Coven Keepers (Dark Fae Hollows Book 10)

by Thea Atkinson

  Chapter 4

  It took seconds for the darkness to wrap itself around me again and to realize I had trolled those creatures in with the light of my magic.

  “Shit,” I mumbled. Now it was on.

  I heard them coming for me as I stood rooted to the stony beach. Each groan and every footstep thudded against gravel until their soles crunched against the gritty beach stone and clarified the smell of rotten fish and sulfur.

  It dawned on me then. They carried the stench. It permeated the air around me, choking me. I tried not to think about the foaming black ooze I’d caught sight of trickling down their skin.

  With magic, I could handle a dozen opponents. Without magic or vision, I might be able to handle two. But I had seen four of them barreling at me in those seconds; they had already put their sights on me and knew where I stood. That fast, they had aimed for me with sniper precision. It was already too late to jump out of the way.

  That was when I shifted sideways. And not one instant too soon. One of them swept past me so close I could feel the edge of its jacket slap against my thigh. I choked on the gasp of relief that almost escaped my throat. Close. Too close. If I was lucky, they would keep on the same line of attack, expecting me to be right in the way, not realizing they had already passed me by. Instinct drove me sideways in three broad steps toward the water. A reference point. It was what I needed. Then I could at least know what direction I faced.

  Rocks bit into my feet as I struggled to keep my balance on the rocky shore, but I kept going, plodding silently as they snorted, heaved, and made gagging sounds in the darkness around me. They knew I was there, and they couldn’t understand why I was out of reach. Just the sounds of their noisy search brought bile to my throat.

  I wanted desperately to throw out some magic, but while I decided where to attack, I couldn’t afford to lose or waste any light. Would they be clustered together so I could zap them in one blow, or did I need to throw multiple blasts? Even then, I had no idea what sort of magic to send. No idea if they were living or dead. I just knew they were all around me, searching with their sense of smell, the sound of their rooting like nothing I’d ever heard in the quiet peace of Avalon.

  I braced myself, forcing my eyes shut even though the darkness was already near absolute. I needed every bit of concentration to travel to every other one of my senses except vision, and I needed my brain to shut down the nerve paths that would signal my optic nerve.

  I drowned out the sound of their movements and listened for the thudding of my own heart. Be still. Find the focus. Use it to pinpoint the closest creature. Maybe I could strike out at them one at a time with my hands and feet. Maybe the darkness could be a blessing.

  I was at least a foot from the water’s edge before I felt safe enough to release a breath. The whisper of the waves lapping the shore helped me navigate closer, putting my back to it as I eased my way into the frigid edge.

  Their snuffling noises shifted to the front. I knew where I was. I could manage it if I was smart. If I didn’t panic. I was used to the dark. I could use it to my advantage. I tried to smother the fact I hadn’t sparred with another person since Freya had died, and even then, it had been a careful, instructional battle. My throat ached with anxiety and expectation. Just a few minutes more.

  Several long moments had passed without incident, and I began to believe I might be able to skirt along the water’s edge and avoid them altogether.

  Then a sort of clicking sound rose on the air, lifting the hairs on my arms in alarm. I could swear they smelled my sweat, tasted my breath on the air. Everything went still as I waited, breath captured, arms tight to my sides, praying to Miriam they would just find me one at a time rather than rushing me all at once.

  I had time to wish my night vision would adjust to the new dark before I heard the swoosh of that girder cutting through the air. Panic froze my feet to the stones. That swing had sliced right through where I had been just an instant before.

  Everything paused while the next instant was born. Even the clicking sounds stopped.

  The rotten-egg taste of brimstone slipped between my teeth as I tried to pull in another breath. Just one, I thought. Just let one of them come.

  I expected the worst. Even my bladder twitched in expectation. But there was no movement, no sound to alarm me. It was almost as if they had gone still, shut down like depowered automatons. I thought of the kraken and my moment of hope.

