Coven Keepers (Dark Fae Hollows Book 10)
Page 18
“I barely made it out of there,” he said. “Even being able to see.” His voice broke as he said that, and I imagined he had carried me the entire way. How far and how long, I had no idea. I just knew there was no other way I could have awoken next to the derelict pier, with Uriel curled around me, unless Ari had somehow thrown me over his shoulder and done so.
I felt nauseous all of a sudden. How badly I must have slowed him down. How close had we become to capture? The back of my neck went cold when I realized he could’ve dropped me at any time. Left me.
But he hadn’t. Maybe there was hope, even if it was a thready one.
“Maybe things aren’t as bad as they seem,” I said. “The Fae general promised me—”
“I have a feeling all bets are off,” he said.
The words struck ice down my spine.
“What did you do?”
He tugged at me again. “Doesn’t matter.”
The sounds swelling in the darkness couldn’t have been a few grim ones. It couldn’t have been the dozen Dark Fae I had seen back on the street. There was something more out there. Something bloated and black and I couldn’t understand how I had missed it before. It was heavy and almost soaking in its presence, as though it could drown a soul.
Curiosity got the better of me. I should’ve known better, but when had I ever done what I knew was the right thing? There was something awful out there, and I wanted to know what I’d be facing if it came to that.
I still had hold of the boy. Before I could think about what I was doing, I dug for his buttons and popped them open. His shirt spread wide, letting his lumen cut through the darkness with a swath of light.
The darkness was writhing where the light didn’t strike and where it did, the grim ones were rushing at us through the streets, rabid looking and almost vibrating with impatience. I caught sight of one or two Fae warriors on the fringes, lashing them forward with various weapons. Whatever grim ones weren’t already running or defending themselves from the lash managed to stagger to their feet and charge for us with all the zeal of a starving wolf.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Most definitely,” Ari said. “Now help me get this in the water.”
“We don’t have time,” I said. Now that I had used the light to see what was in the darkness, they knew exactly where we were. Like night geese, they swarmed together and eddied forward, swerving and snaking over each other as one whole.
But it wasn’t those things that made the bile rise in my throat. It was the clotted darkness that rolled like clouds behind them. Even in the gloom of the city, I could see it collecting. I could smell it. Like rotten fish and something sickly sweet like rancid berries. Whatever time we had enjoyed before, it had run out now. I wondered if the Fae knew what was gathering behind them.
“We won’t be able to hold them off,” I said. “There’s too many of them.”
“Even more reason to get on the raft,” he said.
I shook my head. He could see me make my stand through the shadows. I wondered what he would think when I pushed the boy at him.
“Take him,” I said, handing off a crying Uriel.
“Please don’t,” he said. There was a pleading note in his voice that made me feel warm despite the way my legs trembled. I felt the pull of a smile, soft and sad, tug at the corner of my mouth. I didn’t smile often. I couldn’t remember the last time I had. I knew things would be okay, then. In the end. They would be okay.
I gave him a short nod as though I was getting into him and spun in the sand, putting my back to the horde coming at us. With a lunging sprint, I flew for the water’s edge where the broken-off piece of the pier was still lodged in the wet earth. Ari made a sort of grunting sound as though he thought I was giving in. I was, sort of. Just not the way he thought.
“Here,” he said, grabbing my hand and planting it on the edge of the raft next to his. We leaned in, giving it our backs. Even Uriel pushed at it from beside me. I felt both of their hands on either side of mine as we shoved and grunted. I had the feeling I wasn’t offering much in the way of help, but I did what I could. Every muscle in my body was already sagging. Whatever energy I had left was evaporating.
I only let go when I felt the cool water wrapping around my ankles and the raft lift as it caught a wave. I pushed myself off, satisfied I had done what I could. I was quaking and my teeth were chattering, but I stumbled backward, reaching for the pier to steady myself.
I had done it. I got them safely away. There was a strange sense of pleasure that snaked up my throat. I felt liberated.
