by Laney McMann
Benny reached for the looming gate with her free hand, and it turned to vapor under her touch.
"Wait!" A curtain of blonde hair blurred through the snowcapped trees. "I'm coming!" A dark blue jacket and brown boots came into view, and Cara ran through the underbrush, covered in snow, her face blistery red from the cold. She came to a stop, out of breath. "I'm coming, too."
A lump rose into my throat as I stared at her little ten year old self. "Cara, you can't—the Queen, your mom, they'd never forgive me if something happened to you."
"My mother isn't well," she said, breathing hard. "She hasn't been since the Otherworld began falling ill. So many people are sick." Her gaze cast toward the ground. "I have to help do something. My cousin, Teine, holds the Light. She has to survive, and she came for me when I was in the Shadows, just like I knew she would. I'm coming for her now. I need to help my people. You can't stop me. I'll only follow you if you try."
"She's the fastest at traversing," Benny said with a grin. "Wicked quick." She stared at Cara. "One condition." Her eyes narrowed.
Cara put her hands on her hips.
"We get into trouble, you traverse back home. No ifs, no excuses, no buts. You go home. Deal?"
Cara nodded, her face solemn. "Deal."
21
LAYLA
The procession went on for miles behind me on the steep cliff ledge. I'd stopped glancing over my shoulder, careful to keep a close eye on my feet. The charcoal robe brushed at my ankles as I walked along the narrow, rock-riddled path. After an hour of marching through a forest that resembled the Otherworld's, but wasn't, our party had ended up on the side of a mountain blanketed in a dense mist that hung from looming tree branches overhead. The journey toward the clouds was turning out to be a precarious one.
Every so often someone would shout or cry out from the back of the column, falling victim to the blinding mist and toppling over the edge of the cliff. No one tried to help. The Fomorians didn't seem any more concerned for their comrades now than they did when the arena went up in flames during the Battle. The King stayed a few steps behind me, and a guard was stationed in front. I'd considered throwing myself off the cliff, trying to summon the wind from the Arwen Ogham on my wrist on the way down, but if I was unsuccessful, my family would fall victim to Elethan. Not to mention the Light I supposedly held would be lost forever. I kept walking.
The doorway through the clouds was believed to hold an ancient trail that would lead masses to the Afterworld, as the King called the Ancient city of Mag Mell. My original home—the first Teine's home. My pulse beat faster, harder against my ribs the higher we climbed, chills from the altitude wracking my body, and my nerves. The existence of the other half of my split soul became more and more present the further up we climbed. Teine could feel her home. Of that, I had no doubt. What she would do, or attempt to force me to do once we got there, I didn't know, but I was trying to prepare myself for anything.
My Oghams had healed my wounds. Only small cuts remained on my leg and arm. The golden scales that I'd come more accustomed to covered most of my body in delicately drawn lines. The vines I'd witnessed climbing Max's jaw were doing the same to me. It was hard not to smile at that—the sheer awesomeness of what Max and I truly were, what I'd been hidden from for so long. My Oghams gave me hope. If I could use them to my advantage, keep Teine's fierce presence in check, maybe I could get out of this situation. Go home to Max. Save us all.
I'd tried to keep my thoughts clear of that hope, keep it vague and muddled in case Max was listening, in case he could hear me, figure out what I was doing, or where I was. As hard as it was not to scream his name, all the while praying with everything in me that he was safe, okay, alive, I didn't let myself. I'd managed to get him out of the Shadows. Somehow managed to keep the Otherworld alive. Played Elethan's game, the same way Max had played it trying to protect me. As long as he was safe, along with my family, Benny, Tristan, and Justice, I'd play the game for as long as I had to. Another stupid smile touched my lips. Max had been faithful, loved me, only me. Deep down, I'd always known that.
I didn't try to communicate with Justice either, not sure I even could. I would rather he not know where I was, or more importantly, where I was headed.
