Shadow Trials

by Isla Frost

  I felt bad for her. For entering this place alone. But she seemed unbothered by it.

  “Nope. But I’m glad enough to leave. My mom died in childbirth, and my dad was a mean drunk. I figure whatever’s here can’t be much worse.” She dug out more shards of plaster and wood, then stabbed the wall again, hard. “Or if it is, at least I’ll get to have seen something other than one disintegrating city before I die. Not many people can say that these days.”

  The holes we were carving were farther up now, and we had to take turns. Using our existing toe and handholds, we’d climb the wall and dig the next one out above our heads while the excavated material pelted our faces. It was awkward and difficult work, dangerous too the higher we got, and we were both covered in dust and wood splinters. But at least the wallpaper creatures around our blades had ceased seeming to move.

  Bryn had the luck to carve the final hole. I stamped down my desire to be first. It had been Bryn’s plan after all. I could wait another minute.

  She sheathed her blade, shook the bigger chunks of debris out of her short black hair, and scrambled upward until she gripped the window ledge.

  “Oh hell no,” she whispered.

  “What? What is it?” Worry and curiosity made my fingers itch to clamber up beside her.

  Bryn didn’t answer for several long seconds. Just stared out through the glass. Then she said, “You should see for yourself,” and began the climb down, her motions slower than on the way up.

  Impatient now, I shoved my toes into the first hole the moment she dropped to the desk. Anticipation thrummed in my chest as I climbed, forcing myself to be careful, to check each foothold and hand purchase, until at last my fingers brushed the window ledge.

  “What in the devil’s fiddlesticks is going on in here?”

  The question had not come from Ameline or Bryn. The voice was deep and rumbly with an edge of rust. Like when Mila drove her wooden toy truck over the wreckage of a real one.

  I whirled and almost lost my grip.

  A door that definitely hadn’t been there earlier had opened on the far wall, and standing in the doorway was…

  Well, I had no idea what it was.

  Chapter 3

  The creature was as large as a man and stood upright on a powerful set of legs. But there the resemblance ended.

  It had two heads mounted next to each other—nearly identical with long, tapered snouts, large dark eyes, and small rounded ears. Black fur coated the underside of the jaws and delicate noses while the topside was coated in scales.

  The scales thickened and grew into large armored plates as they descended over the creature’s head, down its back, and along the heavy tail that hung to the floor and extended another five feet. More of the black fur coated its belly, and a combination of both sheathed the forelimbs right up to the long clawed fingers.

  One of the two heads was muttering something to the other, too quiet for us to catch.

  The second was staring at me.

  The sight of it made my own limbs—so normal by comparison—tremble. Or maybe that was because I was still clinging to the wall three stories above the ground.

  Not that the creature looked scary per se. It would’ve been cute if it’d been a fraction of the size and the claws couldn’t have ripped me open in one quick slash.

  But claws or no claws, I was damned if I was going to climb down until I’d seen out the window.

  My fingers curled around the sill, and my foot found the last toehold. I turned my back on the creature and pulled myself up the last few feet. Only to see an external window shutter slam shut.

  “What the?”

  Frustration spiked through me, but what was I going to do? Break the window and wrestle with the apparently magical shutter?

  I swiveled back to the creature, who was still staring—or was that glaring?—in my direction.

  Had it been responsible for the shutter?

  I fought my urge to glare back.

  Ameline stepped forward on my behalf. She might be shy around human strangers, but she’d always been fearless around animals. Anything from feral cats to the cockatrice that had found its way into one of the few remaining human-controlled gardens when I was six. The garden that I’d happened to be playing in.

  Ameline had saved me then, and she was doubtless trying to save me now too.

  She waited till the creature’s heads had trained on her movement and then bowed.

  “Apologies if we’ve wronged you. We thought this doorless room”—she hesitated since the beast thing was clearly standing in a doorway—“well, you see, it did seem doorless a few minutes ago. Um, anyway, we thought it might be some sort of test.”