Ari’s lumen peeked out from beneath his shirt and gave me one last glimpse of his expression. This time, it looked anxious and panicked. Not something I’d ever seen on his face before. His hair was loose and stuck to his cheeks from sweat. I could tell from his eyes that he knew exactly what I was going to do, and he didn’t like it.
“Get on,” he urged. I could just barely make out his hand reaching out for me.
I took another step backward, shaking my head.
I drank in that face, those eyes. Memorized every angle and curve that I could, and then when I thought I could call each one back on a whim, I whirled around to face the city and the things that came for us.
“Hide your light,” I said over my shoulder. I couldn’t stand to hear the way my voice cracked. But there was nothing I could do for that. I had to steady myself and do what I could. Anything I could. Despite the wash of dizziness, the staggering stench that nearly dropped me to my knees, I had to try.
It took me biting down hard on my tongue to call consciousness back to me after that. Everything had been swimming laconically as though through murk. Now I was awake. Awake meant afraid. That was okay, too. What was about to happen should terrify the holy hollow out of me.
I set my feet apart, willing the skin of my soles to take root through the bottoms of my boots. Throwing my hands out, I called to the particles of air. At the same time, I imagined my mind tunneling down into my solar plexus, tapping the spark of my heart and siphoning out each electric beat.
I imagined myself starving. Drowning. Dying of thirst. I let the panic and fear come as it did in times like that. Like it no doubt had in those moments when my newborn terror had sent my mother running for the edge of the magic isle to abandon me there. I set in my mind an image of Uriel terrified as Gus reached for him. That was how I had felt, I knew, in those moments when she left me, I felt exactly like that.
I heard Ari behind me, arguing, pleading with me. Foolish man. He should be gone by now.
“It’s coming,” I said. “Get out of the way or die.”
I didn’t need to see to know that beyond the horizon a pool of effervescent plankton was cocking its light to attention. That lumens across the city were buzzing. That somewhere beneath the depths, the kraken had stirred, sensing a shift in power. All power. Something was happening, and they all knew it.
That something was me.
“Holy fuck,” Ari said, and I knew what he would see if I could look at myself through his eyes.
Blazing red hair on end, waving in the air like the filigree seaweed beneath the waves. Purple and violet and blue split the sky around me, seeking my fingertips. The colors sizzled their way to me, to my hands, trying to join with the spark within my breast.
I didn’t need to see it because I felt it. It was all I had, this last bit of power, and it was greedy to be fed. It wanted all the energy. It wanted to rise above the clouds, the way it had when the kraken had come. The way it had when I called out to it as a babe, hungry for power because my mother’s milk was not savory the way magic was.
It was my last spark. That final bit of energy that fueled my breath and my heartbeat. The most powerful spark. It wanted to live, and in order to live, it called everything to it. Beseeching every last bit of magic to join with it and make it whole again.
It was why they were all afraid. I knew that. Why my mother had dropped me on the banks of Avalon. Red hai
r like Miriam’s, Freya said. The same unique gift as hers to siphon power as well as to use it. Unlike Miriam, completely unable to control it.
I let it all go at once. For the second time in my life, I saw everything for the hundred yards the light moved through. My chest felt seared with that light. I had to blink to keep my eyes dry against the heat of it.
The power lit the sky the way it had on the kraken’s waters and for the same fleeting moment, I felt buoyant and giddy with electricity. It didn’t matter how many grim ones were coming at me, how many Fae warriors charged along with them. They were no match for this power. It had its roots in ancestral magic stored over generations to be used at just the right time.
The last thing I saw was Ari’s face floating in front of me and just past that the swarm of grim ones lifting like deflated water skins in the wake of my power. Black wisps of smoke coiled around them and disappeared. I almost smiled again, but it was impossible to stand against the recoil of that much magic.
It bucked up my arms and threw me backward onto the sand. Some of it fizzled into the sand around me. Whatever was left squatted in my palm like a toad, fat and lethargic.
