me. But she hadn’t. For those few minutes I saw her before she sank beneath the waters of her cistern again and disappeared, she looked as dark as every other witch on the isle. Normal. Far from special.

  I had expected to feel awe for the being who told me I had to strike out into the human realm of the hollow to find this child. I expected euphoria and a sense of acceptance.

  What I felt was the same thing I did as I watched the young witch run from me like I was Coventina herself come to steal her power. It tasted an awful lot like disappointment.

  Chapter 3

  I washed ashore, sopping and limp and completely determined to forget the moments I spent beneath the kraken’s waters. Everything from the time I spilled into the black depths of it until this moment was something I never wanted to think about again if I lived to be a hundred. All I knew was I had made it to some sort of stony shore a dozen hours or more after the encounter and was now coughing up lungs full of brine. All that mattered was I was free of it.

  I dragged myself farther onto the bank and collapsed face-down onto the stones, not caring the sharp rocks bit into my cheeks. I needed sleep. That was all. No matter what came next, in this moment, I needed to let the exhaustion claim me. If my eyes closed against the shadows, I wasn’t aware of them doing so. One deep inhale of the smell of garbage and rotten fish, and I knew no more.

  I woke clammy and so damn hungry I realized I’d been chewing on my cheeks in my sleep. I pushed onto unsteady feet. Thank Miriam for the nearby ruined pier I managed to clutch at just in time to keep from falling. Seemed my right leg had gone numb.

  No telling how long I had been out, but the wharf’s very presence reminded me I was most definitely free of the kraken’s water. Whole, hale, and teetering at the edge of some unfamiliar shoreline. The human realm. Had to be. I should have been plenty grateful I’d made it, considering the nasty bump on my head that ached through to my eye sockets and the way my cheek felt torn to shreds.

  “Holy fuck,” was what came out of my mouth, however. Not the least bit grateful sounding, either. I’d made it alive, all right, but I wasn’t sure if what confronted me was actually preferable to what the kraken had in mind when he’d splintered my dory and sent me into the deep.

  I had assumed the mortal realm would be in shadow, the same as Avalon, but I didn’t expect the depth of it. On the isle, our magics combined when we wanted and lent a hint of light to play through the dark. If we bade our magics move across us, it could light the darkness for at least a foot in every direction. The spelled sconces gave us more light, giving the eternal gloom a sort of undercurrent that reminded a girl of fog. The light we created married with the particles of darkness in a way that allowed us to see if we needed to.

  While it was dark as a darkwater sieve in Avalon, there were at least holes enough to let some light poke through. But here in the mortal realm, the darkness was as unrelenting as the bowels of a tar pit.

  Finding the one human child was not going to be easy. Not in this darkness. And not now that I remembered I’d lost a boot somewhere in the deep of the magical waters around Avalon. I wiggled the toes of my bare foot as I stood on the pebbles of the shore. That boot was as good as gone. I had a vague image of the kraken finding it and chewing the carcass like gum as it waited for my return.

  I shivered. The thought of facing the creature again was something I needed to stuff into some dark drawer within my psyche, or I would never find the courage to return with the child when I found him. So onward it was. Do my task and finish it, barefoot if I needed to. And cross that bridge when I came to it.

  I tested the weight of my body on the bare foot, considering the pros and cons of going fully unshod. I had more ‘sight’ barefoot, that was for sure. In this darkness, I needed every bit of sensory information I could manage. My feet were calloused and tough, but the training that made them so also made them as attuned to touch as my fingers. I couldn’t help but think that would be a good thing.

  So why did I feel so squeamish about it? Maybe it was because I could already feel something squishy and warm next to my instep.

  I froze. My breath caught in my throat. I hadn’t felt anything just seconds ago.

  “Sweet fuck,” I said and grappled sideways for the pier with scrabbling fingers.

  Lordly Miriam and all the crones. Dear holy hell, if that thing that just caressed my bare blessed foot was a rat, I was really and truly going to lose my shit. I could take a kraken and I could take nearly drowning, but vermin were just one peril too many.

  I pulled myself along the pier, feeling my way with bare toes on rock and numb fingers across splintered wood. Pins and needles shot through my thigh, and I groaned without meaning to. I lurched against the wharf and clung to it, pressing my body against the side as I heaved out wheezing breaths, waiting for the pins and needles to subside and hoping all the while that the rodent would stay where it was. My skin felt electric, and everything hummed around me with potential threat.