  I spared the window a final glance before scrambling down to stand beside my friend.

  “Test?” asked the head on the right. “You hear that, Glennys? I told you we couldn’t trust them to be left alone in here. But you just insisted we clean up that mess first. And now they’ve gone and destroyed the wall and frightened the wallpaper too. Look at the poor creatures, terrified half to death!”

  “Oh, don’t be so dramatic, Glenn,” said the head on the left.

  The voice was higher and softer and sounded exasperated. “That one apologized, didn’t she? And the wall will heal in time, and it’ll be like they were never here. It’s not nearly as bad as if we’d left that manticore cub prowling around the dining hall or the megalith moth in the linen cupboard. Now quiet down; you’re scaring the humans.”

  They stopped arguing momentarily, and Ameline took advantage of the brief respite.

  “Are you the ones we’ve come to honor our Agreement with?”

  The head on the right extended its snout to the ceiling and let out a harsh braying sound. Even Bryn flinched.

  “Stop laughing at them,” admonished the head on the left. Glennys, I thought the other had called it. But it—she?—was making a quiet huffing noise as if trying not to laugh herself.

  “It is funny though, I have to admit. No, firstborns, we are merely the custodian here. You will meet the ones you are bound to soon enough. Tomorrow in fact.”

  “Oh,” Ameline said. “What’s your relationship with them then, if I may be so bold?”

  The head on the right, which had mercifully finished laughing, considered Ameline. Was that a softening in those large dark eyes?

  “That one does have nice manners, I’ll give you that. We were rescued by a w—”

  Glennys headbutted him.

  “Ahem. We were rescued by them many, many years ago and brought along when they traveled here. We’re the only one of our kind on this planet.”

  “Rescued?” Ameline asked. “Does that mean they’re, well, nice?”

  Glenn did that braying laugh thing again. Glennys sighed.

  “Ignore him, child. He says one of a kind like we’re some kind of art exhibit rather than glorified pets. Now come along, and we’ll show you to your rooms.”

  She’d evaded Ameline’s question about their rescuers being nice. But rooms sounded hopeful. Better than the dungeon or slaughterhouse anyway. The strange creature was already sweeping from the room, tail dragging behind it.

  Ameline tucked her arm through mine and whispered, “They’re like a black-bellied pangolin—except much, much larger and with two heads.”

  She seemed to think that would mean something to me, but I’d never heard of a pangolin.

  We followed like obedient children, stepping into a grand hallway that, while not as lofty as the tower room, was still a good two stories tall. Rich wood paneling reached as high as my elbow, with more strange wallpaper above that. Above us, an ornate ceiling featured a three-dimensional, swirling pattern embellished in gold.

  So much color, so much care given to details that served no functional purpose felt foreign to me. Yet beyond Glenn and Glennys and the possibly moving wallpaper, there was nothing to suggest this was anything but a grand old manor, built by humans a few hundred years ago and maintained ever since.r />
  I’d seen pictures of houses like these. There were even a few like it in Los Angeles, though they’d been built later and poorly maintained since the takeover.

  This one wasn’t in perfect condition, but nothing was broken, the timber gleamed with a fresh coat of oil, and there wasn’t a speck of dust in sight. So who on earth did this place belong to?

  Maybe we could learn more from the creature we were following. If I could recover from our rocky start.

  “Um, sorry again about the wallpaper,” I said.

  Bryn winked at me, then raised her voice. “I would be too if I’d had anything to do with it.”

  I smirked. Her black hair was caked with pale gray plaster dust, and I was pretty sure Glenn and Glennys were intelligent enough to connect the dots.

  I tugged a strand of my own dark brown hair, which was no doubt equally filthy. “You might want to look in a mirror before you try that one on.”

  Bryn did a double take, her hand rising in belated realization.

  Ameline giggled. Bryn and I joined in. And then, because the creature walked surprisingly fast, we hurried to catch up.