It wasn’t enough. I knew that as I lay there, helpless, trying to maintain consciousness. There were too many of them, and the Fae behind were already roaring their rage. Ari’s feet shuffled by me as I rolled over onto my side, working at pushing to a stand.
“Get back, you fuckers,” he said from above me.
I moaned. He was supposed to be gone. Safe. What had I done all that for if he wasn’t already on his way to Avalon?
His face was in front of me now, the residual magic playing around me as though it were cavorting in a garden, lighting his face, sizzling in the air as it blinked on Fae and grim one and Fae again behind him. I struggled to keep my eyes open. My eyelids felt like grains of sand had wormed in behind them and had gathered into boulders.
My magic was raining down all over the beach, and I could see many of the grim ones deflating and turning to smoke, a dozen Fae lurching sideways as the magic struck them.
But one Fae was untouched. That one Fae charged forward, his eyes steady on the man beside me. The Fae general. And he knew. He knew what Ari was and was determined to win the prize no matter what it took.
But he didn’t know what I knew. None of them, not Ari, nor the grim ones, or even the Fae knew what had begun to spread its cloak behind them, funneling forward to encompass us all. But I could see it. It had teeth. It had a face as terrifying as it was beautiful.
I knew her in the instant my magic touched the edges of her black cloak. Coventina. A mere wisp of her former self, eons old and angry and gathering substance as the magic of the hollow touched her, and all I could do was let go one word.
“Move,” I said to Ari and the general, to anyone who might be in the way.
I might not be able to stand, but I could stretch out my arm, let the last of that magic fly at whatever was coming. Maybe if Ari saw the last of my spark leave me, he would jump back on that raft and be gone.
I counted on it.
It left my hand as softly as a sigh. For an instant, I thought it would be about as effective, but in the moment the magic left my hand, Ari’s palm met mine.
He might have intended to pull me to my feet, but somehow his touch combined with the release of my power and created a blast of energy that lit far more than the mere one hundred yards that my power had. For several heart-stopping moments, the entire city lit up as though a thousand suns had turned on.
Ari staggered back, probably awed by the resulting fireworks, but clearly not afraid of them.
I wanted to look at that light, too, but I couldn’t. It was too bright. I ended up burrowing beneath my arms, trying to protect my eyes from the blast of illumination.
Fae and grim alike fell around me, unaccustomed to such brilliance after generations of darkness.
The Dark Fae general yowled in agony. He might have fallen, but his harsh rasp sounded in my ear, a threat that he would make me pay and then a shriek cut through his message, forcing him to dissolve into whatever realm he had slithered out of.
Didn’t matter. I was alive. I had no idea how, but I was alive. Hot tears of relief and release burned the back of my throat.
Ari’s hands dug beneath my stomach and yanked me backward and sideways, dragging me, heels digging gunnels in the sand. Just the sight of them, making tracks along the beach, had me mesmerized. So clear. Everything was so clear and so bright. My chest felt like someone had opened it up and spread it like curtains to catch the breeze.
Ari either dropped me or tossed me to the bottom of the raft, and then we were water bound. I lay on my back staring up at the blue sky. I thought I saw birds careening this way and that. Maybe it was a butterfly floating above me, I wasn’t sure. I’d never seen any of those things before. I just knew that whatever it was, it pulled a laugh from me that made tears run down my temples and wet my hair. The coven would be pleased. Oh how I would
And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop laughing.
Chapter 21
I finally laughed myself mute. Before dusk closed back down around us, I caught sight of Ari’s worried look. No doubt he thought I’d lost my mind. I might had, truth be told. Only a madwoman would laugh knowing she had just jumped out of a burning building into a fire pit.
The water lapped over the raft, wetting my clothes and my hair. I shivered without meaning to, and Ari stretched out alongside me, Uriel on his chest. His fingers sought mine, and I opened my fist so he could lay his palm on mine. We needed the contact to remind us that something extraordinary had happened back on the beach. Now that the darkness had closed in again, it was too easy to pretend it hadn’t.