  Something moved in the darkness next to me. Something that had the sense of being much larger than a rat.

  “Who in the holy ho
llow is there?” I said. “I mean it. Say something.”

  A rat would say nothing, of course, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear a voice, either. I held my breath, bracing myself to whip around and face the damn thing. The hair stood on the back of my neck, prickling there as though someone was breathing on me.

  I had to gather all the courage I could to face the darkness, thinking that at any instant what was behind me would leap for me. My chest burned with trapped fear. I told myself I had the reflexes of a cat thanks to the daily asatanas, the gorge of a bully with the daily full-bellied training. I had faced the kraken. I had faced my death. I was here, alive, wasn’t I?

  Whatever was in the darkness couldn’t compare to that.

  I steeled myself and swung around. No graceful twirl with dignity and perfect asatana pose intact. No. Full on sloppy bravado and nothing less.

  Nothing. Indeed.

  I laughed out loud, and the sound of my barking, hiccupping brays fed my mania for at least a minute. Two seconds after that, I found myself crouched over, head over knees because my legs couldn’t hold me anymore. I was retching onto the stony beach until my belly quivered and my nose burned. Nothing. It was ridiculous how much that relieved me.

  I was swiping my forearm across my mouth when I heard the voice. It was as gravelly as the stones beneath my toes, and I froze as I hung there. My stomach tightened into a ball.

  “Are you finished?” it said. A man’s voice. Husky and casual sounding as though he’d known me for decades.

  I was proud of the way I didn’t startle, but it was because my body was spent of adrenaline, and not because of any residual courage. I swung toward the sound of his voice with such calm I wondered if I’d lost my mind along with my boot.

  “Why do you care?” I asked. “Am in in your spot?”

  His short chuckle reminded me of the darkheart pears I ate every morning, and my stomach gurgled. I couldn’t help putting a hand over my belly to settle it. Not now. Not again. A spasm of nausea twitched beneath my palm as though to taunt me. I swallowed slowly, trying to gather words to smother the nausea.

  “You nearly stepped on my face,” he said before I could manage a response, and I realized the voice came from a foot away, low, as if it came from a hole in the ground.

  “That was you,” I said, relieved to know the furry thing that touched my foot hadn’t been a rat.

  “My hair, to be more precise.”

  I felt him moving, maybe pushing to his feet. Maybe getting ready to strike out at me now that he thought he had me off guard. I wished the darkness wasn’t quite so black. Catching some sort of outline might make it easier to gauge his height, the breadth of his shoulders. I was already putting my weight on one foot, thinking to sweep him from his legs with my other one. My fists clenched behind me in lotus-thrust position.

  “I wouldn’t bother,” he said.

  My foot halted with the toe dug into the pebbles.

  “Wouldn’t bother to do what?” I asked.

  “Trying to kick me,” he said. “You don’t have the strength for it.”

  I did see his shadow then. It rose in front of me close enough that it appeared to be double my size. Three times my width. The hulk of it made me take a step back.

  “See?” he said. “You almost fell.”

  It was true. The quick step back had almost taken the legs from beneath me, but it was because I was still weak from my struggles in the water and dragging myself to shore. Despite sleeping for God knows how long, my body had yet to recover.

  “A pebble dug into my foot, that’s all,” I said. “Sharp edge.”

  The bulk of the darkness moved toward me, and I thought I felt his breath move over the top of my head, making my scalp grow damp and warm beneath my hair.

  “There’s a lot of sharp edges here,” he said. “Best keep that in mind if you plan to stay long.”

  “I will,” I said. I tried to see through the dark enough to make out where his face was. I imagined him with a beard and a sort of swarthy pallor to his skin. I badly wanted to throw out some magic just to test his response, to see if it unnerved him.

  “I saw you come in,” he said with a musing, almost dry tone. “Nice surfboard.”

  I gave a brief thought to the narrow piece of plank I had clung to over the last dozen hours and knew he was being sarcastic. Just the flash of an image as my mind touched upon the memory, and my willingness to recall it retreated like a cockroach into the corners.

  “I like a challenge,” I said, lifting my chin.

  “A slip of a thing like you?” he said. “You aren’t much bigger than that splintered hunk of wood. I wouldn’t call that a challenge. I’d call that stupidity.”

  I felt my mouth twitch. “I’m done with you now,” I said. “Goodbye.”

  I wanted desperately to sit down. If I didn’t do so soon, my legs would take the choice away from me. I groped backward into the darkness, reaching for the pier, hoping to find support for my quaking legs.