  I almost heaved a sigh of relief, but in the next instant, I felt a cold and clammy grip on my bicep. The fingers dug into the muscle.

  I let go my war cry then.

  “Come on then, bastards,” I screamed. “Show me what you got.”

  They’d all come for me, and I’d let them. I’d take them all. I reached for the hand that clung to my arm and allowed it to find its way to my shoulder. Long years of practice took over as my weight leaned backward. Muscle memory let me use the creature’s weight to hold myself aloft as I twisted and threw it off balance. It splashed into the water just as the others roared to life around me. Some ingrained sense of self-preservation let my eyes see the darkness as just a hint lighter. My night vision. Coming around finally.

  I laughed. I had this. I totally had it. My story as I told it to the crones would be magnificent. They would extoll my virtues. Legends were borne of this. I’d be lauded and loved.

  I took one down, then the next. My feet and hands were alive and had minds of their own, eyes to see and brains to record, register, decide, and move. It would be a thing of beauty if it could be watched.

  The third fell beneath my bare foot, and even as I struck at it with a high-step kick, I felt something give way in its stomach. Cold viscera spilled around me, falling with a loud and sickening plop to the pebbles.

  If I had to explain what happened next, I might say I took careful and plodding steps toward the execution of the final assault. The truth was messier. The feel of the ooze greasing the creature’s palms as it clawed over my skin turned my calm to mush. I lost my mind to panic as the creature fell on me, its hands grasping and pulling. It found my mouth with its palm and held the frigid surface of it over my mouth and nose. Its other arm found my waist. It hoisted me. I lost contact with the beach. I couldn’t breathe.

  It all went to hell after that. I became a reckless, screaming banshee. At one point, a burst of power erupted from my fingers and splayed light for half a foot around me. I saw the thing for real then. Its mouth gaped open with its eyes as black and empty as a tar pit. As the power erupted, the thing let loose a silent shriek with its face lifted to the heavens.

  Without pause, I struck at its neck, crushing its larynx beneath my fist. As my knuckles sank into its throat and mashed into the tissues, I realized the thing was rotting from the inside out.

  Grim ones, the stranger had called them, but I knew right then what they truly were.

  They were the consumed.

  The darkness of Coventina that infected us all and would eventually consume us, too, if the balance didn’t return. These grim ones had lost all their light. They belonged to her.

  I saw a future version of myself in that moment, and I froze. When the grim one fell at my feet, it wasn’t enough for me that it was spasming on the beach, flailing for air and striking my shins as it fought for life. I wanted it dead. Silent. Unmoving.

  I stooped over—feeling along the grimy flesh and tattered, oily clothing—and found its arms.

  My burning lungs were heaving for air as I dragged it to the water. Every muscle in my body was taut with exertion. The damn thing was heavy, and it was not going quietly into the good night. When it contacted water, whatever life was left in it recoiled and fought me harder. It bit into my shin.

  My throat went tight as I held it down beneath the waves that lapped at my shins. It fought me. It didn’t want to give in. The water seethed around me as the creature struggled to keep living. I thought of the kraken and my impotence.

  In the moments that followed
, I felt nothing. My mind went blank, as dark as the world around me, and when I did register anything again, I was already sitting beneath the pier. My pants were soaked and my hair was in strings against my cheeks. I was cold. But it was over. My fight with the consumed was a foggy memory not unlike a murky nightmare that left only whispers of its horrors come morning.

  I couldn’t stay here. As badly as I wanted to just crouch with my knees to my chin and rock back and forth under the wharf, I also knew I would die of exposure if I didn’t get inside and get warm. Some part of me quailed at the thought of running into more of those creatures as I trekked through the city, but an even smaller part of me rose like a flame being sparked to life.