  “Watch the tail!” the gruff one barked.

  I was glad their voices were distinct, because being behind them meant I had to reorient myself on which was which.

  “Oh really,” Glennys scolded. “I’m sure they’re perfectly capable of watching where they’re going.”

  “You thought they’d be perfectly capable of sitting in a room unattended for an hour without damaging it too, and look how that turned out.”

  One of the heads, Glennys I thought it was, turned and mouthed the word sorry.

  “You know I don’t like it when you talk behind our back,” muttered the other one, but they kept walking, and none of us trod on their tail.

  Ameline caught onto my desire to obtain information and formally introduced us. Conversation flowed more freely after that. And as we gawked at the changing decoration and trailed up a creaking stairway, we soaked in what they were willing to tell us. Glenn and Glennys were from a race of beings called the golin who quite literally became one when they chose lifelong mates. Their masters, and the ones that we were now bound to, had rescued them and then magically gifted them with a longer lifespan and the ability to speak multiple languages.

  “Be careful about accepting gifts from them,” Glenn had grumbled. “Now I’m stuck with Glennys for ten lifetimes, and she never stops talking.”

  Ameline, hurrying to head off another bout of bickering, asked, “What did you need rescuing from?”

  “Our own kind,” Glennys replied heavily. “We had a difference of beliefs.”

  “Oh.” Ameline fell silent, not wanting to blunder into sensitive territory.

  Bryn had no such qualms. “What difference of beliefs was that?”

  “They believed we should die,” Glennys said.

  “And we didn’t,” Glenn finished.

  I felt my eyebrows wise unwillingly and fought them down as the creature, or couple, or golin halted and touched a section of wall. The figures on the wallpaper darted to one side—definitely moving—and a door materialized before our eyes.

  “Here’s your room then.”

  I hesitated, not sure I wanted to be trapped in another room. “Um, will we be locked in again?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Glennys.

  “Is the door going to stay when you leave?”

  Glenn sniffed. “Of course it will. We don’t create doors out of thin air, you know.”

  Funny, as it seemed to me they’d done just that.

  “But you do need permission to open it,” Glennys added.

  Which sounded like the essence of a lock as well.

  The golin pointed at a coiled serpent on the wallpaper. Its scales glinted a dark ruby red, and it raised its head when the golin’s claws drew near. All the better to see its oversized fangs.

  “Just touch your finger here so it can taste you. Then Millicent will know this dormitory is yours and will let you inside. Now, do you want to room together?”

  “Yes,” Ameline said at the same time as Bryn shrugged.

  “Why not?”

  “Who’s Millicent?” I asked, peering more closely at the red serpent before touching my finger to it. “Ouch!”

  Something on the wall stabbed me hard enough to draw blood. Quite a lot of blood. It welled from my fingertip and dripped onto the floor. Where it promptly disappeared into the timber.

  “Pfft,” Glenn said, opening the door. “You can hardly feel it. That’s just Millicent identifying you. Can’t be too careful with shapeshifting and all that, but you can’t change your blood.”

  Well, most of my reaction had been shock, but I thought hardly feel it was a stretch. Whatever the hell had punctured my skin had done it with enough force to bruise.

  “Do we have to do that every time we go in and out of our room?”

  And did we need to be worried about shapeshifting beings trying to trick their way inside?

  “Just in,” Glennys assured me.

  I regarded my throbbing digit and hoped whatever we’d been brought here to do didn’t require fine finger work.

  Bryn glanced at me and offered her own hand to the serpent. I saw her flinch, but forewarned, she didn’t react any more than that.

  Ameline stepped forward too, more hesitant. She did not like pain. Or blood. But we’d imagined this day would hold far worse horrors, so she pressed her finger to the wallpaper too.

  No flinch. Huh.

  “It barely hurt,” she whispered uncertainly. “Maybe I didn’t do it right?”

  The golin had already entered our new room and was bustling around seemingly ensuring everything was in order. But Glennys glanced back to see what was taking us so long and spotted Bryn and me bleeding onto the floor.