The highest peak of the snowcapped mountain swarmed into view a few yards ahead, lost in grey sky and clouds. Throwing the hood of my robe up over my head, I pulled the heavy fur-lined cloak closer to my frame, feeling the damp dew settling on the charcoal material under my fingertips. It reminded me of Max, the cloak—of seeing him dressed in Fomore attire over the last few days. Even fronting as a Demon God, he'd been stunning.
I remembered the Dryads' words to me and Justice weeks before when we were on our trek to find the Shadow Realm's doorway. The Tree Nymph told me that it was never Max's place to live among us, that he was a Demon God. The Dryad had been right and wrong. Max had been born into the Shadows, but he had never been one of them. My father had saved him from a terrible fate, knowing who he truly was all along, who both of us were, believing in the legend of the Fire Born like so many people of the Realms hadn't. He'd saved us both.
Max and I truly were the Ancient Fire Born, the Gods reborn from the ashes of our true selves.
Lifting my head from watching the placement of my feet, I focused on the gates rising up through the grey mist in the distance. Their golden hues shone through the gloom like a beacon of hope, and any residual doubt about who I truly was faded.
I was home.
22
JUSTICE
"Son of a bitch." I stood outside the Fomore castle—correction, the abandoned Fomore castle, seething. The barren landscape smoldered, smoke streams spiraling into the dead sky from every direction. "They left. They took Layla and left, mother—" My head tipped back toward the reddish sky, biting my tongue in front of Cara. God, how I hated this hellish place.
"There has to be a lead somewhere." Tristan came to stand beside me, sloshing his boots through the melted, dirty snow. "A trail or a path, something we can follow." He glanced toward Benny in her normal, human skin, and his forehead crunched. "If you shift back into Layla ... god, I hate asking you this, but if you do, can you get a track on her? Hear her thoughts? How close to her true self can you really get?"
"When I shift, I become that person entirely in all but one area, the mind," Benny said. "Someone else's form, but always my mind." She let out a breath. "I can't access thoughts."
"Great." I kicked a rock, skidding it through the field. "Let's walk the perimeter. Maybe we'll get a lead. You guys go left. Cara and I will meet you in the rear of the castle."
"Wait." Tristan stopped. "Can't you talk to Layla?" His eyebrows rose.
I gave him a blank stare. "I know you've been under the weather, but did you forget how our communication works?"
"Ah." He smiled. "She blocked you."
I clenched my jaw. "I doubt she even knows how, Tris. She didn't know we could communicate through our thoughts until about an hour ago."
He turned away, back toward Benny. "Well, clearly she figured it out pretty quick." With a laugh, he walked toward the opposite side of the castle. Jerk.
"What did Tristan mean?" Cara asked. "You can talk to Layla? How?"
"A god's angel can communicate with them soundlessly if the god, or goddess, allows it."
"Oh." Her boots crunched over ice. "So, Layla isn't allowing it?" She smiled in an innocent way.
I gritted my teeth. "No. She isn't."
"Oh." She nodded. "So you're her angel? Only hers?"
"Yeah, I am," I said, distracted. On the back side of the castle, in the distance, sat the arena—a smoldering, blackened ruin strewn with hundreds of fallen bodies.
"I didn't know the—"
With a quick shift of my weight, I turned Cara around, facing the way we came.
No one had bothered to clean anything up, give the victims a decent burial, nothing. Just streams of smoke remained, rising into the red-grey skies. Besi
des the crackling and popping of residual burning, the arena had descended into complete silence. It was as if the survivors left the castle grounds the second I'd fled with Max back to the Otherworld. Not more than a couple of hours had passed, and there wasn't a soul anywhere. No movement. No life. We stood in a literal ghost town. Piles of rubble burned across the field, along with the charred gauntlet, which was nothing but a stack of rusted weapons on blackened wood planks. Losers.
"Let me see, Justice," Cara whined. "I'm not five."
"No, you're ten, and as of now, my responsibility. Sorry, no dead bodies for you."
"Ew."
"Yeah, ew. Ew is the correct response."
Tristan and Benny came around the other side of the castle in the distance, and it was clear from their expressions of disgust, they'd seen similar.
"Nothing?" I shouted.