  Damn them. Damn them for stealing my courage. I was Everly. Abandoned infant on the shores of Avalon, a witch with the hated red hair and reviled blue eyes. I had braved two decades of derision and isolation in what should have been a sanctuary. I had trained every day for this moment, pulled magic to me like it was breath while alone in my cell, teased my hair during special occasions to frighten the young witches, put up with bugs in my food and glass splinters in my water. I had faced the kraken and my own death, and I’d be damned if I’d let the mere threat of a few disgusting darkness-infected humans keep me from showing them all that I belonged on the isle. That I had value. That I was worth something. Those hardships had not beaten me; they had made me strong. I wouldn’t let this day break me.

  “Come on, Everly,” I muttered. “You’ve got this.”

  I swiped the back of my hand across my eyes and stared backward over my shoulder toward the city. Something caught my eye out there.

  I blinked. A glow. Faint, yes, but there.

  I pushed onto my feet and rubbed my palms into my eyes. My head throbbed and my legs quaked, but my mind was clear. My vision, too. It was most decidedly a glow. Several, in fact.

  In sporadic sections throughout the vast darkness of the city, a pinprick here and there moved and blinked out. To my left, a larger glow swam into the darkness. To my right, another. Perhaps in the heart of the devastation, the darkness remained absolute, but along the edges of the shoreline, humankind had found a way to gather and create light.

  I felt giddy when I realized it. Light. Real and honest. I couldn’t believe my luck. The tide, it seemed, was changing.

  I struck out with care. Keeping my eye on the places where the glow was the strongest, I could pick my way along the shoreline. Within half an hour, I had found another pier with several derelict buildings squatting alongside each other, lining the back end like books on a shelf. The boardwalk had once been fine asphalt and tarred boards, but now, beneath my sore feet, those boards had rotted and left behind holes to stumble into and jutted splinters to ram into calloused heels.

  I was limping by the time I was close enough to any breathing thing to realize the light I’d seen had come from their wrists as they moved.

  Just ahead, I could make out several shapes. With just enough night vision to add to the bit of glow coming from places in the dark, I could see one bare-chested man. Light flared out all around him in the darkness so brightly that, for a second, even a full two yards away, I wanted to shield my eyes.

  I squinted. He had a sort of halter across his chest wrought of a glinting metal that secured a small disk to his flesh.

  “You there,” I said.

  I forged ahead, forgetting for a second how badly my feet hurt in light of this new wonder. I held my hand over my brow, but my gaze was pinned to the disk on his chest. It wasn’t possible. Light didn’t exist anymore, not in any capacity that could be harnessed. On Avalon, we had to spell the torches to light. Even then, the result was never pure. Always, the light was tinged with purple or blue. This light was white.

  I watched as one of his meaty hands swung wide, and only then did I realize he was in the middle of a brawl, swinging at someone I couldn’t see in the darkness. I heard a crunching sort of sound and a grunt, then the darkness came alive with jeering and cheers.

  I limped closer as he pulled something over his shoulders, and the light blinked out. A jacket. Or a shirt.

  I cleared my throat. “I said, you there.”

  The man at his feet groaned. I stomped closer, aware my limping gait displayed far less imposing a threat than I would have liked.

  A voice came from the darkness.

  “A woman,” he said, and the man next to me grunted. He pulled his shirt aside as he tucked his fingers into his pants.

  I could see his frank appraisal of me pulling at the corners of his mouth.

  “Not much of a woman,” he said. “Too reedy.”

  He hauled spit from the back of his throat and coughed it at the man at his feet. “I like ‘em a bit plumper.” He flicked his free hand as though he was adjusting his cuffs, and I caught sight of a glow at his wrist.

  I couldn’t stop staring at it.

  “You like ‘em fat,” the first one argued. “This one’s just right. It’s not like they come around here often enough to be picky.”

  A murmur of agreement went up through the shadows, and my back went cold. Time to get the holy hollow out of there even if I did want to know how they powered those disks. Finding out was not worth facing half-a-dozen derelicts, no matter how impossible the light was.

  I was about to spin about and disappear into the dark when I felt someone clutch my wrist. The brawling man. He twisted me closer, ran his wrist over my face so the light attached to it like a bracelet could illuminate my features for him. I felt a needle of spite worm itself into my throat as I watched him looking at me.