  He must have sensed me feeling around behind me, because I felt his hands encircle my waist, and the next I knew, I was airborne for a few fleeting seconds before my bottom rested upon something solid and uneven. Presumably the boardwalk. A splinter dug into my thigh. I was too surprised to even complain.

  “Best if you stay here until morning, little one,” he said. “You won’t see much more, but at least the grim ones won’t bother you this close to the water.”

  Before I could say anything, I heard the crunching sound of his boots as he strode away across the pebbles. It was only as he was retreating and the sound of his boots dissipated into the hollow sound of the night that I finally registered the significance of his words.

  I saw you come in.

  “Hey,” I called after him. “How did you see me?”

  “You get used to the dark,” he said after a time. “And there’s light to be had if you know how to get it.”

  I listened to his footsteps grow fainter in the dark. What light? I hadn’t seen any light when I’d washed ashore. No matter how numb-minded I had been, I would’ve known light had I seen it. Even in the terrified state I was in with my mind barely able to communicate to my fingers to cling to that skinny piece of board, I would have registered any sort of glow.

  For whatever reason he had, he was lying. And it wasn’t just knowing I hadn’t seen light that told me so. After living a life where people either lied to me or ignored me, I knew the smell of falsehood. It was as rotten as the stink of ignorance and prejudice. I wasn’t sure what made me think coming to the human realm would be any different than my life on Avalon. Yet with him gone, I felt even more isolated here in these moments than I had in all my time on the isle.

  I crossed my arms over my chest, hugging myself. A chill had crept into my bones, and I couldn’t help shivering. I’d needed to find shelter. Soon. Whoever those grim ones were he spoke of, at least I could fight them if I struck out into the city. I couldn’t do battle against pneumonia.

  With a sigh, I pushed off the edge of the boardwalk and winced when my feet met the stone beach. Each step toward the rising darkness of what I took to be ruined skyscrapers was as agonizing as the legendary Little Mermaid’s first few steps. Twice, I managed to just catch myself before a piece of metal sliced into my skin.

  By my reckoning, I’d been inching forward for ten minutes, and I was only halfway across the beach. My eyes were no better accustomed to the dark. Morning was still away off, according to the stranger, and with it, only a hint less darkness.

  What could one small blast of magic hurt? Just enough to get me across the beach and find a path to shelter. Once I warmed up, I could begin the search afresh.

  I wasn’t even sure I had enough energy to pull the magic toward me, but I lifted my arms to the air anyway. Inhaling, I closed my eyes, balanced on my bare feet, and focused as my fingers strained for the throbbing bits of magic and power I knew waited in the air. Dark magic, brown magic, black magic, or white magic,
all of it swirled around the hollow for the taking if one knew how to access it. Humans didn’t, but Fae and witches did.

  Just thinking about it reminded me of the stranger’s words. There’s light to be had if you know how to get it. Well, I knew how to get it. I pulled it toward me. And when my skin prickled with energy, I focused the magic over my solar plexus and shot it out into the night ahead of me. It fizzled at first, trying to gain strength in the suppressive darkness. I thought it might fail me, but the magic finally did as it was bid. Within moments, I could see. And not just a few inches as I expected a witch by herself could manage, but for yards out ahead of me. Even in Avalon, a witch couldn’t send light out that far unless she was bonding to another. Once more, I thought of the kraken as I’d pulled in enough of his magic to light the night sky when I’d fought him. This was similar and every bit as peculiar. The shock of being able to cast so much light might have been pleasant, if the sight that met my gaze was a little less daunting.

  As it was, the bit of city I could make out in the burst of light and surrounding gloom was a ragged, soot-filled, and rusted girder-laden thing put me in mind of half-burned parchments from Avalon’s ruined library. The light remained for several heartbeats, long enough to see I was indeed at the edge of the beach and the dregs of the city outskirts unfolded in front of me like one of those burnt scrolls.

  I might have been grateful for that light, except for the fact it also illuminated several humans lurching toward me with a dazed sort of focus. I watched, bewildered, as one of them picked up an iron girder from a pile of rubble as though it was as light as a twig and started swinging it around his head.

  I had time to realize they had taken to a full-on run, their faces lifted as though they were scenting the air and every inch of their skin covered with trails of black liquid as though their veins had split their skin and were oozing from the fissures.

  And then the magic snuffed out, and the light fell back. I might have thought I was alone except for the gasping, groaning sound they made as they ran.