We lay like that for a long time, not speaking. I didn’t feel as though I was exhausted anymore. But I still felt drained in a different way. If my emotions were a fluffy rag, I felt as though they had been dipped into shadow wine and wrung dry.
My stomach reminded me it did not like bobbing about on the waves. I no longer saw the birds above me, but I could smell the brine of the water. Every now and then, plankton skittered under the raft and reminded me there was one more danger to face.
“What are you thinking?” he said.
“I’m wondering when the kraken will come,” I said, not bothering to sugarcoat it. He couldn’t know unless I told him.
“And that’s a bad thing,” he said. “Judging by the tone of your voice.”
“Very bad.”
“For what it’s worth,” he whispered, “I believe you.”
I chuckled darkly. “Well, it’s a pretty badass monster
“No,” he said. “I believe what you say about me and the immortal light. What happened back there—”
“I don’t know what that was,” I admitted, swearing as a wave spilled over the raft and sent water up my nose.
I coughed and inhaled brine. My nostrils went white-hot with pain. I spluttered and swore again, spitting out the foul murk of the liquid. We were close. Too close. My skin prickled with the power all around me.
The last time, when I had faced the kraken and spilled into the water, a failure before I’d even begun, I had nothing left but my own witless terror as I sank beneath the surf. I couldn’t close my eyes for the life of me. For a long, sticky moment, I could see the filigree of plankton leave trails of greenish light all around me. In its light, I caught sight of the blackness of the leviathan above me, churning in the water as it broke apart my boat, searching for me and finding I’d swum my way free of it. Free. A strange word to enter a witch’s mind when she was most assuredly on the path to her death, yet I was paralyzed with calm as I watched, even felt relief that I had no part in the broiling mess above me.
“I almost let it have me,” I murmured, and Ari’s hand twitched in mine. “If not for Freya, I would have let the kraken take me. I didn’t want to let her down.” He wouldn’t know Freya, of course, but that didn’t matter.
That was when Freya came to mind. Her sacrifice. All for me. I thought of Ianna and her crones. I thought of the little witch in the guild hall who had run from me in fear. Freya. Ianna. The girl. A mantra of names to propel me. I had realized then that fear was my greatest ally. It always had been. It could be my greatest strength too, if I let it.
So in the end, I kicked at the water. I reached above me, and I pulled at it. I clawed my way through the murk and suffocating wet as though it was dirt and I needed to find the surface. I couldn’t hold air any longer and I couldn’t keep my lungs from shuddering beneath their need to convulse.
Brackish water invaded my nostrils and burned down my throat as I inhaled liquid. I coughed. Gagged. I went blind with terror. So blind I almost missed getting swept up by the kraken’s tentacle as it thrashed toward me. I clutched at it, and suddenly I was moving through the water with the grace of a dolphin. I was buoyant and free for three seconds until I realized I’d broken the water and was flying upward instead.
My whole body shuddered when my lungs grabbed for the delectable taste of pungent air. Sweet Miriam, I’d been saved. I shrieked out my victory for the entire hollow to hear.
“Fucking yeah,” I had yelled, and I yelled it on the raft as I lay next to Ari, unaware I was caught up in the recollection until my words pierced the darkness around me. The way the words vibrated in my chest was like the release of the finest musical note on the hollow harp. Fine and pure and thrilling. I’d thought fortune had finally decided to smile on me.
“It didn’t last,” I said. “That feeling of liberation. It couldn’t. What goes up must come down.”
In the next instant, I had struck something slimy and wet. Not the water. Oh, no. Nothing with so much forgiveness. The creature’s tongue was what I smacked into, and I only had time to wrap my arms around it before it began its convulsive swallowing, running its tongue and me against the roof of its mouth and along the sides of its palate.