Tristan shook his head. "I say we check inside. The back door to the kitchen is open." He stopped a few feet away. "Any reason you're facing away from the possible clues?"
I shoved Cara's coat hood up on her head, hoping it would shield her from the worst of the carnage, and headed in a sideways slant toward the back kitchen door, blocking her view to the bodies. "I have a child, if you'd already forgotten."
Tristan grinned. "I see."
"I'm not a child!" Cara stomped her booted feet in the slush.
I steered her forward. "Ten equals child."
"Layla and Max weren't considered children at ten years old." She pouted.
"Layla and Max are gods. Sorry for your luck."
We entered the kitchen. Dented pots hung from the ceiling by steel hooks and chains, pans of boiled over and burnt oatmeal sat on the stovetop, and dirty dishes and cups littered the sink. Water dripped from the tap in a constant unearthly rhythm.
Cara squeezed her nose.
"Looks like they definitely left in a rush." Benny turned the water off.
Hurrying through the only door out of the kitchen, we tracked through what seemed to be a dining room more suited to the castle staff. A scrubbed wooden table sat in the middle of a room with plain white walls. No windows. On the opposite side of the room, opened double doors led into a formal dining area, complete with fifteen foot ceilings, wall to wall mirrors, and several crystal chandeliers. A masterfully carved table, flanked by claw-footed chairs covered in purple velvet, ran the entire length of the room. The room appeared untouched, as if no one had eaten a meal there, much less taken up the twenty or so seats it housed. Then again, Demon God Kings probably didn't have a lot of friends to entertain.
Besides the Fomorian guards, and a maid or two, I had never seen anyone who didn't fall under the 'servant' heading inside the castle on my short stay. Except for Max. Maybe Sam, although Elethan clearly despised all the angels. Another lonely ruler with nothing to do but cause problems in order to create a semblance of a life for himself. I would've thought it was sad, except, well, he left his own son for dead and had taken Layla. Layla, who'd been bleeding profusely when I'd taken Max back to the Otherworld. Layla, who'd said she was following me. She had a lot to explain when I finally tracked her down.
The dining area opened onto the grand entry I remembered, with the narrow staircase that led to the cells and the 'quarters' Elethan had housed me and Layla in. Taking the stairs at a run, I rushed toward the second story overhang and down to her room.
The door stood open, food on a silver tray, untouched—all the clothes, including the fur-lined cloak she hated, gone from the closet.
"This place is so weird." Tristan came in the bedroom after me. "Who leaves everything in this kind of a hurry?"
"Someone who doesn't want to be followed or found," Benny stood outside the threshold, staring toward an open doorway. The cell she faced was dark, only a small, barred window on the far wall allowed in shreds of light and illuminated the floor, steel shackles anchored into it. "We need to find her. I don't want her to end up in a cell like this somewhere. Once Elethan uses her for whatever he plans to do, this could be her fate like it was mine."
"Sam got you out, away from here," Tristan said, placing a hand on her shoulder.
"He did. One of the decent things he did, before ..." She heaved a breath.
"We'll find Layla," I said. "We have to. Our lives, Max's life, depend on it."
Benny nodded, glancing away from the cell. "Know where Max's room is? Maybe we can find a clue in there."
It took us fifteen minutes tracking all over the castle before we finally found what had to be Max's room in the far back corner, over the kitchen. Like everything else we'd seen throughout the Keep, it was a disheveled mess. Blankets strewn and twisted on his bed, a shattered mirror, dark wooden dresser, shards of glass all over the floor, and the one thing I couldn't overlook, bloody clothes shoved into a laundry hamper near the closet.
His clothes from the night we killed Ryan, I had no doubt.
"Why is there blood everywhere?" Cara stayed close to my side, fear lacing her tone.
"Um ..." I had no idea what to say, and no idea how Max had been handling killing Ryan, but I still had a knot in my chest that wouldn't go away. I didn't regret killing him, not after what he'd done, only hated that I had to, hated that he'd been so sick he'd basically lost all sense of honor, loyalty, or reason. Sam had been following close in his footsteps, it seemed, and as sick as it may have sounded, I was glad that neither Max nor I ended up having to kill him, too. Ryan and Sam, out of their minds or not, had been right about one thing, though—the Morrigan had to be killed, and soon.