  “You stink,” I said.

  “Pretty little thing, though,” he said. His hand went to my breasts, and he squeezed. “Plump in all the right places.”

  In the next instant, a flash of light peeked out into the darkness from where the injured man lay. His light was weaker, yellowed and sick looking, but it was strong enough to get my assailant’s attention.

  “Almost forgot,” he said and released me.

  Thank Miriam. A distraction.

  I stepped back slowly as he fell upon the prostrate man, pressing his wrist and the bracelet to the man’s chest where the weak light tried to quell the shadows.

  As I backed away, I couldn’t help but watch in horror as that small amount of light flared for one short instant and then went black, leaving the slumped form as a dead man on the asphalt.

  The brawler stood over him with enough light coming from his wrist to illuminate several feet. For just one second, I could see him grin, his face caught in a sort of ecstasy as he pressed his bracelet to his chest. The amulet or disk there pulled in the light and burned violet for a moment. I was as mesmerized by the energy as he looked to be.

  Whatever he was doing happened a lot faster than I’d expected—I’d only managed to back away a couple of feet before he swung his gaze to me again.

  His look of ecstasy disappeared, replaced by greed and desire.

  “Your turn,” he said.

  Chapter 5

  “Leave her alone, Gus,” said a voice from the shadows. I recognized the voice. I had heard it just hours before. I might’ve thought kindly of it, even, since it could mean a few seconds pause, enough to escape, but the next words were delivered like a slap in the face. “She’s just a kid.”

  I wanted to argue the point, but Gus shone his wrist light in my eyes, blinding me. Then the light retreated from my face and ran the length of my body. When it paused over my chest, my teeth ground together.

  “Didn’t feel like a kid to me, Ari,” Gus said. I heard him scuffle closer. “Felt pretty damn womanly, in fact.”

  I clenched my fists. The bastard could expect a very unwomanly touch if he came any closer.

  “Go ahead. See what happens if you grab for my boob again,” I said, testing him.

  “Oh, darlin’,” Gus said. “I’m going to do more than that.”

  He chuckled, the reek of his breath telling me exactly where his face was
. My fist snapped forward with enough thrust that it made my shoulder burn. The sickening sound of him gurgling on his own voice box lifted to the air. I stepped neatly backward, fully intending to spin on my heel and flee into the darkness before he fell against one of his buddies.

  My feet ground into the pavement as I moved, sending splinters of pain into my soles. I stumbled before I could stop myself. Damn the blisters and raw sores. I very nearly winced until I heard one of them coming after me in the dark.

  I braced my spine and squared my shoulders.

  “Stay away from me,” I said, my voice nearly a growl. “Every damn one of you fuckers.”

  A chuckle echoed from the darkness. One shadow extricated itself from the others and tossed something at me that clumped onto the asphalt at my feet.

  I stole a glance downward, not sure what I expected, but afraid it would be something heinous. The way the object sat like a limp pile of leather made me sigh in relief.

  “My boots,” I said.

  “My boots,” said the owner of the shadow—Ari, obviously, judging by his voice. “I found them under the pier. But I can let you have them.”

  A sidelong glance to my right told me that Gus had inched away from Ari and was holding onto his throat. The light from his wrist sent out a trailing beam that illuminated an alleyway just to the left. The shadows just beyond where the light reached were dark and absolute. Enough to make a girl disappear if she bolted for it.

  “Gus,” Ari said. “Play your lumen on the boots so she can find them.”

  Gus did so with a gravely curse, and I found the shoes laying still wet at my feet. An instant later, the lumen went dark.

  I flipped one of the boots over onto its side with my toes and crammed my foot into its clammy belly. There was still some seaweed in the toe, and I cringed as chilly water seeped out. I stomped at the sole so that my whole foot could make its way past all the wet leather. Then I rammed my other foot in the second boot, all the while keeping a wary eye on the shadows around me.