  “Oh,” she said while Glenn checked the woodpile by the fireplace. “I see what’s going on now. Millicent must be upset at you two for harming her wall. So she took a little bit of extra blood for compensation.”

  That would explain why it hadn’t hurt Ameline. Sort of.

  Bryn glowered at her mangled finger. “Who the hell is Millicent?”

  The golin waved its claws vaguely around the room. “Millicent Manor. Didn’t we tell you?”

  My jaw dropped as the implication sank in.

  “The building is… alive?” asked Ameline.

  “Don’t call her a building; she doesn’t like that. Too impersonal. Stick to Millicent. Or the manor. Or home. That one she loves most of all.” Glennys said this like it made perfect sense and bared her teeth in what might’ve been a smile. “Now then, we’ve tarried long enough. Settle yourselves in and then go to the dining hall when you get hungry. We’d best greet the next lot of new students.”

  Glenn shot me a meaningful look. “Before they do any more damage.”

  The torrent of bewildering information made my next question a fraction too slow. “Wait, what do you mean students?”

  But the golin waddled off without explanation—either failing to hear me or pretending to. And Ameline, Bryn, and I were left alone in a strange room all over again.

  A living and apparently angry room.

  And we had no idea how to find the dining hall.

  Chapter 4

  The room we’d paid with our blood to gain access to was technically single story, but the decorative, sculpted ceiling sloped upward with the pitch of the roof, giving it the same spacious feel as the rest of the manor. Albeit a little less grand.

  There were three beds along the right wall, each with a wooden trunk at the foot, and on the left, three padded armchairs were positioned around the ornate but functional fireplace.

  The wood paneling in the hall gave way to yet more wallpaper in here. Lucky us. But more disconcerting than the possibly sentient creatures that would watch us while we slept was the large arched window on the far wall.

  On the up side, it no longer mattered that I’d been preven
ted from peering out the other window. I could see more than any person in their right mind would want to out of this one.

  Plenty of the buildings back in Los Angeles had windows, of course. It was the greenery directly beyond the glass panes that was so daunting.

  A sea of swirling mist, reaching trunks, and tangled foliage fought for space among the thick carpet of decaying leaves that made up the forest floor. All sorts of monsters could hide in a place like that.

  Huge intimidating trees dwarfed the manor, even up here on the top floor. Few of them bothered to display the traditional colors of autumn, their dense canopy blocking out the overcast sky and with it any hope of guessing at our location.

  And if that wasn’t bad enough, vicious-looking vines with blood-red thorns the length of my fingers climbed up the manor itself, the tenacious tendrils clinging to the window frame like it was trying to get in.

  No wonder Bryn had cursed when she’d looked through that other window.

  In the ruined city I’d grown up in, only the foolhardy or insane lived on the edge of the forest.

  Nature—or the magical thing it had morphed into since the invasion—was dangerous.

  Sleeping near it invited a carnivorous tree to snatch you from your bed and bury you alive to nourish its roots. Or a wandering monster to smash through your window for a fast-food snack. Or any one of a hundred nightmare scenarios humans from the Before could only dream of.

  So scenic views had become ominous landscapes, something we’d been warned away from since birth.

  Yet despite the danger and the fear that came with it, the greenery had always called to me. It was beautiful. Far more beautiful than any concrete vista could ever be. And that beauty drew my gaze even when I knew better.

  It dared me to enter. To explore.

  To die.

  Perhaps it was just instinct left over from when greenery meant food, water, life—instinct not yet erased by evolution.

  I wasn’t foolish enough to follow the pull. But with the glass offering a thin veneer of safety, I found myself stepping closer.

  To see more.

  Past the wicked thorny vine and before the edge of the forest stretched a manicured green lawn. Something I’d only ever seen in old photos. Equally manicured garden beds and a lake too perfectly round to be natural disrupted the clipped grass in geometric lines.