"You never told me what happened." Tristan's words broke my stare on Max's bloody clothes, the spots of scarlet marking the sink and broken mirror. "Justice?"
I shrugged with a sigh and grabbed an extra cloak out of the closet. "Ryan came after me and Layla ..." I shook my head. "He lunged, and—"
"You and Max attacked," Tristan finished my sentence.
Cara let out a gasp, her hand covering her mouth.
"Yeah." I shrugged the cloak on.
"I'm sorry." Tristan glanced toward his feet. "That you both had to do that, go through that."
"I'm sorry, too, Justice." Cara held my hand. "I didn't know."
I nodded, not looking at either of them, feeling the warmth of Cara's small hand in mine. "He's at peace now."
"Hope so." Tristan's gaze tracked over Max's room, and Benny squeezed his arm, staying silent. It was strange seeing them together, almost like a couple, but not quite. More like two people who'd come to depend on one another as friends. Not to complete the other, or make one whole from two halves, but out of a genuine respect I saw in every glance. It made me wonder how long Tristan had been in love with Benny and never breathed a word of it.
Underneath the edge of Max's four-poster bed, an open book stuck out a few inches. I bent to retrieve it, releasing Cara's hand. A small glass vial, crushed at one end, lay in the crease of the pages, the faint residue of a green substance coating the glass inside. Layla's memory washing potion. I had no idea how Max had found the vial or why he would've wanted to keep it. The pages the vial marked had tons of drawings in the margins. Black moons, full white moons, red waxing and waning crescents, and the name Layla. Not Teine, but Layla.
A name that didn't belong in an Irish text, thousands of years old. Below the name, words were scribbled down.
Black Moon Rising.
Upon the twenty-ninth day of the seventh month, the black moon shall rise, and the ashes must fall, as the White Raven flies. One day must pass, for the last to descend, merging the lost, unto which the reign will approach its end. On the thirty-first day, as Lilith comes, under the Crone's Waning Moon, undo what has been done.
"Undo what has been done ... Tristan." Motioning him over, I showed him the passage. "Read this. It's part of the Legend ... remember it?"
His finger trailed the page, eyes widening as he shifted through the scribbles. "Parts of it, I remember." He read the first words aloud, "'Upon the twenty-ninth day of the seven
th month, the black moon shall rise, and the ashes must fall, as the White Raven flies.'"
Benny peeked over his shoulder. "This is the seventh month," she said. "July. It's the 30th. Today."
"Right." Tristan's fingers trailed the page again. "' ... and the ashes must fall’ has to mean Layla and Max. The old Legend says,
"'From the ashes of old,
They shall rise.
The last of the Ancients,
Foe and Ally.
The Legend lies in wait,
And bides its time.
Until at last the day comes,
For the children Born of Fire.'"
With a sigh, he said, "'And the ashes must fall.' Max has fallen." He swallowed audibly. "Layla is gone. Maybe this means she'll fall next."
"Or that she already fell." Hands on my hips, I stared out the window over Max's ornate bed into the gloom outside. "Layla already fell before she even entered the Shadow Realm gates. When she died. That was the twenty-ninth of this month. They both fell when their former ashes, or other half of their souls, were rejoined. Still, I don't know ... parts of the passage, I don't remember. The King could've planted the book here for us to find, to throw us off track. Doesn't mean it pertains to Layla or Max."
Benny shook her head. "You think King Elethan would go to that much trouble? Not likely. Tris, what was the next part?"
"'... as the White Raven flies.'" Tristan stared down. "White Raven?" He shook his head. "Never heard of one."
"You haven't? They're in all the Fae legends." Benny motioned for him to keep reading.
"'One day must pass, for the last to descend, merging the lost, unto which the reign will approach its end. On the thirty-first day, as Lilith comes, under the Crone's Waning Moon, undo what has been done.'" He glanced up. "The Black Moon and the Crone's Waning Moon have to be the same thing. When is the next Black Moon?"
